Can we Pull Together?

“We can hang together, or we can hang separately.” — Old Western folk saying.

“Can’t we all just get along?” — Lament of Rodney King, a Black Angeleno, after videos of his deliberate, sustained and brutal beating by L.A. police in 1991 caused a national furor.

To my mind, the title question of this post will fix our national fate. How we answer it will determine not only the results of this election, but our future as a nation. For as Judy Woodruff’s recent serial PBS feature “America at a Crossroads” proves again and again, we Americans are divided as never before.

Even our Civil War and Vietnam War eras don’t really compare. In each, specific issues divided us: slavery and secession in one, and our first unnecessary, misguided, and ultimately losing war in the other. In each crisis, we had a lot else in common, which enabled us to pull together after our Civil- and Vietnam-War crises. Today, we seem divided about everything, and a major party and its candidate are doing everything they can to broaden and deepen our divisions.

So it’s worth a bit of thought, IMHO, to see how we got here. I have a theory. Read on.

Economically, our times are not so tough. They are nowhere near as tough as they were after the Crash of 2008—a debacle within the memory of most voters. They can’t begin to compare with the Great Depression. Then one-quarter of us were out of work, and millions from the Dust Bowl, stowing all they owned in their beat-up trucks, cars and wagons, migrated West to seek a better life. (John Steinbeck wrote a book about this, called The Grapes of Wrath.)

It may surprise you to hear, but we got out of the Great Depression by helping each other. As Studs Terkel reported in his must-read (and easy-read) Oral History of the Great Depression, farmers left sandwiches on their window sills so that passing migrants would not starve. Many of the same farmers were at risk of losing their farms to foreclosure and a crash in agricultural prices. Yet even while at risk themselves, they helped complete strangers out of the goodness of their hearts.

Government helped, too. It funded the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which built roads, bridges and national parks and monuments all over our nation. More important, it gave millions of young men paying jobs to do so, thus boosting our economy and avoiding food riots and a possible revolution. With this productive bootstrapping, our nation emerged from the Great Depression strong and united, just in time to face down the military tyrannies of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Throughout all this period, our government and our whole society ran on simple principles. Help your neighbor, as Jesus had advised. We are all in this together. We will stand or fall as a nation, not as a collection of warring tribes.

The fact that all that has changed is obvious. But how? In his inaugural address in 1960, JFK called us to “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” How did we get from that stirring and patriotic call to pull together to the gross selfishness and division that pervade our nation today, let alone our former president’s obvious and continual grifting?

Of course the sixties’ three assassinations didn’t help. In less than six years, three of our greatest leaders were gunned down in public: (1) JFK himself, (2) his progressive and popular brother RFK, and (3) one of our greatest social thinkers ever, and our foremost secular saint, MLK. If any one had lived on, this nation might be far better off, and far less divided, than it is today. But you can’t change history.

Yet I submit that the causes of our division were much deeper, much less “accidental,” and much more sustained than that. Our division today is the natural consequence of a decades-long, deliberate strategy of a major political party—the very one whose candidate is the reductio ad absurdum of division today.

That strategy had three parts. The first is well known and much studied. In the mid-sixties, LBJ had leveraged MLK’s idealism and effective activism to push the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act 1965 through Congress. Those powerful laws began the long, slow and painful process of making Black people full, active and engaged citizens and realizing the long-delayed promise of their Emancipation back in 1863. It was a watershed moment, which only the cooperation of those two supremely skilled leaders, LBJ and MLK, could have brought about.

Then began the backlash. LBJ himself knew and said so. He lamented that his great legislative triumph in civil and voting rights had cost his Dems the South for two generations. So far, it’s been three and counting . . .

But residual, die-hard racism is not the whole story. It’s not, in my view, even the most important part, if only because it’s been open, obvious and in plain view for well over half a century.

The more important parts, I think, were the last two. The second, like the first, was open and obvious. It was a concerned effort to get American citizens to disdain, disrespect and eventually despise their own government. It began with Ronald Reagan’s insistence that “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”

With all the power of modern PR and Madison Avenue, which the GOP — the party of business — practically owns (or vice versa?), Republicans under Reagan turned voters against their own government. They portrayed our government as inefficient, wasteful, bumbling and downright evil, allegedly supporting shiftless black and brown people at white people’s expense.

Although absolutely senseless from an analytical or historical perspective, this propaganda ploy has been surprisingly successful politically. It has gotten many ordinary voters to forget completely how the FDA keeps their drugs safe and effective, the EPA keeps their air and water clean (or tries to: my apologies to Flint, MI), the NTSB and FAA keeps their planes (mostly) from falling out of the sky, and the DOJ and EEOC try to tamp down the racism and ethnic division that may yet be our national Achilles Heel. The acme of this seemingly irrational propaganda push came in 2009, when an agitated white senior screamed, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”

Yet even this demonization of government was not the end of the GOP’s bag of political tricks. Demonizing government could not have succeeded without an appeal to a much more basic, near-universal human attribute. Turning the tenets of every organized religion on their heads, the GOP made selfishness a virtue.

The appeal was rather subtle. It went like this: The government takes your money in taxes. It wastes a lot of it through bumbling, bureaucracy and inefficiency. The rest of it government spends on things like supporting poor black and brown people, who don’t work hard enough. So you’d be better off — much better off — if you kept your money for yourself. We all would.

This is the message that the GOP has delivered, subtly and indirectly, by dog whistles and innuendoes, ever since 1980. The rallying cry is as simple and powerful as “It’s your money!” (emphasis added)

This is the cry that George W. Bush, perhaps our least intelligent president save the last one, used to win two terms in the White House. But he didn’t dream it up. Our first president to use it was Ronald Reagan.

So there you have it. Divide and conquer: that’s the GOP’s plan since 1980. Make white people jealous of all the others, who are just beginning to taste the American dream. Make everyone hate their own government as wasteful, bumbling, inefficient and evil and (by the way) helping all those black and brown people, but not you. And the ultimate coup de grace, keep your own money; never raise taxes, least of all on the rich, even for our own defense, to fight planetary heating, or as our national debt explodes.

It eludes my comprehension how Evangelicals fall for this. There was Ronald Reagan, with his gravelly voice and undeniable personal charm, putting his metaphorical arms around our common voters, presuming to be their friend. There he was, in plain sight, promoting the “values” of hate, jealously and selfishness that every page of the Old Testament and all of Jesus’ Gospel excoriate. Isn’t that the definition of the Antichrist?

But never mind the philosophical and religious contortions all this involves. It’s a simple matter of divide and conquer — the plan of Julius Caesar.

We all know what happened to him. And we all know that, despite his early demise, the divisions he set in motion led to the ultimate Fall of Rome a few centuries later. It took another millennium, the Protestant Reformation, the advent of Galileo and modern Science, and the Enlightenment for biblical and fundamental human values to creep back into human life.

We humans are small, weak and poorly armed by nature. We don’t have sharp claws or big teeth. We can’t fly or swim for long; nor are we strong or swift. Yet we have become the dominant species on our small planet—enough so to threaten its entire ecology—by working together. Cooperation and empathy are our species’ open secrets.

So the choice ahead is stark. Should we Americans elect leaders who embody the “help your neighbor” pioneer spirit that built this nation and made it great? Or should we vote for candidates who represent the apex of selfishness, grifting, and disdain, if not hate, for others, and the opposite of every traditional and biblical moral value? The choice should not be difficult.


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