Voting your conscience

I would like to stake a position about this issue that the Bernie or bust crowd is not going to like. Voting in the general election, while an individual right, is a public responsibility and not just a personal choice. The time to build a movement, plan a revolution, organize like-minds into a coherent vision for the future; that time is between elections. We are stuck with the hodge podge mashup of precedent, tradition, and the push-pull of various interest groups in the present. Voting your conscience sounds good, but like so many sound byte, bumper sticker slogans used by the Right, it means less than nothing. In fact, treating your vote like your virginity, only to be surrendered to the perfect candidate, is actually surrendering the nation and yourself to the forces of darkness. Anyone throwing a purity tantrum now, when the country actually has a chance at a Democratic successor to the presidency, is acting like a child.

I don't care how many fussy dilettantes unlike my page or send nasty emails, you have had eight years to build an alternative to the Democratic establishment, and you didn't. It is time to grow up and realize that the establishment was here before you and I were and there's no silver bullet to destroy it. Do you think progressive taxation, minimum wage laws, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, anti-trust laws, the National Labor Relations Board, workman's compensation, and all the rest happened overnight or easily? No, liberal reform has always been a work in progress. Vote for Bernie in the primary, work for his campaign, protest real injustice, and work to persuade people to take an interest in issues that matter. But have a little dignity, show some humility, and for crying out loud listen to yourselves. Have the Democrats been so awful for the past eight years that you are willing to surrender the presidency to Donald Trump or Ted Cruz because you believe the three decade smear campaign against Hillary Clinton?

I was on the fence about this Bernie or bust business until I got a chance to hear some of them call in to the Brad cast recently. Up to that time I had only seen a few dingbats write about how they will never vote for Hillary Clinton if she is the Democratic nominee. They never come across as being particularly knowledgeable or wise, but in print the anger and screaming doesn't come through. So now I know that the idiot tea party paranoid style is not just on the extreme right. When I heard these people yelling and ranting about Hillary, it became clear that tea baggers are not the only gullible authoritarian followers out there.

Before you turn up your nose and dismiss me as part of the establishment or a sell out or whatever, I did vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary. I respect his integrity, his positions on issues that matter to me, and I respect him as a man of the people. However, you people out there, who were all in for the ReLOVEution or whatever that was for Ron Paul. You who stood with Rand Paul because President Obama is worse that Bush; and you who are now claiming that the only thing you can do in good conscience if Bernie doesn't win the nomination of a party he still does not belong to is to stay home and pout or vote third party, are not worthy of any respect. I dealt with a lot of you in the Army, we called them blue falcons, the ones who refused to ever admit a mistake or something they did wrong, and were willing to let the whole unit be punished because they couldn't own up and take responsibility. Yes, if you could put aside your juvenile idealistic standards for the moment it would take to pull the lever for the socially responsible act of keeping a fascist like Trump or a theocrat like Cruz out of the White House there would be no problem. But you have to keep going on about this as though it is somehow noble to throw away a perfectly good chance at keeping momentum going for a progressive future. 

No, of course Hillary Clinton is not perfect and neither is the Democratic Party. Why? Because she is human, and the party is made up of humans. People who have flaws, people who have different views, different experience, and yes, different levels of involvement in the special interests and corrupting influences of money. No one in politics has exactly the same perspective, that is why we have parties. The objective is to get as many people's ideas as possible aggregated into as coherent a platform as possible. It is unfortunate that basic political science is not dropped into our political discourse very often. So rarely in fact, that when I tried Google searching for some of the ideas I studied many moons ago in poli sci 101 I could not find them so I'll have to paraphrase. Our electoral system is called single district plurality or first past the post, meaning that only the candidate with the greatest vote total wins. Therefore, rational office seekers coalesce into a mere two choices as close to the center as possible with one party going one way from that center and the other going the other way. The two party system, while sounding like the least number of choices outside of a one party dictatorship, actually presents the greatest choice in a winner take all election. The problem is that republican so-called conservatives have pulled that center further and further to the right, and then run candidates who start on the far right and only grudgingly move to moderate their stances and thereby increase their constituency. Democrats like Hillary Clinton start at the center and generally get pulled to the right. This is not a good situation I grant you, but threatening to pout and stay home is not going to help anyone but the Republican candidate. 

Right now, Bernie or bust people are nothing but lonely, alienated voices in the wilderness. You have no money, no organization, and no leverage; nothing really to offer. Screaming on social media or call in shows does nothing but alienate you further from people who actually have something to lose if a republican takes the White House. And that is why I'm saying that voting your conscience is a self-defeating fallacy. Make your voice heard constructively, build something, move the center in a more progressive direction. But simply screaming about how you will refuse to vote if your demands are not met will alienate you not only from the people you claim to be making your noble claim about defending but the Democratic Party as well.

Again, a personal campaign to make the political system more just, to fight for equality, and society more fair is best conducted between elections. The stakes are too high to pull this crap right now. The last eight years would have been a golden opportunity to organize all the people hurt by bush's wars and financial collapse, to educate people on why big changes were needed. That didn't happen, but there is no reason why you can't try again.

After the election, no matter who the Democratic nominee is. Patience, we can do this right. And it won't mean selling out, it just means being a team player. Aim lower, if the tea bag authoritarians can take over their local parties and put bible-thumping weirdos or monsters like this guy into office, imagine what we could do with good ideas. 

Organize. Labor.

Lincoln Log penned this little ditty four years ago and I thought it would be fun to share.

I fail to understand why people see unions as anachronistic and dangerous to the economy. Yes, they can be cumbersome and also corrupt. But no less than any other human institution dedicated to shared power. Certainly we do not have track record of corporate integrity as the basis for comparison.

Unions came into existence to fight for a better life. People were hunted down, beaten and shot in the pursuit of an eight-hour work day in 1886. Public and private armies bayoneted, shot and killed coal miner, burned the gathering places of copper miners, and attacked striking textile workers--the majority of whom have been women and children. We finally got the 40 hour work week by 1950.

Unions represent the values of a democratic society where people are permitted to join together for their economic self-interest as much as capital is permitted to do so. Why are unions any different than monopolies of money, machinery, or transport? Why should government help chiefly the rich and powerful while turning its back on the needs of the vast majority?

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed." Karl Marx? No. Abraham Lincoln. The GOP has turned so far to the right as to be another party than its origins suggest, much farther to the right than England's own Tories. The GOP is more akin to some third-world elite that seeks to subjugate its own people to enrich themselves.

The current policies in this state assailing women's equity in the workplace will soon become an assault against *all* equity in the work place. If you can reduce due process for discrimination based on gender, then why cannot you stop the same discrimination based on color? Religion? There is an assault on the wage-dependent workers.

'nuff said.

Exactly.

The KKK in the 1920s

Many allusions to Trump rallies as modern versions of Klan gatherings have been made by commentators in recent weeks. Let's look at what the Klan was really like during its last big appearance on the American political scene.

While the immigration restriction movement drew on the apprehension that America might be transformed ethnically by an invasion of alien elements from without, the Ku Klux Klan preyed on the feeling that the country was already in peril from elements within. The KKK was organized on Stone Mountain in Georgia on Thanksgiving night, 1915, in the light of a blazing cross, by William J. Simmons, a former Methodist circuit rider and organizer of fraternal associations. Modeled on the hooded order of Reconstruction days that murdered blacks, the Klan admitted "native born, white, gentile Americans" who believed in white supremacy; by implication, they could not be Catholics. Although it took the name of an old Southern society, the Klan owed more to the nativist tradition of Know-Nothingism, having its greatest appeal not to the deep South but to the Midwest, Southwest, and Far West, where people were worried less by blacks than by the encroachment of "foreigners," especially if they were papists.

The Klan attracted its chief support from the sense of desperation experienced by old stock Protestants who felt themselves being eclipsed by the rise of the city with its polyglot masses. Though the Klan had a following in some cities, especially ones undergoing rapid growth, two-thirds of its members lived in places with a population of less than 100,000, and the KKK found metropolises with large proportions of the foreign-born hostile territory. In cities such as Boston and San Francisco, the Klan got nowhere, and in New York it did not dare show its face at a public gathering.

"The reason there is a Klan in America today," said Colorado's grand dragon, "is to make America safe for Americans." Those attracted to the KKK thought themselves engaged in a battle which their falling birth rates doomed them to lose. "The dangers," Simmons explained, "were in the tremendous influx of foreign immigration, tutored in alien dogmas and alien creeds, slowly pushing the native-born white American population into the center of the country, there to be ultimately overwhelmed and smothered." In its elaborate ritual, its stark pageantry, its white hooded sheets, its titles of "Exalted Cyclops," "Klaliff," "Klokard," "Kligrapp," and "Klabee," the KKK appealed to the lodge vogue of blue collar and middle-class America. When the Klansmen sang "klodes" with his neighbor and klasped his hand in a secret grip, he felt reassured.

In the early years of the 1920s, the Klan, which had less than 5,000 members as late as 1920, experienced a phenomenal growth, and, with probably a few million adherents at one time or other during this period, made its weight felt in politics. In Youngstown, Ohio, the KKK elected the mayor and the entire city government, and in Texas, where it ousted a four-term U.S. Senator, the Klan dominated the legislature and the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Wichita Falls. Candidates running with KKK backing were elected to the United States Senate in six states, and the Klan controlled municipal governments in cities such as Denver and El Paso. In Oklahoma, the governor called all the citizens of the state into military service and declared martial law in an effort to put down the organization; the Klan-controlled legislature retaliated by impeaching him and removing him from office in November, 1923. In staunchly Republican Oregon, a state settled by Eastern and Midwestern Protestants, the Klan helped elect a Democratic governor, Walter Pierce, by the largest majority in state history and supported a law that wiped out parochial schools by requiring parents to send all children between eight and sixteen to public schools. (In 1925, the Supreme Court {Pierce v. Society of sisters} declared the law unconstitutional.) For the most part, though, the Klan did not know, once it had power, what to do with it, for it was more a vehicle to express resentment than a movement with coherent policy aims.

Where the Klan entered, in its wake too often came floggings, kidnappings, branding with acid, mutilations, church burnings, and even murders. In the South, the Klan sometimes used terror to preserve a social system that was swiftly changing. Yet even in the South, intimidation, although it was used against blacks (a bellhop in Texas was branded on the forehead with the initials "KKK," and black homes were burned in Florida to discourage voting), was employed more often against Catholics or political enemies or bootleggers or, most important, against individuals deemed immoral. In Birmingham, a Klansman murdered a Catholic priest in cold blood and was acquitted; in Naperville, Illinois, two hours after a monster Klan ceremony, a Roman Catholic church was torched. When the mayor of Columbus, Georgia, ignored demands of the KKK that he remove the city manager, his home was dynamited. After the triumph of the Klan ticket in Alabama in 1927, a black woman was flogged and left to die; a white divorcee was punched into unconsciousness; a naturalized citizen was lashed for marrying a native-born woman; and a black was beaten until he sold his land to a white man for less than it was worth.

Such episodes did not characterize the everyday routine of the KKK, but they were symptomatic. Most Klansmen never participated in violence, and not a few viewed the organization as an interest group for white Protestants or a fraternal association that sometimes carried on benevolent activities. When the Klan did resort to flogging or social ostracism, it was less likely to do so against ethnic minorities than to people thought to have broken some moral code--by trafficking in liquor, or gambling, or carrying on an extramarital affair. (One of its avowed aims was to "break up roadside parking.") Yet, as an organization exclusively of white Protestants, there was no mistaking its hostility to Catholics and Jews and to anyone it defined as "alien." The Klansmen, who thought white Protestants were being victimized, had no comprehension of the fact that it was not they but Catholics and Jews who faced blatant discrimination in employment, and blacks who, when they were not at the mercy of lynch mobs, were denied the most fundamental Constitutional rights. Furthermore, as Don Kirschner has pointed out, while there were any number of fraternal associations that promised conviviality and solace, "the one thing that the Klan offered that was uniquely its own was extra-legal or even illegal action."

Opponents of the KKK fought fire with fire. Especially in northern cities, the order encountered resistance not only from Catholics, Jews, and liberals, but also from bootleggers and other elements of organized crime. When in Chicago a Klan organizer boasted that his group would soon be strong enough to drive out the bootleggers and maintain law and order, the bullet-ridden body of an outspoken Protestant clergyman was discovered in Cicero, headquarters of the gangland boss, Al Capone. After the Imperial Wizard spoke in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, thousands of armed foes of the KKK massed at a bridge, and when Klan marchers pushed on, several fell dead. Elsewhere, KKK halls from Texas to Indiana were bombed or set ablaze.

The Klan reached the heights in Indiana, and in Indiana it toppled to its death. Hundreds of thousands of white-sheeted Klansmen took over the state. Many of them sauntered brazenly through town with their hoods flung back, not even bothering to conceal their identity. On parade nights in Kokomo, the police force vanished and white sheeted figures, bearing a striking resemblance to the absent patrolmen, directed traffic. The Grand Dragon of the Indiana KKK, David Stephenson, extended his influence in the Klan beyond the borders of the state and into the Republican Party, especially through his association with the governor of Indiana, Ed Jackson. A gross, corrupt man, who was a boozer, a womanizer, and a violent brawler, Stephenson made himself a political power and a multimillionaire overnight through his Klan activities. Finally, he overreached himself: he forced a twenty-eight-year-old State House secretary onto a Chicago-bound train and brutally assaulted her. When she took poison, his henchmen spirited her to a hotel and held her for several days without medical aid; a month later she died. In November, 1925, Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. When his crony, Governor Jackson, refused to pardon him, Stephenson opened a "little black box" which sent a congressman, the mayor of Indianapolis, and other officials to jail; Jackson was indicted for bribery but escaped because of the statute of limitations.

As early as 1924, the Klan had been put on the run in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, and the conviction of Stephenson sealed its doom. It brought into bold relief both the hypocrisy of the Klan (Stephenson had denounced petting parties and had warred on vice) and the corruption that threaded the history of the order. Many of the KKK leaders had joined the organization primarily for personal profit; many who preached righteousness were corrupt. Feeding on a millennial lust for rule by a league of the pure, the Klan, once in power, sometimes licensed the very evils it said it would exterminate. Its ugly side lay in the fact that it appealed to many who were frustrated by the rigid moral code of the small town. Klansmen often felt tempted by that which they were condemning--sexual freedom, modernity--and their frustration sometimes took a sadistic turn, as when they stripped "fallen" women naked and whipped them. The Stephenson episode revealed everything that was seamy about the organization. The KKK never recovered.

Nativism in the 1920s

It is not necessary to go over in depth how nativist and xenophobic Trump and his supporters are. A simple Google search will provide ample evidence on how he launched his campaign by demonizing Mexican immigrants and bragging about how he would get Mexico to pay for a giant wall to keep them in. When that shtick got old he targeted Muslims, with a helpful assist from the ISIS attack in Paris, promising to keep them from entering the country. So we will turn to William Leuchtenburg for a description of nativism in the 1920s.

Despite prosperity, the United States in the postwar years felt deeply threatened from within. The American people suddenly had thrust upon them the responsibilities of war and the making of peace, and their contact with Europe and power politics was bitterly disillusioning. In a world of Bolshevik revolutions and Bela Kuns, of general strikes and Mussolini's march on Rome, there was danger that America, too, might be infected by the social diseases of the Old World. Yet the threat of foreign contagion was not as terrifying as the menace of change from within. In part the danger seemed to come from enclaves of the foreign-born, not yet adapted to American ways, in part from the rise of the metropolis, with values different from those of nineteenth-century America, in part from the new currents of moral relativism and cosmopolitanism. Not a little of the anxiety arose from the disturbing knowledge that Americans themselves no longer had their former confidence in democracy or religion. "They have," observed Andre Siegfried, "a vague uneasy fear of being overwhelmed from within, and of suddenly finding one day that they are no longer themselves." 

Political fundamentalism attempted to deny real divisions in the nation by coercing a sense of oneness. Celebration of the Constitution became a tribal rite; in the 1920s, Americans, as one English writer noted, were "a people who, of all the world, craved most for new things, yet were all but Chinese in their worship of their Constitution and their ancestors who devised it." Constitution-worship was a kind of magical nativism, a form of activity in which, as the anthropologist Ralph Linton writes, "The society's members feel that by behaving as the ancestors did they will, in some usually undefined way, help to recreate the total situation in which the ancestors lived." Efforts toward social change were condemned as un-American. "Individualism?" cried an American Legion commander in California. "Down with all Isms!" This resistance to change and this insistence on conformity intertwined with the desire of rural churchmen to turn back modernism in religion and compel morality by statute. In 1924, Protestant fundamentalists wove together both movements in a "Bible-Christ-and-Constitution Campaign,"while the Ku Klux Klan's warcry was "Back to the Constitution." 

Many felt hostile to anything foreign. Isolationism had its counterpart in a determination to curb immigration, to avoid alien contamination ad to preserve the old America ethnically before it was too late. In the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, the drive for immigration restriction had foundered on presidential vetoes. Restrictionism could not overcome the industrialists' demand for cheap labor or, more important, America's confidence in its ability to absorb large numbers of foreign-born. World War I badly shook that confidence. The war revealed that the sympathies of millions of Americans were determined by their countries of origin, and the fight over the League of Nations reflected the animosities of Irish-Americans, German-Americans, and other "hyphenated Americans." In his defense of the Versailles Treaty, Wilson charged: "Hyphens are the knives that are being stuck into this document." By the end of the war years, many agreed with Walter Hines Page: "We Americans have got to ... hang our Irish agitators and shoot our hyphenates and bring up our children with reverence for English history and in the awe of English literature." 

The drive for immigration restriction after the war was based, to a far greater degree than before, on a pseudo-scientific racism. Men with little knowledge of either science or public affairs were accepted as experts on "race," although their writings revealed neither insight nor good judgment. In The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Madison Grant contended that race was the determinant of civilization and that only Aryans had built great cultures. "The man of the old stock," alleged Grant, "is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners, just as he is today being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals." Lothrop Stoddard in The Rising Tide of Color (1920) and Professor Edwin East of Harvard warned that white races were being engulfed by the more fertile colored races. Most influential of all were the widely read articles by Kenneth Roberts in the Saturday Evening Post. Roberts urged that the immigration laws be revised to admit fewer Polish Jews, who were "human parasites"; cautioned against Social Democrats, since "social democracy gives of a distinctly sour, bolshevistic odor"; and opposed unrestricted immigration, for it would inevitably produce "a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe."
In the first fifteen years of the century, an average of one million immigrants a year had entered the United States. Slowed to a trickle by the war, the stream of immigration became a swollen torrent after the armistace. From June, 1920, June, 1921, more than 800,000 persons poured into the country, 65 percent of them from southern and eastern Europe, and consuls in Europe reported that millions more were planning to leave. By February, 1921, Ellis Island was so jammed that immigration authorities  had to divert ships to Boston. Alarmed almost to the point of panic, Congress rushed through an emergency act to restrict immigration; it passed the House in a few hours without a record vote and was adopted by the Senate soon after by 78-1. 

Despite initial opposition, sentiment for a more lasting form of immigration restriction soon gained increasing strength. For a time, industrialists continued to set themselves against the movement. T. Coleman du Pont protested that critics of the immigrant were suffering from "sheer Red hysteria, nothing more;" while Judge Gary denounced the 1921 law as "one of the worst things that this country has ever done for itself economically." With the new prosperity of 1923 and increased mechanical efficiency, which reduced the need for mass labor, however, the chief obstacle to permanent immigration restriction was removed at the same time that industrialist, agitated by the Red Scare, grew increasingly nativist. So did unions, largely confined to skilled craftsmen, who for some time had wanted to limit new entrants into the labor market, thereby enhancing the market value of their members by reducing supply.
In 1924, Congress passed, over scant opposition, the National Origins Act, which drastically cut down the total of newcomers to be admitted each year and established quotas to be calculated on the basis of the proportion of descendants of each nationality resident in the United States at an earlier time. Under that proviso, the more "Nordic" lands of northern and western Europe got 85 percent of quotas. In addition, the law forbade all Oriental immigration--a gratuitous insult which was marked in Japan with a day of national mourning. "It is a sorry business," wrote Hughes, "and I am greatly depressed. It has undone the work of the Washington Conference and implanted the seeds of an antagonism which are sure to bear fruit in the future." 

The law, reflecting racist warnings about a threat to "Anglo-Saxon" stock, aimed at freezing the country ethnically by sharply restricting the "new" immigration from southern and eastern Europe. In the debate on the bill, Congressmen reviled the foreign-born of the great cities, particularly New York, to whom were attributed every evil of the day, "On the one side," asserted a Kansas congressman, "is beer, bolshevism[sic], unassimilating settlements and perhaps many flags--on the other side is constitutional government; one flag, stars and stripes." For three hundred years, English squires and cutthroats, French Huguenots, Spanish adventurers, pious subjects of German duchies, and, above all in recent years, peasants from Calabria to the Ukraine had come to American in search of gold, or land, or freedom, or something to which they could not put a name. Now it was over. One of the great folk movements in the history of man had come to an end.

Trump and the KKK, Part 2

The controversy surrounding the KKK's endorsement of Donald Trump has probably led to some confusion, with a lot of people wondering "the KKK is still a thing? Isn't that only in that bad South?" While David Duke operated mainly in Louisiana and the original incarnation of the white terrorist group known as the Ku Klux Klan was organized by defeated confederate officers after the Civil War, the reborn Klan had a much larger reach. The following is a story of moralism gone astray, because if your underlying values are terrible then the empirical manifestations are also likely to be terrible.

As I alluded in my last post, all the dog whistles and coded language about race used by prior candidates for the GOP to stoke white supremacy and racial resentment seem to have broken through to explicit and conscious appeals to hate and fear. This is the first big clawing back of racism into our political discourse without any cover. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s, strong organized opposition from African-Americans, Latinos, and other non-whites together with white Liberal allies had made overt racism unacceptable in public. Republican strategists such as Lee Atwater learned to camouflage their language while wooing southern segregationists and bigots across White America.

Why is it resurfacing now? It is pretty obvious even if the republican base, that turned into the tea party, that now supports Trump refuses to admit that most if not all of them are motivated by the same feelings of white supremacy and racial resentment as always, it is just visible now. The strong countervailing forces that could keep this kind of racism in check have atrophied over time in relation to the thundering of movement conservatism. While today's policies of mass incarceration, discriminatory policing, voter suppression and others that disproportionately affect minority communities were put in place with the same sort of veiled racism that was espoused by the politicians who enacted them. "Tough on crime" and "war on drugs" have been buzzwords used to send thousands upon thousands of young men to prison with lengthy sentences without even a halfhearted attempt at rehabilitation. Meanwhile immigration has been demonized simply by adding the word "illegal" in front of it to stigmatize anyone driven off their land by subsidized agribusiness and into the US desperate for work.

It is always difficult to put concrete explanations for why social movements arise and mature, but at least we have history as a guide. The following posts will include a series of excerpts from William Leuchtenburg's The Perils of Prosperity that I also excerpted for the "We Have Been Here Before" series (Part 1, 2, and 3). Professor Leuchtenburg included a chapter on political fundamentalism that I feel is important to retell in this election season.