There is simply no understanding the prevalence of gun violence in America - as evidenced by the recent attempted assassination of a congresswoman during a mass shooting - without discussing the nefarious role played by the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Once an organisation primarily concerned with the education and training of sportsmen, in a coup that came to be known as the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977, hardliners took over the leadership and believed that any gun regulation would take us down a slippery slope to Khmer Rougism.
In the years since, unlike the US in the wake of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy - or for that matter Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre - the response to senseless gun violence has been to discuss everything from the rhetoric on our airwaves to the weather outside.
But any public conversations regarding restricting who has access to guns has been considered verboten (although, thankfully, this time some cracks are beginning to show).
This is largely because the NRA's duping its own members, which we'll discuss below, and coming to the realisation that the real money was in actually protecting the rights of gun manufacturers, which we'll discuss in Part II of this series.
If the NRA leadership is not radical, they certainly see the benefit in playing radicals on TV in order to enrich their financial benefactors who produce and sell the weaponry of death.
In the 1990s, in a climate of fear and paranoia that produced the Oklahoma City bombing, they were all too happy to refer to the government authority that tries to enforce gun laws, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), as "jack-booted thugs". This led former president George H.W. Bush to resign his membership.
They then decided to up the ante by accusing former president Bill Clinton of murder and saying he "had blood on his hands" - all for the crime of supporting background checks at gun shows - which is among the many legislative proposals to reduce gun violence that they have repeatedly blocked.
Others include a ban on high-capacity magazines, banning sales to those on terrorist watch lists, and fully funding the aforementioned ATF (think about the latter when they say they want to "strengthen existing gun laws" after each new tragedy).
In fact, just a few days after the mass shooting in Tucson it was reported by Ryan Reilly from TPMMuckraker that a "jihadist" in America who was... "a moderator and contributor on Islamic extremist web forums, posted songs praising suicide bombers, discussed his jihad fantasies in the open..." was able to get an AK-47, no questions asked.
Emerson Begolly, the "jihadist" in question, responded when queried about this with laughter and facetiously exclaimed that "someone at the FBI showed up to work drunk". Perhaps, but if they were, it was only because the NRA forced them to do keg stands.
The Republicans won control of the House and picked up seats in the Senate in the midterm election on nebulous promises to slash spending and reduce the size of the federal government. House Speaker John Boehner has pledged to reduce spending to 2008 levels, as per the GOP's campaign manifesto, known as the "Pledge to America."
In President Obama's Tucson memorial speech, he talked about Americans as a family. On a Martin Luther King Jr. Day with our country still in grief over the Tucson shooting, it is appropriate to reflect on this idea -- an idea shared by King himself as well as other great American leaders.
Throughout his career, King's speeches and writing were suffused with the ideas and images of family, community, and interdependence. Images of people holding hands in fellowship and "sitting down at the table of brotherhood together" were woven into many of his most important speeches. Invoking his own children in his most important speech as a metaphor for his dream of an American future -- where we are all judged by "the content of our character", and where one day "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers" -- was a clarion call for a vision of an American family. In another landmark sermon, King spoke of ingratitude as being one of the worst sins of all because a person "fails to realize his dependence on others". He went on to say that our fates were "inextricably linked in a garment of destiny."
King was a civil rights leader, but he was hardly just a civil rights leader. He had a broader progressive vision for America, a vision rooted in our nation's most sacred American "scriptures": in the Declaration of Independence and its promise of equality and guarantee of the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to a nation "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" and a "government of the people, by the people, for the people". The reason King's "I Have A Dream" speech has joined those two other documents as a sacred American text is because the ideas in it are too compelling to ignore, too fundamental to the American ideal and identity to be anything other than an iconic American text.
This notion of America as one people, one family -- not just a collection of states or special interests -- is core to our identity, and you can see it in response to the tragedy in Tucson. As in other terrible moments of our history like Sept. 11 or the Oklahoma City bombing, Americans have joined together to support each other in our grief and our determination to go forward united. The outpouring of love and compassion for all the victims has been moving beyond words. The stories of heroism during the event, like the amazing stories of heroism during the Sept. 11 tragedy, were reminders of the courage so many people have even when the worst is happening in front of their eyes. We Americans may be rugged individualists, but we also are one people, one family, mutually interdependent.
The question remains, of course, whether this American family will become more dysfunctional or more caring for all its children. Goodness knows there are way too many dysfunctional families, where children go hungry or are abused, where mental health is not nurtured, where disagreements turn violent. But Martin Luther King Jr. and the recent events in Tucson both call on us to build a stronger American family -- a family that takes care of each other through the worst of times and nurtures each other all the time; a family where all children get a good education and are taken care of when they are sick; a family where differences and disagreements are treated with respect; a family where kindness and the Golden Rule of treating everyone as you want to be treated are revered values. That is the kind of America I want to live in, not the kind of society where, as Glenn Beck put it to a conservative audience who responded with laughter and applause, "the lions eat the weak."
We have a long way to go before my dreams of a mutually supportive American family get realized. The lions that want to eat the weak have been roaring and rampaging. But I still have hope that King's dream of an American family that sits down as brothers and sisters, and that Lincoln's Gettysburg vision of an America of the people, by the people, for the people shall come back into fashion.
The most popular trope to excuse the right of all rresponsibility for decades of demonizing, violent and eliminationist rhetoric: "Both sides do it!"
Not so much:
This has been out there for a very long time for everyone to see. A tremendous tolerance for violent rightwing rhetoric has been built up--particularly by so-called political "moderates", "centrists" and the "objective journalists" of the so-called "mainstream media". This is what they've all grown accustomed to--and devoted themselves to making other accustomed to as well.
Gosh, who knew someone would end up getting killed! After all, they only talked about it all the time! There were tell-tale signs at all the rallies. They were carrying guns to political events all across the country. And their political leaders were sending out very clear messages, with no one else reigning them in.
I hope that's not where we're going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.
What Democratic Senate candidate has done that? If both sides do it, then there must be at least one. Who is it?
And Giffords' opponent holding "Get on Target for Victory in November" and "Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office[.] Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly".
What Democratic congressional candidate has done that? If both sides do it, then there must be at least one. Who is it?
All these incidents are only on the right. There is nothing like them on the left. That alone is enough to refute the absurd "both sides do it" narrative.
But it's only the beginning.
These are not isolated incidents. They are highpoints of a vastly repeating pattern, that has hundreds of thousands of violent rhetorical echoes that have been there to report on for at least three long years now. And they are a perfectly predictable repeat of what the militia movement and others did the last time we had a Democratic President.
The media needs to stop lying about this. Democrats themselves need to stop lying about this. Both sides don't do it -- just as both sides were not equally responsible for the Civil War. Conservatives have clear-cut history of violent treason in our country. And they've just recently started to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of it--even as they continue to lie, and claim that it wasn't about slavery. It's true now, like it was true 150 years ago: Both sides don't do it. And America deserves a media and a political leadership that's not afraid to simply state the truth.
In case you hadn't noticed, I've been pretty damned outraged by Glenn Beck's attempt to steal the identity of the Civil Rights Movement. But there's no way he could pull it off all by his lonesome. And I'm not just talking about the conservative hegemony machine. I'm talking so-called liberals, too. I'm even talking our first black President.
This essay examines the rhetorical situation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." It argues that King's "Letter" was an essential response for civil rights to continue as a mass movement in Birmingham and beyond. At a broader level, King's "Letter" demonstrated the enactment of rhetorical transformation. By creative use of kairos and pathos the letter rebutted the claims of the moderate white clergy in Birmingham and changed King's rhetorical persona and presence. The "Letter" transformed the idea of reasonableness from the province of moderation alone and united it with justifications for direct civil disobedience. Consequently, the "Letter" as rhetorical response opened a new public frame for pragmatic, value-based identification with civil rights for historical and contemporary audiences.
Now, I didn't think that was a particularly profound insight. In fact, I'm citing it because of the opposite: it's really nothing more than a recasting of King's own words into scholarly discourse. This is not at all to belittle the effort involved, or its importance. Scholarly articles such as this are part of the process by which new ways of thinking and being are concretized, normalized, and rooted in the world. Still, the basic argument here is already quite clear in King's original text, where he explores in detail the vast gulf between the superficial negative peace of oppression and the profound positive peace of justice, especially in the particular nature of the struggle needed to move form one to the other:
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative....
There were two major modes of viewing the issue raised in the comment that were worth taking note of. First, there was the discussion of racism in the Tea Party, typified by Filler's comment (directed :
You are the type of person for whom no evidence of racism would ever be good enough.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has spent the past few days talking about racism in the Tea Party and those, like Metamars, who enable it, if anyone's interested.
Second was the view of the Tea Party as an example of American white supremacy, which was typified by Oaktown Girl's comment:
Just like 1776
Here's a good Tim Wise link unpacking the take our country back rallying cry. Hard to get a louder dog whistle than that:
How fascinating. That it is factually impossible to separate out the "racism part" from the rest of it is something many white folks seem not to understand. They seem to think there was once a time of innocence when oppression wasn't happening, or that we can easily extract from our accounting of those crimes the great and noble things about our forefathers and view them in some patriotic vacuum.
Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark "other" does so, however, it isn't viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic.
The discussion of racism in the Tea Party took up most of the comment thread. It represented far and away the most common perspective. But the song/video was clearly articulated from the perspective that Oaktown Girl introduced, the perspective of the Tea Party as an example of American white supremacy.
There are, as I see it, two fault-lines here worth noting:
Back in mid-December, Ed Kilgore wrote a piece "Taking Ideological Differences Seriously". The piece was useful in that it argued that differences among "progressives" were not simply differences over political strategy, but also over ideology. It's a pretty basic idea, but one it seems that most folks have paid far too little attention to.
However, the piece ran into trouble when trying to describe the ideological differences. Indeed, it never even attempted to describe both sides of the divide. Rather it focused on the so-called "Third Way" and on distinguishing it from conservative approaches. Chris linked to it precisely for this reason. But because it fails to even attempt to describe both sides, this approach is more justificatory than explanatory--though it certainly does explain how Third Way types would like to be seen. The explanation itself is presented in terms of policy mechanisms--specifically, the Third Way "strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results" But this completely avoids the more fundamental question: what about differences in ends, not just means? What if one person's "progressive policy results" are another person's "not so much"?
I first tried to do that myself, by responded to Kilgore's piece with a diary "What's Wrong With The Third Third Way" which described how historically this was the third such "compromise" between naked capitalism and an oppositional alternative. The first "Third Way" was democratic socialism, the second "Third Way" was the market-supporting "liberal" welfare state in the typology of Gosta Epsing-Anderson's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, and the third "Third Way" is--despite frequent disavowals--largely a repurposing of the market-supporting welfare state for politically conservative ends, but with
"competent" centrist Democrats in charge. I'm afraid that this analysis was too far-flung for some. So I want to take another stab, first at providing a more down-to-earth set of test-points, and only after that by presenting yet another grand vision sort of overview.
Here, again is Kilgore's central presentation of Obama's "Third Way":
To put it simply, and perhaps over-simply, on a variety of fronts (most notably financial restructuring and health care reform, but arguably on climate change as well), the Obama administration has chosen the strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results. This approach was a hallmark of the so-called Clintonian, "New Democrat" movement, and the broader international movement sometimes referred to as "the Third Way," which often defended the use of private means for public ends. (It's also arguably central to the American liberal tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson, and is even evident in parts of the New Deal and Great Society initiatives alongside elements of the "social democratic" tradition, which is characterized by support for publicly operated programs in key areas).
Does It Work?
The problem here, as I see it, is that Kilgore is avoiding the central concern for populist (as opposed to, say, corporatist) progressives: Does it get the job done? I'm sure that Obamaphiles would say, "Yes it does!" but that only brings us down to the real bottom line: what exactly is the job? When it comes to healthcare reform, there's plenty of room for disagreement, but a fairly good starting point might be "reducing overall system costs to something close to the OECD median while improving overall health outcomes to something close to the OECD media." There's nothing particularly ideological about this formulation, at least in the commonplace meaning of the word, which Third Way types like to use in dismissing populist progressives. It's just (a) quite commonsensical, and (b) rendered in measurable terms that ought to appeal to the purported wonkiness of Third Way types.
Today is the 43rd Anniversary of Martin Luther King's speech, "Beyond Vietnam, A Time To Break Silence". Earlier this week, I wrote a diary calling attention to a Tavis Smiley PBS special devoted to discussing this speech. He had an excellent cast of commentators who had some very good and important things to say. But he didn't focus as much on digging into the specifics of what King said as he focused on the broader implications, as well as the constraints King was struggling against.
This isn't a criticism. Smiley has a lot more experience in doing television than I do, and it struck me as a very savvy and sensible use of tv time. It's just that it left me wanting to highlight something else I find most significant, which centers on the arc of arguments King made about why he had no choice but to speak out against the war. This diary is as selective in its way as Smiley was in his, and I invite all readers to join in with whatever seems most important to them in the comments.
The first thing I want to underscore is the way that King meets head-on the main criticism he knows that awaits him: What is he doing speaking out of turn, a civil rights leader speaking about peace? It seems like an utterly ludicrous objection to our ears today. But one of the reasons it seems so ludicrous today is precisely because of Martin Luther King, both his personal example, and the highly specific way that he answered that question. Of course, in the broadest and most profound sense, the entirety of the speech is his answer to that question, but the following passage is the tip of the iceberg, as it were. What's more, it ends by subtley standing the entire premise on its head, and-more in sorrow than in anger--calling into question the competence of those who would ask such a foolish question in the first place:
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
On Sunday, President Obama made a quick, unannounced trip to Afghanistan, just to check in on his own personal war-one that every honest historian in the world knows that America will someday lose, since no empire has ever conquered Afghanistan and held it. With his own war and his own Nobel Peace Prize, he's got everything a poltical leader could possibly want. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, PBS airs a Tavis Smiley's special "MLK: A Call to Conscience", where we get to see what a real Peace Prize winner-and a real hero-sounds like. Here's a brief excerpt, revolving around King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech given April 4, 1967:
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight, because my conscience leaves me no other choice. A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
CLAYBORNE CARSON: Martin Luther King knew, when he gave that speech, that it would set off a firestorm.
SUSANNAH HESCHEL: It's the speech that challenges us, and in that sense it's his most important. That we are uncomfortable with that speech tells us something.
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Well, such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, that question suggests that they do not know the world in which they live.
VINCENT HARDING: It was precisely one year to the day after this speech that that bullet, which had been chasing him for a long time, finally caught up with him. And I am convinced that that bullet had something to do with that speech.
On Monday, Smiley was on Democracy Now!, where that excerpt was aired.
The special also includes the following powerful message from Cornel West:
CORNEL WEST: Here he was shouting, a voice, prophetic voice in the wilderness, and he knew the sleepwalking was increasing. What he didn't know was that the sleepwalking would get thicker and thicker during the age of Reagan. And what he didn't know, that there was a black man on the way to the White House in 2009, and was hoping that there would be some awakening connected to his legacy of focusing on poor people and working people and jobs and homes and studying war, no more, not because a president would be pacifist, because it upset me when I heard my dear brother Barack Obama criticize Martin on the global stage, saying that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s insights were not useful for a commander-in-chief, because evil exists, as if Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't know about evil.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was fighting terrorism. He was an anti-terrorist who was fighting Jim Crow and James Crow. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew something about evil, more so than many of us, including our beloved president. But he also knew that if you don't break the cycle of domination and bigotry and hatred and try to exemplify some alternative, then that cycle would be reinforced in such a way that you would be a pro-war president, pro-war citizen, and not giving peace a chance.
In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". In Part 2, I dealt with the the first of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension." This diary deals with the second such narrative.
If Alexander's first narrative is a transparent bunch of hooey, the same cannot be said about his second one. There is some truth in claim that liberals look down at people repeatedly voting against their economic interests, for cultural causes that are repeatedly ignored or outright betrayed between elections. But this is an isolated observation, and the question is one of context, which raises a host of subsidiary questions: Are liberals who do this more or less condescending than the cynical conservative manipulators who run these games? Is there anything particularly liberal about this? Or is it simply a matter of elite attitudes towards the masses? Or--as Jack Balkin's analysis "Populism and Progressivism as Constitutional Categories" suggests, of people who identify with progressivism towards those who identify with populism? And what about those on the left who reject the 'stupid voter' narrative one way or another? Such as George Lakoff, Drew Wesson, Larry Bartells ("What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?"), or me, for that matter? And, finally, what about all those liberals who are themselves members of the working class who haven't been fooled at all, but sure are pissed at Democratic elites for doing such a lousy job on their behalf the last three decades or so? The welter of questions like these points to where a genuinely honest debate about elitism and condescension, left and right, might take us. But it's not at all a direction in which Alexander has any interest.
Indeed, Alexander regards his interpretation of this narrative as so self-evidently true, without any possible alternatives, that he lays it out in a single sentence, then points quickly to three examples in support, before (condescendingly, one might think) telling us what it all means. First:
Rampant poverty can't be written off as the result of historical accident or a worker's incompetence. It is actively cultivated by bad public policies that direct economic resources into the hands of a wealthy few. The resulting inequality creates unnecessary suffering all over the world, from the humanitarian crisis in Haiti to the alarmingly high poverty rate in the United States.
Systemic poverty in Haiti
The tragedy in Haiti is not only the result of a massive earthquake. As Richard Kim explains for The Nation, Haiti has long been one of the world's poorest nations, and that poverty has prevented the country from protecting itself against natural disasters. As Kim explains:
Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor-by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.
Kim details Haiti's struggles under the weight of colonialist debt that dates back to 1804, the year it won its independence from France. Soon after the revolution, the U.S. and France threatened a trade embargo against Haiti unless the nation of former slaves agreed to pay reparations to its former slave-masters in France. Haiti paid off this extortion with loans from U.S. and European banks. The country was still paying those loans back in the 1940s.
In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide demanded that France repay Haiti $21 billion of these unjust payments. He was ousted by a military coup for his efforts. Even today, the emergency IMF loans that are ostensibly helping Haiti cope with the disaster are crippled by insane stipulations, such as raising electricity prices for Haiti's poorest citizens.
One-eighth of U.S. population receiving food stamps
The U.S. has been waging a quiet war against its own poor for decades as well. In a blog for Working In These Times, Akito Yoshikane highlights today's record level of poverty: One in four U.S. children are living on food stamps, while one-eighth of the entire nation is receiving them. That's over 38 million people, or more than four times the population of New York City. A poverty epidemic on this scale is a total affront to any concept of economic justice, liberal or conservative.
MLK and economic justice
Just economic policy was a critical concern for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But today's 13.2% U.S. poverty rate is actually higher than when King spoke out against it in 1968, as Rich Benjamin notes for AlterNet. The economic oppression of minorities continues to this day. While the overall U.S. unemployment rate is 10%, among black workers, the rate is an astonishing 16.2%, while Latino and Latina workers face 12.9% unemployment.
10% unemployment vs. multi-million dollar bonuses
It's impossible to tolerate 10% unemployment in any economy. But those high rates are especially cruel considering the multi-million-dollar bonuses being paid to bankers who were bailed out with U.S. citizens' tax dollars. Nomi Prins' fantastic interactive chart at Mother Jones reveals both the obscene executive pay levels and staggering federal bailouts that banks subsequently used to boost profits and banker pay.
Top bank executives scored regal paydays for nearly destroying the economy, and some of them even helped pervert the government into an enabler of banking excess. Need an example? Prins highlights Robert Rubin, who pushed through a host of radical deregulatory laws as Treasury Secretary in the 1990s, then left to take a job at Citigroup, where he reaped over $120 million before his company needed a massive bailout. There's no reason for policymakers to accept a 13.2% poverty rate while subsidizing paychecks for wealthy bankers.
What can be done?
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel convened to uncover the causes of the financial crisis, could play a key role in overturning the injustices embedded within the U.S. financial system. As Ruth Coniff notes for The Progressive, it's not simply that the bailouts saved the banks. It's that the banks are piggybacking on taxpayer-granted perks to score record profits.
Economic arguments are routinely deployed to excuse outrageous social injustices-the most common argument for the U.S. bank bailout claims that things would have been much worse for everyone if we hadn't thrown billions at the banks. There are grains of truth in the argument. If all of the banks had actually failed, the result would have been economic mayhem. But that bailout money should have come with major strings attached. There is no reason why bank CEOs, rather than taxpayers, should be reaping the rewards from profits that taxpayer funds generated.
In both global and domestic politics, severe inequality is often accepted as an economic fact, not a problem that must be solved. But the moral outrage prompted by the disaster in Haiti and the U.S. financial bailout is both real and justified. If we want to live in a just society, we cannot continue to subsidize the rich by exploiting the poor.
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In his book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by Yale historian David W. Blight describes in detail how the history of the Civil War-its meaning, cause, purpose and effect-was completely rewritten to reflect the views of Southern racist ideology over a period of 50 years after the war. Blight describes the interactions of three different broad visions of Civil War memory-reconciliationist, emancipationist and white supremacist-which contended with one another over time. Eventually, the reconciliationist narrative, which had its roots in revulsion at the sheer horror of the war itself, became completely subsumed by the white supremacist narrative, simply because the South refused reconciliation on any other terms, thus resulting in the virtual elimination of the historically accurate emancipationist narrative, which did not fully re-emerge until the Civil Right era in the 1950s and 60s. I wrote about Blight's book at some length in my December, 2008 diary, "American Amnesia: The Cost of Accommodating The South".
In turn, something very similar to the process Blight describes has been underway to rewrite the history of the Civil Rights Movement itself, and the recent uproar over Harry Reid's clumsy remarks about Obama's appearance and speech is a classic illustration of that process at work. Another example is the Facebook invitation I recently received to attend the Republican Party of Los Angeles County's "first annual" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Awards Dinner. The event description began:
Please join the Republican Party of Los Angeles County as we honor two great Republicans who embody the courage and spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. - A Republican who stood for individual responsibility and spoke eloquently and boldly in defense of liberty and justice for all.
The dreams of Dr. King live on in scores of Republicans today. This year our first annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Award will be presented to Star Parker and Walter Allen.
This crude attempt to reinvent King as a conservative Republican is laughable to anyone the least bit familiar with the real King, a democratic socialist well to the left of the entire white political spectrum. Most particularly, as I pointed out in my 1995 MLK Day essay republished here last night, "Martin Luther King - A Different Drum Major", King's concept of character-as reflected in his speech, "The Drum Major Instinct"-was the polar opposite of the acquisitive conservative ideal, touted by the likes of Parker.
It's fashionable today to pose the theme of personal responsibility in opposition to the continued quest for social justice. We even hear Reverend Martin Luther King quoted out of context, as if judging people by the "content of their character" was meant to endorse the idea that some of us should starve, some should go homelss, and some should shiver naked in the midst of winter.
But Dr. King didn't think that the content of our characters was something coldly quantifiable, capable of being determined by the marketplace, like the price of pork rind or pig iron. When he spoke of personal responsibility he had a much more lofty view in mind: that we are each responsible not just for ourselves, but for each other, and for our collective redemption from the sins of our past that stain us still. He did not falsely oppose the ideas of personal responsibility and commitment to social justice. Rather, he saw the commitment to social justice--rooted in the Gospels--as a means for transforming mere egotism and blind ambition into engines of individual redemption--the crowning reward of personal responsibility.
In his famous speech, "The Drum Major Instinct," delivered two months to the day before his assassination, he spoke of the many ways in which the desire to be first, to be noticed, can distort our lives, beginning from Mark 10:35, the story of James and John petitioning Jesus, "Grant unto us that we may sit one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left hand in they glory." Dr. King spoke of people living beyond their means, buying a car or a house that cost more than they can afford. He spoke of people dropping names, calling attention to their influential connections--real or imagined. He spoke of people turning to crime and other forms of anti-social behavior, questing for notice, for distinction. He spoke of exclusive clubs, and the advertisers' constant appeal to our desire to be set apart, to be superior to others. And he spoke, finally of "tragic race prejudice," which leaves its mark on all of us, whatever race we are.
It's my belief that it's no longer in doubt: Barack Obama is not a progressive, even a moderate or cautious one. On virtually every issue imaginable, we've seen nearly a year of bending over backwards to mollify conservative and reactionary forces-with a singular lack of success-while repeatedly rebuffing or attacking progressives, even when all they are doing is trying to support his agenda,
Behind all the various different examples one could point to, I believe that there's a common thread of underlying continuity and accommodation with the Reagan/Bush/Gingrich/Bush era ideology, rather than fundamental change. Put simply, as revealed during the campaign, at a fundamental level Barack Obama believes that Reagan's criticism of the New Deal is true. Which is why he is aligned with conservadems who want to gut Social Security and Medicare. He also believes that Reagan's style of blind, unquestioning, authoritarian patriotism is not just legitimate, but superior to the progressive, democratic-republican alternative that is actually founded on living out the political philosophy on which our nation was founded.
All that is quite a mouthful, but what it comes down to is that Obama does not believe in the critical/prophetic patriotism professed by Martin Luther King, and carried on, however imperfectly, by his own long-time minister Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The incidents used to drive a wedge between the two were actually superficial to their underlying differences. Obama is, above all, a symbol of black assimilation. After centuries of always being on the bottom, trampled underfoot by any recent arrival, with Obama's ascension to the Oval Office, black America could finally say it had arrived , it had been integrated into America's polity at the highest level.
On The Flip: Martin Luther King had never been an apostle of mere integration...
Note: While searching for a link from another past diary, I came across this, and was startled at how well it speaks to the growing sense of disappointment with Obama that many progressives are starting to feel. It was written in December, 2006, apparently just before Obama made his decision to run for President
Chris Bowers posted a very important frontpage story here at MyDD last night, "The Two Obamas and Me, Part One". In it, he drew a distinction between the Obama who first attracted widespread, enthusiastic netroots and grassroots progressive support, and post-Senate election Obama who has often reiterated rightwing stereotypes of the left, in order to position himself more favorably.
In the course of the comments, some counter-arguments were raise, many knee-jerk and fatuous, but some serious, and deserving of serious replies. Chris himself has said he will have more to say, and so I make no attempt to speak for him, or answer all the serious objections raised. Instead, what I want to do is add a perspective to reinforce where Chris is coming from, as I understand him, which is the same place I'm coming from on this. That perspective is the subject of an ongoing series I'm doing on hegemony, a complex concept that is nontheless deftly summarized as "a dominant ideology in drag as common sense."
In my view, the concept of hegemony is most useful in clarifying where Obama stands, and what he stands for. He is, in my view, a hegemonic figure in drag as a counter-hegemonic figure. Jump to the flip if you're interested in why.
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