Marj-at-Large: News &Views
  • News & Views
    • About the Author
  • Right Now
  • My Take
    • Bright Spots >
      • Where Has All the Kindness Gone?
      • A New Day on the Way: Jan. 3, 2019
      • Blessed Are the Peacemakers
      • The Audacity of Hope
      • Issues >
        • Budget and Taxes
        • The Environment
        • Guns
        • Health Care >
          • Statistics
      • The Purity of It All: LLWS
      • The Polling Place Adventure
      • July Potpourri
      • The Unexpected Bison
    • State of the Union >
      • 12/5/18: The Best of Days, the Worst of Days
      • 7/17/18: Deals With Dictators, Episode 2
      • 5/17/18: Suffer the Children
      • 4/7/18: Never Let a Crisis Go To Waste
      • 12/6/17: The Centre Cannot Hold
    • Saving the Children and Other Living Things >
      • Saving the Elephants
    • Taxes, Broadly Speaking
    • Health Care
    • Presidential Malpractice >
      • 6/22/18: Gratuitous Brutality
    • The Political Parties >
      • 2/2/18: GOP: The Cabinet Chorus of Praise
  • Marj-inized
  • Readers Write
    • Your Turn

Making America Whole Again

1/12/2021

0 Comments

 
By Mary Ellen Brooks

​Mary Ellen is an adjunct professor of sociology and anthropology at Palomar College in San Marcos, CA.

Making America Whole Again
All morning I’ve been hearing liberal media figures assert that the terrorist attack on the Capitol was all about racism. Pointing to the disturbing discrepancy between the aggressive police treatment of peaceful BLM demonstrators and the tolerant, if not encouraging, treatment of violent white, male Trump supporters, the media on the left are underscoring the breadth and depth of racism in the United States.
 
But is the fact that America has a serious race problem really the “breaking news” here? I think not. 
 
The truth is that the social dynamics behind the attack on the Capitol are far more complex than we are being told. The terrorists who attacked the Capitol are indeed white racists, but they are only the outward face of the problem. Behind them and largely behind the scenes are powerful individuals and groups who have seized on American racism and are using it as an effective tool to achieve their own goal of maintaining and increasing wealth and power. 

Winning Control 
As threatening as they were with their bombs and firearms, the thugs who stormed the Capitol are not the most dangerous people in America. They were useful idiots doing the work of some very smart, obscenely wealthy people who knew that in a democratic system, they would never be able to win over the average American voter by telling the truth— by saying “vote for us, because we are the candidates who will take even more of the Nation’s wealth out of your pocket and put it into mine.” No, that message would never sell. To win ultimate control over U.S. and, indeed, global wealth, they had to find a wedge issue that would induce a large enough segment of the American population to vote against their own best interests and endow the upper echelon with enough power to overthrow our democratic republic. 
 
Because let’s face it, not everybody in the US wants to uphold and protect our form of government, a government endowed with the ideological right and justification to redistribute wealth from the bloated rich to the starving poor. The democratic system of government that the founders and framers of the Constitution bequeathed us rests on the belief that all people, having been created equal, deserve the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but intrinsic to this foundational belief is the need to redirect money and resources from the highest echelons of wealth and privilege to the middle and lower classes when excessive wealth is concentrated at the top, and the gap between the wealthy and the rest of society is too great. The rich could never get behind the idea of Robin Hood running the government. 
 
Despite their words to the contrary, the wealthy deplore a “trickle down” economic system if the taxing of the rich is the means whereby wealth flows to the middle and lower classes. They much prefer a system that cuts their taxes, claiming— quite falsely—that the added money in their pockets will fuel the economy and “trickle down” to others. 

Of, By, and For the Rich
What the wealthy much prefer is not a democracy of, by, and for the people, but rather a plutocracy— a government of, by and for the rich, and Donald Trump, though flawed in many respects, promised to give them what they wanted and almost achieved. 
While Trump identified as being one of them in terms of class, wealth and power, he looked to them like he might just be the right man for the job they wanted done. Sure, he lacked the polish and sophistication of the upper class, and sure, he probably wasn’t really all that wealthy (at least not until he used the Presidency to accumulate wealth), but Trump brought to the battle some important assets that the rich and powerful thought they could use to their advantage. ​

​Importantly, Trump was both a genuine racist and an actual reality tv star who knew how to dupe average white Americans into believing that he was a successful businessman with a sincere populist message. While crossing his fingers and winking at his rich supporters, he told out-of-work miners in West Virginia that he’d bring back coal mining, and he promised unemployed factory workers in Illinois and Michigan that he’d bring manufacturing back to the country and to their states. Sure, he was lying to them—promising them the impossible— but while his wealthy benefactors saw through his deceit, his working class supporters believed his lies and loved him all the more for telling them what they most wanted to hear.
 
Trump managed, then, to win support both from the ultra-wealthy who expected him to do their bidding, and from the much larger population of average, white, working-class Americans who have been watching their own economic strength erode increasingly over the past 50 years and who genuinely believed that Trump was going to restore their notion of the American Dream. He was going to give them back their jobs, their pay raises, their new cars, their nice homes in the suburbs. He was going to “make America great again.” 
 
Cowardice or Avarice?

Meanwhile the richest of the rich knew what Trump was really doing. If you wonder why Republican Senators and Representatives stood by and did nothing to stop Trump from overturning our democratic system, the reason was not cowardice. It was avarice. Most of them had immense wealth to protect, and those few who weren’t wealthy believed they’d secure wealth and power by swearing loyalty to Trump and to the people who represent his REAL base—the ultra-rich in the US and abroad (including people like Vladimir Putin). 
 
So yes, we have a race problem in the US, but what we’ve been seeing is not a return to Jim Crow racism. It’s worse than that. What Trump has been doing is to harness racism as a tool to seize ultimate power, and that, I would propose, is slavery re-envisioned, slavery reinstated.
 
If we want to prevent the history of the past four years from repeating itself, the way to begin is by doing what we can (and what we must) to fight racism. The way to begin, I believe, is by taking on institutional racism. The choices of people that President-elect Biden has made to join his leadership team are right on the mark in terms of diversity, and philosophically they appear to be fully prepared to lead us by policy and by example toward a country where people are judged by “the content of their character”— not by the color of their skin or the size of their portfolio. Though we are a nation deeply divided, if we can begin to remove that which divides us, racism, then we can reunite as a people and be made whole again.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    How to submit to "Readers Write"

    To submit your thoughts on all matters political for publication in this section, please use the contact form on the "Your Turn" page. Please include brief biographical information to accompany your piece. 

    Archives

    August 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    August 2021
    June 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017

    Categories

    All
    Candidates
    Civil Rights
    Climate Change
    Congress
    Deregulation
    Economy
    Gender Issues
    Guns
    Health Care
    International Relations
    Political Parties
    Reflections
    Reproductive Rights
    Satire
    Taxes
    The Big Picture
    The Constitution
    Trump

    RSS Feed

Copyright © 2017