All Kossacks know what Progressives want in a general way, including universal Health Care, sane economics, no insane wars, saving the planet, and so on in that vein. We can discuss current ideas about ending global poverty and oppression, too. But how do we get there? How do we win anything, given that every game in town, including elections, the economy, the media, and education, is rigged?
Well, we know part of the answer to that. Every time the powers that be mess up, the rest of us get a chance to see how much we can fix. Thus, the Bush multiple-front catastrophe eventually brought us Obama. But that isn't enough. The damage wrought by Republican greed, bigotry, and intolerance has been getting worse in recent cycles as the party has turned further to the racist Southern base, and kicked out more and more of its Moderates. Nixon, as bad as he was, still gave us the EPA, went to China, and got us out of Vietnam. What have Reagan and the Bushes ever done for us (or should I say to us) except dig us in deeper?
The real question is how to fix the system to work for the people again.
So what's wrong that we need to fix? A lot, actually, but this is my short list of the worst problems.
- Old hatreds
- Lies
- Corporate money in politics
- Economic greed and delusion
- Gerrymandered safe seats
- The schools
I assume that I don't have to explain the problems with legal forms of bribery in politics, the delusory nature of Voodoo Reaganomics, or the ease with which those consumed by hate accept lies. So we have to look at the current hatreds, and at gerrymandering and the schools.
- The primary form of hatred is economic. The poor despise anyone who wants to keep them poor, and the rich despise anyone who doesn't want to keep them rich. Not just prosperous, but richer than the rest of us. See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, for details. Most other forms of hatred stem from this basic form, but disguise themselves as motivated by race or some other invidious distinction.
- Religious hatred is commonly second in potency, except when it is based on economic hatred. The Crusades were as much about Muslim cultural, scientific, and economic superiority as about the territory, including the Holy Places.
- Sex is often an occasion for individual hatred, but can get entangled with the others. The meme of Black men raping White women is one of the nastiest examples. (It goes with the fear that White women would prefer Black men for being in better shape and not threatening to lord it over them. Certainly White slaveowners routinely carried on with female slaves.)
- Guilt is last on my list, but not at all least.
Hatred of Blacks in the South is originally due to guilt over their torment, as excused by Southern Baptist preachers. This original hatred was greatly multiplied by the loss (Yankee "theft") of the Blacks themselves as property, and of a privileged way of life on the plantation. Since then, Yankee judges and politicians (and that Texas traitor Lyndon Johnson) have taken away Jim Crow, and are still telling racist Southerners how evil they are. Thus the overhyped fear that President Obama's agenda is to take away all Southern property and privileges as Reparations, since it was all built by or on the backs of slaves.
Almost everybody else who is widely hated today got there first by either by being poor, or by having imperial conquerors and slavers as ancestors. Latinos and other immigrants today, and the Irish, Jews, and many others in times past. They all came to take away "our" jobs, and then our privileges, until they were no longer poor, and thus no longer economic threats.
For several decades, there has been an agreement on gerrymandering safe districts for minority candidates, while at the same time creating larger numbers of safe seats for anti-minority politicians. This has gotten a significant number of Black, Latino, and other minorities into various legislatures, but I claim that it is completely counter-productive today. What we need is competitive districts that have political conversations, where all politicians of whatever race have to win over voters of other races in order to succeed.
"All politics is local," said Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and nothing is more local than the racial composition of the community. Bill Clinton called for a national conversation on race, and was roundly ignored. It has to come from people talking face to face, not just from politicians and TV talking heads. But it is refreshing to hear a real discussion going on now, even if not by the usual suspects. If we can discuss race on the basis of direct knowledge of facts, then we can discuss anything on that basis. It turns out that the young have been having that discussion for a long time, and will fairly soon take over from those clinging to the past.
There is a good deal more to this topic. We have to discuss, at the very least,