The former Confederate states are all going to rejoin the Union, willingly this time, and we are all going to come together to make it happen. This is the thesis of Bishop William Barber's book The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement, gathering arguments that he has been making for years.
The first Reconstruction briefly flourished after Emancipation, and the second Reconstruction ushered in meaningful progress in the civil rights era. But both were met by ferocious reactionary measures that severely curtailed, and in many cases rolled back, racial and economic progress. This Third Reconstruction is a profoundly moral awakening of justice-loving people united in a fusion coalition powerful enough to reclaim the possibility of democracy—even in the face of corporate-financed extremism.
"Redeemer" Democrats in the South during the first Reconstruction campaigned to Take Their Country Back and Make America Great Again. Their plan to institute Klan terror and legal Jim Crow succeeded for nearly a century. In 1876 they made a deal to vote Republican "Rutherfraud" B. Hayes in as President. In exchange Hayes made a promise to remove Federal troops from the South, and agreed to sign the Posse Comitatus Act, preventing Federal troops being used to maintain order in any state without explicit authorization from Congress. (Florida had messed up, and thrown the election into the House of Representatives.)
Racism has been in agonizingly slow decline since the Civil War. Now the decline is accelerating, as the children of the racists fall away by the millions every year, and even some of their elders are appalled by overt White Supremacism. Misogyny, homophobia, science denial, Islamophobia, nativism, and other fears and hatreds are also in slow but inevitable decline. The Republican Southern Strategy has nowhere left to go. Not that that will keep them from trying.
We have our work cut out for us. But we know what we have to do.
A majority of the US population favors Progressive solutions to all of our major problems, including gun violence and a woman’s right to make decisions with her own doctor, with no legislative bigots sticking their noses in where they are not wanted.
The only reason why these solutions have not been implemented is Republican fear and hatred, implemented as lying, cheating, stealing, gerrymandering and voter suppression. But that has just about reached its limit, except maybe in Mississippi and South Carolina and a very few other states.
Democrats are on course to win the Senate and the White House in 2020, and increase our majority in the House. We also expect to pick up more Governorships and wrest control of more legislatures from Republicans.
The first order of business at that time, apart from rolling back Trump policies in the Departments and Agencies and strengthening health care, is a new Voting Rights Act, similar to this year's HR 1. It will need
- a SCOTUS-proof preclearance list
- a requirement for independent redistricting in every state
- a specific ban on every known form of voter suppression
- a general ban on any new measures that disproportionately affect voters of one party or another
- and a requirement to provide voter registration systems, voting machines, and machines for counting ballots that meet NIST standards to be developed.
We also have to end the practice of partisan hacks overseeing voting in their own elections, or acting as campaign officials in elections that they oversee.
Disclosure: I am a Founding Member of the Open Voting Consortium, which has been demonstrating its auditable ballot printer system in public, to various states, and to NIST for years. The San Jose Mercury News called our system
The Holy Grail of voting systems.
Anti-Capitalist Meetup: Secure Voting Systems 101: The "Holy Grail"
It would have prevented the unintentional undervoting, misvoting, and double voting on the Butterfly Ballot that cost us President Gore in 2000 and the undervoting for Senator Nelson in Florida last year.
But even more important than fixing voting once we get in, is creating the coalition to get us in.
In this memoir of how Rev. Barber and allies as diverse as progressive Christians, union members, and immigration-rights activists came together to build a coalition, he offers a trenchant analysis of race-based inequality and a hopeful message for a nation grappling with persistent racial and economic injustice. Rev. Barber writes movingly—and pragmatically—about how he laid the groundwork for a state-by-state movement that unites black, white, and brown, rich and poor, employed and unemployed, gay and straight, documented and undocumented, religious and secular. Only such a diverse fusion movement, Rev. Barber argues, can heal our nation’s wounds and produce public policy that is morally defensible, constitutionally consistent, and economically sane. The Third Reconstruction is both a blueprint for movement building and an inspiring call to action from the twenty-first century’s most effective grassroots organizer.
The book ends with Fourteen Steps Forward Together, all of them familiar to those who have been on the front lines. The last is
Resist the "one moment" Mentality; we are building a movement!
It took more than 70 years for women to get the vote, and 50 for LGBT Marriage Equality. Neither of the struggles for women's right nor LGBT rights is over. White Supremacy has been with us for centuries, but is finally decaying enough for us to look at comprehensive remedies.
- The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except for convicts. The Southern states convicted as many people, mostly Black, as they could employ themselves or rent out to others. Then they decreed that convicts would permanently lose the right to vote.
- US labor unions were initially all White. The International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters broke that color line, but the issue still simmers among White Supremacist Reagan Democrats and their children.
- FDR tried to get Black agricultural and domestic workers included in Social Security. The South absolutely refused to hear of it.
- The GI Bill was given to the states to administer. Segregationist states found numerous creative ways to exclude Black GIs from housing, education, and other benefits in great numbers, though not entirely.
- Federal housing policy required banks to redline poor, i. e. black and immigrant, neighborhoods for both housing and business loans.
- After Truman desegregated the US Military "with the stroke of a pen" in 1948, it took five years more for the order to be implemented in the Army in Korea. Meanwhile Strom Thurmond ran against it on the explicitly racist segregationist Dixiecrat ticket, and then bolted to the Republicans.
- Court-ordered school desegregation in 1954 provoked a massive backlash throughout the South, including the explicitly racist Impeach Earl Warren movement.
- Court-ordered busing and Affirmative Action provoked a massive backlash in the North as well.
- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provoked the Goldwater States Rights campaign and the Republican Southern Strategy that resulted in landslide victories for Nixon and Reagan.
Every political issue in the US is a race issue and a moral issue. Guns, health, notably including women's and children's health, immigration, religion, education, banking, housing, income inequality, policing, the courts, prisons, voter suppression, energy, food, and much more.
Late in Bill Clinton's second term, he suggested that the US needed a conversation on race. He was laughed at, and roundly ignored during most of the Bush years. But here we are.
First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win.
Gandhi
And then they claim that it was their idea all along.
Me
The current round of fighting includes struggles over gerrymanders, voter suppression, overt racism, and maintaining every aspect of systemic racism.
The only cure is treating other people is human beings. This is the essence of Bishop Barber's moral revival movement: welcoming every kind of person into the movement together, especially those who thought that we were the enemy.
It's true. We Democrats all want the best of everything for everybody, whether they don't like it, or not. (HT
Misterjaw) It's not our fault that a raging but shrinking minority refuses our offer for fear that Those People will get some. We stand for Progressive measures that the real and vocal majority of Americans wants on almost every issue. Even gun safety and women’s medical choices and Global Warming.
Let Us Review
News out of the Southern states is a decidedly mixed bag, three steps forward, two steps back. The states are all very different, but Republicans in all of them are suffering from the same demographic shifts and the same kinds of social evolution. And the same fears and hatreds.
I first got into analyses of the South as a whole with a Nate Silver article on attitudes to Marriage Equality in the various states. His regression model indicated that even Alabama and Mississippi would come around to majority support by 2024. That's not a hard prediction, of course. Besides, we know that racism and abortion will take much longer.
Here is a map of approval of President Trump. A direct translation from this to Electoral College votes is not valid, of course, because many Republicans are happy that he is a crook and a rotter, though not so much that he is a poltroon. It's too bad. It would give the Democrat in the race a 300 EC vote victory. Not 300 votes in total. A 300 vote margin.
Here, however, is an actual prediction for 2020, from Rachel Bitecofer. It shows the generic Democrat starting with enough EC votes to be elected, four states too close to call, and further problems for Republicans in Georgia and Texas.
The following state notes include numbers from the Cook Partisan Voting Index.
Maryland (D+12)
At the beginning of the Civil War, Maryland tried to secede, but was stopped by Federal troops. There was an assassination plot in Maryland against President-elect Lincoln, foiled by Pinkerton agents. Now Maryland is firmly Democratic.
Virginia (D+1)
Statewide offices are all held by Democrats. The gerrymander has been overturned, and the legislature is expected to turn to Democratic majorities in both houses this year.
West Virginia (R+19)
When Virginia seceded from the US, its western part seceded from the state and came back to the Union. Its politics became polluted by the influence of coal mine owners, so that it is extremely regressive. Nevertheless, WV has a Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin.
Coal is dying. We have a chance to win over even the most die-hard coal miners in time, those asking
What have you done for me lately?
They desperately need health care, which they have been repeatedly denied. They need their pensions salvaged. They need their communities cleaned up from all of the ravages of coal, physical and moral. We can show them that Democrats mean business on these issues, and then we can talk to them about new jobs in Green tech.
North Carolina (R+3)
1872: If we cut taxes, then the government can't keep its promises to former slaves.
Notice how that later became the entire platform of the Republican Party.
How North Carolina Turned So Red So Fast
Until Republicans took control, the state had long been known as an outpost of Southern progressivism. This year’s elections may indicate whether the state’s shift to the hard right is in step with most voters.
But that has not changed the demographics of the state. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is extremely popular, and NC Republican power plays are shooting themselves in their own feet.
And now their gerrymander has been overturned. Again.
South Carolina (R+8)
The ancestral home of States Rights and Nullification, the first state to secede, and the first to fire on a Federal fort, starting the Civil War.
They still call it Mr. Lincoln's War, because he tricked them into shooting back first. Or something.
14 Maps That Explain South Carolina’s Political Geography
Political ideology among adults in South Carolina
Only 15% call themselves liberals.
Kentuckiana (KY R+15, IN R+9)
At the beginning of the Civil War, slave state Kentucky did not secede, but its politics have become more and more Southern, more and more racist since then.
We will see whether we can unseat the increasingly unpopular Moscow Mitch. Also,
KY-Gov: James Carville Helps A.G. Andy Beshear (D) Take Down Failed Governor Matt Bevin (R)
With vast numbers of economic migrants from the Kentucky hills, southern Indiana, aka Kentuckiana, has also been polluted with southern politics. In the 1920s nearly a third of men in Indiana were Klan members, but the Klan imploded when Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson was convicted of kidnap, ongoing rape, and murder of a schoolteacher, Madge Oberholtzer. He then spilled the beans on systemic Klan corruption statewide.
The History of Hate in Indiana: How the Ku Klux Klan took over Indiana's halls of power
Barack Obama won Indiana in 2008. We had a one-term Democratic Senator, Joe Donnelly, because even the church people could not stand Richard "Rape babies are God's will" Mourdock. If Pence had not gotten to run for VP, he might well have lost the Governor's race here.
Bishop Barber was born in Indianapolis. I was invited to speak at one of his events here, but we ran into a scheduling issue. Instead I got to stand next to him on the stage as he spoke.
Tennessee (R+14)
I trained for the Peace Corps in Nashville TN in 1966. (We needed Koreans in a hurry to teach their language, and found some missionaries training at a Bible college there.) I saw firsthand the backlash to the Second Reconstruction. Nashville had just put in county-wide Metro government to dilute its Black vote. But that was then. And now?
Tennessee lawmaker says he supports getting rid of higher education, later calls comments 'hyperbole'
A Republican Tennessee lawmaker says he supports getting rid of higher education because he argues it would cut off the "liberal breeding ground."
Sen. Kerry Roberts of Springfield called for eliminating higher education while speaking about attending a recent abortion legislative hearing on his conservative radio talk show on Sept. 2.
Roberts specifically called out one activist who testified in favor of protecting abortion rights. He asserted, without evidence, that the woman's beliefs were a "product of higher education" and claimed that getting rid of higher education would "save America."
Fisk University, an HBCU, was the very first university in all of Tennessee. That's the sort of thing Whites couldn't stand. They threatened to burn Fisk to the ground, but nothing came of it. Before the War, Tennessee, like the other slave states, had made it illegal to educate slaves.
Almanac of American Politics Tennessee state profile 2018
Tennessee, once a political battleground, is no longer. It has become one of the most solidly Republican states in the country, with just a few pockets of blue in its biggest cities. That said, Tennessee still has an active strain of moderate Republicanism, embodied by its senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, and its governor, Bill Haslam.
Georgia (R+5)
Stacey Abrams was robbed of the governorship by her opponent, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, one of the worst voter suppressors in the country. But that only put off the inevitable for one more cycle.
Abrams has been invited to run for Senator, but she considers her work on voting rights in her new organization Fair Fight to be more important.
I’m going to use my energies and my very, very loud voice to raise the money we need to train those across the country in our 20 battleground states to make sure Donald Trump and the Senate take a hike.
Florida (R+2)
Florida has been messing up Presidential elections since 1876, when it sent two delegations of Electors to the Electoral College, throwing the election into the House. Its population of conservative retirees is continuously replenished, but it no longer has Cuban refugees arriving all the time. Instead, it has climate refugees, especially US citizens from Puerto Rico. Also, the retirees come from progressively younger generations over the years, and are progressively a bit less Conservative in consequence.
Alabama (R+14)
Way back in Second Reconstruction time, comedian Dick Gregory used to claim that he was fired from the Post Office for putting mail to Alabama in the Foreign slot.
The Senate race between current incumbent Senator Doug Jones and notorious pedophile Roy Moore may be repeated, but there are lots of other candidates in the Republican primary.
2020 United States Senate election in Alabama
For a long time, the Democratic Party in Alabama was beyond moribund.
DNC to Alabama Democratic Party: Shape up
Alabama Democratic Party officer: Doug Jones, DNC ‘plan to strip voting rights from blacks’
In an open letter released on Tuesday night, Alabama Democratic Party Secretary Val Bright slammed Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for ongoing attempts to overhaul the state party’s bylaws and leadership structure, saying the “true target” is “blacks.”
This whole saga started last August, when Jones led a failed coup of the Alabama Democratic Party during its election of officers, including an unsuccessful attempt to unseat Chairwoman Nancy Worley. Worley was the preferred choice of the Alabama Democratic Conference (ADC), which is known as the “black political caucus” of the state party.
Since then, formal challenges about that election were filed with the DNC, which is now attempting to force the state party to hold a new election of officers and drastically change the structure of the State Democratic Executive Committee (SDEC) in a manner which would include less African Americans.
No, I don't know what was really going on there. Anyway, Good News! This week only, just a few days ago! (Until the next time).
Montgomery elected its first black mayor in 200 years. This is why it matters
He's gonna bring this town together, black and white people. We're not gonna measure him by his color. We're going to measure him by what he does for the city of Montgomery.
On the issue of Marriage Equality,
Same-sex marriage in Alabama
A year after the Supreme Court ruling only twelve counties would either issue licenses to no one or only to opposite-sex couples. By 2017, this number had dropped to only eight counties, with all eight refusing to issue licenses to anyone. In May 2019, the Alabama legislature passed a bill replacing marriage licenses with marriage certificates in order to keep probate judges from violating their consciences and so that the remaining counties would resume marrying couples. These final eight counties began issuing marriage certificates to all couples on August 29, 2019.
Yes, even in darkest Alabama, there is evolution.
Mississippi (R+9)
Both of Mississippi’s Senate Seats Are Up for Election. National Democrats Barely Paid Attention.
Mississippi has the highest proportion of Evangelicals in the country.
They say that in Mississippi the people say
Thank God for Alabama!
so they won't come in last on every measure.
Sorry, too late.
Louisiana (R+11)
Gov. John Bel Edwards is a Democrat. Otherwise,
Other than Gov. John Bel Edwards, Louisiana Democrats have little to cheer about
“God, guns and abortion are the main cultural issues that prevent the Democrats from being relevant” in Louisiana, Cardona said. “The national party's positions on these issues have done a number on our ability to compete in rural districts.”
A key reason for Edwards’ success is that he hunts, is a devout Catholic and has broken with national Democrats by supporting anti-abortion legislation.
Texas (R+8)
Since Beto O'Rourke came close to unseating Sen. Ted Cruz, Republicans in Texas are panicking. Now that Latinos in Texas are targets of vicious immigration practices and of mass shootings, Latino participation in elections is expected to increase significantly, and White sympathy is increasing among their neighbors in the Southern parts of the state. The nearly all-White northern parts of Texas are a different story.
It used to be that the only talk radio you could get when driving through the Texas Panhandle was hate radio. (Personal experience) Now there is satellite radio and even the Internet, when you are in range on your phone.
Battleground Texas has been targeting the state for voter registration for six years, and has been called out by Republicans as the most dire threat they face.
No, I imagine Molly Ivins gently explaining to them, you are the worst threat you face.
New Mexico (D+3)
There is a Democratic majority in New Mexico, although Republicans can still win statewide some of the time.
Arizona (R+5)
Martha McSally is the poster child for Republican woes in Arizona. She lost a Senate race as an incumbent appointee last time (to John McCain's seat), and is now running for Arizona's other Senate seat, with dimming prospects.
Arizona poll shows Kelly overtaking McSally as of Aug. 20.
President Trump's pardon of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio has considerably stirred things up among Democrats and Republicans both.
3 ways Donald Trump and Martha McSally could avert the disaster that is Joe Arpaio
Nathan Sproul, managing director of Lincoln Strategy Group and former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party, predicts that if Arpaio is on the November ballot, he could bring down the entire Republican ticket.
Links
Repairers of the Breach
Repairers of the Breach is a nonpartisan 501 (c) 3 tax exempt not-for-profit organization that seeks to build a moral agenda rooted in a framework that uplifts our deepest moral and constitutional values to redeem the heart and soul of our country. We challenge the position that the preeminent moral issues are prayer in public schools, abortion, and property rights. Instead, we declare that the moral public concerns of our faith traditions are how our society treats the poor, women, LGBTQ people, children, workers, immigrants, communities of color, and the sick. Our deepest moral traditions point to equal protection under the law, the desire for peace within and among nations, the dignity of all people, and the responsibility to care for our common home.
The Poor People’s Campaign
A National Call for Moral Revival is uniting people across the country to challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nation’s distorted morality.
We Rise: A Movement Songbook
Further Reading
We Were Eight Years in Power, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, describes the successes and failures of the First Reconstruction, when Whites revolted against improved government provided by ex-slaves. Also the lies that Lost Causers got put into history textbooks nationwide.
Almanac of American Politics 2020, $89. Check your local library.
RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans, by Stanley B. Greenberg
The End of White Christian America, by Robert P. Jones