Major social change requires changing minds, and at the same time it requires that its opponents die off in the normal manner. This tends to shift opinion by about 1% annually, in favorable cases, so that from a standing start we can get to a voting majority in favor of the new policy in about 50 years. It is very occasionally less, but in the worst case, White Supremacism intertwined with Creationism, it has gone on for far longer.
- Slavery. Jim Crow. Son of Jim Crow.
- Votes for women. Pay for women. Women’s and children’s health. #MeToo.
- Prejudice against assorted minorities and nationalities.
- Police brutality. Stop and Frisk. Police murders.
- Hippy-punching. The War on Druggies.
- LGBTQs in the military. LGBTQ Marriage Equality. LGBTQ human rights.
- Hate crimes. More hate crimes. Other hate crimes.
- Union rights. Income inequality. Voodoo economics.
- Science.
- [Your issue here.]
After we win the first campaign of 50 years or more on any issue, we get to start the next round, while our opponents try every dirty trick they can think of to roll back whatever progress we have achieved. We ended slavery, and got Jim Crow. We rolled back Jim Crow, and got the Republican Southern Strategy, plus the Christian Right strategy, plus racist and partisan gerrymanders and voter suppression. That is coming to an end, as entitled Whites shrink into a minority and the children of the bigoted churches increasingly fall away.
But don’t think that it is over. There is always a next round.
As we near a tipping point, the rate of change can accelerate. In the cases of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, DOMA, and finally Marriage Equality, the population was moving at more than 2% annually as it became clear that it was going to happen.
Let us consider some leading examples, and see what lessons we can draw from them.
The First Howto
Wilberforce and his allies invented all of the apparatus that we associate with progressive social movements. Well, not all. Certainly there were plenty of pamphlets around during the English Civil War and the American Revolution and so on. That all went back right to the invention of the printing press in the 1450s, and the Protestant Reformation that followed in 1517.
But buttons, ribbons, public meetings, demonstrations, confrontations with elected officials, boycotts, all of that as we know it since came out of the Wilberforce anti-slavery campaign. As he said, the idea was to drive the issue into public consciousness so hard that nobody could ignore it or pretend that it was just normal, The Way Things Were.
John Newton, former slave ship captain and the author of the hymn Amazing Grace and others, contributed a great deal to the effort by identifying and explaining the instruments used on slave ships for restraining slaves in transit in torturous conditions, force-feeding them, and much more.
In 1788, 34 years after he had retired from the slave trade, Newton broke a long silence on the subject with the publication of a forceful pamphlet Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, in which he described the horrific conditions of the slave ships during the Middle Passage. He apologised for "a confession, which ... comes too late ... It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders." He had copies sent to every MP, and the pamphlet sold so well that it swiftly required reprinting.
Further Applications
Slavery. “Curse of Ham” theology, and the split with the Northern Baptists. Nullification, Secession, War. Jim Crow segregation. Son of Jim Crow (Massive Resistance, voter suppression, Segregation academies, which are back in the news in Mississippi).
Hundreds of years to the Civil War and the First Reconstruction. More than 80 years from the Civil War to Truman desegregating the military, then Brown v. Board, then the Civil Rights Era and the second Reconstruction. Fifty years more to Bishop William Barber’s Third Reconstruction, where the plan is for all of the former Confederate states to rejoin the Union properly and indeed willingly this time.
Hundreds of years in American history, thousands in recorded world history. Euripides in Classical Athens raised the question about enslaving prisoners of war, especially women and children, in The Trojan Women, and won a prize for it, but no action. Muhammad’s most convincing miracle was refusing to kill or enslave the Meccans who had tried to wipe out Islam, and offering peace to any who would declare peace. More of us should try that.
It has been a century and a half since the Civil War. During the first century afterward, there was almost no progress on Jim Crow attitudes in the South. But the practical effect of the Voting Rights Act and other measures has taken hold, so that recently we have begun to approach the normal rate of change, although White women are moving along notably faster than entitled White men. We can celebrate electoral victories, won with massive Black turnout and grudgingly increasing White support. We have won or come within the margin of voter suppression error at least once across all of the South from Virginia to Arizona in recent cycles.
Job 1 in the new House in 2021 (apart from hearings on a multitude of continuing issues) is H. R. 1, including a comprehensive new Voting Rights Act. That means that we will be able to take Georgia and Florida on a regular basis, compete in Wisconsin and Indiana and elsewhere, and encroach on White Privilege in every other Red state.
Lessons
White folk need to know a great deal more about this history, and to come to grips with their own denial about how much they benefit from entrenched, endemic, systemic racism. See White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo. Let your Black friends, or indeed any you come into contact with, know you support them. They don’t hear it enough. Listen to their stories. In 1966 I asked the manager of the Black YMCA in Nashville TN if that huge sign out front was still true. He said no, but they hadn’t gotten around to changing it. Then he sat me down and told me about the Civil Rights lawsuits he had been involved with back in the 1930s.
- Votes for women. Pay for women. Women’s and children’s health. #MeToo.
72 years from Seneca Falls in 1848 to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Then divorce, Griswold v. Connecticut (contraception), Roe v. Wade (abortions), Title Nine, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, #MeToo...and so much further to go.
Lessons: Men, same story. Let women know you support them, and listen. No Mansplaining. Also, we need comprehensive fact-based sex education in the schools. No more “hysteria”, no more “abortions cause cancer and depression and cooties” and access to tampons will cause a black market.
😖
We need comprehensive outlawing of TRAP laws (Targeted Restrictions Against Abortions) and requiring doctors to lie to their patients.
- Prejudice against assorted minorities and nationalities.
George Washington signed the very first US immigration law, which said that only Whites could become citizens, for a very particular value of White.
The Chinese Exclusion Act and the fantasy of White Slavery via opium, No Irish Need Apply, violence against German-Americans in WW I, Marijuana-crazed Mexicans and Cocainized N*****s, Japanese internment (but not Italian internment, reportedly because nobody could seriously propose to lock up Joe DiMaggio’s grandmother), and now Islamophobia.
We get over each one in time, but there are so many more to choose from.
- Police brutality. Police murders.
Justice during the creation of the Common Law in England used to be a matter of enforcement by soldiers attached to aristocratic courts, where the aristocrat was automatically the judge. Aristocrats could only rarely be charged before higher-level aristocrats, and eventually before the House of Lords.
In the 1960s we started to get rid of the “wrecking crews” maintained by police departments to beat up “suspects”. We still have not cracked police impunity in a lot of the country.
Police murders, with the approval of many communities, serve much the same function of Klan lynchings before the Feds cracked down on them, that of maintaining the Black population in a constant state of terror.
- Hippy-punching. The War on Druggies.
Ehrlichmann admitted many years later that the Nixonians knew damn well that they were lying about the whole ideas of Law and Order and The War on Drugs, but it fed into the vast expansion of voter suppression and denying decent jobs and other opportunities to Blacks, while discrediting Liberal college students who were increasingly opposed to the Vietnam War. Also, Nixon committed treason by wrecking the peace talks during the Johnson Administration.
Now even Republicans, some of them, are embracing prison reform and decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana. They are not so much interested in the humanitarian aspects, but think it just costs too much. A fair number of Republicans voted to give ex-felons their voting rights in Florida in this past election, even while embracing the racist attacks on Andrew Gillum.
- LGBTQ Marriage Equality. LGBTQ human rights.
Advise and Consent, 1959. Stonewall riots, 1969. Harvey Milk elected, 1977, assassinated, 1978. The Harvey Milk strategy is
Out, Loud, Proud, Organized, and Voting
which many other movements can learn from.
DADT, DOMA, and their repeals, and eventually Obergefell v. Hodges at the Supreme Court.
And now we need protections against housing and job discrimination and hate crimes and Conversion Therapy, and against stupid and vicious Anti-Trans Bathroom Bills and Trump trying to ban Trans people from the military.
Starting with Native Americans. See minorities, immigrants, enemy ethnicities during wars, and now homophobia and Islamophobia. And attacks on churches, synagogues, and mosques. They wore going down for quite a while, but increased in opposition to Obama and in support of Trump.
This, too, shall pass, but not before November, when we get a chance to turf out Trump and a bunch of Senate Republicans.
- Union rights. Income inequality. Voodoo economics.
Economic injustice is most of the history of humankind, going back to the protection rackets that sprang up early in the development of settled agriculture, and then developed into kingdoms.
Everything for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
Big business opposed slavery as unfair competition when putting the Republican Party together and choosing railroad lawyer and simultaneous opponent of slavery and White Supremacist Abraham Lincoln as its candidate. Then big business turned against free Black labor and White labor both as unfair competition, when both Whites and Blacks started to unionize, but Whites wouldn’t let Blacks into their unions.
Almost every antitrust law aimed at corporations was first used for union-busting.
The fad now in Red states is Right to Work (for much less) laws.
The Right greatly praised economic idiot and mumbler-in-chief Alan Greenspan as Fed Chairman for holding down inflation, by which they most particularly meant holding down wages.
The Right greatly praised Affirmative Action hater Clarence Thomas for how he ran the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, by which they meant gutting enforcement of all of the laws the EEOC has jurisdiction over.
We were making progress on ending poverty when big business went in with the Southern Strategy and linked its programs of tax cuts, deregulation, and union-busting with racism and then bigotry and all of the other hatreds. Except that now anti-abortion Protestants mostly approve of anti-abortion Catholics and Mormons, and lots of Republicans now approve of Russian tyranny and international overreach.
“Darwinism”, the unforgivable and even unmentionable sin of telling the Flower of the Southern Aristocracy that they were descended from Black Africans just like the rest of us. Darwin published in 1859. William Jennings Bryan blamed WW I on Darwinism, and let the fight to ban it. And then when we finally got Creationism out of the schools with Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968 in they came back with “Creation Science” and then “Intelligent Design”. The forces of obscurantism are in retreat as they lose millions of their children, but this fight is nowhere near over.
And then every corporate campaign for profit over human lives and the environment going back to leaded paint and gasoline.
Well, at least Global Warming Denialism doesn’t really matter any more. It turns out that saving the planet is cheaper than letting it all go to Hell, and investment in saving it has been running at about $300 billion annually. Hey, have you seen next year’s electric cars? There is even an electric pickup truck with a 500 mile range.
Oh, how I wish I could get out there in one of those with Jacob’s Ladder spark gaps on the back corners, and roll electrons at the bozos.
Again, we eventually win each fight over science, but there are so many more, run from the identical playbook.
Overall Lessons
Nothing new here. Just what we all should have known to start with, but we keep having to learn over and over again.
- Keep your eyes on the prize.
- Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
- Take it to the enemy.
- Never interfere when your enemy is making a grave error.
- Non lessi illegitimi te carborundum. They are in more of a panic than any of us.
- GOTV. GOTV. GOTV.
