The Elite Playing Of Racism Among Poor Whites As An Essential Part Of Black History

I STARTED WRITING a piece on the Randy Newman song lyrics posted by the always relevant RMJ yesterday, the 1970 song Rednecks, about the relationship of perceived regional snobbery and resentment and white supremacy.  I started writing one and it got really, really long.  Why?   Like most Randy Newman songs it makes some relevant points and like all such topical songs, it overgeneralizes and leaves things out.   That's inevitable when you are using archetypes in song lyrics or a full blown novel.  That happens even when you try to avoid them turning to stereotypes and even when you, as Newman clearly does, has some sympathy with those he's opposing in the songs he writes.  That's one of the downsides of writing topical material.  

But you can't talk about the history of discrimination and inequality, segregation, oppression, enslavement and murder without dealing with the motives of those who did that and those who may oppose them but who don't mount an effective opposition to it.  You can't deal with an oppressive history without understanding what put it in power and what keeps it in place.  And white supremacy is, in fact, the major force for evil in American history and America's present.   And it has been promoted and encouraged and kept in place by those who benefit the most from all of that, the rich, the white, the male and those in their families and their economic class. 

I'm interested in poor whites who don't follow those archetypes, the ones who don't need to be won over because they are already on the side of equality and democracy and who are, despite what such artificial entities as state lines and the goddamned Electoral College would lead you to believe, are an important percentage of those put in that group.  I don't recall many topical songs talking about working class white southerners or northerners, for that matter, who favor equality and economic justice on the basis of morality, the Golden Rule, Matthew 25: 31-46, the radical egalitarian commandments of the Old Testament, etc.  Or those whose for whom the vestiges of that heritage are still held under the erosion of secularism.  

But even as I say that I know that in many of the states, not only Southern ones, such poor whites even when voting with Black People and People of color don't constitute a reliable majority, swamped by a combination of upper-class People an poor-whites who are suckered by the kind of regional and class resentments that are whipped up to divide them from their natural allies in the long and most often thwarted struggle for equality.   Some states, Alabama, Mississippi, have never not been governed by a white supremacist government, just about every state, including every one who were on the Union Side during the Civil War was not governed by white supremacy at some point in its history, including Maine, including even Vermont.  I think those very artificial boundaries and entities have more to do with empowering evil in the United States is far more important than is ever discussed.   If we didn't have states and an Electoral College some of our worst presidents would never have come to power, including Rutherford Hayes, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

The struggle for equality which made the most headway at first was the struggle of white men of the working class and lower in the early years of the 19th century.   The Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800 that swept aside the Federalists - who were, for the most part, anti-democracy - was, itself, swept aside by the "Jacksonian Revolution" three decades later, though those early movements for equality pulled up the ladders lest others climb them.  Jackson was a likely candidate for a predecessor of Trump, who had someone tell him he should hang his picture up, no doubt as a figurehead of white criminal racism in the presidency.  

Once there was supremacy for a larger number of white men, including those who had been excluded from voting by not owning property, it proved easier for the elites to divide and conquer.   White men and their families may have had some marginal benefit from it but they were always in danger of falling through misfortune, through being cheated and swindled, through just being not very smart or, even if smart, being ill-educated.  It was the genius of the elites, especially the richest class in the world at the time, the plantation owner-economic elite of the South and their Northern allies, that they were able to encourage poor white men and women to hate those who had no actual power to keep them oppressed, pretty much the same thing that the "free press" did after the very, very brief period of the late 1960s and earliest 70s devolved into vulgar and pornographic shock jock humor and worse.   Entertainment has always had a big hand in that divide and conquer program and it still does.  Hollywood has been the greatest force in that in our history, matched only later by cabloid TV and now the hate-filled internet.  

So much of the struggle for equality by Black People, other People of Color and others has had to deal with the margin of white supremacists among those who economics and politics should make their most natural allies.   I don't think you can make much progress until you address that.   The first and probably most productive way to do that is though alliances with those poor whites who favor equality and economic justice and there doesn't seem to be much of a hope of the organizational foundation of that coming from the college-credentialed white elite, such as are represented in the intro section of Newman's song.  When I started thinking about this I thought if he didn't have All In The Family in mind when he wrote it, he had something very much like that in mind.  It turns out that he referred to Lester Maddox's appearance on Dick Cavett's show, a Nebraskan Protestant who I doubt any angry Georgian would have mistaken as a "smart-ass New York Jew."  I don't think any such movement is likely to come from any media figure, they have too much investment into using stereotypes and manipulating their audiences.  

I think it's most likely to come from the churches, to tell you the truth.  The ones who are in place, already.   The old line about Sunday morning being the most segregated hours of the week was probably far from accurate when it was said and is certainly less accurate now, though that would depend on congregation and denomination.   

We've got to do something different than we've been doing.  I can appreciate Randy Newman's analysis of things, Lester Maddox was many things evil but stupid wasn't one of them.   He got elected to office and exercised power such as Dick Cavett or the writers of All In The Family never did.  They didn't seem to get that even in New York, the Archie Bunkers exercised more power than they and their guys ever did. 

Remember All Of This Is Happening Under The U.S. Constitution And The "Rule Of Law"

 such as those really are in real life.

We are at the stage of fascist takeover where the values slogans of even the Nancy Pelosis and Joe Bidens aren't going to help.  The "institutionalism" that was peddled by the virtuous lawyers of MSNBC have been pushed into the Patomac and drowned.   It proved to be not much use in the past four years.   This is the greatest crisis in American democracy in its history, worse than in 1861 BECAUSE THEN IT WAS THE PRESIDENT AND THE CONGRESS WHO WERE ON THE SIDE OF DEMOCRACY AND THIS TIME THEY ARE ALL IN ON THE NATIVE FASCISM THAT THE CONFEDERACY CHAMPIONED.  

This time the traitors ARE THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER, THOSE DEFINING "THE RULE OF LAW."   

Lincoln could use the Federal government to fight against white supremacist government and treason, they've got control of the federal government this time.  Just as they have for the entire antebellum period, during the long Jim Crow period and ever since Republican-fascism has been resurgent in the backlash against the long struggle for equality and economic justice in the brief period in which that made some headway.  

This is the worst it's been since at least the lowest period before 1861 and I hold it's arguably worse because they're stealing everything as they destroy democracy.   And they've got the entire federal government now, especially the Roberts Court.

We MUST All Observe Black History Month Because It Contains So Much Of What Is Best About America

AND BECAUSE TRUMP'S regime is trying to suppress that history. 

So I will go back over posts from a project I did a number of years ago dealing with the history of abolitionism starting tomorrow.   I hadn't planned on that before just now, reading about the Trump regime's order banning that history so I need to go back to review and revise and add to those posts.    

The history of he struggle of People of Color and Women and LGBTQ+ and Disabled People and Poor People and everyone else who are subjugated and oppressed for equality is the best thing about us.   Only those who love the worst about America want to suppress that, most of all our indigenous fascists, the white supremacists who dominate the Republican Party and the corporate media. 

Elections Bought By Musk and Thiel Are A Direct Result Of The Supreme Court's

First Amendment rulings since 1964.   Elections are won through what the media puts out and our media puts out lies and slanted information based on who owns the media and the interests of the rich men and a few women who own the media and finance it through advertising.  The rich having ever so much more money than the poor and middle classes, their lies and slanting dominates the biggest and most politically effective media.  There's nothing complicated or mysterious about that, though the Ivy League product on the Supreme Court pretends it isn't entirely obvious and one of the most salient factor in American life and politics.

Franklin warned that experience keeps a hard school but a fool will learn in no other one.  He was right but it's hardly enough.  It is a hard fact of American politics, that the media has the power to overcome even the hardest of even lived experience.  That the Covid 19 criminal insanity and idiocy of Trump I didn't bury his political aspirations forever is a product of the American media lying for him during the catastrophe and lying for him after, during his nonfeasance , malfeasance and misfeasance which were the entire substance of his first regime.   

Even his completely catastrophic economic shit show, what the media and its owners care about more than anything MORE THAN UP TO A MILLION UNNECESSARY DEATHS OF AMERICANS NOT FIVE YEARS AGO didn't force them to tell the truth about Trump's disasters.  And worse, as Joe Biden did literally the best job in the world of recovering from Trump's disasters, they sandbagged him and undercut him and lied and lied and lied about him and his team of perhaps the most competent appointments in recent history - and I do make an exception of Merrick Garland in that - to pave the way for Trump II EVEN AS TRUMP ANNOUNCED HIS INTENTION OF BEING A CORRUPT DICTATOR WHICH HE IS PUTTING IN PLACE AS THE MASS MEDIA LIES TO SUPPORT HIM IN THAT. 

That is all a result of the Supreme Court, from the Sullivan decision of Earl Warren's time, when the remote priests of the Supreme Court got addicted to setting up would-be progressive milestones of "freedom" in permitting the New York Times and the rest of the media to lie with total impunity when it came to politicians and other public figures, to the Burger Court's Buckley v Valeo, and the even more blatant First Amendment enabling of political corruption and election corruption by overturning the clean elections laws passed by the Congress AFTER WITNESSING AND EXPERIENCING THE CRIMES OF THE NIXON YEARS,  Nixon having been a direct beneficiary of that first, the Sullivan Decision, and onward in the parade of increasingly corrupt and incompetent and bungling Republican administrations, its magnification through the Gingrichization of the Congressional Republicans, through further Supreme Court decisions, the Roberts Court's Citizens United expansion of the line of Sullivan and Buckley v Valeo, announcing that American elections were on the market for billionaires such as Musk and Thiel, and before them the likes of the Mercers and Kochs to buy themselves the Congress, the presidency and through such dark money groups as Leonard Leo runs, the Supreme Court.

I have been a life long student of politics and a news junkie and there is literally nothing clearer about American politics of my lifetime than that analysis of how things went to shit in America.  And I will bet you if I or someone brought that case with full documentation to even the three non-bought, Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court they would literally be as clueless as to its meaning as the aged member of the Brit aristocracy who didn't know how to put toothpaste on his tooth brush, his valet hospitalized having done that his entire life before him.  Such is the power of the lore of "Constitutional scholarship" to blind even those who are somewhat willing to see what's right there before them FOR DECADES. 

And all of that flows from the sloppy, nonspecific, and incomplete wording of the First Amendment of the Constitution as it was molded and modified, especially by first the rather stupid liberalization of the Warren Court and then far less attractive aspirations of further courts, partly through a stupidly and falsely virtuous building on those Warren Court aspirations to - and they really are this politically stupid - "enhance freedom."   Even the "liberal justices" went along the more obvious motives of other "justices" to enable exactly the buying of elections on behalf of a party which was increasingly addicted to the financing of millionaires and billionaires.   That motive BEFORE THE ROBERTS COURT CONGEALED IT INTO ITS CURRENT FORM was most blatantly expressed in the Court's Bush v Gore decision, in effect five Republicans on that court choosing to put George W. Bush in office, though he'd lost the election, one of them, Sandra Day O'Connor, having expressed displeasure over Gore winning the election because she wanted to retire and didn't want a Democrat to choose her successor.  

That the Constitution didn't and still doesn't expressly prohibit the goddamned Supreme Court from stealing an election on behalf of the party of its majority is a damning indictment of the document. 

But now that the Supreme Court has made those previously uncut trails to corruption and dictatorship through the already far less the pristine virgin forest of the First Amendment, the only way to shut down that road to dictatorship is to change the wording of that stupidly inadequate text.   It has to be blatantly set out that "free speech - free press" does not include that oxymoron of secular legalism a "right to lie."   It has to include language that the press is an artificial, human creation and has no rights, those only adhering to natural living creatures but that it may have permission to tell the truth and operate for the public good but not the public damage.  It has to be made plain that media and speech which attack or damage equality and democracy can be acted against civilly in ways that prevent the media from damaging equality and democracy.   That has to be done because it is the story of American history that millions of Americans have been denied the most basic of rights on the basis of lies and, especially, lies spread by the media, including "entertainment" media.  

We have a number of rights under a democratic government, as they say in Canada, speech is a right but it's not the only right.  One of the most interesting of those rights but one which the legal scholars and Supreme Court "justices" don't seem to have much interest in at all is the right all of us have to being governed by a LEGITIMATE government.   There is no truly legitimate government which has been devised by human ingenuity except egalitarian democracy, and within that realm of legitimacy must come the admission that even an egalitarian democracy is a product of human aspiration and human trying and with that comes the susceptibility to human error.   We have a right to a far, far better government than the one which our Constitution has given us, certainly People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, etc. have suffered terribly under the United States Constitution, the only good things in our history are the story of the struggles to right what has been wrong under that document AND THE SO-CALLED BILL OF RIGHTS throughout our history.   The very framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were some of the worst oppressors of People of Color and Women, the oppression of both groups has been the law of the land for almost all of American history, under the Constitution, under the rule of law under that Constitution, the few hiccups in that under random Court rulings have been only temporary as the history of the history of the Rehnquist and, most of all Roberts Court have proved in their headlong return to Jim Crow and motel-room abortions and the most florid period of corrupt, bought government since the previous periods punctuated by a brief period immediately after Lincoln,* immediately after the Republican crash and the FDR years and the brief period after the now dead Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were in effect.  There was, in truth, no such a thing as legitimate government without the voting of Women and People of Color, there is no such a thing as legitimate government through most of American history which we have fast returned to under the regime of First Amendment permitting lying by hate-talk media as championed by that group you are unhappy with me telling the truth about, the goddamned ACLU.  

By the very terms set out in the preamble to the Constitution - the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence having been set aside by our slave-holding, financier aristocrat-framers - the American Constitution has now failed catastrophically in the Supreme Court aided return of Trump, this time as the dictator he promised he would be.   The Republican partisanship, the servicing of the billionaires who put them on the Court matter to the corrupt Roberts six more than anything about even an effective or mildly beneficial government.  The diseased Clarence Thomas and Alito are interesting cases in pathology but it's the genteel Virginia white supremacy of Roberts that has interested me most right now.  I think in his articulate and somewhat hesitant support of the most blatant of corruption, his desire to present an attractive fascade even in the face of the crudeness of the rest of his coalition of Republican-fascists on the court might give us some insight into how those corruptions baked into the Constitution by the framers, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Ellsworth, etc. were shit presented in the form of an heroic monument.   

I've also become more interested in something I read from Louis Boudin in his discussion of the problem having a written Constitution presents.  He discussed the proud legal erudition of the early "justice" Joseph Story, one of the most learned legal scholars in the history of the Court but one who was wedded to the long history of the English law in the way that the least learned of today's corrupt Court, Alito cited in the government takeover of Women's reproductive systems.  Boudin pointed out that the very provisions of early English law that Story cited to support his American Constitutional decisions had, by the time he cited them, already been discarded in England through the courts and government addressing the defects in those earlier legal holdings.   He said that the flexibility that the unwritten British Constitution allowed was foreign to the legal system under the written Constitution and so a learned "justice" could remain totally clueless as to what was wrong with what they ruled.   In the case of Storey, it lead a putative opponent of slavery to write what was, before Dred Scott, the most infamous pro-slavery, anti-egalitarian and most blatantly unjust rulings of that already blatantly unjust Court in its history, the Prigg decision.   

The reverence we are taught and rotely give to the Constitution, the Bill of Right, the Supreme Court are misplaced and not based on an honest, accurate and informed assessment of their real existence in reality instead of hagiographic lying.   The fact is that slavery, genocide, land theft, the theft of labor, the turning of the bodies of slaves and Women into chattels of white men and the bodies of workers into the chattels of rich white men (Goresuch on companies freezing their employees to death as a term of employment proves that's still ongoing) all of that has existed under the rule of law under the U.S. Constitution.   The corruption of our politics by money and by media lying is permitted under the U.S. Constitution and the idoloized First Amendment is the vehicle under which that corruption is maintained even in the face of bi-partisan attempts to clean up our elections.   The corruption of Trump II, blatantly bought by billionaires and now running the United States government into the ground on behalf of the billionaires who bought it is a direct product of "free speech-press" as it is laid out in the First Amendment as that has been made to mean by Supreme Courts for the past sixty one years.  

You have to be a total idiot to not realize that something is wrong here and that that is what is wrong.  We are required by our civic superstitions to pretend nothing is wrong and what we can see right before our eyes is not happening.  Such is the "civic religion" to use Sandra Day O'Connor's putrid phrase, it would seem to be dependent on the lies it permitted and now promotes.

* Which would lead to a discussion of the Electoral College and other slave-power enhancements baked into our corrupt Constitution.