On The Week Before The 4th of July

JOE AND MIKA are not two MSNBC figures I much listen to much but I listened to their discussion with Adam Serwer talking about his book that just came out pointing out that the cruelty of Trump's regime was the point of it, the key to his success, the key to the haters putting a repulsive figure like Trump into the American presidency.   Serwer said several interesting things, pointing out that there was an appetite for Trump's level of hate politics even before Trump ran for the presidency.  Given that the GOP absorbed figures like Jesse Helms and Strom Thermond with no difficulty,  that it has been the home of racists, goons, thugs and actual neo-Nazis,  that it had produced the Nixon presidency and that others like Reagan, Bush I, even Mitt Romney (whose anti-Latino punch line figures in the discussion) who tried and succeeded by practicing the worst of racist politics, that's not news to anyone who pays attention to the news.  And he pointed out something that's extremely important and unmentionable in America's myth-based politics, that Republicans took advantage of the structure of our politics, the "cooked-in" aspects of it that allow one party to rule even when they lose elections and represent a minority of voters.  

I've held all along that the Republicans knew what they were doing because what they did was done by the slave-owners during legal slavery and during the de-facto slavery of the Jim Crow era, something we'd all be better off if we admitted it was the old "slave power" identified by the abolitionists clutching victory from the jaws of their defeat in the Civil War and imposing a modified slave system on a large part of the country up till the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed and became law, up till the Rehnquist and Roberts courts started dismantling those in favor of the white supremacists who have exercised out-sized power in American politics from the time of the Second Continental Congress which wrote our Constitution, putting that power into the hands of the slave owners, by plan, by intention and with full knowledge that what they were doing would insure that the potential of a racist, self-serving, cleptocracy to do what the Republican-fascists have done could do it as long as those structures put into place to do that persisted.  THAT is the real story of the Founders, the framing of the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution to which Barbara Jordan famously put her entire faith in even as everyone forgets that as a prelude to that ringing declaration, the changes to the Constitution and by laws such as those very Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were included in it.   

Her endorsement was contingent on the non-continuance of that power given by the Constitution, through the anti-democratic structure of the Senate, with their power to confirm "Justices" to a Supreme Court which was designed to be unanswerable to The People, with their power to give a minority the ability to thwart the will of the majority and through the various powers to corrupt elections and the delegates to the House of Representatives and the presidency through the Electoral College ALL OF WHICH ARE THERE AT THE INSISTENCE OF AND FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE SLAVE POWER AND AT THE EXPENSE OF, FIRST BLACK PEOPLE, BUT ULTIMATELY ANY MAJORITY THAT WAS NOT FRIENDLY TO SLAVERY AND THEIR OTHER PRIVILEGES.   That's the problem of writing a good line that can have the impact that Barbara Jordan's famous declaration of total confidence in the Constitution can be, that if it cuts off a larger and more complex conditioning of the catch phrase, that slogan can be turned into its own worst enemy.   

I have thought of writing about the chasm between the language of the Constitution and the atrocious government it has given us and the Declaration of Independence which will be read out by various hacks and flacks and talking heads on NPR on the 4th of July.  I have recently focused on the infamous lapse between Jefferson's declaration that All men are created equal and his vile character as a slave holder whose devotion to slavery grew and grew even as that of some of his fellow slave owning founders diminished.  I have come to the conclusion that when he was looking for a foundation for his claims of the right of all men to live, liberty and the pursuit of happiness he, in his undoubted brilliance could not find any such foundation except through it being the desire of God, there being no such thing that can be discerned by science or mathematics, the gods of his slave-friendly enlightenment. If he had been able to identify a secular source of what he certainly wanted to be held self-evident about HIS rights and those of his fellow aristocrats, he wouldn't have made others like John Adams and James Madison squirm a bit at the mention of God in terms of politics.

I think the fact that that Declaration was the thing identified by The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. as an unfulfilled promissory note to the future is the most important thing about it and that the anti-democratic governmental structure that is used by the Republican-fascists, the Roberts Court, lower courts to return us to a de facto Jim Crow era in which that payment will be continually deferred is the most important thing to understand about it.  And the reason they have not been made to pay, even as a majority of Americans want equality is found exactly in those anti-democratic features of the Constitution.   If we are not going to overturn those atrocities, the Electoral College, the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate, the life-termed, Supreme Court relieved of being answerable to The People, which has, except in the briefest of eras, been a bulwark of first slavery, then Jim Crow, now neo-Jim Crow, the gerrymandering, voter-suppressing state governments, etc. then we should at least be fully aware of what we face and why our best efforts are so easily thwarted by Republican-fascists and their lying minions of the media.  

That's what we should be thinking of in this week before the 4th and on the 5th and beyond.   The haters have always had a friend in the Constitutionally set-up system.  That is by intent.  I would recommend everyone read the great abolitionist Wendell Phillips' book on that, The Constitution A Pro-Slavery Compact  which is free for the reading and whose substance is, with the fewest of amendments, as relevant today as it was when he published it.   The abolition of slavery was important though easily gotten around, especially with the help of the Court and the Senate.  Especially as Rutherford Hayes used the Electoral College to enable the newly defeated slave power.  As, no doubt, Madison and the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia planned they would be able to.