Thursday, June 10, 2021

These Things That Pass For Knowledge I Don't Understand

 This is where I stopped reading:

Step one for these right wing politicians and the morbidly rich who support them is to pit one group of people within the nation against others: Marginalize and demonize minorities, deny them access to the levers of democratic power while openly attacking them for trying to usurp the privileges and prerequisites of the majority.

The argument goes on that this is what happened in the '30's to destroy democracies in Europe and elsewhere, so in the '20's of the 21st century, it's clearly America's turn in the barrel.  Except I heard this argument about pitting groups against each other as a means of maintaining power 50 years ago.  And it was being applied to the treatement of blacks in America since at least Reconstruction.  It was in the work of the Rev. Will Campbell, an important figure in the civil rights struggle, if not of the stature of Dr. King or John Lewis.  He pointed out that rich whites had set poor whites against blacks purely to keep them from both paying attention to how the rich whites were screwing both groups blind.

And frankly, you can go back to the works of William Faulkner and see the dynamic playing out in his fictional southern setting, which is about as fictional in truth as Hardy's "Wessex."  Shakespeare's characters were fictional, too; but they told more truth about the human condition than most history books do to this day.

And yet has democracy ended yet?  Or does it only matter when people are doing it today, while you're alive to notice?  Or when they're only doing it to white people where you think you can see it?  Honestly, this strategy is as old as America itself.  The Constitution was founded on it.  It's why only landowning white males could vote, and blacks were 2/3rds of a person for apportionment of representatives.  The Constitution literally denied access to the levers of democratic power to the majority of people who were subject to it.

Did democracy end in its beginning?  Did we all miss that?

1 comment:

  1. Kilmead as representing "white culture" reminds me of Flo Kennedy when a man asked her if she were a lesbian, "Are you the alternative?" If FOX is the representative of "white culture" I hope it dies last month.

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