I’m reading Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric, and he reminds me the generation listening to “folk music” in 1963 had their minds in Weimar Germany, and what happened to that. That was their historical context. Their immediate context was HUAC and the “Red Scare,” and how much that involved private action (not just acquiescence) as it did government action. The “black list,” after all, was purely a private affair. It was enforced by private actors to keep HUAC appeased.
And if you comfort yourself with the fact Trump will be gone in 3 years, or Congress will change, HUAC was a standing committee from 1938 to 1975. I remember hearing about it in my ‘60’s childhood, though its influence was in decline. Most of the “Red Scare” was really fear of HUAC.
I was also reading an essay eulogizing Ronnie Duggar, the first editor of The Texas Observer, founded in 1954. One of Duggar’ bete noirs in the’70’s was the way the Texas Legislature was interfering with education at UT-Austin.
The more things change…
Of course, that’s been going on in Texas so long I consider it background noise. I used to be righteously enraged by any interference with the purity of education. Now I consider it on par with Texas heat and floods or hurricanes: you get the job done the best you can despite conditions. And frankly, we mostly create those conditions ourselves.
The same issue of the Observer has a column by Molly Ivins, from 1997, on the push for school vouchers (finally passed 28 years later). She ends the column taking on the issue of local control of school boards. “If local control is such a great idea, then how come the schools are so bad?” Another time honored question. The biggest school district in Texas was taken over by the state because it was supposedly “so bad.” This was only a few years ago, and whether things have improved, or not, depends on who you listen to. Eventually the state will declare victory and withdraw, and parents who want to put their kids in private schools with vouchers will find those doors closed to them and, at best, be welcomed by pop up schools which will take their money and run. In fact, that happened around 1997, I now recall, and the program was such a dramatic failure the Legislature repealed it, root and branch, in the next session (albeit two years later). As usual, no one thought of the children, then or now.
And yes, I fully expect history to repeat itself.
State universities have to bend to the will if the state. UT Austin always has; or to the will of a Board of Regents always more conservative than the faculty, who are hardly radicals (take it from an alumnus). Private actors; not just politicians. Outside Austin, or some alumni, who noticed? Now Columbia and even Harvard make deals with Trump, and it’s the end of the world as we know it. Except HUAC did the same thing, and while the late ‘60’s broke some of their power, private citizens agreed the students at Kent State in 1970 never should have gotten in the way of the National Guard’s bullets.
None of the four dead that day were involved in the protest. Too bad, so sad.
One last anecdote, from Wald’s book. White folk groups went to the South to promote the civil rights movement, which in 1963 was still a’bornin’.
…a woman leaned over to Cordell Reagon of the Freedom Singers and said, “If this is white folks’ music, I don’t think much of it,” and Reagon responded, “Hush, if we expect them to understand us, I’ve got to try to understand them.”
We’re not quite as segregated as that. Or maybe we still are.
Most of what we’re seeing is people and institutions bending the knee to oppressive government. Engaging in their own oppression, in American democratic terms. At least, that’s how we think this is the way we are now; in the aberration, not the rule. We are only 57 years removed from George Wallace declaring: “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Trump and the Roberts Court would reinstate that tomorrow, if they could. And many people would go along with it. Change is not a “one and done” situation, and the changes in some of American culture is not as old as I am.
And some changes, like electing a woman president, remain as intractable as ever.
And 99% of that is down to private action. Not even inaction (the favorite excuse), but action. The country is nit afraid of Trump; the Congress is not afraid of Trump. Those who vote with him do so willingly.y are allies, not sycophants. Trump won the election, that must mean he is favored, the best gauge of being “representative” is election results (better even than polls!), so the measure gets reset every two years.
Which means responsibility is always on the public. It’s always down to us. Things mostly depend on private action, and despite declarations of “independence,” that’s just the lie we tell ourselves as we go along to get along.
“We have met the enemy, and he is us!” A perpetual truism.
So is this the end of democracy and the last days of the republic? Only if we want it to be. The sad truth is, our imagined social history of rugged individuals going it alone, Aun Randian heroes defying all authority, was always bullshit. The railroads were built with government aid. People moved west on government land grants. Even Rand’s architect only built buildings that didn’t collapse because of engineering principles taught largely at public universities, and building codes enforced by local governments for the benefit of all. Frank Lloyd Wright (Rand’s model) never built a building without government oversight and permission. The idea that we stand alone, rather than on the shoulders of giants, and that we are not upheld by many hands, and uphold others in turn, is pernicious nonsense. It’s the nonsense that is the foundation of Donald Trump’s malignant narcissism. The only thing Trump has accomplished is not losing all the money his father left him. He has been supported by others his entire life, but is psychologically incapable of seeing that.
In that, he is a personification of the American myth of the “self-made man.”
And lo and behold, a case in point:
Writing on Thursday, he recalled a recent international conference of 400 fact-checkers meeting to discuss the work they do. "After years of exponential growth," he said, "political fact-checking was in retreat and under fire."
He cited Meta's decision to stop funding U.S. fact-checkers and Google's announcement that it will end the ClaimReview program. President Donald Trump's ongoing government cuts killed the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had funding for fact-checkers across the world.
Google (“Don’t be evil”) and Meta (“Who, me? Yipes!”) bent the knee voluntarily. Gee, never saw that coming.
Is this it? Is this the sign of the end?
Or is it just the status quo ante? And what is our vaunted democracy, then?
Same as it ever was. SNAFU. FUBAR. Dese are de conditions dat prevail.
Ah, but don’t you believe it. Just don’t despair over it. Just don’t keep pounding that panic button. It ain’t workin’.
