No Right Is Ever Safe – but Progress Is Possible
The outrageous assault on birthright citizenship should prompt us to reflect on the fragility of democratic progress - and our own responsibility to defend it.
Some thoughts from my new piece:
https://steady.page/en/democracyamericana/posts/0999474f-9069-4edc-8afa-14ba857741fa
“We shall repeal the twentieth century”: That is how self-identified “radical reactionary” Murray Rothbard described the Right’s vision in 1992.
That really is the core of Trumpism as a political project: Roll back whatever racial and social progress has been achieved over the past century and a half.
The realization of how fragile democratizing progress is should make us appreciate and celebrate it more, not less.
Only if we value the progress that has been achieved do we understand what we must defend.
The lesson from U.S. history, if there is one, is not that progress is impossible. There has been tremendous progress at times!
But we must not assume directionality in history. There is no arc, there is no linear progression, no utopian end goal we are somehow destined to reach.
We need to accept that things can change – in either direction: It really could get much, much worse. But it could also get better.
There is nothing inevitable about either doom or progress. We are neither fated nor guaranteed to experience the status quo for all eternity.
This realization is deeply unsettling: There is no moral arc of the universe, progress can always be reversed, victories are never guaranteed to last.
But it should also be empowering and, at the very least, create the sense of urgency that is needed to propel America forward.
Let us believe them when they say they want to “repeal the twentieth century.”
Whether or not enough people can be convinced to defend the vision of egalitarian pluralism with equal ferocity and conviction may well decide the fate of democracy.
The American war of independence was a thing.
I would like to remind people that the 13 colonies waged a war of independence against the world‘s richest man at the time and his corporation the East India company.
Just saying
Yes, but surely the later Civil War was a desperate attempt by the (then) rich dudes to protect their new-found wealth, privilege, and ability to own and profit from slaves? Not so very far from where the US is now, methinks. Y'all may need to get around to finishing that off, probably with guillotines.
Oh something like we’re going to party like it’s 1789
The concept of progress we have is understandable, but it’s also ahistorical.
All of this is about balance of power. The super rich have very methodically and very deliberately increased theirs, and the crisis we are living through is direct product of the super rich and the attitude they have about other people.
It’s part of the human animal you can’t educate it away and think it disappears.
it will show up in any generation with the right circumstances
Referring to reconstruction is apt. And its worth a revisit for most of us on the left.
I was just reading an essay by Noel Ignatiev "The American Blindspot", discussing the difference between W.E.B. Du Bois' perspective on reconstruction and that of Eric Foner.
"In the teaching of U.S. history, the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War occupies a position analogous to the Revolution in France or the Khyber Pass in military affairs: whoever controls it controls the terrain below."
In it he explains that Du Bois viewed the slave revolts and the subsequent seizing of power over local government (sp. in SC) by freedfolk and workers as revolutionary, as a dictatorship of the proletariat and as the beginning of our genuine second revolution but that it broke down on contact with northern white orgs and activists.
First those beneath the king revolted against feudalism, and now— 100yrs later, the workers on the bottom rung had revolted against the brutal dictatorship of capitalists and were moving that fight north. There the revolutionary momentum would be foiled by white leftwing organizers and organizations who couldn't see that revolution for what it was, didn't see the freedfolk as their comrades, and who wouldn't join forces with the freedfolk and local black ppl by welcoming them into their unions.
This perspective was mostly new to me and seems like it could use more engagement in this moment.
It strikes me, that today workers and the left are less-organized than they were then, and that we have our work cut out for us.
I hope that those of us who care are beginning to lay the groundwork for supporting and collaborating with whoever joins the cause in good faith.
I hope we can get out of our own way in time to see that in order to do get something we've never had, we'll have to do something we've never done.
Anyway, looks like I gotta read Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois now.
Thomas Zimmer
Seb
GhostOnTheHalfShell
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