White Terrorism and Willful Ignorance

Know the devil..

John Murillo III - Impossible Stories: On the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creation

John Murillo's new book, Impossible stories: On the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creation, dissects Black time and space in order to better understand the nature and mechanics of Black life and death lived in the antiblack world. The following is an interview the author had with with Roberto Sirvent of Black Agenda Report.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

John Murillo III: In Impossible Stories,  I dissect Black time and space—Black spatiotemporality—in order better understand the nature and mechanics of Black life and death lived in the antiblack world. Theoretical questions about the relationship between Black folk and history, memory, the passage of time, the problem/question of “progress,” the ability to “belong” somewhere, and the capacity to move through and occupy a place animate my writing and thinking throughout, as well as the literary works I curated for the analysis. 

But more importantly, my work depends on a profound concern for the ways Black folk speak to and experience Black time and inhabit Black space. Every theoretical claim and manicured line breathes a debt to narratives of Black life and death that signal the destructive consequences of Black temporality and Black spatiality as they are in the antiblack world. I frame all the analysis and theorizing with all-too familiar narratives of antiblack violence that, once explored more deeply, reveal how Black time is “untime,” and Black space is “nowhere”—that the everyday spectacular violence visited upon Black folks creates a Black existence that is crucially, terribly, and generatively out of alignment with standard, linear-progressive (read: Human) experiences of time, and out of step with normative ideas about the inhabitation and formation of space(s). 

I say all this to arrive at the larger question I’m asking before and after all the timey-wimey, spacey meditations: What have we made, can we make, and must we make from  our “untimeliness” in the middle of “nowhere?” And also, how  do we undertake this kind of creation, the kind that uses  our destruction as originary material, as prima materia, whether that creation takes place in streets, on screens, on pages, or elsewhere, now or whenever? 

Impossible Stories  analyzes literature, narrates Black experiences, and draws from physics in order to speak to this essential part of Black work: this ceaseless taking-up of destruction in order to make time when there isn’t any for Black folk, and make a way when there is no way. What we’re seeing out in the streets now, the ongoing protracted struggle on behalf of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Toni McDade, and all the named and unnamed and unrecorded folk who have died and will die in the name of the antiblack world, is, at its fundament, a transmutation of our own destruction into creative political action (that itself is generatively destructive, in the name of the unnamable political project of building another world). I think my work sheds light on that destructively creative, creatively destructive practice. 

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

I hope that both find something complementary to the ongoing, active refusal to accept the world as is. The work is an assessment of the influence of Black spatiotemporality on Black work:  on what we do, how we do it, and what’s at stake in doing it. It is not meant to “lead” anything or anyone, but to parse out the mechanics, stakes, and possibilities of doing our various forms of Black work when we more precisely understand and actively embrace the spatial and temporal characteristics of Black life and death in the antiblack world. I think there is utility in that, but I don’t want to misrepresent this as some kind of guidebook. I just think that in analyzing what I believe are essential elements of Black life, work, and death in the antiblack world can be useful in shaping all  of the work we do, possibly sharpening it, or maybe just honing it.

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

I very seriously hope readers un-learn something we all uncritically hold to be true, or universal: the experiences of time  and space.  There are many more analyses of the problem of Black space, and many of the forms those problems take in the real world—e.g. gentrification—are more widely accepted as issues that represent that larger problem of Black spatiality. I have “new” things to say about that, but this problem isn’t as pressing as the other. 

As Michelle Wright notes in her own Physics of Blackness,  there are consequences to the uncritically accepted notion that the word “time” names some universal experience of linear progress that all humans share. Perhaps that is true if we recognize that Black folk, in the antiblack world, don’t get to be  human, except perhaps biologically: as far as humanity in the sociopolitical world is concerned, we do not bear the accoutrements of human life; this is a consequence of living in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery” and what Christina Sharpe dubs “the wake.” The distended temporality of slavery, the way the “time” of enslavement reaches into, shapes, interrupts, twists, and disappears all time after it via the antiblack world’s political systems and structures, its ideologies and values, and the minds, hearts, and behaviors of every single individual, warps Black folks’ experience of time in ways that affirm our sense of the world, of “progress,” and of the possibilities of the future.

So mainly, I would hope we could un-learn an acceptance of time as linear or coherent for Black people.

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

The list is insanely long, here, and some folk are on it for many more reasons than one. Reducing this list to a few people is like naming the top 5 in my NBA pantheon. 

So, so, so many names, and in no particular order: Toni Morrison; D’Juana Murillo; John Murillo; Chinyere Cindy Amobi; Frank B. Wilderson III; Jared Sexton; Bridget Cooks; Tiffany Willoughby-Herard; Saidiya Hartman; Hortense Spillers; Octavia Butler; Selamawit Terrefe; Jaye Austin Williams Nicholas Brady; Jerome Dent; Macala Lacy; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson; Patrice Douglass; Darol Kae; Lashonda Carter; Janisha Gabriel; Taijah McDougall; Kiese Laymon; David Marriott; Chanda Prescod-Weinstein; Ashon Crawley; Kara Hunt; Benjamin Ndugga-Kabuye; Sheree Greer; Susana Morris; I’Nasah Crocket; C. Riley Snorton; Tiffany Barber; Jared Rodriguez; Tabias Olajuawon Wilson; Delia Younge; Tiffany Lethabo King; Michael J. Dumas; Alexis Pauline Gumbs—there are so many. I know I’m leaving some out, living and dead, but this is a glimpse. My deepest apologies to those I did not name. 

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

Impossible Stories  asks us to reimagine Black work, all of which is inherently creative, be it activist work and political organizing, novel- and poetry- and song- and story-writing, as destructive  work. This is not some new discovery, but it is naming an important tendency or undercurrent of Black work that I don’t think is often framed this way.

My perspective is a predominantly afropessimist one, and one of the most frustrating questions lobbed at afropessimism is: “Well, what are we supposed to do with that, then (if everything is as bad or as deeply ‘impossible’ as you say it is)?” Usually, the question aims to take what I interpret as a very understandable frustration with the truth or resonance or applicability of this theoretical framework to what Black folk are actually seeing in the world and, rather than aim it out at the world creating the problems afropessimism names, aiming it at the one doing the theorizing that names the problems—basically, the question is asked as a way of trying to kill the messenger because of the message, and not the system of domination we name and its agents around and within us. But with the advent of more and more writing that avows afropessimism and wields it as guide toward new questions, new claims, new terms, and new possibilities, responses to “what are we supposed to with that?” are becoming clearer. 

This is my entry into the growing collection of voices and works that uses afropessimism in this generative manner. In my own way, I am saying that this world has no time and no space for Black life; that Black time and Black space are violently incongruous with the time and space of the antiblack human world; and that our task is to take those facts that unmake, or destroy us, as the stuff with which we might create a radically different world. 

To answer the question, “What are we supposed to do?”, differently, we must take the constitutive, destructive features of being Black, with no place to be and no time to spare, and wield,  rather than ignore or misrepresent, these things that (un)make us to do the impossible work we all are trying to do, whatever the tagline or slogan or school of thought we bear.

 

Musings

 

A Brilliant Ancient Thought Experiment Exploring What Makes You You

 

Source: Brain Pickings

"Throughout our lives, we come to inhabit the seven layers of identity, often interpolating between them and constantly changing within each. And yet somehow, despite this ever-shifting seedbed of personhood, we manage to think of ourselves as concrete selves - our selves. Hardly any perplexity of human existence is more fascinating than the continuity of personal identity - the question of what makes you and your childhood self the “same” person, despite a lifetime of change, from your cells to your values. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert captured this paradox perfectly: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

Two millennia before modern psychologists came to tussle with this puzzlement, the great Greek historian and writer Plutarch examined it more lucidly than anyone before or since. In a brilliant thought experiment known as The Ship of Theseus, or Theseus’s paradox, outlined (though not for the first or last time) in his biographical masterwork "Plutarch’s Lives" (free ebook/|public library), Plutarch asks: If the ship on which Theseus sailed has been so heavily repaired and nearly every part replaced, is it still the same ship - and, if not, at what point did it stop being the same ship?

He writes: "The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

In this wonderful animation, the visual educators at TED-Ed - who have previously explored how you know you exist by way of Descartes and the nature of reality by way of Plato -examine the famous thought experiment and how it illuminates the perennial question of who we are:

Which you is “who”? The person you are today? Five years ago? Who you’ll be in fifty years? And when is “am”? This week? Today? This hour? This second? And which aspect of you is “I”? Are you your physical body? Your thoughts and feelings? Your actions?

 

Complement with Hannah Arendt on being vs. appearing and where our thinking ego resides, then revisit other illuminating TED-Ed animations exploring what depression actually feels like, why some people are left-handed, how melancholy enhances creativity, and why playing music benefits your brain more than any other activity."

 

 

Poet’s Nook: “The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman

 

 

When day comes, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry, a sea we must wade.
We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken,
but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.
‘Never been more optimistic’: speeches, songs and celebrations cap Biden’s inauguration day – as it happened

And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine,
but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
This effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith, we trust,
for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption.
We feared it at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour,
but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So while once we asked, ‘How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?’ now we assert, ‘How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?’

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be:
A country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change, our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.
With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the golden hills of the west.
We will rise from the wind-swept north-east where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked south.
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.
In every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country,
our people, diverse and beautiful, will emerge, battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

The Coup Klux Klan and the January 6 Insurrection

 

 

 

What were the underlying fears and motivations for the insurrection beyond the Big Lie of a stolen election? The bedrock of white supremacy that has driven white riots for more than 100 years is the key that unlocks the door to this hellish landscape.

Matthew Cooke - This Is a Wake Up Call For Republicans

The Myth Of American Exceptionalism

 

Musings

 

America's Been Coup'd

 

 

Source: Indica

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

~~William Butler Yeats 

America the Undead by Chauncey DeVega

 

Source: Salon

What do we see in the images of Wednesday's bloody and lethal attack by Trump's terrorist mob on the Capitol Building and American democracy?

There is the superficial. The tens of thousands of rage-filled white people running amok and defiling the Capitol Building as they looted, destroyed public property and attacked police officers in a lethal white supremacist insurrection and mob action. Many of those same police even went so far as to allow the pro-Trump terrorists to enter the Capitol Building and the surrounding area. After the coup attempt, the Capitol police then allowed most of them to leave without being detained or otherwise stopped.Advertisement:

There are now iconic and infamous images of Trump's terrorists in their MAGA regalia — including one traitor dressed up as a buffalo. Trumpists broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office and sat in her chair, mocking her. Other Trumpists urinated on the floor of the Capitol Building. It was all a party or some type of right-wing fascist Saturnalia, with Donald Trump in the role of Pan or Dionysus. Of course, Trump's mob of terrorists carried weapons. Congresspeople and their staffs and others who work in the Capitol Building were under siege. To say that the Capitol police and other security forces were on the "defense" is a polite way of saying that they were overrun and routed. Five people are now dead because of Trump's coup attempt, including a police officer. A member of Trump's mob was shot by the Capitol police. Broadcasters were aghast at the images of her bloody body. 

When one looks more deeply, slowly, and more meditatively at the images of Trump's coup attempt we can see something else — if we so choose.

Breathless media coverage makes contemplation and such viewing and thinking more difficult — this is especially true during the long moment of never-ending crises that is the Age of Trump. So-called "hot takes" by the news media and other observers fill the bottomless hunger of the 24/7 news cycle, but almost by design such writing and thinking is ephemeral and almost a type of journalism and reporting as planned obsolescence.

It is that type of writing and thinking which helped to enable and normalize Donald Trump and his Republican Party and their fascist movement. The controversies were exhilarating and exciting — however horrible and vile their substance was and is — but the news media's tenet "if it bleeds it leads" all too often denied the American people a critical framework and the knowledge to explain exactly why these horrible things were happening to them. In total, the myopia caused by the real and imagined controversy of the day or week (or perhaps even month) all too often hides more than it reveals.

And in that way, fascism and authoritarianism get and retain power and control by creating a society-wide feeling of disorientation and exhaustion. The result is more than just the feeling that reality itself is broken, because in the ways that matter reality itself is in fact broken in Trump's America. We can try to counter that force by engaging in acts of critical self-reflection. Who are we? What do we represent? What are our values? Who am I in this society? How do we and I see the world? What of our relationships to and responsibilities for others?

I am a working-class Black American. For me this is a declaration of my first allegiances, description of my material realities, and mission statement for how I make my way through the world. Thus, when I reflect upon and look deeply at the images of Trump's fascist riot and coup attempt, I see another of the many temper tantrums of white supremacy and white entitlement and white aggrievement which have occurred throughout American history. I see the enemies of Black and brown strivers like myself. I see the people who denied Black and brown people the ability to accrue intergenerational wealth and income. I see the people who tried to take away the dignity of Black and brown people — and yet we succeeded over and over again nonetheless. I see the enemies of a better and more inclusive American Dream. 

I also see Trump's favorite president, Andrew Jackson, a literal white supremacist slave driver and a man who led a genocidal campaign against First Nations people. In 1829, Jackson's populist supporters (of course this version of populism mostly excluded Black people) ran amok in the White House on Inauguration Day. Almost 200 years later, Trump's fake populist white fascist mob attempted a coup against America's multiracial democracy by invading the Capitol Building.

Because images do not exist in isolation but rather in relation to one another, in the rage-filled faces of Trump's goons I also see the reflections of the Black and brown folks (and white brothers and sisters) in the old Jim Crow state of Georgia who the day before bravely overcame voter suppression, vote theft, voter purges and the coronavirus plague to elect a Black man and a Jewish man to the United States Senate. 

Many Black folks were lynched in Georgia during Jim and Jane Crow. A Jewish brother was lynched in Georgia during Jim and Jane Crow too.

Trump's fascist goons who defiled the Capitol Building and sought out congresspeople to put on trial — and perhaps even execute — were not just attacking the idea of democracy in the abstract, but purposefully trying to smother multiracial democracy.

As such, the Trump mob's fascist rampage was much more than a political "protest": it was the physical manifestation of death anxieties about being "replaced" by non-whites. Such fears are the heart of Whiteness since its invention in the 15th century. These anxieties of Whiteness are the fuel which sustain and fuel Trumpism, the Republican Party, and other forms of American fascism and white supremacy both historically and through to the present.

On Trump's fascist mob and the overall threat to America's multiracial democracy historians Rhae Lynn Barnes and Keri Leigh Merritt offer this historical context in a new essay at CNN:

"The helpless white minority."

That simple lie lays bare so much of America's misery and suffering. The far-right and White supremacists' purported fear of losing status, wealth and most importantly, political power, in the face of mass Black voter turnout has always been part of what animated racial violence in this country, from riots to lynchings to police brutality.

I felt waves of sickness at the images of Black Capitol policeman being chased by a mob of racist white Trump terrorists. Many of the latter were armed. Those Black Capitol police were granted power by the State to use deadly force. They did their best to protect the congresspeople, staff members, others there, and the Capitol Building itself. But they were limited in their power to do so. White police would have showed little if any hesitation at shooting a mob of Black and brown people chasing him down with the intent of causing them harm. But Black or brown police must always show restraint in how they use force against white people. In a racist society Whiteness and white people are to always be given deference.

Trump's white thugs were having fun chasing away an armed Black cop because they were secure in the fact, either consciously or subconsciously, that Whiteness empowered and protected them. Watching those Black Capitol police do battle with, flee, and eventually be run over by Trump's mob, I could hear the white slave driver singing in the movie "12 Years a Slave." In another year not too long ago, Trump's mob would have been out in the night hunting down Black people to hang from the lynching tree. Several Black Capitol police officers were quoted in a recent feature at BuzzFeed News where they shared the following:

"I sat down with one of my buddies, another Black guy, and tears just started streaming down my face," he said. "I said, 'What the fuck, man? Is this America? What the fuck just happened? I'm so sick and tired of this shit.'"

Soon he was screaming, so that everyone in the Rotunda, including his white colleagues, could hear what he had just gone through.

"These are racist-ass terrorists," he yelled out.

In the seven years since Black Lives Matter has become a rallying cry, the image of a white cop deciding how and when to enforce law and order has become ubiquitous. On Wednesday, Americans saw something different, as Black officers tried to do the same, as they attempted to protect the very heart of American democracy. And instead of being honored by the supporters of a man who likes to call himself the "law and order" president, Black Capitol officers found themselves under attack.

"I got called a nigger 15 times today," the veteran officer shouted in the Rotunda to no one in particular. "Trump did this and we got all of these fucking people in our department that voted for him. How the fuck can you support him?"

"I cried for about 15 minutes and I just let it out."

White men walked throughout the Capitol Building as though they were on vacation, entitled to be there because in their minds at least, the world is theirs and America is theirs for they are the "Real Americans." In the collective imagination of the so-called Real American, non-white people are just guests in the United States.

Trumpists proudly carried the Confederate Flag, a symbol of white supremacist treason. That evil cause was defeated by the Union. But in the 21st century that hateful and traitorous flag and those who rally beneath it had a moment of revenge as they rampaged throughout the Capitol Building. Not to be forgotten, the Confederates believed themselves to be real "patriots" and to be carrying on the legacy of George Washington. This is the same thinking that animates Trump's fascist mob and larger movement.Advertisement:https://77cef2ce203458caff99e1fbf7606063.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

There were the Black janitors and other maintenance people cleaning up after Trump's coup rampage. I am the child of a janitor. I saw my father's face in theirs. Both literally and symbolically, Black people are always cleaning up White America's messes. That is true in the Capitol Building. It is true for the so-called "essential workers." It is true in Georgia. It is true on Election Day. It is true from before the Founding and through to the present.

When they look at the images from the Capitol Building, what do Trump's followers and other members of the right-wing see?

The right-wing media and other fascist myth-makers are claiming that the Trump traitors are "victims" who have been "misrepresented." Donald Trump is also a victim of the "liberal media" and did not attempt to incite violence and lead a coup.

Some of the most deranged members of TrumpWorld and the right-wing echo chamber more broadly even believe that the mob which attacked the Capitol Building and democracy were actually antifascists in disguise. Therefore, Trump's coup is imagined as being some type of "false flag" operation.  Advertisement:

And for those in TrumpWorld who acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that Trumpists overran the Capitol Building, such an act was "patriotic" and was mostly "peaceful," as dishonestly compared to Black Lives Matter, for example.

In total, TrumpWorld is a "reality" of lies, conspiracism and other distortions and delusions where reality itself is not just realistically and reasonably mediated through experience but instead wholly made into something grotesque and deranged.

What Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels described as "the big lie" is the foundation of TrumpWorld and its coup attempt.

In a series of posts on Twitter, historian Timothy Snyder explained this in the following way:

The claim that Trump won the election is a big lie.

A big lie changes reality. To believe it, people must disbelieve their senses, distrust their fellow citizens, and live in a world of faith.

A big lie demands conspiracy thinking, since all who doubt it are seen as traitors. A big lie undoes a society, since it divides citizens into believers and unbelievers. A big lie destroys democracy, since people who are convinced that nothing is true but the utterances of their leader ignore voting and its results. A big lie must bring violence, as it has. A big lie can never be told just by one person. Trump is the originator of this big lie, but it could never have flourished without his allies on Capitol Hill.

The Age of Trump and all the societal and other evils and ills that it has unleashed, legitimated, and empowered has left America a type of undead nation. Sacred civic myths have been shattered about the country's democratic institutions and the inherent goodness of its people. Even with Trump removed from the White House, his cult members and other deplorables will be a mass of tens of millions of fascist zombie followers that he will control with shaman-like powers.

Ultimately, Trumpism and the forces which made it possible have transformed the United States even more into a type of fun house mirror society ruled by twisted images and confusion about the very nature of reality and truth — and without such a consensus a healthy democracy is impossible.

America Has Entered The Weimar Era by Walden Bello

Source: Foreign Policy In Focus

By mid-February 2021, American deaths from COVID-19 may well surpass the country’s 405,400 deaths during the Second World War. By around mid-May, more Americans will have died from the virus than during the Civil War, which killed 655,000, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, when 675,000 are estimated to have perished.

Yet America’s largely self-inflicted COVID-19 disaster may be eclipsed by the country’s political unraveling, which has proceeded with warp speed in the last few weeks, with the once celebrated American way of succession in power via the ballot box dealt a body blow by a large sector of the electorate that has marched in lock step with their leader in refusing to accept the results of the presidential elections.

Joe Biden will be seated this time around, but he may be regarded as illegitimate in the eyes of the 74 million Americans under the spell of Donald Trump. Future electoral contests for power may well end up being decided by a strong dose of street warfare, as the U.S. goes the way of Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic. The violent storming of the Capitol by a Trumpian mob underlined the face of crises to come.

America’s crisis has been building up for decades, and COVID-19 has merely accelerated the march to its dramatic denouement. Central to explaining this crisis is the evolution of white supremacy, a condition that the Republican Party has exploited successfully since the late sixties, through the so-called “Southern Strategy” and racist dog whistle politics, to make the party the representative of a racial majority that is threatened subliminally by the demographic and cultural expansion of non-white America.

An added contribution to the Republican consolidation of its white political bastion has been the desertion by the Democratic Party of its white working class base — the pillar of the once solid New Deal Coalition” put together by Franklin Delano Roosevelt — as “Third Way” Democrats from Clinton to Obama legitimized and led in promoting neoliberal policies.

America Displaced

Neoliberalism has been central to the concurrent and seemingly irreversible economic crisis of the United States. By preaching that it would lead to the best of all possible worlds for America and everyone else if capital were free to search for the lowest priced labor around, neoliberal theory provided the justification for shipping manufacturing capacity and jobs to China and elsewhere in the global South, leading to rapid deindustrialization, with manufacturing jobs falling from some 18 million in 1979 to 12 million in 2009.

Long before the Wall Street crisis of 2008, such key U.S. industries as consumer electronics, appliances, machine tools, auto parts, furniture, telecommunications equipment, and many others that had been the giants of the capitalist global production system had been transferred to China.

With highly paid manufacturing and white collar jobs sent elsewhere, the U.S. became one of the world’s most unequal countries, prompting economist Thomas Piketty to exclaim: “I want to stress that the word ‘collapse’… is no exaggeration. The bottom 50 percent of the income distribution claimed around 20 percent of national income from 1960 to 1980; but that share has been divided almost in half, falling to just 12 percent in 2010-2015. The top centile’s share has moved in the opposite direction, from barely 11 per cent to more than 20 percent.”

Trump smelled an opportunity here that a Democratic leadership tied to Wall Street ignored, and he made anti-globalization a centerpiece of his 2016 electoral platform. And, by tying anti-globalization to anti-migrant rhetoric and dog whistle anti-black appeals, he was able to break through to the white working class that had already given signals it was ready to be racially swayed as early as the Reagan era in the 1980s.

Ironically, the combination of neoliberalism’s ideological conviction and corporate America’s hunger for super profits made China’s state-managed economy the so-called “workshop of the world,” contributing centrally to the creation in just 25 years of a massive industrial base that has made China the new center of global capital accumulation, displacing the United States and Europe. Xi Jin Ping has his pulse on the New China, infusing confidence to millions of Chinese with an ideology that combines the vision of ever rising living standards with nationalist pride that China has forever left behind the “century of shame” from the mid-1850s to the mid-1950s.

America’s Ideological Malaise

Even as an ideologically motivated Chinese population emerges from the Coronavirus crisis, convinced that China’s ability to contain COVID-19 proves the superiority of China’s authoritarian methods of governance, the current spirit of American society is perhaps best captured by William Butler Yeats’ immortal lines: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” American ideology — and there is an American ideology — is suffering from a profound loss of credibility, including among Americans themselves.

Two primordial beliefs undergird this ideology, and both have been irretrievably eroded: the so-called “American Dream” and “American Exceptionalism.”

The American Dream has long lost its sheen, except perhaps to immigrants. To people on the left, the American Dream is now mentioned only in cynical terms, as a lost Golden Age of relative social mobility that was destroyed by neoliberal, anti-worker policies. To those on the far right, the American Dream is one that liberals have taken from whites through all sorts of affirmative action programs and given to racial and ethnic minorities. The subtext of the Trumpian counterrevolution has been, in fact, restoring the American dream, the bright prospects of social ascent, to its rightful owners — that is, to white Americans, and to them only.

As for American Exceptionalism, the idea that America is God’s own country, this has had two versions, and both have long lost credibility among large numbers of Americans.

There is the liberal version of America as the “indispensable country,” as former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright put it, where the U.S. serves as a model for the rest of the world. This is supposed to be America’s “soft power,” of which Frances Fitzgerald wrote: “The idea that…the mission of the United States was to build democracy around the world had become a convention of American politics in the 1950s,” so that “it was more or less assumed that democracy, that is, electoral democracy combined with private ownership and civil liberties, was what the United States had to offer the Third World. Democracy provided not only the basis for opposition to Communism but the practical method to make sure that opposition worked.”

Cold War liberals believed that it was America’s responsibility to spread democracy through force of arms, if necessary, and it was this ambitious project’s tremendous cost in lives lost and sovereignty of nations violated that led to the historic emergence of the New Left in the U.S. beginning with the Vietnam War. The effort to resurrect this missionary democracy to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s received widespread repudiation both domestically and globally.

The conservative version of American Exceptionalism was first forcibly expressed in the early 1980s by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, who said that the United States was indeed exceptional and unique and that its democracy was not for export as other countries lacked the cultural requisites to water it, thus providing the justification of American support for dictators like the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.

When Donald Trump appropriated the right’s ideological legacy, democracy itself was taken out of what was supposed to be unique to the United States. In his rabidly anti-immigrant and pro-police speech at the Republican National convention in August 2020, not once was the word “democracy” mentioned. What was unique to America, in Trump’s view, was the spirit of conquest of the land and the West by white “ranchers and miners, cowboys and sheriffs, farmers, and settlers,” a white world made possible by the likes of “Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill.” Those names of television characters that Trump apparently loved as a child did not exactly resonate with non-whites nor with the rest of the world.

Another Hallowed Institution Threatened 

With Trump inciting resistance to democracy and his Republican base marching to his tune, as the storming of the Capitol so vividly illustrated, the next four years promise to be an era of unrestrained political strife. And with civilian politicians increasingly unable to break the political stalemate, another hallowed American institution might well become extinct: the subordination of the country’s military leadership to civilian authorities.

To those for whom military intervention in the name of “political stability” is unthinkable, they have only to see how many unthinkable things Trump has done to American political traditions in just the last few months, with undying support from his large mass base. They have only to look at Chile, where that country’s proud tradition of military non-intervention in politics ended in a military coup in 1973, after right-wing resistance to the lawfully elected President Salvador Allende had stalemated the democratic process and led to violent street warfare instigated by right-wing paramilitary gangs like Patria y Libertad that resemble today’s Proud Boys, American Nazis, and the Klan.

In recent days, many American and foreign commentators on U.S. politics have evinced shock that the country that invented modern logistics could only get 4 million of the projected 20 million people vaccinated for COVID-19 by the end of 2020. But there are even more previously “unthinkables” that are likely to occur as a country plunged into the depths of political and economic crises becomes more like the rest of the world, as Americans become more like the rest of us ordinary mortals.

Cornel West & Chris Hedges on America's Existential Crisis

 

Chris Hedges talks to moral philosopher Dr. Cornel West about what we can learn about America's existential crisis after witnessing enraged supporters of Donald Trump storming the Capitol to try and halt Congress's counting of the electoral votes to confirm the victory of President-elect Joe Biden.

Frank Schaeffer: The Capitol Invasion Was Not About Politics But Religion

 

Source: FrankSchaefferBlog

America's problem is not political. It is religious fanaticism.
 
Until America addresses our White evangelical delusion problem we will not have a functioning democracy. Evangelical MAGA churches want theocracy and are now the nexus of Trump's misinformation, hate and lies. Without them Trump would never have become president.
 
It took 40 years of evangelical misinformation my family contributed to and 4 years of Trump's lies to create the invasion of our capitol. Until America admits that the White evangelical movement is an insurrection with a White nationalist terror wing we're lying to ourselves.
 
If you'd like to thank some individuals for the attack on our Capital don't forget that without Franklin Graham's and Ralph Reed's support Trump would never have been elected by 69 million deluded White evangelicals.
 
America's problem is not political. It is religious fanaticism. Am I the only person that will say the Republican leadership's refusal to stand up to Trump was NOT only about fearing Trump but was also about GOP leaders' fear of standing up to 69 million deluded White evangelical voters who have overtaken the GOP with anti-democracy paranoia?
 
Honest headlines? "Congress Certifies Biden Win after Mob Invades Capitol" should be "Congress Certifies Biden Win after WHITE EVANGELICAL Mob Invades Capitol." Media, tell the truth: America has a White Evangelical terror/extremist problem.

For 4 years I have been called extreme for warning America that Trump's evangelical supporters want theocracy and so hate and fear our democracy that they would foment terror. Yesterday thousands of them showed up in DC to prove me right as they attacked our Capitol. After 1/6/2021 the next MAGA hat I see gets vomited on. This was our new 9/11.

Killer Robots Learn to Dance... Just when you thought 2020 couldn't get ...

The Media Created a Monster. Now They Want to Wash Their Hands

 

You idiots better burn those fucking MAGA hats! Trump took your money, took a dump on democratic insitutions then punched you in the mouth telling you how stupid you are! You must feel like a worthless piece of shit knowing now how you got punked!! The whole world is laughing at your dumb asses now, as well they should - you burned your own house down, fucking clowns!