The district government in Washington DC, under financial threat from Congressional Republicans, removed the words Black Lives Matter from a prominent boulevard. Colleges and Universities, targeted by the Trump administration and statehouse reactionaries, are cancelling classes and programs that address racial and gender issues.
We have been here before. In the disputed election of 1876, Republicans agreed to pull federal troops out of the South to secure the election of Rutherford B. Hayes. It was called the Compromise of 1877, but in fact it was one of the greatest betrayals in American history. It left the former slaves at the mercy of their former masters and ended Reconstruction. Confederate diehards launched the Redeemer movement that repudiated the reforms of Reconstruction, and institutionalized Jim Crow for the next hundred years in the South.
It was called by Southerners the Redemption and led to the rewriting of the history of the Civil War. The war was renamed The War of Northern Aggression, celebrated the Lost Cause of chattel slavery, and romanticized the KKK. It did not happen all at once. High points in its development included the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy vs Ferguson, which legalized “separate but equal” segregation. It included the election of Woodrow Wilson’s racist administration in 1912, which segregated the federal workforce, and showed D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation at the White House, a movie that celebrated the Ku Klux Klan, and inspired the revival of the Klan in the 1920s. The Redemption was enforced by law and by terror, as in the coup of 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, when a Redeemer insurrection overthrew a biracial Republican city government and slaughtered its supporters.
The new Redemption, like the original, is about re-establishing past hierarchies of power, race, class, gender, and sexuality. It too has been enabled by the Supreme Court in its Citizen United decision, which completed the monetization of American politics, and Trump vs The United States, which gave Trump monarchical immunity to legal penalties while in office. It is hostile to any scientific inquiry that does not follow the pre-Enlightenment MAGA party line or the latest whim of the president. It considers universities and other institutions of higher education to be hotbeds of Leftist sedition. Any government program that helps the poor or marginalized, such as food shipments to Cleveland’s food bank, is attacked and defunded. It only values the environment for the profits that can be ripped out of it. Decades in the making, it is a comprehensive and reactionary campaign that is well thought out, financed, and organized.
The goal of the new Redemption is much more than just challenging the public policies that came from the New Deal and the egalitarian social movements of the past fifty years. The goal is to make the power of Capital absolute in America. Their goal is to establish a new order. A new order that will make it much, much harder to challenge power. It has inaugurated a new set of Tech billionaires who will rule a Redeemed America. What they are building has been called either Technofascism or Technofeudalism. It is explicitly authoritarian. Their hero is Elon Musk.
Confronting this political blitzkrieg is a Democratic Party that is bitterly divided between a senile leadership desperately hanging on to power, and a restless base eager for battle against the MAGA Redeemers. The Left is in bad shape as well with a host of debilitating illnesses. It long ago disappeared into academia, where it acquired the bizarre jargon of that venue, making its language incomprehensible to most Americans. The housebreaking of the American labor movement in the 1940s, and the deindustrialization supervised by the Clinton Democrats, denied it the ability to practice class politics. In the place of class politics, it adopted identity politics, which was always an ill-fitting suit of clothes and contributed to the fragmentation and disorientation of the Left. A final hatchet in its back was the curse of the NPIC, the Non-profit Industrial Complex that colonized leftist organizing and made the Left vulnerable to financial blackmail by elite philanthropic foundations.
The Democratic Party is clueless on what to do about MAGA and Trump. They were totally unprepared for the politics as war practiced by the Republican Party. The Let’s Make a Deal ethos of bipartisanship is fine until the other side is committed to hoisting your head on a pike. The Democrats are a governing party confronting a right-wing revolutionary movement. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, they hope to click their ruby slippers together while repeating the words, “There is no place like normalcy” to wake them from their nightmare. They still don’t know where they are or what time it is. Their banner reads, “Just wait until the Mid-Terms!!” They still don’t get it.
Meanwhile, the meat grinder grinds on. Those who benefitted from the late great time of social justice are being disappeared. Not literally, not at least yet, but socially, culturally and politically. We need to consult our own history to learn the wisdom of those who resisted before, and to invent new ways of resisting in the future.
The casualties pile up. The climate movement is being flattened by such events as the Energy Transfer Partnership’s slap suit in North Dakota, which may bankrupt Greenpeace for their participation in the DAPL Standing Rock demonstrations. Some are confident that the case will be overturned in the Supreme Court. The children still believe in Santa Claus. Meanwhile the universities of the United States are under siege by MAGA, which looks upon education and the educated as the enemies of the people, even though they are led by Ivy Leaguers. Every day brings news of another university that has capitulated to Trump. The original Redeemers were states’ rights fanatics and so are their spiritual descendants in the Ohio Statehouse who hunt troublesome professors, trans kids and student protesters, while rigging elections and suppressing the vote, attacking free speech rights, stepping on the poor, and fattening the rich.
The media that has not already been purchased by the techno elite are trying to dance to the new music. ICE is snatching people off the street, practicing for even broader future crackdowns. ICE director Tom Homan, and new FBI director Kash Patel, are holding seances with the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover to get his advice on future activities.
You want to know what the United States will look like if their project wins? It will be poorer, less educated, more polluted, more unjust, more violent and sicker, just as the South was after the first Redemption. Those who were able to advance during the reform movements of the past will again feel the old familiar boot of repression on their necks. If this is not to be our future nightmare, then we must not only resist but start to lay new foundations for our country to rethink, reimagine and reinvent itself. Normalcy is dead. We have always been pretty good at reinventing ourselves in the past. Let’s see if we can still do it.
In April, I will bring out four rants I have been saving up for Earth Day. I remember the original Earth Day in 1970, but as I say I am older than dirt. — Randy Cunningham
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Why Randy’s Rants? Randy’s Rants is in honor of the anabaptist sect called the Ranters in the English Civil War, who would chain themselves to the carriages of the nobility, and denounce them by ranting at them; denouncing their greed, depravity, and oppression of the common people. A tradition we intend to continue.
