Joe Biden opposed busing for the wrong reasons

Before a few months ago, I thought, maybe Joe Biden, then a 29-31 year old senator in the years of the mid- 1970s, had opposed busing because he was listening to the black nationalist-leftist critique of busing. The black nationalist-leftist critique of busing at that time was we, the larger white majority, were taking the best/brightest young African-Americans and removing them from their communities. The argument then said, Directly help the communities and, once the communities began to thrive, they would integrate because non-racist whites would move there, too. RFK's Bedford-Stuyvesant program, named after a particularly poor, African-American community in New York, was designed to help black people where they live with a set of New Deal type programs.  It would not require African-American children be bused, but it would put the "I'm not a racist, but I oppose busing" position to a test: "So, whitey, are you gonna use taxpayer dollars to rebuild these areas that were destroyed, in large part, by racist culture which led to policies giving white people incentives to move to the suburbs on publicly subsidized roads and into publicly subsidized (FHA loan) homes?"  

The answer is not known because RFK's Bed-Sty program was attempted after RFK's assassination, but without the leadership necessary to push this through, especially when Nixon and the Republicans were promoting the white backlash to the civil rights movement.

But reading this article from Politico.com in May 2019 and this latest article from NBC News about Biden and busing, one may find a hint of this RFK type of position from Biden, but it is feint and not really what Biden was doing and saying at the time. Worse, Biden's post-debate interview on MSNBC shocked me with anger, where Biden said he supported busing where the segregation was de jure, a Latin and legal phrase meaning, segregation based upon statutory and judicial made law, but he opposed busing for de facto reasons, which are essentially cultural and economic reasons, including realtors redlining against black home buyers and the type of cultural racism that rears its head in white people protesting against a black family moving in on the white folks' block. Sorry, Joe. That is the language of white racists who deny they are racists. In the 1960s, RFK had learned, particularly from his young attorney staff at the Justice Department, and later Peter Edelman and his wife Marian Wright Edelman, that de facto and de jure distinctions were false, and that one re-enforced the other, particularly with respect to housing patterns and educational opportunities. Richard Rothstein's recent book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of Our Government Segregated America, is well worth reading, especially if one is unfamiliar with this sordid history that affected northern and western regions of our nation more than the south, where de jure segregation was enforced precisely because poorer whites lived near poorer blacks.  It definitely and conclusively shows de jure and de facto segregation categories are not distinct, but overlap and again re-enforce each other. Rothstein shows redlining worked because most civil rights laws did not apply to housing, and how the civil rights legal movement was continually stymied when it came to overcoming racist housing patterns.

One other historical note I wish to add is, when RFK was debating Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) in Orange County, CA, in the last two weeks or so before the CA presidential primary, the busing and housing topic came up, and Gene McCarthy gave the then standard liberal answer.  Yes, to open housing into the then-highly white and right wing Orange County.  RFK replied he was maybe not as interested in having the government just pay to move ten thousand black families into Orange County rather than helping people where they lived.  Over the years after RFK's assassination, even the likes of his hagiographer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said "Bobby" was "demagogic" with that Orange County white audience (page 910 of Schlesinger's book).  However, Schlesinger immediately recognized the position was consistent with RFK's outlook over the years, though Schlesinger did not give context to what he meant, which was RFK having had continued confrontations with black nationalists in New York  and elsewhere, and how the Bed-Sty program was meant to work with those African-Americans who were in spirit if not full intent with the black nationalists saying save and develop their own neighborhoods with the type of government help for white farmers and white urban people in the 1930s New Deal era. We ought to also note McCarthy won in conservative, white Orange County in the CA primary, I believe because the whites there, even some of anti-war liberals, who remained a distinct minority then, knew RFK was very pro-civil rights, very pro-African-American, and had been one among the few US Senators who took up Marian Wright (later Marian Wright Edelman, having married one of RFK's top aides)'s challenge to view "black poverty" in the lower mid-west and south just a year before (see here and here).  And they were not going to have their taxes raised to help African-Americans in Compton or South Central Los Angeles.

Final personal promotion comment: In my novel about RFK surviving 1968, I deal with this divide in the African-American community over whether to move out African-Americans from communities or stay and redevelop them.  It is in the context of robust support for the Bed-Sty program, which morphs into the journalistically clever phrase, "Bed-Stay," and how Roger Wilkins, the young, African-American Solicitor General, decides to heed black nationalist and leftist arguments to oppose busing in the US Supreme Court and promote a subset of the New Deal type of policies that directly help African-Americans.  

Again, Joe Biden's stance on busing in the 1970s era strikes me as too coddling of white racism in his home state of Delaware and in the US Senate.  It is of a piece with his continuing to talk about "civility" when talking about the likes of the openly vile and racist senators from the Southern region of the United States in that era.  I am willing to hear more historical context and how much Biden had tried to do on a national basis what RFK was talking about.  But I sense Biden was already doing the type of neo-liberal dance that was defensive about the best 1930s and 1960s liberal values.  It is simply who he is, and, if Kamala Harris' dramatic rhetorical blows fatally hurt Joe's campaign, so be it.  Too bad it will be far more difficult for voices to be heard in corporate media showing how Harris is of the same type as Biden, and how, for her own advancement, she left behind the African-American community, including siding with bad police practices, for example.  Worse, once Biden departs from the race, we will see, hear, and read corporate media pundits demanding Bernie also step aside for being old, though Bernie's personal political history is consistently on the side of African-Americans, to take one example. The sad and frustrating truth remains: corporate media fears Bernie more than any other candidate running for president this cycle.

Thoughts on the two Democratic Party debates this week and corporate cable news' influence

I had the rare opportunity to watch most of the two Democratic Presidential debates this week while on a business trip.  After the second debate, I also had the opportunity to watch some of the cable news commentary at the vastly overrated among progressives' network, MSNBC, and was reminded of why I am so appalled at the corporate media propaganda system: First, how it trivializes running for president as if it was another episode of "The Voice." Second, how there is a diversion from issues and focus on the horse race aspect of any party's primary process. And third, how the corporate cable news commentators continue to use the words "far left" and "moderate" in a manner which obscures the true disconnect existing between the majority of American voters and those who hold power.  See here for a summary of the issues I raised last November, after the Democratic Party gains in the mid-terms, where consistent polling data show a majority of Americans support Bernie Sanders' platform, which should make the "far left" mainstream in any honest definition of the word "moderate."  Just imagine how you may feel about the candidates if you were told every single day that what Bernie Sanders proposes is the "moderate" or mainstream position.  It would change perceptions to demand change and demand an end to the disconnect of politicians who are not responsive to what the majority of Americans believe. It would expose, though, who owns the nation when we say something is not "politically feasible."

The corporate owned media's use of the word "moderate" is designed to promote frustration, resignation, and despair so the true owners of our nation can continue to reap the profits from the economy, bomb other people around the world who do not bend to our owners' will, and continue to risk killing off a lot of humans and other life on the planet, like some comic book villain.  The motto of the real owners of our nation is summarized in the 1980s vehicle bumper sticker,  He who dies with the most toys wins.  What corporate media commentators and the Republican Party political leadership feed people is hate and fear, which leads half the potential voters to despair and frustration, and ultimately resignation from voting, instead caring about nothing other than their own day-to-day survival.

Last fall, I talked about the Argument Among the Rational. That has begun in the Democratic Party presidential debates, though the argument, thus far, remains less clearly engaged, owing to the gross number of candidates, and, most frustratingly, the questions the MSNBC commentators were asking.  Why, for example, did the MSNBC questioners not ask Bernie Sanders to comment on UBI and talk about the pros and cons of Andrew Yang's proposal?  Where was a discussion of Marianne Williamson's idea for a Department of Peace, as it would have opened up the moral dimensions of foreign policy and most important, the operation of the American Empire in creating, not merely searching for, monsters abroad and within ourselves?* Why did the questions regarding Medicare for All stress the negatives, instead of a more objective form of questioning?  There was no question regarding the $15 minimum wage nor any that focused people's attentions on inequality in any systemic sourcing.  There was no question, and no discussion, of card check, the rights of people to form unions, and specific demands for where candidates stand on re-developing infrastructure.** There was one question about climate change that only allowed for a barely superficial discussion about the future of our planet, energy needs for humanity, and how to promote the economy while transitioning away from fossil fuels. And why not tell Cory Booker, Hey, your statement against BigPharma was nice, but Big Pharma has been a major booster of yours.  And nobody said, Nice speech against VP Biden, Senator Harris, but how do you answer critics of your law enforcement record in the context of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow?*** Then, to put a not-too-fine-a-point on your bonnet, at the end of the second debate, the elitist corporate liberal commentator, Rachel Maddow, castigated the largely well-behaved audience for showing emotion instead of sitting like good little children in church.  

The goal of corporate media is to herd people into accepting narrow choices.  They will use words like "moderate" in a way to tell you can't have nice things other nations have, starting with Medicare for All, free public college tuition, and will rarely, if ever, disclose how military spending is nearly 60% of federal government discretionary spending, after Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt (See this clever, yet compelling, visual of US military spending over the past five or more decades; and here for how we spend more than the next seven nations on the planet combined.).  

I regret to say, if you wish to avoid corporate media manipulation, one should first turn off corporate media cable news.  Turn it off.  If we watch a debate on television, turn it off after the debate and don't listen to the vacuous, trivializing, manipulative commentaries.  These people are shills, hacks, and purveyors of propaganda.  They are right out of They Live.  They have no interest in informing people about issues as they do not believe the average American citizens are capable of deciding issues.  This Argument Among the Rational, however, is proceeding apace, largely through social media, which provides a wider variety of voices, good and bad, of course

If I am to offer my own "spin," it is this: Stand for and with your children. Stand for and with the planet.  If there is to be sacrifices made, let the economic sacrifices begin with those who have the most money and most power to withstand the sacrifice being called upon.  If there are sacrifices to be made, then we should be doing so with an idea of protecting our children's future and the future of life on the planet.  If there are positive goals to achieve, starting with ensuring everyone has full and complete access to health care, full and complete public college attendance without paying tuition, taking part in rebuilding our nation's infrastructure, erasing student debt to increase economic activity and power for those who have graduated from college, then let's elect people who truly stand for those things, not uttering vague, rhetorical noise or literally saying, "I'm for Medicare for All, but..."   We have an opportunity this time to vote for presidential candidates and those running for other offices who enunciate and articulate what the majority of American support. Corporate media commentators do not want you to believe that, and, those who profess to be "liberals" or even "progressive" in the corporate cable news media, invoke Trump to scare people away from voting for what they want.  

The high tide of The Argument Among the Rational is coming.  Let's be prepared.  Let's keep the argument going.  And if we have the opportunity to call out corporate media for its coverage and questions posed, then let's do that, too, especially when speaking with those who have questioned their fealty to Trump, for his broken promises apart from promoting white racism. Those are the swing voters of 2020.  And for God's sake, keep supporting voter registration efforts among The Young.  For our sake, too. 

* The reference to monsters is from John Quincy Adams' Fourth of July speech in 1821, when he was President James Monroe's Secretary of State. The more complete context is where he stated: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example." This is what Bernie Sanders means when he said the other night, in the ten second and other limits set on candidates, he wants a foreign policy where diplomacy, not war, is the cornerstone.

** This is consistent with the way broadcast cable news has all day to talk about things, and literally almost never discusses workers striking across the land, or how it is only, and I mean only, Bernie Sanders who shows up in city after city to support labor rights. 

*** And the day after the debate, she attended a fancy fundraiser for her campaign, where a former Wells Fargo executive was host.  Senator Harris is proud she was bussed away from her family and community so she could personally enter the Big Club Where You and I Ain't In It.  

Falling into Van Wyck Brooks

Most Americans do not know orhave never heard of Van Wyck Brooks (the middle name is pronounced "Wike").  Among the most highly educated Humanities major Americans, one may hear the name and say, "I think I know the name...." but nothing else.  Brooks is someone I have read references to over the years, but only in a way which spoke of him as old-fashioned, out-of-date, and antiquarian to anyone in the late 20th Century through the present.  I knew of Brooks most particularly as someone who wrote about Emerson, Thoreau, and the other 19th Century New England intellectuals and writers. I had a soft spot for him, though, as he was one of the few literary critics of the early to mid-20th Century who liked and admired Sinclair Lewis' writings, seeing Randolph Bourne's insights put into novel form (see page 177 of Mark Schoerer's detestable in opinion, not research, biography of Sinclair Lewis).  For me,  Brooks' kindness to Lewis, unlike so many other critics of the era in which Lewis wrote, made Brooks at least a name worth remembering. But still, I never read Van Wyck Brooks' works.  

Until now.  And I must admit, I am smitten.  

Two weeks ago, I was in Downtown Books, a used bookstore in downtown Albuquerque, and found, quite by accident--which is the main reason to frequent used books or new books bookstores, by the way--a Brooks book entitled The Opinions of Oliver Allston, a book Brooks wrote in the early 1940s.  It is a book of observations in the creative guise of a fictitious person, "Oliver Allston," as if Brooks was writing a literary and intellectual biography of a real person, when it was just himself.  The book has an intellectualism suffused with airiness, meaning a literary feeling one is flying and gliding along, which is akin to W. Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up  (1938). The book is also vastly superior, and equally more creative, in style to the laborious third-person style Henry Adam employed for his Education autobiography.  One feels the mischievousness in between the lines and in the self-criticism in Brooks' work, particularly in the chapters on Socialism and Communism, which is all the more remarkable for the World War II period.  Brooks is saying, in effect, I have no fear of you Red-baiters, who were already on the rise as World War II was in progress. Brooks, in his late 50s, and beyond fear of economic deprivation, spoke plainly about the hope and positive aspects of socialism at least, while making clear he detested the loss of democratic values inherent in most Communist revolutions of the era. As one reads Brooks' novelistic book of letters, one marvels at Brooks' flights of fancy and insight. But, as with Maugham's wonderful book, when one tries to quote from the book, one is mostly at a loss for words. It is a strange feeling, but one I have found, in my old-ing years, more and more comforting.  All that is solid melts into air, I suppose, from a literary perspective.

Then, a week ago, I was in another used bookstore, Uncle Charlie's Covers, in Bernalillo, just north of us here in Rio Rancho, NM, and found a first edition of Brooks' New England: Indian summer: 1865-1915, published in 1940.  I admit to my surprise I am savoring it page by page.  Brooks' insights about the post-Civil War period are remarkable for his time, in recognizing the rise of corporate capitalism as a given, and recognizing how it was ripping through our cultural and economic life, especially for workers and those on farms and in rural areas. Sounds familiar, somehow....:) Brooks' insight as to the novels of that time, with their echoes from Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the like, and the ideas and works of Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others, screams of a Marxist analysis, but without any of the cant and dogma so prevalent at that moment of 1940. Brooks even mischievously quotes Henry Adams' Education autobiography, where Henry speaks of Grandfather John Quincy Adams and said by "rights" the grandfather "should have been a Marxist..." (see Adams' chapter on Darwinism for this quotation) in the way JQA envisioned American infrastructural development, sharing of land and resources for common goods, and the like.  

Brooks' analysis of the 19th and early 20th Century writers who came from or came to New England speaks to a literary and intellectual history for our nation which needs reaffirmation in this time of oligarchies making us feel more divided than we are--even as one recognizes Brooks limited himself to the northeast, and did not write about the western writers, starting with Jack London, though, peeking at the index, I see multiple mentions of the California scholar who came east to Harvard, Josiah Royce. Nor did Brooks write about southern authors such as Faulkner, though, Faulkner does not arise until the 1920s, and, in this interview for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which NBC produced in 1955, Brooks speaks very highly of Faulkner.*  Brooks' insight is how the first intellectual and literary figures emanated from New England, not New York, not the South, not elsewhere.  And even today, it remains indisputable the American literary and intellectual grain begins in Boston--notwithstanding Jefferson and Madison in Virginia--as did American intellectual demands for morality in action, most acutely with the Abolitionist movement. Brooks is also wonderfully illuminative regarding Wendell Phillips, the only leading pre-Civil War Abolitionist who, after the Civil War, gravitated to fighting an even more losing battle against "wage slavery." Brooks also speaks at length, sprinkled throughout the book, of the rise of the now also forgotten and derided William Dean Howells, the Ohio transplant who came to Boston the way Islamic religious people come to Mecca, though Howells stayed for decades before decamping to New York City, which, Brooks rightly says, became the cultural center by the second decade of the 20th Century.  I am a major Howells fan, and find his trajectory of becoming more radical as he aged most remarkable. If one is not familiar with Howells' business novels, such as The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New Fortunes (I seem to recall a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker where he shows the continued relevance of Hazard, but could not find this morning) or the radical Traveler from Alturia, one is missing an important set of insights into the history of our nation from any sociological or economic standpoint. And one basks in the presence of Brooks' great writing while one is enlightened.  Brooks is acutely aware of economic forces challenging New England's cultural dominance, particularly how the shipping industry declined in New England, and lost ground to New York and other ports by the end of the 19th Century.  Brooks sees the loss of the clothing industry to other parts of the nation as part of New England's relative decline. Brooks also notes, without any racism whatsoever, the rise of the melting pot European immigration into the New England area changed the "Yankee" (Scots-Irish) culture that defined an earlier 19th Century New England.

But I return to where I begin, which is why would Brooks be relevant today?  I think one place to begin to find Brooks' relevance is Brooks' demand for sentiment in the face of his knowledge and cynicism.  Another is Brooks' insights into highest parts of American culture from 100 to 150 years ago, and deeper, in his The Flowering of New England, which I suppose I will read next after I complete this one, which I am only in the first 20% through of a near 500 page book. His insights help us understand patterns in American life that continue even with a more ethnically diverse nation.  I read echoes of his analyses in modern journals such as New York Review of Books, for example, and among those who analyze the latest novels of new immigrants and those whose voices have been oppressed for so many centuries.  Lin Manuel Miranda would "get" Brooks and find Brooks' non-racism almost astonishing, and therefore hopeful, considering white Americans' deep racism in the era in which Brooks grew up and thrived. Brooks' insights regarding the literature America was producing as our nation developed into a global Empire has remarkable staying power.  This 1996 New York Times review of a Brooks biography, saved online remarkably, speaks to my view that Brooks is well worth reading.  

As I close this meandering post, I admit to finding it amusing that Brooks was born and grew up in, and married, in Plainfield, NJ, not far from where I grew up. Brooks was, however, smitten with New England from his attending Harvard, graduating in 1908, as we learn in Wikipedia.  I, too, was smitten with Harvard (still am), but I have not had any pretense of ever attending or teaching at Harvard--though, as I have written, the Son should have been accepted there. The Son was and remains certainly "Harvard material," at least for the undergraduate years, and one day, a professor there.  Overall, I am glad to have finally met Brooks, and learned I still have much to read in days when I find myself simultaneously wanting to remove myself from the noise of ignorance and rise of fascism and even Confederate style Nazism ascendant in our land--and as I wonder more and more, am I even "white" anymore?  I find comfort in reading about the people who inhabited the intellectual and literary life to which I wanted myself to aspire--even as I know Henry Adams, if he met me, would detest me for being of "Jewish" heritage.** I do, however, believe we are in a moment of great artistic ferment in terms of streaming television, and the rise in diverse voices who need to be heard.  I stand aside as an older semi-white male and marvel at the justly angry and creative youth, and wish them well. I hope some will find Brooks and ingest and incorporate him, as he is an ancestor worth knowing.

* The interview is worth a watch, for those daring enough to consider watching, as he speaks in the midst of the Red Scare and President Eisenhower, about statesmen behaving like "boys," which first he says is unprecedented, but then, steps back to say Teddy Roosevelt was a more boyish-boy than Ike.  Brooks harps on Jeffersonianism, and had that then-mistaken view of Andrew Jackson being a precursor of FDR, when of course FDR was more a Hamiltonian with a Jeffersonian sensibility--which Herbert Croly had called for in his 1909, The Promise of American Life.  Brooks speaks more highly of the then-New Critics in literary criticism than he should have, considering their disdain of Sinclair Lewis. However, Brooks gets the limits of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in a manner that would be considered revolutionary in our present days. Brooks sees Hemingway's violence as immature and Fitzgerald's adoration of the rich as woefully immature. Brooks declines to speculate much about what the future would bring, and therefore shows a wisdom beyond mine, for example.  It was a pleasurable, though highly sentimental and nostalgic, half hour to spend watching.  By the way, the interviewer, Hiram Haydn, was a famous editor of the early to mid 20th Century who edited many writers, from William Faulkner and William Styron to, believe it or not, Ayn Rand.

** See Edward N. Saveth's American Historians and European Immigration: 1875-1925, and particularly the devastating chapter on Henry Adams' crazed anti-Semitism; and I mean crazed, as he seems to use the word "Jew" to mean "modern," something he feared and detested.  It was so strange to consider in light of my adoration of Henry Adams.  Thank goodness the anti-Semitism only showed up in the private letters Adams wrote to others and not his essays, novel, or histories.

UPDATE: September 22, 2019.  I ended up finishing New England Indian Summer and The Flowering of New England, and loved both.  I just found and am starting to read The World of Washington Irving, which Brooks called his prequel to The Flowering of New England.  This last opens with a mini bio of Parson Weems, he of the apocryphal George Washington biography about cherry tree cutting.  It is another delightful start.   UPDATE: September 29, 2019.  Brooks' chapter on the South left me a bit disappointed, as Brooks appears to have thrown in slavery as an afterthought and, while he recognizes its horridness and cruelty, he seems more enamored with Jefferson and less sympathetic to Hamilton than later scholars would finally correct. It is funny how some of the things he states appears to recognize the limits of the historical consensus at the time, but he appears timid in moving beyond that historical consensus, and appears to not know how the Southern historians had created this misunderstanding.  I am somewhat dreading the later chapter focused on Thomas Jefferson, because I know he liked to call himself a Jeffersonian in a way I did as a teenager, before I read more of Vidal and then other scholars showing me that Jefferson was a wily political figure who became more and more unwilling to end slavery.  As readers may know, I have long been a champion of Alexander Hamilton since high school, and was a Herbert Croly acolyte in believing the two men's philosophies can be melded for a better America.  Otherwise, Brooks' book remains a delight, as it is filled with extraordinary information and analysis.

David Brion Davis (1927-2019): The power of moral ideas in history and the art of writing history

I somehow missed the death of historian David Brion Davis, who died on April 14, 2019.  His death date is sort of ironic as it is the same day Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.  Davis' writings centered on the "problem" of slavery, and how it was not until the late 1700s that a Western oriented movement began to develop to eradicate at least chattel slavery, based upon political philosophy, morality in human dignity, and ideas that crossed into revolution over all hierarchies. Davis wrote many books on the subject of slavery, as one may see here at the Wiki page.  Davis' three towering books, which pioneered modern comparative history, spanning nations and continents, and, which promoted social history (history from the "bottom up"), have been:

The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

Davis' life and work is ably summarized here at the Chronicle of Higher Education, particularly his experience as a soldier in segregated armies in World War II, and his finding inspiration from the historian Kenneth Stampp, who did so much to start a historians' movement away from the awful, racist Dunning School of historians regarding the Reconstruction period, which racist-oriented scholarship bled into a Confederate-oriented view of the Antebellum period (meaning the period leading to the U.S. Civil War), and the U.S. Civil War.  I had recently been re-reading some early Robert Scheer and had seen a reference Scheer made to Davis' father, Clyde, who was a journalist and novel writer. I had not recalled the reference before, and when I saw the middle name "Brion," I quickly looked up Clyde Brion Davis on Wiki, and saw the paternal relationship. It was then I discovered, clicking through the Wiki link for the son, David, that David Brion Davis had passed away in April at the age of 92. Damn, I thought to myself.  However, I immediately was glad Davis had finished The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation in 2014, as I had read that book two years ago. I had begun to despair that third book in the trilogy may never be written, as the Age of Revolution book had been published in the mid-1970s.  The Age of Revolution was brilliant in helping me understand how the idea of abhorring chattel slavery developed and how non-obvious it was, and almost astonishing it developed at all.  It is easy to think, well, what can this book on something so obvious in our time offer in terms of insight into our own time?  For me, reading about (a) British and French movements against slavery, with the French, moving slower than the British despite the French Revolution, ironically enough; (b) Davis' mischievous, hinting and subtle analysis that there are different types of slaveries, starting with wage slavery, which was developing in Great Britain in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries; and (c) the manner in which most of white American society recoiled  against any movement toward abolitionism, and, at most, favored re-colonization to Africa or even Central or South America, one sees how movements fail and continue to fail, until they succeed. Davis' scholarship, his insight, and his creativity in moving back and forth among the U.S., Great Britain, and France, and sometimes elsewhere, was, again, remarkable.

Davis' three books alone (and his others, such as his lecture book, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style) are an extraordinary achievement. The books are, admittedly, not easy reads for lay readers, as the books contain detailed footnotes/endnotes--though, for me, the footnotes/endnotes provided much information and understanding about the level of Davis' research, and where one may find nuggets of his philosophical approach that almost screams with frustration at the human condition. I recognize most lay readers find detailed and wordy footnotes or endnotes overwhelming, though they continue to be a delight for my autodidactic and antiquarian mind. I had often wondered how Davis would end his trilogy, and how the book itself would end. I was highly gratified to read Davis' Age of Emancipation book ending, where Davis recognized how, despite the abolition of chattel slavery in much of the planet, something which had been openly supported throughout most of human history (and where even Aristotle spoke glowingly about how "natural" it is to own human slaves or be human slaves), human beings, including in the civilized societies, often easily fall back into such behavior. Davis' final words in the book speak of human trafficking, wage slavery (he could have added prison wage slavery), of how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union reverted slavery and slave camps, and that any catastrophe from either nuclear war, climate change, or something else, could, again, easily restore chattel slavery on a large scale, especially starting in the region we call The Middle East. Davis then humbly reminded his readers that, if we transported ourselves back into 1860 Mississippi, we would find ourselves confronted with otherwise educated plantation owners who took chattel slavery for granted as a God-given right and, most ironically, a moral duty. Davis' last words in the book state simply and clearly: "The outlawing  of chattel slavery in the New World, and then globally, represents a crucial landmark of moral progress that we should never forget."

I was privileged to have had one personal interaction via email with Davis in the fall of 2012, after The Smithsonian magazine just published a feature article on the Reconstruction period, and the end of chattel slavery in the U.S. after the Civil War, to coincide with the release of the Spielberg film, Lincoln, itself based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals.  The Smithsonian, in a fit of ideological dumbness, assigned the arguably racist Southern so-called humor writer, Roy Blount, Jr.,* to write the article. Blount wrote an article that was right out of the Dunning School, and showed a remarkable indifference to African-American suffering after the Civil War. It was so horrible I could not believe it.  I wrote an admittedly outraged letter to the editor to The Smithsonian, which was not published of course. But I sent via email a copy of the letter to historians Eric Foner, Drew Faust, and David Brion Davis, who each had written not only scholarly books or articles on the eras, but had written popular essays for major publications.  Foner emailed back informing me he was not in the least surprised The Smithsonian editor picked someone like Blount, as, he said, the editor is "quite conservative," but that my letter was an appropriately "strong rejoinder."  Faust gave a more polite reply, merely thanking me for stating my viewpoint (Well, she was president of Harvard at that point, and did not need to have any further controversies...:)). I admit, however, to being most personally gratified by Davis' emailed response.  Davis emailed me regarding my letter, saying:

This is a superb and much needed critique. I've not seen the film of course but it's shocking to read about Blount's article.

Best, David Brion Davis

Yes, I kept that email from October 27, 2012, which is now inside my hardcover copy of The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation.

David Brion Davis has long been in my personal pantheon of the mid to nearly late 20th Century historians. The historians of that era wrote in a style that some in the academy appear to now feel is too "authoritative," meaning not enough "I feel..." or "It is my opinion" in the text.  I admit to finding that critique silly, as one knows, when one is reading a book, the book itself is the writer's viewpoint.  To put in all those "I's" is distracting in what is a long text, particularly a text with extensive, copious footnotes. For me personally, Davis and other historians of that era--one thinks immediately of David Morris Potter, Richard Hofstadter, Henry Steele Commager, and C. Vann Woodward, for starters--represent the pinnacle of American historical writing. Each of these historians had a penetrating sense of "History" as a continuing argument, recognized the study of history as a philosophical endeavor can tell us much about the impact of ideas in a given society (Potter, Hofstadter and Davis are brilliant on the topic of historiography), and, most important for me as a contrarian type, each recognized those in human history who proved fundamentally wrong in general may not have been wrong in certain particulars. Here, I think of Woodward's great essay on Virginia antebellum lawyer, George Fitzhugh's mischievous "defense" of chattel slavery compared to wage slavery in Fitzhugh's 1856 book, Cannibals All: Slaves Without Masters, reprinted in Woodward's American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue. Yes, I get these historians I have named are all white men. However, the racial and sexual status of these historians should not distract us from their insights, their elegant writing, and their remarkable scholarship. And it certainly does not mean that women and those who are not white males cannot or have not reached their level of style and insight. I have, in recent years, deeply admired the scholarship of Glenda Gilmore (her work on the early 20th Century civil rights movement is required reading), Drew Faust, and Jill Lapore, as well as the African-American male historian, Robin D.G. Kelley. I also remain a major booster for the now long gone Rayford Logan, an African-American historian of that 1940s-1970s era, whose Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson aka The Nadir: 1877-1901, remains lost to most Americans, and many American historians, and should be reissued.  Logan really put the historian's Mark of Cain on Wilson at a time when the historian, Arthur Link, was writing hagiographies about Wilson.  It is, however, enough to remark the white male historians in my pantheon are like The Beatles of their profession.  They wrote about American history in a way that allowed other to build upon and recreate, and they remain remarkably unique and compelling to read as this still new century unfolds.

To ape the style apparently favored in too many academic circles, I feel sadness at learning of Davis' passing, and feel badly I missed an opportunity for further communication with him.  My feeling speaks, I guess, to my own frustration about not ever becoming a history professor myself, where I may have interacted with Davis on a professional basis.  There.  Enough feelings? :) 

* I will always remember seeing Blount on television the night Obama won the presidential election in 2008. He appeared drunk to me, and was so ridiculously saddened that Obama won that I thought, My God, is Blount really this racist?  It was a pathetic performance.

A documentary about a song and the reverberations from colonialist racism and modern corporatism

Netflix has an amazing documentary about the history of the song we know as Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight). It is a story about redemption at one point in the documentary, but hanging over it are the echoes of colonialism and racism, and how it reverberates into intellectual property law and global economics. Where the film fails, I think, is helping a viewer understand why it is the three daughters of Solomon Linda, the author of the song Mbube, which became Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight) received less than $1 million in royalties, which we will discuss initially below.

The film is well worth seeing first, and I invite people to stop reading and watch it first.  

Okay?  Did you watch it?  Okay then.

So, you ask, why did the sisters only receive $750,000 in royalties?  The first reason is the legal battle the famous South African copyright lawyer fought on Linda's daughters' behalf against Disney was based upon a leftover British copyright law quirk that had remained in South African copyright law, which concerned a reversion of copyrights back to the composer after 25 years (the documentary discusses a so-called 1911 copyright law, designed at the time to protect Charles Dickens' widow and heirs). Such a reversion was later repealed in Great Britain, and was never the law in the United States.  The U.S. law has long stated, when the time for copyright expires, the creative works revert to the public domain.  So this means, when the daughters achieved a settlement against Disney for its use of the song in The Lion King, it was only for royalties generated within South Africa.

Second, when trying to figure out how much the daughters could have gotten from Disney, there were two other limitations.  The song takes up, perhaps, two minutes at the most in an hour and a half film or a two hour play.  That's it.  Plus, what we learn along the way in the documentary is Solomon Linda did not write the verses "In the jungle/The mighty jungle/The lion sleeps tonight...In the village/The peaceful village/The lion sleeps tonight." That was written in 1961 or thereabouts by a guy named George Weiss, who is shown to be sorta crass, particularly the way he sings and plays what he wrote.  My wife and I sat appalled at how crassly he played what was so beautifully rendered in The Tokens'  iconic version of the song.  But, what I flashed onto as I watched this song's development unfold was how Heart and Soul became La Mer (here is the classic version) which then became Beyond The Sea.  I listened to Mbube and realized the heart and soul, pun intended, of the Lion song we find so compelling is as much, and possibly a bit more, from George Weiss' verse melody as the Solomon Linda wee-wee-wee-wee-wee and Mbube chant melody.

Third, if there is any criticism of the lawyers in South Africa, it is their lack of vision in agreeing to the ten-year limitation.  But I wonder how good the initial 1911 copyright argument was to have agreed to the ten year limitation in the first place.  I think the documentary was weak on this point as it should have delved into why the lawyer thought the settlement was so good to start with. The lawyer had said on camera the settlement was for far more than he had ever hoped to get from Disney, which told me, as a practicing trial lawyer, he thought his argument arising from the 1911 copyright law was clever, but maybe not so much of a slam-dunk as people around him thought. That may be why there was the ten-year limitation on the copyright claim.  If there is any legitimate criticism of the strategy in accepting the settlement, it was not seeing the idea of what, since the Spiderman franchise especially, we now call "re-boots."  But again, if the 1911 copyright law argument was only so-so, then how far is the leverage?

Now, let's go to the societal issues.  First, Gallo Records, the South African record company where Solomon Linda recorded his song in 1939, certainly ripped off Solomon Linda.  The idea that this man, who could not read or write, signed away his rights to the song in the early 1950s after Pete Seeger, through Alan Lomax, got hold of the song, is almost glossed over.  One looks at Linda's signature on the release of rights and hears the daughters almost saying the signature is a forgery; yet, most lawyers know that waiting decades to challenge such a thing means running smack dab into the statute of limitations.  Second, lawyers took at least 30% of the money (the main lawyer getting 20%).  Third, the South African government, which had wonderfully stepped in when Gallo proved cowardly in not wanting to challenge the international behemoth Disney, decided to take its share of the money fronted to the lawyers and the costs of the litigation.  The documentary does not say what that sum was, but it sounded like another 10-20% so that now nearly half the money went to lawyers and the government--apart from taxes, of course.  And again, let's remind ourselves this is only about royalties in South Africa, not anywhere else on the planet, and remind ourselves too this is only about a portion of a single song in a longer film and play.  

The racism and colonialism hover over this because, as we think of Solomon Linda's daughters, we think of Leadbelly and the black blues artists who sang the songs that never were copyrighted by these poor, black singers and how it was largely the music business executives (whites and some Jews who became "white" in the parlance of the mid to late 20th Century) who made the money.  When one sees how Pete Seeger, upon learning the song was not some "traditional" song--meaning really old, public domain melody--but something composed only thirteen years before, said he wanted no royalties from the song, one stands up and applauds the old Red.  But one quickly learns Folkways Records, for whom Seeger recorded, had no such guilty or humane conscience, and merely gave a relative few pennies percentage of royalties to Solomon Linda and later his widow and daughters.  This is horrible because Seeger was literally singing most of Mbube and had not been singing the later George Weiss-Tokens version.  Seeger, though, coined "wimoweh" because for some reason he could not pronounce "mbube," which I found a bit odd, I have to admit.  And later, when there was litigation in the 1990s between Folkways Records and George Weiss and his music publisher, somehow Folkways lost and George Weiss became, get this, sole owner of the song.  What the heck?  Sole owner?  That there seems to have been no consideration of the Solomon Linda family in the American litigation tells us so much about how law actually works in developed nations and how little regard we have for the nations the U.S. and European nations have exploited over centuries.  

And, in the modern world, meaning since the end of World War II, we have corporations and scamming professionals so often ripping off artists.  When I hear the now late Harlan Ellison criticizing individual consumers for piracy, I think first and foremost of South Park's response.  The real rip off people are the big corporations, and us professionals. Most artists make very little money, and it is only a few superstars who make any real money. And even then, one thinks of The Beatles' John Lennon and Paul McCartney saying how much money record companies and managers made off the Beatles--one thinks of the song You Never Give Me Your Money and, for our libertarian friends, Taxman.  One thinks of how Ray Davies and the Kinks railed against record companies, and how Flo and Eddie/The Turtles talk about how managers and lawyers ripped them off.  Zappa saw this early on and formed his own record company, as did the Beatles, but the money always ended up not quite staying where they thought, which was in their pockets as composers.  And now the Zappa children are fighting over the still vast royalty money proceeds arising from Zappa's estate. 

This is why, the older I get, the more I wonder about why so many of us are so much against a strong, deeply penetrating welfare state, where people are simply taken care of, and allowed to make art, where one may get adulation and status more than money from creating art that touches a mass of people.  Money is a root of evil, not the only one, of course. However, it is stunning how much evil money can generate when we stop to think about it.  The middle people, whether they are corporate executives or professionals (in the form of management, distributors, lawyers, accountants, etc.), are the ones who seem to make oodles of money, and there is nothing creative in any moral sense about what these persons actually do.  And the grasping children or heirs, who did not create the art, end up fighting each other as with the Zappa kids and so many other heirs of artists over the last century.

And so we return to Solomon Linda's daughters, and I find I weep more for their father, weep more  over the exploitation of Africans and African-Americans, which exploitation debases and undermines any joy in the daughters' lives (the side bar about the one sister dying of AIDS does not even bother to mention how many Africans died of AIDS, and how men, who were notoriously straying from their wives, infected many African wives), and weep more for how corporate globalism continues to wind its way through our planet, putting our planet at risk, and harming and eventually killing many human beings and killing off many of the planet's creatures. We rarely want to make all these connections because to do so is simply overwhelming. However, we should also recognize this as a result of propaganda from international corporate owned media, whose executives and management do not want us to think in this manner. It is, as former elite power player Al Gore, Jr. recognized, only in his exile, an assault on reason. It is why, again, I find myself, as I get older, becoming more radical in my views about money and power, and why I keep reading Louis Auchincloss novels to salve my psychic wounds and depression, I suppose.  In my dreams, I keep hoping one day the lion of justice and human kindness will awake.  However, I see more likely only more reaction, more religious fundamentalism, and more fascism.  We humans would rather fight each other over money and power, and, in doing so, draw socially constructed distinctions between ourselves about our religions and skin color, rather than see what we have in common with each other as human beings. We would rather promote a philosophy of selfishness rather than a philosophy sharing with each other.  I did weep a bit too for Solomon Linda's daughters, yes, but I stepped back and thought of these other things and fell into a far deeper despair. 

Give Trump the House of Representatives' impeachment proceeding he obviously wants--plus a primer on parallel campaigns

Trump is goading the House of Representatives Democratic Party leadership to institute impeachment hearings against him.  Trump is behaving as if to say, in language racist Trump would understand, "Yes, Brer Fox, don't fling me into the brier patch."  Trump thinks it will be like Iran-Contra and Ollie North's bullshit testimony that, in the pre-Internet age, was able to convince many Americans he was a patriot. Trump dreams of getting higher poll numbers as happened with Bill Clinton with the Republicans' crusade, er, impeachment proceedings against Clinton.*  I think, however, if people testify to the hundreds of contacts Trump and his camp had with Russians during the 2015-2016 campaign, as people come forward with how Trump has behaved as a business person and how, since the early 1990s, Trump has had to rely on Russian money and Deutsche Bank (the fact courts have now ordered Deutsche Bank and Capital One to turn over its Trump related documents to Congress is a big story lost amidst the jockeying of the past week), this will drive the portion of the electorate, in the Rust Belt particularly, who voted for Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016, and the other undecideds to vote against Trump in 2020. I also see House of Representative's impeachment proceedings as also investigating, under the heading of a cover-up, the money support Russians have given to Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, among others.  This impeachment proceeding will be more like Nixon's as FB friend Joe Conason writes in his latest article at The National Memo.  But it will also take on a larger target of how the Republican leadership has cynically allied itself with Russian oligarchs and are enabling Trump's untrustworthy conduct, particularly with McConnell and Congressional Republicans not being interested in protecting American electoral integrity from Russian hackers for the 2020 election.

The late, non-lamented Wisconsin Junior Senator, Joe McCarthy, loved to talk about the Democrats' "Twenty Years of Treason," which should have been a giveaway that the Red Scare was first and foremost a political operation designed to demonize first New Deal internationalists and then New Deal liberals (see also Page 333 of the Buckley/Bozell book defending McCarthy, where the authors admit a primary purpose for the Red Scare is to strike out against "liberals.").  The charge of treason was and remains a canard in almost every way, but it is a charge too many older Baby Boomers and too many in our parents' generations continue to believe hook, line and sinker.  However, here we have Trump and his twenty-five years of "treason" in the form of what will be shown are rather slippery relationships with Russians and corrupt banks (Deutsche Bank), which relationships Trump brought with him to his White House campaign and presidency.  See Craig Unger's book and Seth Abramson's book on Trump's long march with the Russians. 

It is therefore good to begin impeachment hearings, even if the hearings turn into a sideshow--for we, as a people, can chew gum and walk down the street at the same time.  It is about time Democratic Party leaders understood what election day is about--and that is running parallel campaigns.  One campaign will be the impeachment campaign. Another campaign will be the ideas and policies campaign that progressive candidates like Sanders and Warren bring, and Yang is also bringing.  A third campaign has got to be registering as many young people as possible. What we find from polling data is Americans under 40 represent a potentially majority constituency for a more hopeful and communal America; and are demanding helpful government policies for America. In short, our children understand the New Deal legacy better than most of us Baby Boomers and certainly my parents' generation, who came of age in the aftermath of WWII and the depths of the Cold War propaganda and Red Scares.  And now, a fourth campaign has been added, courtesy of the theocratic Christian fundamentalist branch of the Republican Party: Women across our land are getting more mobilized as it dawns on even those women who claim to themselves they are not a "feminist," that there is, in the words of Stephen Stills' song "For What It's Worth": There's something happening here...But unlike Stills' anthem song from 1967, What it is is, actually, exactly clear.  The anti-abortion legislation being passed in state after state is designed to criminalize women's sex lives, i.e. sexual autonomy, and dangerously and cruelly undermine women's ability to maintain their health.

My advice to people is choose the parallel campaign that best fits your personality and best fits your sensibility. So, as we roll through the rest of 2019 and into 2020, do not castigate the other parallel campaigns as a "diversion" for what is "really" important.  Each of these parallel campaigns is important.  Rachel Maddow has her place as much as a person who registers voters, for example.

Therefore, I say loudly and clearly:  Bring on the impeachment proceedings.  Trump, you want it?  You got it, buster. 

* The impeachment against Clinton in 1998 failed in the senate, as we should recall. However, it so tarnished Clinton's reputation, notwithstanding a strong economy, that Al Gore, running for president in 2000, refused to use Clinton in any sustained way to help his campaign.  Had Clinton not been impeached, Gore would have called upon Clinton without fear that he was condoning Clinton's sexually defined moral failings. The Republican leaders knew the longer game and that is how they got their campaigning-as-a-moderate candidate GW Bush just over the top in the Electoral College in the 2000 election.  And for those who want to blame Nader, I say look within.  Gore won Florida if he and his lawyers had decided to push to count overvotes (where a person pushes in the chad and then writes in Gore's name to show total intent to vote for Gore).  Had they done that, the count showed Gore actually won in Florida, hence, he would have been president.  And really, Baby Boomers.  You had the chance to vote for goddamned Ralph Nader and you blew it.  Your children would have understood what to do then, and my advice to Democratic Party leader poobahs is, If you think you can get away with nominating Biden, you may find more than a few still idealistic youth turning away from the Democratic Party for good.  This remains your election to blow.  And Baby Boomers of the white persuasion, you have been warned--as I warned us back in 2016 about what 2035 or 2036 will look like.

Why economic populism is the way to take the Senate

I like Eric Levitz at New York Magazine. I think, though, in this column, he is thinking too conventionally about the weak prospects for the Democrats in the US Senate for 2020. The article is worth reading through before coming back here.  Don't worry, I'll wait.  I will listen to some music on YouTube while you read. 

Okay? Read it? Depressed? Again, okay. Now, for an alternative...

I appreciate Mr. Levitz's point that the Dems are only likely to gain three or four seats in the current predictions for 2020, but even there, we are seeing once again how little policy figures into the arguments Mr. Levitz is making.  If, for example, the DNC promoted  and supported economic populists in various Republican leaning States, they could win in those places through candidates speaking to rural area Americans' best values.  But let's not start there, shall we?  Let's start with Mr. Levitz's assumption that Republicans serve rural America's interests. Not once does Levitz tell us what it is precisely Republican politicians are giving people in rural areas. Rural areas continue to fall behind economically, are lacking medical facilities and doctors, are lacking teachers for schools, and lacking most things people in urban areas expect, starting with restaurants of good quality. Rural areas lack transportation to other towns or cities, unless their pick ups are in good enough shape to travel distances, and they can afford to pay for the gas, and then have money to spend somewhere else.  So, again, what are Republican politicians giving these people? Well, hate for one. And they give them an extremist gun position that tells them, You can be the hero to stop the Mulsim-Mexican-Jewish-gay hordes ruining your life, all while pushing for Jesus and the Apocalyptic visions that go along with this. And, of course, saving the unborn, and punishing those harlots who want an abortion, makes it all "moral."  It has been an effective recipe over the decades, as the Democrats lost the ability to speak in New Deal language, and, with the Democrats offering mostly the language and policies which make a wealthy person in La Jolla in Southern California feel safe that nothing Democrats propose will cost them money.  And strategists are really surprised rural, mostly white Americans in the various States Mr. Levitz discusses vote for the Republicans?   

So, please, corporate Democrats. If you want to avoid making Mr. Levitz's prognostication a reality, you will find the type of politician who speaks to these folks is a home grown Bernie Frickin Sanders. I've seen it in footage in West Virginia and Nebraska, where Sanders causes more than enough of those folks, when added to the 40% who vote Democrat, and who the Electoral College type of prognostications tell us to ignore as we speak of "Blue" or "Red" States as if completely "Red" or "Blue," to support a Democrat or a person who is, egads, a New York Jew by birth and raising.  To tell me this won't work is to act like what is being done now is working.  No, that strategy of the Clintons and the Neo-liberals has utterly failed in those States.  So, this proposal I make is at least worth the try.  Wine and cheese corporate Democrats, who finesse with language in a way that really has fooled largely white people over 50 who watch cable news, too often tell us what is not going to be accomplished, tell us to accept the globalization that has occurred, as if this type of globalization is the only globalization, and pop champagne bottles at the current economic indicators.  Rural America needs the type of policies that speak to the heartache, and then propose hope through policies that will benefit them directly and their children.

For me, I have long been concerned with rural America, as much as urban America, where poor Hispanics and blacks have lived since the 1950s.  I loved, for example, Tom Harkin, now retired US Senator from Iowa, and endorsed his presidential candidacies in 1988 and 1992. For those who believe so deeply in the Country Mice/City Mice meme, explain how someone like me, a suburban-urban professional guy, a Jew, a "liberal," did that. Tom was a great person who cared about his state of Iowa and what Iowa represented in the history of, and life and culture in, the United States. Cue Field of Dreams. Harkin stalwartly opposed the NAFTA and the WTO for the correct reasons. He understood why there was a New Deal and why we needed one again. But, living in Orange County and Southern California from the 1980s through 2017, I so often found myself out of step with those Democrats (far more economically well off than me, more often than not) who fell for Gary Hart, Dukakis, Clintons, Gore, Bradley, and eventually Obama.  These candidates were nice bankers. All of them. They wouldn't know a union if it fell on them.  They had no idea how to help rural America and never cared enough to find out--or if they knew, they realized it would cost the rich people in the suburbs and urban areas money.  

Meanwhile, people in rural America know bankers are not nice when you need the bankers. They know bankers will never come through in the hard times. They know when the bankers pay a visit to your home, it is to take your home and cut up and sell your farm.  The rural people, when nobody is appealing to their best values, turn to those who tell them who to hate--and Republican strategists and politicians are right there waiting. I have marveled all these years how working class white people and rural white people never notice the bankers standing next to Republican Congressman Steve King, to take another Iowa politician example. But, with the structure of the discourse on television and radio, there has been an effective obscuring of the differences in the two parties because Democrats are always happy to have some banker stand with them--to prove the Democrat is a solid, respectable business person!--and are content when the liberalism the banker shows are about things that don't directly cost the bankers money.  Being for abortion doesn't cost bankers money or power.  Being for same sex marriage may actually make money as gays and lesbians feel more empowered to open joint bank accounts, and gays and lesbians, to the extent they do not take on children, have lots more money to invest if they are in the professional class.  So bankers love LGBT movements and promote them.  Plus, bankers really don't want too many Americans to own guns, do they?

If one constructed a novel about the coalitions in our politics for the past nearly 45 years, people would say it is crazy and would not be able to exist over any length of time. It is too far fetched, they would say. Well, it is, and has been, the reality--and it is now also killing our planet.  Mr. Levitz's article is important and he could well be correct.  And right now, the Democratic Party's national committees, leading "official" political strategists, talking heads on television, and donor classes, are still highly clueless, arrogant, and refusing to accept, strategically, we are in an economic populist moment--and that social media doesn't have to be the enemy, but instead can also be our friend.  If the DCCC and DSCC, for example, promoted, embraced and supported economic populist progressives, they would find more victories in the Senate races in 2020 than Mr. Levitz believes is possible.  The worst that happens, if the Democratic Party committees change course, is a closer loss, and a possible downturn in rich donor class money.  However, there would be more money flowing to those candidates from the grass roots, and more excitement.  If there is a victory, and there well could be, then that could be part of the potential salvation of our nation's (and planet's) fortunes, and, maybe it will begin to heal the rifts which corporate media and strategists currently in power are vastly overstating between rural and urban America. We have more in common with each other, as Americans, than we think.  We have more in common with each other as a species on this planet, too, but we need to tell people in places where they have been taught to hate that are we are on their side before we can hold hands in communion and say there are others who suffer, and we must work together to help them, too.