What Is the Fight Really About?

I had never heard Randall Kennedy speak until last week when he appeared on Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square. I was impressed. Until then, I had only a vague notion of who he was - a prominent African-American public intellectual. I now understand that he is a law professor at Harvard University and the author of a number of books, including, memorably, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002).

 

Like any white person with at least a minimal sense of decency, I feel a certain measure of discomfort writing that title, given the prominence of the racial slur that is its subject. But I decided to write it out despite my discomfort. And I think I’m going to have to read the book in its entirety, given my interest in sociolinguistics and racial relations.

 

The n-word (by which I will identify it from now on) is peculiarly harsh in its impact. No other racial or ethnic slur carries the nasty punch that the n-word does. I’ve long believed its uniquely nasty quality reflects the viciousness of racial oppression itself. The reason for this, as far as I can tell, is that when used by a white person, it automatically calls up the cruelty and injustice of racial oppression and does so approvingly. To use that slur is to say through subtext, “You, black person, are stuck in a lowly category that allows me to look down on you every time I glance your way, and you have to accept it because that’s just the way things are. So, screw you.”

 

The word, in other words, is not simply an insult in the way that words like scumbag, dipshit, and asshole are. It’s an ethnic slur that echoes the dark spirit of an entire social order, a grossly unjust and cruel social order. This order is the source of the word’s poison. Those who use it are, consciously or not, strutting and preening themselves while trampling on the injured limbs and pummeled bodies of the system’s victims.

 

I have noticed in my lifetime that the n-word has replaced the f-word as the most unacceptable item in polite conversation. This is a good thing, and it reflects some of the positive changes that Professor Kennedy noted in his GPS remarks. Kennedy also noted that many of the phrases we use today have been weaponized and so have lost their usefulness in our current efforts to push social improvements further along. According to him these no longer useful terms include racism, structural racism, and, of course, critical race theory.

 

I agree.

 

It seems to me that the biggest issue facing us since the upheaval of the Trump years is best framed not as black vs. white, but as fair play and decency vs. malpractice. The key issue is the survival of the democratic institutions that we rely on to promote justice. The central political question should be, “Is your party for democracy and fair play or against them?”

 

If I were advising Democratic party leaders on future elections, I would recommend putting more emphasis on America’s longstanding promise of democracy and justice for everyone, and less emphasis on fighting racism per se. The Republican party is trying to cast Democrats as anti-white by coughing up the idea of critical race theory and claiming it lies at the heart of the Democratic party. For Republican propagandists the hope is that they can make white Americans feel inherently criticized by the Democrats. Their scheme is aimed at driving moderate whites away from the Democrats and into the GOP.

Let’s not take the bait. The real issues are not race, nor criticism about race relations, but justice and democracy. The Republicans have aligned themselves against both of these with their slew of new restrictive voting laws. Let’s fight them with all we have, not across the black-white seam, but on the front where we are sure to win, the fair play and decency divide. The Republicans have rejected these American values and that’s where we should be hitting them hardest. I can’t speak for Professor Kennedy, of course, but my sense is that he would agree with this approach.

 

                 Professor Randall Kennedy

 

 

 

Democrats versus Putinistas

I watched enough of the Democratic debate last Wednesday to see Elizabeth Warren beat up Mike Bloomberg and to see Amy Klobuchar show her irritable side to Pete Buttigieg. This was the feistiest debate of the season and quite a few observers fell back on the “circular firing squad” metaphor to describe it. Nonetheless, all the participants did survive, some a bit more wounded than others.

Bloomberg took the heaviest hits. If you believe Elizabeth Warren - and you’d be foolish not to – Mike Bloomberg is a racially insensitive old codger who talks about women as though he were a crude, arrogant jock in a 1950s locker room. Bloomberg’s failure to handle the  criticism from Warren, Bernie and other fellow Democrats [editor’s note: Bloomberg is a Democrat these days] was telling. Just as damaging as his stop-and-frisk policy and his misogyny were his total failure to prepare convincing responses to criticisms that a blind man could see coming. Why didn’t his team prepare him more effectively to counter these attacks?

Part of the answer, I believe, was revealed in comments by Andrew Yang who, having dropped out of the race, is now a commentator for CNN. Yang, whom I very much admire, seems not at all hostile to Mike Bloomberg, but he pointed out that the mayor can be resistant to change. Things did not go well for Mike during visits to Iowa and New Hampshire when he first planned to enter the race. He gradually realized that to succeed in those states, he was going to have to spend hours hanging out with anyone who wanted to talk to him, chatting in local cafes and people’s living rooms in order to win them over one by one. He decided that was not his thing and switched to his strategy of aiming for Super Tuesday delegates by swamping the media with thousands and thousands of ads that make him look like a capable leader who is best buds with Barack Obama. In other words, he decided to buy the nomination. I do not hate him for this, though it does make me think that our electoral processes need…some tweaking?

Maybe Bloomberg’s motto should be “I don’t have time for you, but vote for me, cuz…look at all my money!”

Let me be clear: If Bloomberg gets the nomination, I will vote for him in a New York minute.

Another point Andrew Yang made as a CNN discussant was that Bloomberg’s people (he has a lot of people) were calling donors encouraging them not to support other Democrats now that Bloomberg is on the rise. Yang knows this because one of his donors told him he had received such a call. It’s not clear that Bloomberg’s campaign to cut off his rivals’ funds is working, but it is true that some candidates are so strapped for cash that they may well drop out within a couple of weeks. This is true of Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren. Bernie is doing well with his army of enthusiastic small-scale donors. Biden could also be in trouble. However, if he does quite well in the South Caroline primary (February 29), and particularly if Bloomberg continues to look like an arrogant jerk, Joe may start to attract donors who have been skeptical up till now.

But the upshot of all this is that the Democratic convention might be contested. If I were going to predict - and at this point why not? – I would say some combination of Bernie, Bloomberg, and Biden will roll into Milwaukee with significant delegates, but none with a majority. The rules, to which Bernie objects these days, say that the nomination will go to whichever candidate can garner a majority of delegates. On the first ballot, when delegates are pledged to abide by their primary voters’ preferences, there are 3,979 available delegates and a majority would be 1,990. If nobody wins a majority on the first ballot (quite likely, the way things are going), delegates are released from their pledges and can vote as they please. Plus, about 800 more “super delegates” will now be eligible, and these are likely to be traditional Democrats, more sympathetic to a Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar than to Bernie. Of course, Bernie’s enthusiastic army of supporters can’t be dismissed, and neither can Bloomberg’s billions, so, a contested convention could be a very newsworthy event. But not, let us hope, a suicidal bloodletting.

Sixty years ago, in July of 1960, I was at Boy Scout camp during that year’s dramatic Democratic convention. My family was Republican, so I wasn’t excited about it, but all the other guys in our cabin were and they anxiously watched the delegate count as it stacked up throughout the evening. John Kennedy was favored to win, but Lyndon Johnson had threatened to block him on the first ballot. If Johnson had succeeded in blocking Kennedy, LBJ might well have won on a second ballot vote. However, when the last state, Wyoming, cast all of its 15 votes for Kennedy, JFK was over the top with his majority and my cabin went crazy with joy. That was the first time I witnessed the effects of Kennedy’s charisma. My Boy Scout buddies were besotted with it. In any case, the good news is that despite the bitter struggle between Johnson and Kennedy, they united at the convention and went on to win the White House.

No matter who gets the Democratic nomination, I hope from the bottom of my weary and battered heart that he or she will pull the party together and win the election. 

The incompetent crook now occupying the White House has recently dismissed his Director of National Intelligence, after he was told by that DNI that Putin is once again interfering in our election and, as in 2016, trying to help Trump win. The fired DNI has been replaced with Richard Grenell, a devoted Trumpian utterly lacking in experience in intelligence. I’m tempted to add “and utterly lacking in intelligence,” but, to be fair, I know little about this particular Trumpian.

Putin to Trump: “You keep your base fired up while I handle these other trouble-makers.”

So here we are, America, the Democrats – including, among others, Bernie the Independent Democratic Socialist, Bloomberg, the former Republican, and Joe the holding-on-for-dear-life traditionalist – are banging away at each other, while Trump works on his swagger. Meanwhile, back in the Kremlin, Trump’s soulmate concocts ever more fiendish schemes aimed at poisoning our democracy.

But, we can handle this, America, am I right?

Tribalism and the Defense of Sexual Predators

I don’t really like the word tribalism. For one thing, it is implicitly insulting to actual tribes like the Cheyenne and the Cherokee.

But, that aside, we all know what we mean when we say that American politics has become distressingly tribal. Politicians are fighting for their tribe, i.e., their party, even when such fights are bad for the country.

Democrats are guilty of this, but Republicans are way guiltier.

Okay, that sounds like a tribal defense of the Democrats, but here’s why it is not. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, first got the tribal blood sport going in the early 1990s when he promoted war at all costs against the Democrats. Gingrich, by the way, later became Speaker of the House (his war-to-the-death worked!), but was then forced out of office for being a sleaze. This ouster had nothing to do with his partisan tribalism, however.

The Magna Carta of GOP tribalism was the Gingrich memo of 1990 in which he instructed fellow Republicans to use a specific list of 63 insulting words whenever they talked about the Democrats. Here, as reported in the New York Times, are some of Gingrich’s words for Democrats: “decay, sick, unionized bureaucracy, greed, corruption, radical, permissive, [and] bizarre.”

Gingrich’s fellow Republicans were instructed to memorize the words on his list and to use them whenever they talked about Democrats or any particular Democrat.

When discussing the GOP, Republicans were told to choose words from a flattering list which included “opportunity, challenge, courage, pristine, principle(d), care, caring, common sense, peace, [and] pioneer.”

Now politics ain’t bean-bag, as the philosophical Mr. Dooley once observed, but isn’t routinely and automatically referring to your political opponents as greedy, corrupt, bizarre, etc., going too far? Yes, it is, and doing so was the beginning of the tribalism we see in our politics today. Note that the Democrats, to this day, have not conjured up a list of evil words to throw at the Republicans.

One symptom of the Gingrich-inspired partisan breakdown is the failure of Democrats and Republicans to socialize together in DC. Before Gingrich, it was customary for members of Congress and other officials to get together at local watering holes where bipartisan friendships blossomed. But now our nation’s capital is divided into gathering places that are associated with one party to the exclusion of the other. Bipartisan hanging out is largely a thing of the past.

So, Washington is broken and ruthless tribalism is what broke it. 

Adding to the collapse of cooperative politics was Mitch McConnell’s grossly partisan decision in 2016 to block Merrick Garland's appointment to the Supreme Court. McConnell's excuse was that February 2016, when Justice Scalia’s death gave Obama the opportunity to name Garland, was too close to the election.

Hmm.

See what I mean? The Democrats, whatever partisan fighting they have engaged in, have done nothing like this. Yes, they’ve done other things, but nothing so crass and so grossly un-American as what Gingrich and McConnell have done.

When Senator Al Franken was found to have behaved badly toward women in the past, he was asked by his fellow Democrats to step down from his Senate seat and he did so. Some have argued that his crude behavior toward women was not so unforgivable as to require a resignation. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t as crude or aggressive as the behavior of Justice Brett Kavanaugh as described by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and other women who say he victimized them.

But still, Senator Franken resigned. Democrats did not step forward and demand that Franken fight like hell, accuse the women of lying, portray himself as a victim, etc. But that, of course, is exactly what Brett Kavanaugh and his GOP supporters did – despite the numerous women offering credible descriptions of his predatory behavior. And, I might add, his well-documented tendency to be a frequent and belligerent drunkard in his youth.

So, the Democrats said, “Yes, Al Franken has to go, even though he is an intelligent and effective senator,” while the Republicans are now saying, “We don’t care what those women are saying about Brett Kavanaugh’s assaults, we support him!”

I ask you, who is being more tribal?

Naturally, you can point to past politicians, Democrat and Republican, whose sexual misbehavior is well-known – most notably Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. But the #MeToo Movement is creating an entirely New World - a better world, one in which sexual predators are no longer protected by their “tribe” and are not rewarded with high public office.

Well, I’m getting ahead of myself here. Kavanaugh’s appointment shows that we have not built that New World yet. But maybe, after next month’s election? Let’s see. And let's hope.

                                   (Picture from BBC)