I've been thinking recently about Trump's obvious difficulty with the democratic process. There's been a lot of talk about the fact that he hasn't fulfilled his campaign promises and that his main policy accomplishments have involved executive orders and/or appointing extreme right-wing capitalists as advisors or cabinet members (often, in the case of advisors, to positions that don't involve Senate approval). It's pretty obvious that he didn't expect the presidency to be this hard because he expected it to be a lot like what he already did, which was to be the CEO of a business empire. That's essentially an autocratic position--CEOs can and do make unilateral decisions based on whatever it is that they think or feel, and have them carried out. That's what Trump's been used to, and even in its most degraded form, being the president is not like that. You have to negotiate with Congress, you have to take advice, you have to pay at least lip service to the idea that other government forces are intended to be a counter-balance to your power. Trump clearly didn't realize this ahead of time, and part of me thinks that's why he made all those campaign promises. Put up a wall? Sure, he could put up a wall! Easy peasy! Just tell people to build one! But it turns out that the money involved requires other people's approval. He seems to react to each such discovery with a kind of peeved astonishment--how could this be? How can a judge deny the president's orders? How can Congress ignore what he clearly stated was going to happen?
It's made me think a lot, weirdly, about pre-existing conditions and what individuals presume about the levels of control people have or should have over the circumstances of their lives. Trump, because he has always been rich, has assumed that he should be able to unilaterally change the circumstances of his life just based on what he wants. I think this view plays heavily into the Republican argument about healthcare--yes, there's a big chunk of it that's just disingenuous propaganda, because they are being paid off by big business. But I also think wealthy people in the Republican party (and among their donors) find it hard to conceive of having things happen to you. (And the Democrats, in their overall refusal to push for progressive economic reform, I think suffer from the same blind spot). Of course, even Republicans die. But the idea that you could be helpless before a disease or condition in a way that had more to do with being able to afford treatment than with the ultimate will of God is, I think, inconceivable to them. They can always DO something about an illness, because they're wealthy. At the level at which they can't do something, it's because God has for some reason decided the sick person's fate (based, of course, on whether or not the person was worthy somehow). I think that's how they imagine healthcare.
To those of us in the middle-class, it's a little different, obviously--and I've been thinking, especially, about the widespread expressions of horror around the issue of pre-existing conditions. There was a huge public outcry when Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama opined a couple of weeks ago that people who don't have pre-existing conditions are people who have lived "good lives" and therefore should be rewarded with cheaper health insurance. We have this intense reaction to that issue (which I think is warranted), and the basis of it seems to be that it's not fair to penalize people for pre-existing conditions, because they can't help it. Pre-existing conditions are no one's fault, and the market should recognize that. Of course to the market that's ludicrous--the issue isn't whether fault is involved, it's whether certain patients cost more than others to insure, and how they can swing the most money into their coffers. But it's interesting to me that we take it for granted that the question of personal control should matter--that you shouldn't be penalized for what you can't control--and how different that can look from perspective to perspective. Trump probably looked at previous presidents and wondered why they didn't just make people do whatever the hell they wanted them to do--although, as he is currently finding out, a president has far less control over the actions of others than a CEO does. It's a matter of positioning. In the same way, the middle-class has far less control over the kinds of health care it can access than the wealthy--and we also, realistically, have less control over the kind of incidents that impact our lives and health in general. From our perspective, it's not our fault--from Rep. Brook's perspective, we should have lived better lives. But then what about the kinds of pre-existing conditions that the white middle-class assumes are within people's control because that would be true for us? Poverty, realistically, is largely a pre-existing condition in this country. Geography is a pre-existing condition. Access to education is a pre-existing condition. We say, well, why couldn't you just get another job? Why couldn't you just move? Why didn't you find another school for your kid if she wasn't doing well there? Those things are within our control, most often, the same way quality health care is within the control of people who are wealthy (and, I might add, who are male--even wealthy women in the US are generally getting health care that is less good than what they would get in other developed countries). We base our assumptions of what other people can do based on what we can do, and then we apportion fault or blamelessness based on that--but it's pretty ridiculous. It's true, having cancer or chronic depression or diabetes doesn't mean you've lived a bad life--but neither do all the conditions attendant on being born to poor parents or being born with a particular skin color in a particular country or town. It's assuming that the conditions of your life pertain in other people's that leads to that kind of faulty reasoning. Of course, I do it, we all do it, but maybe it's worth thinking about.
It also might be worth considering why this issue exists in this country to the extent that we are currently seeing it does (and we're seeing it partly because Trump, unlike previous presidents, has made no claim to middle-class culture or values. He doesn't look like the rest of us, but he's also not trying to do that). And how that huge gap between the supposed mainstream (the white middle-class) and Trump, as well as the other huge gap between the "mainstream" and marginalized communities, impacts the way the country runs. I've been reading a book by Elizabeth Janeway, The Powers of the Weak, which I recommend. (Tip of the type to The Neglected Books Page, where I found out about this book). It was apparently dismissed in the 80s, when it was written, as a feminist tract (not that there's anything wrong with a feminist tract from my perspective) but her analysis really has much broader applications. One of the things she talks a lot about is the impact on systems of governance when people on both sides of the system (governing and governed) come to see the powerless as qualitatively different than the powerful because they can't control the same things. What's wrong with you, that you can't control your access to healthcare? Of course, access to healthcare is a function of power, and so that's really like asking, what's wrong with you, that you aren't powerful? It hasn't been a problem for us! The powerful are powerful because they have power. The more impossible it is for the powerless to obtain power, the more both powerful and powerless come to see themselves as completely different kinds of creatures....and the more the consent of the governed becomes a kind of sham. Because the powerful no longer believe that the people they govern either deserve to give or are capable of giving real consent. They're not capable of much else, after all, are they? Just look at how they can't get their healthcare/education/housing together! The scenery of consent is still part of democracy--we vote and go to rallies and such--but it no longer occurs to the governing body that the people they govern are in fact people, like them, with whom they are supposed to have some kind of reciprocal relationship. As a point of comparison, you can think about the relationship between Congress-people and their donors,which continues to be reciprocal. The concerns of one are taken seriously by the other because it's assumed there's mutual benefit involved. Ideally, the consent of the governed is also a benefit to politicians, and they would respond to it by conferring return benefits. In actual fact, however, the appearance of consent is created by those with the power to, say, pass voter ID laws or fund campaign ads. The consent of the governed is considered something to extract, like oil, rather than something offered in the context of human exchange.
The point is, you cannot maintain anything other than a sham of democracy in the face of the depth of inequality that exists in this country. And I think that's one thing we should be noticing about the debacle that is the Trump presidency. Inequality does not only impact people we consider marginalized--there is a gap between the middle-class and people like Trump, and it impacts our citizenship rights in real ways. But also, if the gap between the middle-class and marginalized communities is as big as the one between us and Trump, and engenders as much unwarranted dismissal of other people's real concerns (by us)--maybe this is a new way to become aware of it.
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I've been thinking a lot recently about this book, Swastika Night, by Katherine Burdekin, which I originally read a couple of years ago. It was published in 1937, as WWII was ramping up, and I think it's been unjustly forgotten outside of scholarly circles (although this is almost certainly because it's not that much fun to read). The book is basically a dystopian story about what Burdekin imagined would happen if the Nazis took over the world.
In the Nazi future she imagines, Jews and Christians have been largely killed, and whatever Christians remain have sort of filled the former place of the Jews--they trade, they're exempt from some of the laws of general society, but they also have to wear identifiable crosses on their backs and are excluded from most of the rights of the majority (in this case, the Germans). The Germans are sort of like the UK at the height of its empire--racial Germans are the most important and control other countries as colonies, but people from those colonies can be sort of acceptable (if still second-class citizens) if they adhere to the state religion of Hitlerism and accept the supremacy of racial Germans. But none of these elements are really the focus of the book--what Burdekin really focuses on are gender relations. In a way it's like an earlier and much more polemic Handmaid's Tale. Hitlerist Germans treat women like cattle--they live in their own segregated areas, are required to cut their hair short and wear a common sacky kind of garment. Men come in to sleep with them and create more men. Men can do just about anything they want to them (including, if I'm remembering correctly, trading them)--when girls are born, they're left to their mothers. When boys are born, they're taken out and raised in military cohorts, kind of like (I learned this week) Spartan boys. (Although Spartan women, I hasten to add, were as a result quite empowered, not like the women in this book). Women only leave their enclosures for mandated fire-and-brimstone sessions at Hitlerist churches, where they're yelled at about how terrible and disgusting women are. The history of how things were before WWII has, of course, been distorted or wiped out. The main thrust of the Nazi regime in Swastika Night is not their treatment of the Jews (which we now pay attention to almost to the exclusion of all else), but their denigration of women, and their promotion of an ideal of masculinity based almost entirely on the ability to perpetrate violence.
Katherine Burdekin wrote this book under a male pseudonym, Murray Constance, and people didn't realize she was the one who had written it until a scholar named Daphne Patai figured it out in I think the 80s. But gender was a central concern of hers--I've read a couple of her other books (which she published under her own name or the slightly masculinized "Kay Burdekin," and which are also sort of speculative or dystopian fiction) and they generally revolve about this central question: what does it mean for women to live in a patriarchal society? And, more broadly, what does it mean for a society to teach a whole class of people that it is inferior? How can a society be re-structured so this doesn't happen? A lot of her thinking particularly has to do with impacts on people's sexuality, probably because she herself seems to have been what we'd consider bi or lesbian--she was married to a man, divorced, and then had a female partner for the last 40 years of her life.
In Swastika Night, she has one of her characters say something that I've thought a lot about--that it has to be possible for every person to believe that what they are is the best thing to be. When I initially read the book, I was sort of shocked by this, because it seems to me that she's essentially described a world where one group of people (the Germans) DO think what they are is the best thing to be, and where that's a big problem. If people think this, won't they just try to dominate people who aren't that thing? And if multiple groups of people think this, isn't that just a recipe for endless war? Recently I've been thinking, though, that what she had is a sort of incomplete formulation of another idea, which is that in order for things to be fair and run well, it has to be possible for every person to buy into the central conceit of her society while at the same time believing that it is possible for her to be good as herself, as the things that she is. Meaning, I don't have to be able to believe that it is better to be queer than to be straight. I have to be able to believe in the majority ideology of America while also believing that a lesbian is a good thing to be. That I can be seen as "good" without pretending to be anything else or wishing I was anything else. (It's worth pointing out that this is not always possible, either for lesbians or anyone else who is not a straight white Christian man in the US today). Which, I mean, there's a range involved here, between societies where this is completely impossible for some categories of people to societies where it's easily possible for everyone (although I'm not sure such a place exists).
This is a long wind-up to say that I've been thinking about this book because of Ahed Tamimi, particularly the reactions of Jewish people and writers to her imprisonment for something that under any fair system of law would not carry the consequences that it's likely to carry for her. One Israeli writer got upset at the amount of negative international attention the story is getting and wrote that people should not be thinking that the Tamimi family are "angels," that they are activists against the Occupation and therefore hate Israel and hate the Jews, and that this is why it is totally just to keep Ahed in prison. My first response to this was that if you take that argument apart, it doesn't make a lot of sense--I mean, the law allows for Ahed to be jailed for slapping a soldier because she is a Palestinian. She's not in ostensibly in jail because of what either she or her family thinks about the Occupation, so it doesn't make sense to use that as a rationale. If you think the law that allows her to be imprisoned is fair, you have to be able to argue that it's fair without that element. But then I also started thinking about how this argument is haunted by this alternative character: a Palestinian who Israeli law would treat differently because he or she was not against the Occupation. That character is essential to arguing that the Israeli legal system is fair, because it make it seem that the law allows the punishment of a particular person not because of what he or she is, but because of what he or she does (or thinks).
But if you take that character seriously as a possibility...you come up against Katherine Burdekin and Swastika Night, or at least I do. Is it possible for someone who is Palestinian to buy into the central conceit of Israel, which is that the Jewish State is deserved, laudable, and necessary to maintain and expand by keeping non-Jews out, while still seeing him or herself as "good"? I don't think it is. I just don't. At some point, it may have been more possible than it is now. But to support the Occupation now is to support the rights of Israeli citizens and the Israeli army to literally steal your house while you are living there, to cut off your access to your fields, to openly advocate policies that allow for your living space to be continually restricted or blocked off. In the service of Jewish state that (openly!) argues that it can only maintain its Jewishness, its most important quality, by keeping you out. How is it possible to buy into that ideology, to support or approve of it, as a Palestinian, without hating what you are? In that story, there is no such thing as a good Palestinian, because fundamentally even a good Palestinian requires a place to live. And that's the Israeli government's problem with the Palestinians, that they exist and have some claim to the land that they live on. The only way the Palestinians can be good is...not to be there. And while I've seen lots of people do lots of things that were harmful to themselves to fit into the mainstream of where they were (women who got married and had children when either or both of those things were dangerous to them, people who abused and hated members of their own racial or religious groups, etc etc), there's always been some kind of incentive for doing so, however small. They could imagine that at some point they would be a good ________ (fill in the blank with whatever category you can think of). Such a character existed for them, no matter how much trying to emulate that character required them to break themselves.
When the central conceit of the societal mainstream is that your very existence is always a problem, no matter what you do or say or believe.....it's just not possible. It's not. And when you argue that people should be able to support that conceit when it has absolutely no place for them, you're arguing that they should be able to live without self-regard or even the instinct for self-preservation--that they owe it to you to do this. At no benefit to themselves at all. But human beings just don't work that way, unless they suffer from pretty extreme mental illness--and usually not even then. To argue, as some Israelis do when the Tamimis are mistreated, that these punishments wouldn't be necessary if only they believed that they didn't have the right to exist or live where they live...it's not any kind of argument. You can't require the inhuman or the superhuman of people and call that a fair system. Would the Jews in the Pale of Settlement, who formed a similar "problem" for the Russians at various times in their history, support the idea that the Pale should be liquidated and its Jews pushed out of the country? Did the Jews in Spain during the Inquisition support the idea that they should be kicked out? Of course not. People want to survive, for the most part. If you're mentally healthy, it's hard to avoid wanting that. No legal or ideological system (and the Israeli system is far from the only one that impacts people this way) should ever feel justified in requiring that anyone give that up.0Add a comment
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I've been thinking recently about Trump's obvious difficulty with the democratic process. There's been a lot of talk about the fact that he hasn't fulfilled his campaign promises and that his main policy accomplishments have involved executive orders and/or appointing extreme right-wing capitalists as advisors or cabinet members (often, in the case of advisors, to positions that don't involve Senate approval). It's pretty obvious that he didn't expect the presidency to be this hard because he expected it to be a lot like what he already did, which was to be the CEO of a business empire. That's essentially an autocratic position--CEOs can and do make unilateral decisions based on whatever it is that they think or feel, and have them carried out. That's what Trump's been used to, and even in its most degraded form, being the president is not like that. You have to negotiate with Congress, you have to take advice, you have to pay at least lip service to the idea that other government forces are intended to be a counter-balance to your power. Trump clearly didn't realize this ahead of time, and part of me thinks that's why he made all those campaign promises. Put up a wall? Sure, he could put up a wall! Easy peasy! Just tell people to build one! But it turns out that the money involved requires other people's approval. He seems to react to each such discovery with a kind of peeved astonishment--how could this be? How can a judge deny the president's orders? How can Congress ignore what he clearly stated was going to happen?
It's made me think a lot, weirdly, about pre-existing conditions and what individuals presume about the levels of control people have or should have over the circumstances of their lives. Trump, because he has always been rich, has assumed that he should be able to unilaterally change the circumstances of his life just based on what he wants. I think this view plays heavily into the Republican argument about healthcare--yes, there's a big chunk of it that's just disingenuous propaganda, because they are being paid off by big business. But I also think wealthy people in the Republican party (and among their donors) find it hard to conceive of having things happen to you. (And the Democrats, in their overall refusal to push for progressive economic reform, I think suffer from the same blind spot). Of course, even Republicans die. But the idea that you could be helpless before a disease or condition in a way that had more to do with being able to afford treatment than with the ultimate will of God is, I think, inconceivable to them. They can always DO something about an illness, because they're wealthy. At the level at which they can't do something, it's because God has for some reason decided the sick person's fate (based, of course, on whether or not the person was worthy somehow). I think that's how they imagine healthcare.
To those of us in the middle-class, it's a little different, obviously--and I've been thinking, especially, about the widespread expressions of horror around the issue of pre-existing conditions. There was a huge public outcry when Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama opined a couple of weeks ago that people who don't have pre-existing conditions are people who have lived "good lives" and therefore should be rewarded with cheaper health insurance. We have this intense reaction to that issue (which I think is warranted), and the basis of it seems to be that it's not fair to penalize people for pre-existing conditions, because they can't help it. Pre-existing conditions are no one's fault, and the market should recognize that. Of course to the market that's ludicrous--the issue isn't whether fault is involved, it's whether certain patients cost more than others to insure, and how they can swing the most money into their coffers. But it's interesting to me that we take it for granted that the question of personal control should matter--that you shouldn't be penalized for what you can't control--and how different that can look from perspective to perspective. Trump probably looked at previous presidents and wondered why they didn't just make people do whatever the hell they wanted them to do--although, as he is currently finding out, a president has far less control over the actions of others than a CEO does. It's a matter of positioning. In the same way, the middle-class has far less control over the kinds of health care it can access than the wealthy--and we also, realistically, have less control over the kind of incidents that impact our lives and health in general. From our perspective, it's not our fault--from Rep. Brook's perspective, we should have lived better lives. But then what about the kinds of pre-existing conditions that the white middle-class assumes are within people's control because that would be true for us? Poverty, realistically, is largely a pre-existing condition in this country. Geography is a pre-existing condition. Access to education is a pre-existing condition. We say, well, why couldn't you just get another job? Why couldn't you just move? Why didn't you find another school for your kid if she wasn't doing well there? Those things are within our control, most often, the same way quality health care is within the control of people who are wealthy (and, I might add, who are male--even wealthy women in the US are generally getting health care that is less good than what they would get in other developed countries). We base our assumptions of what other people can do based on what we can do, and then we apportion fault or blamelessness based on that--but it's pretty ridiculous. It's true, having cancer or chronic depression or diabetes doesn't mean you've lived a bad life--but neither do all the conditions attendant on being born to poor parents or being born with a particular skin color in a particular country or town. It's assuming that the conditions of your life pertain in other people's that leads to that kind of faulty reasoning. Of course, I do it, we all do it, but maybe it's worth thinking about.
It also might be worth considering why this issue exists in this country to the extent that we are currently seeing it does (and we're seeing it partly because Trump, unlike previous presidents, has made no claim to middle-class culture or values. He doesn't look like the rest of us, but he's also not trying to do that). And how that huge gap between the supposed mainstream (the white middle-class) and Trump, as well as the other huge gap between the "mainstream" and marginalized communities, impacts the way the country runs. I've been reading a book by Elizabeth Janeway, The Powers of the Weak, which I recommend. (Tip of the type to The Neglected Books Page, where I found out about this book). It was apparently dismissed in the 80s, when it was written, as a feminist tract (not that there's anything wrong with a feminist tract from my perspective) but her analysis really has much broader applications. One of the things she talks a lot about is the impact on systems of governance when people on both sides of the system (governing and governed) come to see the powerless as qualitatively different than the powerful because they can't control the same things. What's wrong with you, that you can't control your access to healthcare? Of course, access to healthcare is a function of power, and so that's really like asking, what's wrong with you, that you aren't powerful? It hasn't been a problem for us! The powerful are powerful because they have power. The more impossible it is for the powerless to obtain power, the more both powerful and powerless come to see themselves as completely different kinds of creatures....and the more the consent of the governed becomes a kind of sham. Because the powerful no longer believe that the people they govern either deserve to give or are capable of giving real consent. They're not capable of much else, after all, are they? Just look at how they can't get their healthcare/education/housing together! The scenery of consent is still part of democracy--we vote and go to rallies and such--but it no longer occurs to the governing body that the people they govern are in fact people, like them, with whom they are supposed to have some kind of reciprocal relationship. As a point of comparison, you can think about the relationship between Congress-people and their donors,which continues to be reciprocal. The concerns of one are taken seriously by the other because it's assumed there's mutual benefit involved. Ideally, the consent of the governed is also a benefit to politicians, and they would respond to it by conferring return benefits. In actual fact, however, the appearance of consent is created by those with the power to, say, pass voter ID laws or fund campaign ads. The consent of the governed is considered something to extract, like oil, rather than something offered in the context of human exchange.
The point is, you cannot maintain anything other than a sham of democracy in the face of the depth of inequality that exists in this country. And I think that's one thing we should be noticing about the debacle that is the Trump presidency. Inequality does not only impact people we consider marginalized--there is a gap between the middle-class and people like Trump, and it impacts our citizenship rights in real ways. But also, if the gap between the middle-class and marginalized communities is as big as the one between us and Trump, and engenders as much unwarranted dismissal of other people's real concerns (by us)--maybe this is a new way to become aware of it.0Add a comment
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I did a data visualization project on refugees and asylum seekers last year (I will not display it here because the visualization aspect was not great), and in the process I learned that I had a lot of misconceptions about what those terms mean and how the system operates. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, since immigration is obviously in the news. On the off chance that others might have similar misconceptions, I thought I'd detail some of what I learned here.
1-The 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees: This is the main guiding document that shapes the UN's apparatus for dealing with refugees (all the definitions I'm about to cite come from it)--it was created, obviously, to address the refugee crisis that was created by World War II. One hundred and forty-five countries signed this convention, and the US was one of those countries. This is important, as you'll see below.
2-Asylum Seekers and Refugees: this has been really downplayed in the US media discourse, but the two are not the same. A refugee, according to the Convention, is "a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him— or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution." An asylum seeker is someone who is waiting for courts to determine whether he or is is in fact a refugee--meaning, whether he or she has a well-founded fear of being persecuted at home. Usually this happens at what's called the asylum seeker's country of first refuge--meaning the first safe place they reach where they're able to ask for asylum. That's why most asylum seekers in the US come from Latin America, not from Syria. People who come here from Syria already have had their refugee status determined somewhere else.
3-Who we are talking about when we talk about refugees: This is an important point-most of the time when we talk about refugees coming to the US, you'll hear people talk about Syrians or others from the Middle East. What's important to keep in mind in these cases is that they ARE refugees--meaning, it's already been determined that they can't go home. The process of determining that is long, arduous, and complicated. By the time they get here, they've been heavily vetted by the UN, their country of first refuge, and US immigration officials. If they are from countries where there are terrorists, lots of people have already jointly determined that these refugees are running away from them. In contrast--when people on the news talk about the "refugee crisis" in Europe, they are largely actually referring to asylum seekers. Meaning, a lot of people from other countries are coming in, the vast majority of them because they probably will turn out to be refugees, but no one's made that determination yet. Those people are in the process of being vetted. They also have rights, as I will explain in a second. However. For people like Donald Trump who are like, look at Europe, people can just come in,, they're all terrorists, it's important to recognize that they are comparing taking in refugees to having a lot of asylum seekers come in. Both groups have rights, as I said, but the processes and levels of vetting are not the analogous.
4-Who we are talking about when we talk about "illegal immigrants:" A lot of the people from Latin America who Republicans like to refer to as "illegals" are in fact asylum seekers. And this is a point on which the 1951 Convention is crystal clear--an asylum seeker is never ever an illegal immigrant, even if he or she has crossed the border illegally or overstayed a visa. Read that again. Never. The people who wrote the Convention understood that when you are running for your life, you do not always have the option of doing things in what the Republicans might refer to as "the right way." And no, if you are seeking asylum you cannot often just go back to where you came from or stay where you are. It is marginally possible (although fairly unlikely) that someone might try to claim they need asylum if they actually do not. But until that determination is made, those people are still asylum seekers, and the countries which signed the Convention have agreed to treat them all as potential refugees, although often they do not (we do not, clearly). Again. Lots of "illegal immigrants" are not actually illegal, because they are asylum seekers.The mothers and kids who Trump is now talking about separating? Asylum seekers. They are not coming because it's easy. In most cases, they're coming because they have no choice--and we as a country have signed on to a Convention that makes it their right to seek asylum.
5-Asylum seekers have rights. The most important of these are a-the right to non-refoulement. This means a right not to be sent back to their country of origin unless it has been conclusively proven that the danger they ran from no longer exist. b-freedom of movement. Contrary to the way Trump and his minions are painting the idea of letting mothers and children go free until their hearings as some kind of undeserved luxury, this is actually a right under the 1951 Convention. Countries often break it, but that does not make it any less of a legal right--and it is a right because an asylum seeker has not done anything either illegal or wrong. c-right to liberty and security of the person. This means, again, that asylum seekers should not be put in jail, held in tent camps like the ones in Texas, dumped over the border, or any of the wide number of "solutions" that Americans think are somehow OK. Again, countries do those things, but they are not legal. d-the right to family life. Trump would love to, of course, but it's illegal to separate families by giving one person asylum and not others. If someone is given refugee status, their dependents (or sometimes other family members) should eventually get refugee status through them. (this, incidentally, is the origin of the legal term "anchor relative"--as in "anchor baby"--it really just means the person who got refugee status initially and thereby gives it to other people in the family).
I know there are a lot of people who say that it's not a good idea to conceptually separate legal and illegal immigration, as though it were OK to assault the rights of either category, and I think that's fair--but I think it's also important for people to get what's involved here. Every year, the UN puts out a report on "problem areas" of the world (which are experiencing violence, civil war, etc), where lots of refugees and asylum seekers can be expected to come from. Every year, Latin American countries are on that list. Many of the people Trump's people are rounding up or kicking out came for that reason. Congress, by the way, is not unaware of this--because they get a report from the State Department about it too. Every year. Maybe they don't read it, I don't know. But the idea that this whole thing is an effort to punish people who broke the law, even just by crossing illegally, is broadly inaccurate even if you want to look at it in those terms.0Add a comment
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I just finished reading a pretty wild book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, by Timothy Snyder. His argument, which I find satisfying, mindblowing, and a lot too relevant for comfort, is basically that we've made a central error in thinking of the Holocaust as the product of nation-states and bureaucracy. Instead, he brings substantial evidence to show that the Holocaust was enabled by the destruction of states and institutions, by intentionally creating zones of statelessness in which people were unprotected and incentives could be radically hijacked by the Nazis (and the Soviets, although for different reasons).
The first part of his argument is to explain the totality of Hitler's thinking when he thought about world conquest. It wasn't just about blonde kids or about hating the Jews. His idea (and Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt's idea, which weirdly I have recently seen referenced in relation to Trump) was that states were irrelevant--the really important thing was race. He believed that it was in the nature of races to fight to the death, such that the last one standing would win, and he further believed that the Aryan race was being jeopardized by two factors: the first was that they were in competition with states that had far more arable land than they did, and as a result, would end up starving. The second was that the most damaging thing to strong races (like the Aryans, who he believed were the strongest race) was the institution of states and norms that essentially involved constraint of violence against the weaker races (non-racist ideas! laws that treated people equally!) and the idea of redistributing goods so that everyone would benefit from them. These policies and ideas, Hitler believed, were ploys created by the globalizing Jews (naturally the weakest race), and this was especially true of Communism. Presumably this was because the theory of Communism has to do with the redistribution of goods. So the problem was that these norms, which one might term "political correctness" were being enforced by the pernicious Jewish conspiracy worldwide, and therefore the stronger races were being prevented from fighting to the death as they had the right to do, and in fact as they HAD to do to survive. (Any of this starting to sound familiar??) It's also interesting to note that Hitler did not really believe in law at all, which is to say he believed that the law was whatever would help the race survive. The idea that law should constrain what people could do to each other was anathema to him (also a little bit familiar?). It wasn't even that might made right. It was that might was right. If you could do it, it was legal. If someone could kill you for doing it, then that person had just made it illegal because you weren't strong enough to kill them first. A nice view of the world.
So now here comes the second part. Hitler's idea was basically to colonize other countries in order to gain arable land and to displace the people who lived there to other, less arable places (there's some further complicated stuff here about his view of America's annihilation of the Native Americans, which he wanted to emulate). And/or to starve them. His primary concern here was about food supply. At the same time, he also wanted to move the Jews out of his territory. A combination of events that involved the early Soviet-German alliance and the way each of them treated occupied territories ended with consecutive mass murders and deportations of different groups, but also with the total destruction of state governments and even institutions in many places, which the Nazis and Hitler learned they could take advantage of. People who are stateless are easy to kill, because there's no one to really object. On the other hand, people who have some kind of citizenship are much more of a problem, because then whatever you're doing comes under the heading of foreign relations, in which states do look out for their own. Even anti-Semitic states didn't allow Nazis to just storm in and kill their Jews--no state can allow that and survive as a state. But that also meant that Jews who the Nazis tried to deport in areas with surviving governments could appeal to state bureaucrats and delay their deportations, and also that people who wanted to save or help Jews were protected by state laws. Snyder gives the examples of Estonia and Denmark, before the war both pretty similar--if anything, Estonia was less anti-Semitic than Denmark. 99% of Jews in Estonia died. 99% of Jews in Denmark survived. Why? Because the Danish government, for a variety of reasons, survived through German occupation, and it had things to say about what could and couldn't be done with its citizens. Even when German police arrested a pretty tiny fraction of Jewish Danes, the Danish government appealed to Berlin and got them released or imprisoned under less deathly circumstances. When neutral Sweden suggested to Germany, over open air-waves so that the Jews of Denmark would find out, that Denmark's Jews should come over to Sweden (the Nazis had been trying unsuccessfully to get Danes to kill them), Danish citizens helped them to escape openly at essentially no risk to themselves. In Poland, the penalty for giving any one of these escapees food would have been immediate execution. That's not to say that what the Danes did wasn't great--it was. But they were protected by the legal system, which did not allow citizens to be penalized for helping other citizens, or killed for refusing to kill other citizens (as would happen to Polish police who refused to kill Jews--or members of other groups for that matter). It's also worth noting that the Danish government treated Jews who were refugees very differently. It wasn't their attitude towards Judaism that mattered so much as their attitude towards Danish citizenship.
The point is that the Holocaust wasn't the product of widespread, exceptional anti-Semitism on the part of non-Jews in the countries where it happened. And the places where non-Jews did and didn't help the Jews weren't differentiated primarily by their level of anti-Semitism. They were differentiated by the survival of state institutions. That makes a whole lot more sense to me than the way Americans view it typically--that everyone except those who saved people were these incredible anti-Semites. Some probably were. But honestly, that assumes that anyone who isn't anti-Semitic has the capacity to be a hero and risk his or her life on behalf of other people, and that just does not ring true to me at all. It also belies what we know about Germany before WWII, which is that it was the place in Europe where the Jews were most integrated. Yes, you can say that people still had anti-Semitic attitudes, but integration is more complicated than that, and so is prejudice. I mean, there was a lot of intermarriage between Germans and Jews, for example. You can use Virginia Woolf's mixed marriage (in England) as a tool to think with here. She was known to make anti-Semitic comments to and about her Jewish husband, Leonard Woolf, so perhaps you could say that she was broadly anti-Semitic. However, Leonard was her husband. There is not a chance she would have willingly let him be taken to a concentration camp....unless, perhaps, it was a choice between him going and her going, and that's when you get into complicated territory about love and self-sacrifice. The point is, once you have a huge chunk of the population in that territory, the state has already failed. That's not about individual prejudice. (Incidentally, German Jews were more likely to survive if they could stay within Germany--mass murders took place outside the country--and many of those who did survive did so because they had non-Jewish spouses who refused to divorce them and who hid them).
It does make sense to me that people of goodwill will help other people in extreme conditions when they themselves are less at risk--like the people in Denmark. There were some people in all areas who put themselves at incredible risk to help Jews and other people out---but they were rare, and honestly, people like that are always rare. People want to survive themselves, and that's pretty normal. Snyder also points out that people who tried to help were substantially more likely to be successful, and for longer, in areas where there were still state institutions---or where they themselves were used to functioning without or in contravention to state institutions even in peacetime. Members of minority religions tended to help more (it didn't matter which religion, incidentally-just that it be the minority in the region. Protestants helped in places where they were the minority and did not where they were the majority). Members of the Communist party helped more where the Communist party had been illegal before the war (while the Soviets killed lots of people, Jewish and otherwise). They already had tested networks, they were used to the idea of being in opposition, they were more savvy about how to do illegal things with a degree of success. That makes a lot of sense to me.
There's a lot more to the book, and I recommend it although I don't agree with all of it--in particular, in his last chapter, I think Snyder is very careful to avoid applying his conclusions about the possibility of genocide in the present day to the actions of the State of Israel, while citing the risk that Muslim states (in an undifferentiated way) will spread anti-Semitism. He talks about the politics of scarcity, and how present day concern in wealthy countries for maintaining surplus supplies of food and oil/gas could lead to a similar rationale to Hitler's original one for destroying states (i.e., acquiring arable land for Germany), but he somehow avoids talking about how that could lead Western countries to rationalize the destruction of Muslim states because they need their gas or oil. He's pretty pro-Zionist, and I think that's why he avoids those obvious (to me) applications. I wish he hadn't avoided them. But I think his general point is pretty important. Here's a useful summarizing quote:
"Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realized. If we are serious about emulating rescuers, we should build in advance the structures that make it more likely that we would do so. Rescue, in this broad sense, thus requires a firm grasp of the ideas that challenged conventional politics and opened the way to an unprecedented crime." (Snyder 2015: 320-321).
Maybe we're already too late. It seems to me that US state institutions have been in the process of being weakened and corrupted for decades. But as Trump draws on racial narratives, depicts the world as an unending catastrophe in which "America" is always getting the short end of the stick, and starts deportation raids, it's worth thinking about what we can preserve that will help us to be more like Denmark and less like Estonia as things proceed.
I also think, (I add as a postscript) that in an era where Trump thinks saying that he is the least anti-Semitic person because he has Jewish grandchildren is a good answer to what the government will do about anti-Semitic threats, it's worth considering this viewpoint. Whether or not widespread violence against a particular group takes place has a lot less to do with personal feelings than the incentives that the situation (or the state, or lack of state) provides. Full stop. That's how structural racism works, and, if we believe Snyder, it's how genocide works too.
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Feb7
Trump Suddenly Very Worried about Safety of Women and LGBTQ People: Something the Media Really Isn't Discussing
I find this fascinating (although of course also horrifying), and I haven't seen anyone on any of the mainstream media outlets paying attention to it. Here's a little nugget hidden away in Section 1 of the Muslim ban (my source for the text is CNN):
"The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including "honor" killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation."
And later on, in Section 10, in the list of information types that the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General will have to release to the "American people" every 180 days:
"(iii) information regarding the number and types of acts of gender-based violence against women, including honor killings, in the United States by foreign nationals, since the date of this order or the last reporting period, whichever is later;"
Of course "honor killings" is a dog-whistle phrase, meant denote to the murder of women specifically by Muslim men, as against the murder of women by Christian or white men, which is often motivated by perceptions of male honor but which Trump seems not to think is a big deal, just as he does not seem to think that domestic violence committed by Christian or white men is a big deal. I say this because his budget apparently includes plans to eliminate funding for Violence Against Women grants that are run through the Department of Justice. (So he's going to track domestic violence committed only by Muslim men, or immigrant men? But remove any kind of funding for helping the victims, because that, to him, is hardly the point. One wonders whether those grants are what allows the DOJ to collect statistics on domestic and gender based violence as well--how exactly does Trump plan on finding out about these crimes? Perhaps he'll just intuit some data, as he often seems to do).*
Going back to the first quote, one wonders what happens when the First Amendment Defense Act, so-called, is passed--couldn't any homophobic or transphobic immigrant, from any country, argue that he or she was perfectly supportive of the Constitution as currently read by the administration? Or is it that discrimination based on the idea of freedom of religion is only allowable for non-immigrants? Or non-Muslims?
I am flabbergasted by the total ridiculousness of all this.Not to mention disturbed. As both a woman and a lesbian, I object to the use of my body as a pawn in this travesty of an executive order. If you're so worried about me getting beaten up or discriminated against because of who I am, don't pass laws that make it legal for some people to do it while demonizing others who might. If it's wrong to do, it's wrong for everyone, and if, from Trump's perspective, (as I suspect) it's not wrong, then he needs to find some other trumped up excuse for his anti-immigrant rampages.
*Don't get me wrong: there are actually good, feminist, reasons to link domestic violence to things like national security and mass shootings or killings: as Soraya Chemaly detailed here in the Rolling Stone back in June, after Orlando, people who perpetrate mass killings often commit domestic violence first. However, this pattern is not limited to Muslims, immigrants, or Muslim immigrants--it's just as true of white American men who commit massacres and whose victims can end up just as dead as the victims of anyone else. Really.
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You probably already know about the Warming Pan Scandal if you either a-are British, b-study British history, or c-like BBC documentaries. I fall into category C. Last night I was watching a BBC documentary called "Tales of the Royal Bedchamber," featuring Lucy Worsley (who for some reason I find irresistible--I think it may be partly that she seems so excited about history in general), and I learned the following:
In 1688, Mary of Modena, then queen of England and wife of James II, gave birth to a baby boy. In doing so, she fulfilled her most essential royal duty as queen, but in fact many Brits were unhappy about it. The problem was that Queen Mary was Catholic, and James II had converted to Catholicism when he married her. His previous marriage, to a Protestant, had only produced daughters (Mary and Anne), so the birth of a male Catholic heir to Queen Mary would mean that Catholicism would continue to be (as it then was) the religion of state in England. Protestants in England, understandably worried about this possibility, spent a lot of Queen Mary's pregnancy trying to undermine the idea that her pregnancy was legitimate. When she actually gave birth to a male child, they (successfully!) argued the following:
1-the baby being presented as the prince did not actually belong to Mary or James II.
2-the real baby had died (or else possibly Mary had never actually been pregnant--opinions varied) and the fake baby now being paraded as the prince had been sneaked into the birthing chamber from a neighboring building while hidden in a warming pan (see image below for what a warming pan looks like. When not being used to sneak illegitimate Catholic heirs around, warming pans were generally filled with hot coals and used the way we might use hot water bottles today). No one noticed that the baby in this warming pan (surely a baby would wiggle?), apparently, because it was carried through.... a series of secret passages.
The entire warming pan scenario was based on the fact that, when questioned about her participation in the birth, months later, one midwife reported having seen a warming pan. Obviously suspicious (although of course it's NOT particularly suspicious--if warming pans were used in bedrooms, it doesn't seem crazy to imagine that there would have been one floating around at the birth). Some observers at the birth also had difficulty seeing the baby at the moment it issued from the birth canal. (Princess Anne, who had claimed that she would not believe the child legitimate until she actually saw its birth, had particular trouble witnessing the blessed moment, since she avoided attending the birth altogether.) The Protestants blamed the lack of visibility on the fact that the Queen gave birth under covers, and the fact that the midwives were clustering too closely around the royal bed, thus obscuring the view. They claimed that both elements had been put in place on purpose, to prevent the audience from noticing the commoner baby being snuck in via warming pan.
Both blankets and hovering midwives had been pretty normal at previous royal births (I assume I don't have to explain why), and the Protestants hadn't had any issues with those births, but suddenly now they were suspicious. Why wasn't the Queen reasonable enough to allow people to see her genitals at the moment of the birth? Why should this be such a big deal? Other women, contemporary commentators remarked disparagingly, gave birth with far less privacy. Why should the queen get this special dispensation? She probably thought she was special because she was Catholic. Also, she and her Catholic minions probably thought that they could pull off any kind of trick and have the public just believe that the baby was hers because, you know Catholics. They just take things on faith and believe authority. That's what their church teaches them. But we, we rational Protestants, aren't so easy to fool. We see right through that papist, that idolator, Mary of Modena (although not through the suspiciously thick birthing blankets that covered her genitals during labor).
The story of the substituted prince was spread far and wide--songs and poems and pamphlets about it popped up everywhere. There was a hearing in Parliament questioning the veracity of the baby's birth. Of course, in the days before the DNA test there was no way the warming-pan story could be proven, and that may have been the point--if it was impossible to prove, it was also impossible to disprove. The possible fake-ness of James Frances Edward Stuart (the baby) gave Protestants in Parliament plausible deniability when, a year later, they helped James II's Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William, take the throne. Did Mary and William actually believe that James Frances Edward Stuart was not really the child of James II and Mary of Modena? Not so clear. But a lot of people did, and it made what was essentially a governmental coup seem justifiable to the Protestant population. Facebook would not be invented for at least 300 years. Even the telegraph was over a century away. But fake news successfully transformed the political future of the throne of England.
Propaganda, and what makes it work or not work, is obviously at the heart of this story, and clearly there are more than a few modern parallels available The article I read today (McTague 2013) offers some really interesting analysis of how the the warming-pan narrative played on the conventions of traditional English anti-Catholic bigotry to argue that James II and Mary of Modena were trying to preserve the idea of an absolute, completely unaccountable, monarchy. But I was particularly interested another of McTague's points, about how the story of the warming-pan ridiculed Catholics for their unquestioning trust in authority while asking Protestant audiences to demonstrate their loyalty by believing a narrative for which there was very little proof. If it can't be proven, and you consider yourself a rationalist, why believe it? Because you trust the tellers of the story--or maybe because the story benefits you. Maybe a bit of both.The Catholic monarchy would only fall if it had no male heir, and so it made sense for Protestants on all levels of society to deny that there was such an heir. Even when there was.
The point of this for me is that propaganda, even at its most ridiculous, works because at least a subset of people wants to believe it, because it accords with their interests in some way. This has been true for most of human history--it was not invented by social media or during this election cycle. Further, the impact of propaganda is not limited to the uneducated, the credulous, or those with the habit of unquestioning religious faith. Propaganda is alternatively believable and tempting to educated rationalists just the same way it is to anyone else, because at its base it's about rationalizing and maintaining power. Probably there is no human being, alive or dead, who hasn't on some level wanted their own side, their own country or ideology or family, to prevail.And that means that there is no human being who has not been tempted by a convenient but unsubstantiated belief.
To truly be able to claim a commitment to evidence and proof, you have to resist propaganda even when its message is attractive to you. You have to encourage and teach people to be critical even when it's your side telling the story. An informed citizenry isn't necessarily one that agrees with you (although hopefully if you are committed to critical thought, many of your beliefs also have some solid facts backing them up, and that's part of why you believe them). An informed citizenry is one that expects and demands evidence from anyone, as a matter of course. There are lots of ways to foster that kind of thinking, but insisting that your own ideas are unimpeachable because you like them is not one of those ways. That is to say, if you are worried about "fake news" but expect people to believe that Russia exerted an inordinate amount of influence on the recent election without giving them access to any kind of verifying information, you are not anti-propaganda. If you are worried about "fake news" but were OK with the way the NYT dealt with Bernie's campaign, if you are worried about "fake news" and Trump's election but are OK with the way that the US has used propaganda and persuasion to influence elections from Brazil to Honduras to Russia itself...then you're not really worried about "fake news." You're worried about a loss of power. It's far less laudable, and it doesn't go well with a commitment to the facts. To make sure that the truth is spoken despite the interests that act against it, you have to teach people to ask for it unapologetically, again and again and again. Even if it means that putatively liberal but essentially non-transparent politicians lose support.
There are far, far better reasons to oppose Trump's presidency than the possibility that Russians might have tried to convince Americans to vote for him. And there are far better ways of inoculating future elections (if we're lucky enough to have them) against populist demagogues than putting a lot of energy into investigating Putin. And yes, a lot of those ways and reasons involve discussing things that are likely to be embarrassing to the Democratic party. But the way I think about it, the essence of progressive government has to be that it acts in conversation with the people it serves. If you're imagining that the methods of oligarchy or plutocracy, the methods of non-transparency, can create good policy, I'd say that that's unlikely, because those methods create the kind of government that's inherently unresponsive, even to its "own" base. Is it really possible for anyone in power to feel respect for the needs of people whose responses and perceptions they work so hard to control--especially when they are so successful at it? Is it really possible for anyone in power to maintain a commitment to empowering and educating citizens when they simultaneously rely on citizens' vulnerability to slanted narratives? I don't think it is. The expectation of transparency doesn't just keep politicians honest--it reminds them that their constituents are powerful and worthy of a healthy respect. Contrary to what many politicians might tell you, politics isn't just about the end, it's about the means, because the means frames an awful lot about how people think, what they expect, and how they imagine themselves as citizens and civil servants. In that regard, uncritically accepting the fake news spread by your own side is harmful even if you like and trust your side. It's just not a good basis for a government of the people.
McTague, John (2013) Anti-Catholicism, Incorrigibility and Credulity in the Warming-Pan Scandal of 1688-9, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 36(3).0Add a comment
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Hey, y'all. It's been a while since I wrote anything here. But in addition to the standard things that are worrying lots of Americans in the just-pre-Trump era (which are extensive, and which I don't think I need to list--yes, before you get upset at me, I did bite my tongue hard and vote for Hillary, but no, it does not seem to have helped), I have this other constellation of political worries, and I thought maybe it was time to write about them. So here goes.
I recently spent some time reading Masha Gessen's (lesbian Russian-Jewish journalist-please Google her before you decide that she, and therefore I, are spreading "Russian propaganda," which I notice is now a "thing") Facebook feed, partly because I'm a little bit obsessed with her, and partly because she's done a new spate of interviews after the NYRB recently published her excellent article, Autocracy: Rules for Survival. She's said a few times in those interviews that, contrary to what most of the media expected, she actually expected Trump to win, and her newsfeed bears that out--she mentioned it numerous times during the election season, although clearly she was hoping it wouldn't happen. Here's what really struck me--a lot of her friends, many of them international journalists or, I imagine, people who live in other countries with autocratic governments, agreed with her. The thing I particularly noticed was a post she made right after Hillary Clinton picked Tim Kaine as her running mate, where she basically said, now I am even more sure Trump will win. There goes Hillary's chance to appeal to progressives.
On my Facebook feed, saying anything like that, or even complaining about the choice of Kaine, was greeted with cries of "Bernie-bro!" "How could you say that!" "You're voting for Trump by criticizing Hillary!" On Masha Gessen's feed, it looks like one person may have objected, but a lot of people seem to have thought that was a reasonable fear. Not an outcome to hope for, but a reasonable fear. The thing is, in the end she was right. Trump did win. I don't know whether or how much Tim Kaine as VP pick impacted the election--I think there were a lot of factors involved. But the fact is that in Democratic/liberal circles (which do extend into a lot of mainstream media), even discussing that possibility was treated as heresy--and as a result, we were completely unprepared for the results of the election. I think that's something that bears thinking about. Gessen has talked a lot since the election about the inability to imagine US institutions crumbling under an autocratic government as a failure of imagination. I think a lot of that failure comes from a tendency to adhere to, and police, ideological orthodoxies in the US, on the left as well as the right. We don't tolerate genuine dissent very well--we don't like to hear it, we don't like it on the news, and we're quick to criticize people who voice it. Even those of us (and I include myself here) who see ourselves as primarily dissenting characters.
All of this is a long way to introduce my current set of political worries, which is the new Democratic/liberal orthodoxies that look like they're emerging post-Trump. From what I'm seeing, a lot of people are dealing with Trump's election by either a-talking about how racist and terrible Trump supporters are, sometimes in order to make the case that there was no way Clinton could have reached out to them (this is separate from talking about how racist and terrible Trump supporters are when reporting racist attacks and harassment, or when discussing his cabinet picks. Those are important things to be talking about and I am in no way criticizing them). b-somehow discounting the idea of a white working class, either by saying that talking about race in the working class is racist and anti-solidarity, or saying that the white working class doesn't deserve any sympathy because they're racist, or c-trashing people who wonder whether Bernie might have done better as sexist (or Bernie bros, or both). All of those tendencies are used to shore up the idea that the Democratic party doesn't need to change, it's just that voters were somehow unworthy of them. The fact that these are the conversations we're having, and that anyone who doesn't see things that way is castigated, is really frightening to me, and I want to urge people to rethink them before they lead us into a place where the mistakes made during this election are further cemented. There's a failure of imagination that leads you to be unprepared--but there's also a failure of imagination that prevents you from acting for a better result, and I think that's how all these defensive arguments are setting us up for the next time around.
The thing is, as long as we keep saying that the white working class is just racist and reprehensible, we set up a continuing rhetoric where the Democratic party not only can't, but shouldn't, reach out to them. On a purely electoral level, that's a problem, because they continue to be a part of this country, and they continue to vote. But on another level, that should be a problem for anyone who considers themselves to be progressive or liberal and concerned about issues of racial and economic justice. Here's why.
There's a pervasive myth in American rhetoric that's been going around for a really long time, which basically says that when people of color, women, gay people, etc have equal rights, it is necessarily and always going to be bad for white men, that any rights those groups gain are at the expense of white people. That's what Republicans (and before JFK, Southern Democrats) have been telling white communities literally since before the Civil War, and a lot of them have believed it, obviously. It's been cemented by the fact that, by coincidence or not, big civil rights changes have often coincided roughly with big cuts to the social safety net. For example, right after Civil Rights in the 60s/70s, you got Reagan in the 80s (and Reagan cleverly used racial rhetoric to cement cutting the social safety net, which supported the whole myth even further). So this is a belief of long standing. The problem, though, is that the Democrats' increasing commitment to what might be called "identity politics" in the face of their decreasing commitment to economic justice and workers' rights has actually cemented that myth further, instead of countering it. Their response to the idea that a world where minorities have civil rights is bad for white people has been, yes, that's true, but that means that if you're white and don't support us/civil rights, you're selfish. I saw a lot of writing and talking over this election season about the Dems reaching the limits of shaming as a political tool, and I didn't really understand it until the past couple of weeks, when I started realizing this. If you want people to act against what even you are saying is in their self interest, you shame them (thus implicitly acknowledging that what you're offering is not in their self-interest). It also suddenly became clear to me why a lot of Dems this election season have been so insistent that voting is in some sense an altruistic act--there's been a lot of criticism about people using their votes to try to "express themselves" or "make a point" or "vote their beliefs." Voting shouldn't be an altruistic act--but telling people that it is, is a way of shaming them into voting the way you want them to, if you're not willing to appeal to their self-interest. The Democrats, increasingly, have not been willing to appeal to the self-interest of working class whites, although in fact most of those people used to be Democrats, because the Democratic party has become a neoliberal, corporatist party. The Democrats aren't working on expanding worker protections, union rights, or the social safety net for the most part. And they're certainly very reluctant to act against corporate power, in education, employment, or any other area of life.
So now to the issue of the white working class and racism. Here I am not talking about the people who voted for Trump who are white nationalists and Nazis. They voted explicitly on their racism, and they are indeed reprehensible. No question about that. But there's a whole cadre of other people who voted for Trump who are not like that--who in some cases even voted for Obama. In some cases, they voted for Obama twice. Yes, of course you can vote for a black man and still be a racist on some level, the same way you can be married to a woman and still be a misogynist. But in terms of people who are so unremittingly racist that there is no possibility they would ever vote for someone running in part on a racial justice platform--no. That is not those people. I've seen some people online saying disparagingly that even those of Trump's voters who aren't explicitly racist were willing to ignore it because it wasn't that important to them. And I think that's the truth, but I think we need to take the disparagement out of it and take another look at how voting really works.
The fact is that human beings act based on what they perceive as their self-interest. That's not maybe the best human quality, but it is a nearly universal one. When you are in the majority and you act in self-interest, that can look like racism because it can mean you're acting against minority interests, but the truth is, it's not exactly racist--it's not that you think white people are inherently better than African-Americans, for example. It's that the person you care about most in the world is a white person, and that's because that person is yourself. That sounds terrible, but it's a little easier to see when you put it in a minority context---for example, most African-American voters voted for Hillary in the primary, even though I think it is honestly uncontroversial to say that Bernie would have been by far the best candidate for Native Americans. He was the first major party candidate ever to have hired an outreach coordinator to Native American communities, and he's been fierce in his support, for example, of the water protectors at the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. Native American communities are possibly the most mistreated and oppressed communities in the country even under what most of us would consider normal administrations--for example, in October, an investigation for In These Times found that Native Americans are actually the most likely Americans to be killed in police encounters. Are African-Americans who voted for Hillary anti-Native American rights? No, I don't think so. I think it wasn't the most important issue to them, and they felt that Hillary had done more outreach than Bernie had to their own, African-American, communities. They were voting in their self-interests, as we all do. Again, I say this not as an insult, but to say that the instinct for self preservation and the tendency to act out of that interest is human. We can wish it weren't, we can say it shouldn't be, but that doesn't make it less true.
Moving on to white people, there was a lot of Democratic rhetoric ahead of the election about voting for Hillary because of what Trump would do to communities of color. A lot of us white middle-class people heeded that call, or seemed (even to ourselves) to be doing so. In the end, if you had asked me why I ended up voting for Hillary the day I voted, I probably would have said it was because I was concerned about racial justice. But when I did some hard thinking after the election, I realized that that wasn't entirely it. Racial justice is really important to me, and I have been thinking about it a lot during the election. But the truth is that I am also doing OK economically right now. I am in school. I have a job now and I anticipate (when I'm not freaking out) being able to find a job when I get out. My girlfriend is gainfully employed and makes a decent salary. We are really fortunate, at least for now. As much as I am angry about the injustices of American neoliberalism, those injustices aren't directly bad for me right now. So, yes, I voted in some sense altruistically, for concerns about race that do not impact my body or my life, except to make me angry. But I was also, in a real sense, voting for my own interests. I voted for a candidate who promised that things would basically stay the same economically, in an economy where I am OK, even though I know that many people are not. Am I classist? Did I choose to vote my class instead of for the broader economic good of the country(not that I think Trump is good for the economy, but if we imagine that his populist rhetoric was for real)? That's certainly another way of looking at my vote. The fact is that even though I have ideological commitments on class and against classism, in the end a vote against the racist candidate was also a vote for my personal class, so the two weren't in conflict. If I had been working class and white, even if I was slightly less racist than the average American white person (as I try to be at least slightly less classist than the average American middle-class person), I might well have listened to Trump's rhetoric and Hillary's rhetoric and voted my class. I would have heard Democrats saying, you as a white person need to vote altruistically in terms of race (which is basically what a lot of them were saying) and I would have thought, I need something to change because I can't freakin' feed my kids. Or I'm working three jobs. Or my kids are stuck in the same dead end as I am. And I would have voted my perceived self-interest, which now is being glossed as racist, but which might just be self-interested and human. The nature of the political game is that that's what people do. The Democrats' job was to recognize that and respond to it, and they did not. That was one of the things that lost them the election.
And for those people who are saying it's racist to divide the working class into white people and people of color? I think it's important to recognize that, whether we like it or not, that divide already exists, and the Democratic party not only is aware of it but is complicit in maintaining it. People of color who are working class voted for Hillary in large numbers because, in the nature of American racial capitalism, their racial interest is more urgent than their class interest, to which she was mostly not appealing. (Here I am skipping a long rant with links on the intersection of class and race in the Civil Rights movement). I am not saying they were wrong in doing so--I think that is an accurate assessment of their interests (as they certainly do not need me to tell them, or say for them!). But it has to be clear to all concerned that that calculus does not work out the same way for their working class compatriots who are white. That's not a split I am making by using the words "white working class." It's not a split Hillary made either, but it's certainly one her campaign and the past 30 years of Democratic campaigns have made use of, because it ensures them a certain "wall" of guaranteed voters absent any kind of real economic reform.You only have to look at some of the previously Democratic states she lost--Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin--to see the problems with that strategy. Those are heavily white working class areas, traditionally union---and that means that the economic lives of people who live in those areas have been getting worse for a while. In the past, there's been just enough lack of appeal to those voters in Republicans that they've continued to vote Dem, but Trump flipped the script by pretending to be an economic populist, and Hillary was very reluctant to adopt an economically populist platform. (It's also fair to say that the Dems on a national level have not done much to protect the unions in those states, which have been dismantled or partly dismantled, and which have traditionally been a big source of Get Out the Vote initiatives for the Democrats). So people voted for Trump, or maybe they stayed home. Aaaaand....there went those states, which it turns out Hillary needed to win.
So now back to the myth of the multi-cultural society that's bad for white men. We might wish that people voted altruistically, but that is vanishingly rare, and I think it's not only wrong but politically unintelligent to keep acting as though it weren't. Given that, it was the job of the Democratic Party---it is the job of any even vaguely left-wing party---to be both economically AND racially progressive. To make the case to everyone that it IS possible to have a multi-cultural society that is better than the one we have now, for white people as well as people of color. Because in a society where every person is valued, class differences are also minimized. Safety nets are repaired and improved. The rights of workers are protected--not just rhetorically, but actually. Minimum wages are living wages. Everyone gets healthcare. That's not just how a multi-cultural, multi-racial society should look, it's how such a society has to look to survive. Because when it doesn't....well, you get Trump's America. You get a place where the political interests of the white working class and the non-white working class are sharply divergent, which makes it easy to stoke racial animosity--and that puts the whole multi-racial project at risk. This is the real issue--any party that is racially progressive but economically neoliberal carries the seeds of its own destruction within it. Of course, you can choose not to see it, and you can try to discipline other people into not seeing it by claiming that straight-up economic populism is just "extreme." I think that's what has happened this election season, and what these new Democratic/liberal orthodoxies, where discussions of the white working class are painted as heretical or racist, are trying to perpetuate. But then what you get is Masha Gessen's failure of imagination, where it's hard to think through what's gone wrong---and then nothing gets better for anyone. That's the discussion we need to be having, and it really scares me to see liberals amassing the tools to continue preventing it, based on the idea that to do otherwise is disloyal to the party, or to people of other races, or to Hillary herself.
If you've decided to gloss this whole post as me excusing racism, all I can say is that we need to explore a little more fully how that word gets used in an electoral context. And if you are saying, but why should people of color feel bad for white working class people when no one feels bad for them (I've seen people saying this)--I'm not saying that they should. We have to get away from the idea that political action should be about who deserves compassion or pity or altruistic protection, or indeed that it can truly be motivated that way (Saul Alinsky famously used to talk about the importance of organizers having "skin in the game"). What I am saying is that any party that wants to a-win an election in difficult economic times, and b-increase racial justice, let alone preserve the idea that a diverse people can live together in conditions of equality, has to be realistic about why human beings do things and acknowledge the self-interest of a chunk of Trump's voters. That also means acknowledging that the Democratic Party has to change, or that a lot of us need to be thinking about how to create a different party (assuming we continue to have meaningful elections--if we don't, I guess no one has to change anything, but that's not the result any of us want, surely). You can, certainly, call me a racist or a Bernie Bro or a sexist or whatever else for saying that, but keep in mind that people have BEEN saying that all election cycle, and all it did was keep us from seeing that Trump might be elected until he was. It didn't protect the Democrats or even Hillary herself, and it didn't protect people of color or gay people or immigrants or women or anyone else who is at very real risk in the face of a Trump presidency. Now we have to get prepared for that presidency in a hurry--but I think we'd better be getting prepared for the next election cycle, too.0Add a comment
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For the past few days I've been meaning to sit down and write about the current fractious triangle between Black Lives Matter, progressive Jews, and the word "genocide." But last night I sat down to do some research, and it turns out I don't have to write much of anything at all--someone eminently more qualified has already written it for me. And that person is the person who invented the word to begin with.
Just to frame what I'll quote below--I think a lot of English speakers, and certainly many Jews, find the word "genocide" particularly offensive as applied to a Jewish state because they associate the word with the Holocaust.It might surprise you (it surprised me) to learn that the word was created in response to the Ottoman Empire's massacre of the Armenians starting in April 1915. The term was coined by a Polish Jewish lawyer, Rafael Lemkin, in 1943, to refer to a phenomenon that he had been steadily pushing the international community to recognize since the 1930s. This was essentially his life's work, even his obsession. Tragically, while he was traveling around the world lobbying for governments to recognize genocide as a crime, most of his family back in Poland were killed by the Nazis(1).
Since Lemkin was the one who created this word, I think we have to turn to his writings to find out what it means. And here's what he wrote in 1944, emphasis mine (2):
"...the term does not necessarily signify mass killings, although it may mean that.
More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feelings and their religion. It may be accomplished by wiping out all basis of personal security, liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail, the machine gun can always be utilized as a last resort."
In 1948, Lemkin got the UN General Assembly to ratify the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. He'd earlier put similar ideas before the League of Nations--his main idea was that genocide hurts all countries, and that therefore it should be punished internationally. Here is how the UN Convention (still in effect) defines genocide (again, emphasis is mine):
"In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a)killing members of the group,
(b)causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,
(c)deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,
(d)imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,
(e)forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
It's also worth noting that the UN Convention criminalizes not only these acts (actual genocide) but also "[d]irect and public incitement to genocide." You'll notice that the definition of genocide here is more limited than Lemkin's original (it doesn't include what he said about the destruction of political and social institutions), but still more expansive than the way I think most Jews are using it now, to mean "physically killing people en masse so that their group will be exterminated."
"But, but," I can hear some saying, "what if the Palestinians are committing genocide against the Israelis?? Ever think of that?" I have. But more importantly, Lemkin did too. Here he is again, writing in 1944-parens and bolding mine(4):
"Minorities of one sort or another exist in all countries, protected by the constitutional order of the state [this was largely the case in European countries pre-WWII, although not always today--usually it meant that minorities like the Jews did have protected, although second class, status]. If persecution of any minority by any country is tolerated anywhere, the very moral and legal foundations of constitutional government may be shaken."
Lemkin could not have been more clear. Genocide is something majority populations do to minorities. It does not work the other way around. You can say a lot of things about Jews in the state of Israel, but one thing you can't say is that they're the minority population. Numerically and in terms of political power, it's just not true.
If you're a person who either doesn't acknowledge that Israel perpetrates human rights abuses against Palestinians, or if you're a person who thinks they're justified in doing so, then I don't think this linguistic history will matter to you (and you probably also do not read my blog). But if you're one of those people who's been saying, like many progressive Jews are,"I know Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is bad, but I just don't think it rises to the level of genocide," then I'd ask you to take a long look at these quotes, particularly the one's I've bolded, and be real with yourself about whether these are parts of Israeli policy towards Palestinians. Not even whether they've always been, but whether they are right now. I think most people who already recognize that bad stuff is going on there will recognize that they are. And in that case, I think you'll see that Black Lives Matter has used the term genocide correctly as applied to the state of Israel. And when you consider that the US is funding a lot of this activity, you'll probably also see that mentioning this has less to do with anti-Semitism and more to do with a feeling of American culpability.
Maybe you're still uncomfortable with that--maybe it'll turn out that your objection to that term was really more about objection to criticism of Israel than to the term itself. In that case, at least you'll know that, and you'll be able to think it through in whatever way seems appropriate to you. I don't say this to say that balancing Jewishness and progressiveness and attachment to Zionism or the state of Israel is simple. But I think it's worth considering what Lemkin believed--that once you allow people to be killed based on their group identity in one place, you make that acceptable in other places too. In other words, you can't be against it in one place but for it in another. If he can see Jews turning away from Black Lives Matter because of his word, genocide, I can only imagine he's rolling over in his grave.
(1)Power, Samantha (2002) A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Harper Collins.
(2) Lemkin, Rafael (1945) Genocide - A Modern Crime. Free World, Vol. 4, pp. 39-43.
(3)UN General Assembly, 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
(4)Lemkin, 1945.
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For your general information, it turns out that there's some other stuff going on right now in US policing that for some reason isn't being brought into the current discussion of policing practices:
New Video Shows Off-Duty Cop Fatally Shooting Black Man Delrawn Smalls, from Democracy Now! This is going on right now. It's interesting because the cop was out of uniform and off-duty--it appears the whole thing was a wild overreaction (on the cop's part) to road rage. The version of the event he gave after the fact is demonstrably false based on the video, but it seems like he's still being given "police protection." Even if you feel that the police have a uniquely hard job and therefore are justified in using force the rest of us would be arrested for using, how far does that extend? Does it mean that killing or violence in the private life of cops also gets a pass?
Wall Street Journal story on the same incident when it happened (the video of the incident was just released).
Judge threatens City of Chicago over Failure to Turn Over Documents (Chicago Tribune) The city's attorneys failed to disclose that the same guy who is currently being sued for using a Taser on a pregnant woman was declared unfit for duty twice and has killed someone before. Apparently the judge is partly distressed because the City of Chicago often has to be threatened to turn over evidence when police are sued.
And, in other "current police practices don't serve police officers well either" news:
May: Settlement in Chicago Cops' Lawsuit Spares Emanuel from Testifying on Code of Silence
Two whistleblower cops sued because of retaliation after they had exposed police corruption--the city (it appears, I haven't been following this case) decided to settle after the judge ruled that the cops could call Mayor Rahm Emanuel to testify on the police "code of silence." Now he won't have to testify. And the same story from the Chicago Tribune.
May: Gay officer sues the Memphis police department for discrimination.
May: Two Michigan State Troopers sue for discrimination and retaliation allegedly because they won their original lawsuit about discrimination. (OK, this is slightly funny to me, although I assume not to them)
May: New Haven's first black female police captain sues for discrimination and hostile work environment.
June: Whistleblower cops facing retaliation and suing in Baltimore
June again: Whistleblower assistant chief of police in Kauai sues because of retaliation
June, from the BBC: A former officer sues the Cleveland Police Department for racial discrimination and bullying.The officer was Asian--he said Asians were widely treated as corrupt by other officers and the department didn't want to hear about it.
June, NYT: Muslim cop suing the NYPD because they wouldn't let him keep his beard as his faith dictates.
OK, are you noticing a pattern??? I only looked at newspaper articles since May 2016. These are not even all of the articles I saw in which cops are suing their departments, either for discrimination or retaliation after whistleblowing. There are a lot of similar cases going on in a lot of police departments. It turns out that police do this a LOT. I have no way of knowing if this is true anymore, but here's an article from 2014 claiming that at least in New Jersey, police departments are sued more often by their own officers than by civilians.
So why is that? It looks to me like that is in part because Internal Affairs Bureaus, which are supposed to investigate misconduct, retaliation, and discrimination when they're reported, are rarely responsive to complaints. In most areas that's the end of the line for any kind of internal complaint, because state, city, and county governments have virtually no oversight role in police department governance (and if they do, it seems like it's not exercised very well). So the civil courts are essentially functioning as outside oversight, which is costly (for taxpayers, not for the police department itself--this is one reason why just suing as opposed to trying to bring criminal charges may not be an awesome idea, although it's recommended by a frustrated sounding Appeals Court judge in a recent Washington Post article here.). In a couple of newspaper reports, the litigants are explicitly quoted as saying that they tried internal channels first, but got no response: here are two black officers in Brookline, MA, who sued for racial discrimination who talk about this.
The point I'm trying to make is that it looks like (admittedly, based on media coverage, but again--did I say how many of these articles there were?) the debate about whether our "men and women in blue" deserve our support, love, and unquestioning obedience is the wrong one to be having. The complete unwillingness to hold police departments accountable for how they treat women and minorities and how they address misconduct and brutality in their ranks isn't just bad for civilians--it's also really bad for the cops themselves. Everyone keeps saying the cops shouldn't have to change because they're sacred and we should all be so grateful to them, etc--but an uncompromising system that doesn't allow critique or change, even from the inside, is a problem for the people who do that job. So let's stop defending the right of police departments to be autocratic and discriminatory and not to respond to critique in any way-whether it's about the treatment of employees or the brutalization of civilians. Let's have civilian oversight with real teeth. Let's have real oversight of employment practices by government officials who aren't in bed with politically powerful cops, if they can be found. A police system that was held accountable would actually help everyone.
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