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As you may know I'm rather trenchant in my political leanings and fairly far from any mainstream of ideology. Maybe that's a weird failing on my part, maybe that's a result only of my journey in life. I've done what I've done and had the experiences I've had, I wasn't persuaded to any one opinion or another by any eloquence or literary aptitude. I've read Marx and I've read Smith, I've read Hobbes and Locke and I didn't agree with any of them, not really. So I don't come to you today with my political perspective in effect, because it's my perspective and I don't care if you agree with it, I don't have it because I want you to agree or disagree, I have it becaue I came upon it honestly through experience.
But I do have a critical eye and a pretty decent grasp of what's come before, of history. So I want to speak about a thing, because I think it is important to consider.
So - for a long time, maybe you know this, for a long time the Republican party was the party of Black folks - because Lincoln freed the slaves, because Lincoln committed the country to a cause of war to unite the states and abolish the system of states-rights. States don't have rights, so to speak - the 14th Amendment does a pretty good job of guaranteeing that. States fall in line with Washington or they go to court, or, in the 19th century, they get burned down. The plowing under of states rights was the first major political agenda of the Republican party. It was a pretty good idea. A whole nation of different nations each expressing some extreme of the unified baseline was just waiting to fall apart or be welded together. Lincoln welded it together, the first Republican president. He burned half the country down.
He also campaigned on a platform of unity, togetherness. I kept thinking of that back in '04. George Bush Jr. said he was a uniter, not a divider. Remember that? Lincoln said the same kind of thing, and burned half the country down.
After Lincoln there's that whole list of bearded Ohioans that ran the country - they're almost interchangeable, all of them Republicans, all of them... Well - can you name them? Any of them? Between Lincoln and the first Roosevelt? Somewhere along the line these guys got... Well there are many things to say about those administrations, but I think, and probably a lot of people do too -that the GOP really didn't express much of a position or a solid identity until it dealt with Modernity and the new urban centers that came to dominate the US in the 20th century.
In the 20's - that's when the GOP that we can understand and recognize came into being. Hoover, Coolidge, Harding - these are the elections where the Republicans began to identify themselves as anti-. Anti hyphen. Equality? Temperance? Sufferage? Kind of falling away. Temperance and prohibition were still big Republican ideas in the 20's, but then the other big idea was one that we're all now familiar with, that we're all now confronted by, though it is sometimes camoflauged. That concept is White Supremacy.
There's no plausible argument against the role of white supremacy being one of the binding components of the Republican ethos. Back in the 20's the Republicans enacted immigration regulations - thereby doing away with the greater power of the KKK. Since a great part of the KKK's organizational power was rooted in the fear of immigrants and Catholics - when the Republican government conceded to the essential component of the KKK's platform and set quotas for immigration - then the purpose of the KKK vanished.
This isn't to say that the Democrats were any good in the 20's either. The solid south, american aparteid - that's real stuff, real shitty stuff. What's weird though - is those elections in the 20's - think of the big one in '28. Catholic urbanite Al Smith runs the Democratic ticket - based on what? Urban equality and southern segregation? It's a crazy combination, and no wonder Hoover took the Presidency. When's the last time Massachusetts and Mississippi went the same way on a presidential election? (Yeah, I know, plenty of times, but McGovern Carried Mass, and Thurmond and Wallace carried MS - that's what I'm getting to.) Because here is the Deal. Black subjugation is sometimes allied to white supremacy - but the thing is- they don't always go together. That's weird right? Someone was saying to me that it's weird to them how over just one or two generations all the different eurpoean and latin (and heck, middle-eastern) immigrants have assimilated into the mainstream of american culture, but that after all this time Black folks have not. And I thought - well - it's probably because hating black people is one of the main aspects of mainstream american culture. Which... well I can't endorse mainstream American culture, I won't, I said that. But that's not the same as white supremacy. See- white, black - they're laughable constructions - no one with any bit of... I dunno, even genealogical knowledge, let alone someone who knows who Mendel is would tell you that these are true ideas. White, Black, races - it's just some rubbish that was invented. Invented by the self described white-race to create a global hegemony actually. Because this is the essential component of what it is to be conservative. The very idea of the West, of Western Civilization - it's... it's folly, constructed on lies. The drawing of lines between Plato and Aquinas and Luther and Locke - that's just... It's the most disingenuous breed of falsehood, but it's a canon constructed to enshrine a narrowly defined group of persons in a postion of hierarchical dominion.
If you go to school that story is told to you, without irony, without even a question of its spurious origination. No, it's canon and it is taught as canon. Jesus and Aristotle, DaVinci and Shakespeare, Jefferson and Rousseau - they're all part of a long lineage of connected ideas that led ot a civilization of morally superior people - white people. It's a ficiton, sure! But compelling to some. If we create our myths, we'll create them to make ourselves feel better and our forbears to look good. The myth of white people is that everything is theirs and they're the culmination of something that has been building. Forever.
History has a precedent for it - the Romans said they came from the greeks, the greeks said they came from the Egyptians - and none of it was true - but you get that justification - history. Ford - crazy old Ford, who almost ran against Hoover in '28 - he said History was bunk, because it is. Because it's a kind of mythology constructed to enshrine contemporary ideas (you know what - if you're a scholar of history, if you are, you know I love you - I am too, know what you're doing, you're doing good work - but... come on. you know what I'm talking about).
The problem with this system, this looking back and staking a claim over everything great that has ever happened ever and then saying "White People" - the problem there is that when you look aroudn at the people, your people - Americans, let us say, you're gonna be kind of disappointed. Now if you start building up your mythology and tying your social order to this cherry-picked lineage, you're liable to end up with wildly incoherent thoughts, ideas like the City on the Hill and the Last Best Hope and American Exceptionalism. Because you're going to see yourself as the inheritor of some long line of precedents that have nothing at all to do with reality. You know how the Romans declined for a few hundred years and then set up shop in Constantinople? And that was the second Rome? You know what the third Rome was? Moscow. The Muscovites thought that they were the inheritors of the Roman traditions, from when Brutus stabbed Tarquin the Proud right down to Princess Anastasia. It wasn't true, but it was believed, because when your society is predicated on basic ideas of survival and competition, you're maybe going to want for something a little more - let's say profound. So you end up with the Exceptional America. That's a pretty crazy idea, a pretty lousy one - to my mind. I mean, hey, I like it here, I like it a lot, I dig being an American all day long, but to put that burden on us all, to say that we're more than just a country full of people trying to get by and make somehting of ourselves- that brings us into some bad territory. Because we're not a whole lot different than any other country. Heck, every other country also speaks up about how they're different and their own historical legacy and traditions. They're also trapped by their own made up history cinto pursuing pointless adventures and reckless, catastrophic agendas - because - hey, traditions!
Now Republicans - they sometimes take that kind of talk more seriously than others, and they sometimes get more or less motivated by the other American tradition of shitting on Black people. Shitting on Black people is important because you can't have equality among the various tribal coalitions of white people without there being black people to shit upon. LBJ is the one that pushed segregation into the GOP's platform, he's the one that made integration a Democratic mission and let the Republicans, who'd previously outldawed slavery and put to death the idea of states' rights move into a new direction. When I was a kid Ronald Reagan was president and he sold this message with some amount of smarm - I won't say charisma because I personally don't see what people saw in him, but he carried 49 states so who am I to argue? Anyhow, he told tales about how black people were living it up on the white-man's dime, and that took him far. Perfectly capturing the shit on Black People component of the Republicna platform, and that got him 8 years. There's more to it, of course, the Supply Side, the exercise of the Monroe doctrine - etc... a lot went on. I'm not trying to be obtuse or fatuous or reductive, well a little reductive - but to my thesis - you have Reagan, pretty much selling, in very coded form, the rightness of shitting on Black People. Then you have Bush - George Bush Jr. The whole Project for the New American Century that's the White Supremacy plank. These concepts of exceptionalism, superiority, and moral superiority - you remember, I don't have to tell you.
Of course that whole position tended to chafe. When people started to see what it cost to spread the gospel of white supremacy throughout th world, when we started to realize what the bills were going to look like when we'd finally christinaized the infidel and defeated the Turk? When we'd all grown finally to realize that Dick Cheney was no latter day Charles "The Hammer" Martel? Well - then we gave in. Nobody cared what John McCain had to say, nobody ever had. That guy was trash and we all knew it. He'd done some things, worthwhile things, and then he'd betrayed his wife for money, and then he brought on some crazy-eyed lady from Alaska who really seemed to like the sound of her own voice and th idea of being famous - and nobody wanted to give him any money, and nobody really wanted to vote for them, and so we had Barack Obama. Now, he was tricky, he skated in and won the nomination that was Hillary C's - hers to lose and she lost it. So we got Barack Obama, a decent sort, maybe. Not the worst guy to ever hold the position, maybe one of the better ones, probably riding along in the middle of the road with Truman and one of the Adams, maybe Wilson, not a Buchanan but not a Lincoln either. So we have him. But we're told, now, by the GOP - that the world will end. And this is a lot like Chicken Little meets the boy who cried wolf. How many times will the world end? John of Patmos wrote his apocalypse in the 2nd century Anno Domini but we're all still waiting right? Waiting for that other shoe to drop. Waiting for the end of the world. And wouldn't you know it- here you've got Barack Obama, who's at the confluence of the two competing themes in what it is to be a Republican - White Supremacy and Shitting on Black People. They're complimentary, but I think, while allied, they've always been separate issues, campaign-wise. They're certainly related, certainly, but there's a nuance and a difference and in my life it's been one, or the other - except for now - and now it's both and now it's probably the ugiest, worst thing that I have seen in politics.
But I do have a critical eye and a pretty decent grasp of what's come before, of history. So I want to speak about a thing, because I think it is important to consider.
So - for a long time, maybe you know this, for a long time the Republican party was the party of Black folks - because Lincoln freed the slaves, because Lincoln committed the country to a cause of war to unite the states and abolish the system of states-rights. States don't have rights, so to speak - the 14th Amendment does a pretty good job of guaranteeing that. States fall in line with Washington or they go to court, or, in the 19th century, they get burned down. The plowing under of states rights was the first major political agenda of the Republican party. It was a pretty good idea. A whole nation of different nations each expressing some extreme of the unified baseline was just waiting to fall apart or be welded together. Lincoln welded it together, the first Republican president. He burned half the country down.
He also campaigned on a platform of unity, togetherness. I kept thinking of that back in '04. George Bush Jr. said he was a uniter, not a divider. Remember that? Lincoln said the same kind of thing, and burned half the country down.
After Lincoln there's that whole list of bearded Ohioans that ran the country - they're almost interchangeable, all of them Republicans, all of them... Well - can you name them? Any of them? Between Lincoln and the first Roosevelt? Somewhere along the line these guys got... Well there are many things to say about those administrations, but I think, and probably a lot of people do too -that the GOP really didn't express much of a position or a solid identity until it dealt with Modernity and the new urban centers that came to dominate the US in the 20th century.
In the 20's - that's when the GOP that we can understand and recognize came into being. Hoover, Coolidge, Harding - these are the elections where the Republicans began to identify themselves as anti-. Anti hyphen. Equality? Temperance? Sufferage? Kind of falling away. Temperance and prohibition were still big Republican ideas in the 20's, but then the other big idea was one that we're all now familiar with, that we're all now confronted by, though it is sometimes camoflauged. That concept is White Supremacy.
There's no plausible argument against the role of white supremacy being one of the binding components of the Republican ethos. Back in the 20's the Republicans enacted immigration regulations - thereby doing away with the greater power of the KKK. Since a great part of the KKK's organizational power was rooted in the fear of immigrants and Catholics - when the Republican government conceded to the essential component of the KKK's platform and set quotas for immigration - then the purpose of the KKK vanished.
This isn't to say that the Democrats were any good in the 20's either. The solid south, american aparteid - that's real stuff, real shitty stuff. What's weird though - is those elections in the 20's - think of the big one in '28. Catholic urbanite Al Smith runs the Democratic ticket - based on what? Urban equality and southern segregation? It's a crazy combination, and no wonder Hoover took the Presidency. When's the last time Massachusetts and Mississippi went the same way on a presidential election? (Yeah, I know, plenty of times, but McGovern Carried Mass, and Thurmond and Wallace carried MS - that's what I'm getting to.) Because here is the Deal. Black subjugation is sometimes allied to white supremacy - but the thing is- they don't always go together. That's weird right? Someone was saying to me that it's weird to them how over just one or two generations all the different eurpoean and latin (and heck, middle-eastern) immigrants have assimilated into the mainstream of american culture, but that after all this time Black folks have not. And I thought - well - it's probably because hating black people is one of the main aspects of mainstream american culture. Which... well I can't endorse mainstream American culture, I won't, I said that. But that's not the same as white supremacy. See- white, black - they're laughable constructions - no one with any bit of... I dunno, even genealogical knowledge, let alone someone who knows who Mendel is would tell you that these are true ideas. White, Black, races - it's just some rubbish that was invented. Invented by the self described white-race to create a global hegemony actually. Because this is the essential component of what it is to be conservative. The very idea of the West, of Western Civilization - it's... it's folly, constructed on lies. The drawing of lines between Plato and Aquinas and Luther and Locke - that's just... It's the most disingenuous breed of falsehood, but it's a canon constructed to enshrine a narrowly defined group of persons in a postion of hierarchical dominion.
If you go to school that story is told to you, without irony, without even a question of its spurious origination. No, it's canon and it is taught as canon. Jesus and Aristotle, DaVinci and Shakespeare, Jefferson and Rousseau - they're all part of a long lineage of connected ideas that led ot a civilization of morally superior people - white people. It's a ficiton, sure! But compelling to some. If we create our myths, we'll create them to make ourselves feel better and our forbears to look good. The myth of white people is that everything is theirs and they're the culmination of something that has been building. Forever.
History has a precedent for it - the Romans said they came from the greeks, the greeks said they came from the Egyptians - and none of it was true - but you get that justification - history. Ford - crazy old Ford, who almost ran against Hoover in '28 - he said History was bunk, because it is. Because it's a kind of mythology constructed to enshrine contemporary ideas (you know what - if you're a scholar of history, if you are, you know I love you - I am too, know what you're doing, you're doing good work - but... come on. you know what I'm talking about).
The problem with this system, this looking back and staking a claim over everything great that has ever happened ever and then saying "White People" - the problem there is that when you look aroudn at the people, your people - Americans, let us say, you're gonna be kind of disappointed. Now if you start building up your mythology and tying your social order to this cherry-picked lineage, you're liable to end up with wildly incoherent thoughts, ideas like the City on the Hill and the Last Best Hope and American Exceptionalism. Because you're going to see yourself as the inheritor of some long line of precedents that have nothing at all to do with reality. You know how the Romans declined for a few hundred years and then set up shop in Constantinople? And that was the second Rome? You know what the third Rome was? Moscow. The Muscovites thought that they were the inheritors of the Roman traditions, from when Brutus stabbed Tarquin the Proud right down to Princess Anastasia. It wasn't true, but it was believed, because when your society is predicated on basic ideas of survival and competition, you're maybe going to want for something a little more - let's say profound. So you end up with the Exceptional America. That's a pretty crazy idea, a pretty lousy one - to my mind. I mean, hey, I like it here, I like it a lot, I dig being an American all day long, but to put that burden on us all, to say that we're more than just a country full of people trying to get by and make somehting of ourselves- that brings us into some bad territory. Because we're not a whole lot different than any other country. Heck, every other country also speaks up about how they're different and their own historical legacy and traditions. They're also trapped by their own made up history cinto pursuing pointless adventures and reckless, catastrophic agendas - because - hey, traditions!
Now Republicans - they sometimes take that kind of talk more seriously than others, and they sometimes get more or less motivated by the other American tradition of shitting on Black people. Shitting on Black people is important because you can't have equality among the various tribal coalitions of white people without there being black people to shit upon. LBJ is the one that pushed segregation into the GOP's platform, he's the one that made integration a Democratic mission and let the Republicans, who'd previously outldawed slavery and put to death the idea of states' rights move into a new direction. When I was a kid Ronald Reagan was president and he sold this message with some amount of smarm - I won't say charisma because I personally don't see what people saw in him, but he carried 49 states so who am I to argue? Anyhow, he told tales about how black people were living it up on the white-man's dime, and that took him far. Perfectly capturing the shit on Black People component of the Republicna platform, and that got him 8 years. There's more to it, of course, the Supply Side, the exercise of the Monroe doctrine - etc... a lot went on. I'm not trying to be obtuse or fatuous or reductive, well a little reductive - but to my thesis - you have Reagan, pretty much selling, in very coded form, the rightness of shitting on Black People. Then you have Bush - George Bush Jr. The whole Project for the New American Century that's the White Supremacy plank. These concepts of exceptionalism, superiority, and moral superiority - you remember, I don't have to tell you.
Of course that whole position tended to chafe. When people started to see what it cost to spread the gospel of white supremacy throughout th world, when we started to realize what the bills were going to look like when we'd finally christinaized the infidel and defeated the Turk? When we'd all grown finally to realize that Dick Cheney was no latter day Charles "The Hammer" Martel? Well - then we gave in. Nobody cared what John McCain had to say, nobody ever had. That guy was trash and we all knew it. He'd done some things, worthwhile things, and then he'd betrayed his wife for money, and then he brought on some crazy-eyed lady from Alaska who really seemed to like the sound of her own voice and th idea of being famous - and nobody wanted to give him any money, and nobody really wanted to vote for them, and so we had Barack Obama. Now, he was tricky, he skated in and won the nomination that was Hillary C's - hers to lose and she lost it. So we got Barack Obama, a decent sort, maybe. Not the worst guy to ever hold the position, maybe one of the better ones, probably riding along in the middle of the road with Truman and one of the Adams, maybe Wilson, not a Buchanan but not a Lincoln either. So we have him. But we're told, now, by the GOP - that the world will end. And this is a lot like Chicken Little meets the boy who cried wolf. How many times will the world end? John of Patmos wrote his apocalypse in the 2nd century Anno Domini but we're all still waiting right? Waiting for that other shoe to drop. Waiting for the end of the world. And wouldn't you know it- here you've got Barack Obama, who's at the confluence of the two competing themes in what it is to be a Republican - White Supremacy and Shitting on Black People. They're complimentary, but I think, while allied, they've always been separate issues, campaign-wise. They're certainly related, certainly, but there's a nuance and a difference and in my life it's been one, or the other - except for now - and now it's both and now it's probably the ugiest, worst thing that I have seen in politics.
