The United States entered
the 20th century with impressive concrete
achievements in political and economic reform
derived from the ideological ferment of the final
two decades of the 19th century. Still it has
failed to this day to address, much less resolve,
several of the fundamental contradictions and
problems that have plagued the young nation from
the very beginning.
The Civil War brought
about the abolition of slavery, but racial
discrimination has continued unabated in US
society and politics, keeping the nation divided
along race lines, largely into two
separate economies, two
segregated societies and two antagonistic
political cultures. Most equal opportunity among
the races has been in the form of tokenism. Among
those denied equal opportunity because of their
race, the common complaint about tokenism is that
the mainstream only lets in people who look like
us, but not those who think like us.
The race issue The race issue is
now threatening to torpedo the near-certain
nomination of Barack Obama, born in the US of an
African father and a white American mother, as
Democratic candidate in the 2008 presidential
campaign. The controversy on the seemingly
shocking rhetoric of Reverent Jeremiah Wright,
long-time mentor of a young Obama, and recently
retired pastor of the Trinity United Church of
Christ in Chicago, shows not the pastor’s views as
extremist as much as how clueless the white
mainstream is about the centuries-long anger and
frustration the majority of its black brethren are
still laboring under.
Wright is not
anti-US nor is he against what the nation's ideals
stand for; he is condemning those policies and
practices that the US government and society have
regularly forced on African American citizens in
violation of the moral ideals of the nation. Can
any self-respecting American do less?
The
mainstream US press has focused, sensationally and
out of context, on Rev Wright "God damn America"
sermon. Readers can judge for themselves what
Wright actually said:
The [US] government gives them
[African Americans] the drugs, builds bigger
prisons [to incarcerate African Americans],
passes a three-strike law [against African
Americans] and then wants us to sing 'God Bless
America'. No, no, no, God damn America, that’s
in the Bible for killing innocent people ... God
damn America for treating our citizens as less
than human. God damn America for as long as she
acts like she is God and she is
supreme.
The test is less about Obama
as a viable bi-racial candidate for president for
being partially a product of the black political
culture as much as about whether the United States
can finally fulfill the national pledge of
allegiance required of every grade school children
of "one nation under God, indivisible, with
liberty and justice for all". The test is whether
the US can accept Obama as president without
molding him as another empty token of racial
harmony.
There is no need for Obama to
deny reality or to reject justifiable black rage
against racial injustice. Obama’s message of
moving on towards a coming together of all races
is right on. The issue of racial and religious
harmony is of critical geopolitical importance
because the president of the United States is also
a world leader in a world where over 70% of the
population is non-white and 65% non-Christian.
The economic Iissue The Civil
War also destroyed agrarianism to firmly establish
Federalism with policies that support economic
centralization at the expense of economic
democracy. By the end of the 19th century,
populism had been co-opted into the two-party
political system as progressive factions in both
major parties. The subsequent period is known in
history as the Progressive Era, led by Theodore
Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson
in national politics, three leaders of distinctly
different ideologies.
Continuing the
populist movement, early 20th-century progressive
reformers campaigned against what they viewed as
two related prime evils: growth of political
corruption and the disturbing trend of government
on all levels to grant, in the name of the
national interest, special privileges and
protection to organized wealth at the expense of
popular wealth. Progressives professed a populist
faith in the wisdom of the common people and
insisted that good government must safeguard the
common interest of all in the nation and respond
to the voices of the common people. They worked to
eliminate the control of government by political
bosses and machines that were in the employ of
narrow special interests, and to re-impose high
standards of integrity and honesty along with
transparency and accountability to make holders of
public office more responsive to the general
electorate.
Specifically, progressives
were alarmed by the unhampered growth of
monopolies that routinely resorted to unjust
exploitation of farmers and workers. They wanted
government to promote the general welfare of all
the people and to protect small businesses from
predatory assault by big business.
Progressivism then and now A
century later, progressives in 2008 stand for
practically all the same reform objectives as
their comrades in 1908, even as the specifics and
context have changed with time.
Progressives in 1908 were conservative
reformers rather than revolutionaries. They wanted
to restore to the nation the early founding ideals
of democratic government, individual liberty, the
rule of law, and the protection of private
property rights from predatory invasion by big
business and big finance. What progressives wanted
was a new set of legislative mandates and
regulatory tools needed to preserve these founding
national ideals that had been increasingly
corrupted by arrogant big business and big-finance
mentality in the industrial age. In other words,
they wanted socio-political progress to keep pace
with techno-economic progress.
Progressives in 1908 did not merely want a
rich economy at any cost; they wanted a rich
economy not exclusively benefiting the rich elite
and created not by making the majority poor, but
by preserving fair economic equity among all the
people to share fairly the fruits of progress.
They did not merely want a strong nation; they
wanted a strong nation the security of which did
not depend on an outsized military; but on being a
"shining city upon a hill", an early self-image
increasingly receding from reality a century after
the nation’s founding.
"The shining city
upon a hill" was an image first invoked decades
before the birth of the United States by John
Winthrop (1587-1649), who was elected 12 times as
governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony of
Britain, to guide his new Pilgrim homeland as a
communal, non-capitalistic society, drawing from
the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus had
addressed a large crowd:
You are the light of the world. A
city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men
light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a
stand, and it gives light to all in the house.
Let your light so shine before men, that they
may see your good works and give glory to your
Father who is in heaven." (The Sermon on the
Mount, Matthew 5:14-16)
Republican
president Ronald Reagan, echoing previous
references by Democratic president-elect John F
Kennedy in 1961 and unsuccessful Democratic
presidential candidate Walter Mondale in 1984,
invoked Winthrop’s image in his farewell speech to
the nation on January 11, 1989:
The past few days when I’ve been at
that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the
"shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes
from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the
America he imagined. What he imagined was
important because he was an early Pilgrim, an
early freedom man. He journeyed here on what
today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like
the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home
that would be free.
Continuing with
his sugarcoated Disneyland version of history,
Reagan continued:
I've spoken of the shining city all
my political life, but I don’t know if I ever
quite communicated what I saw when I said it.
But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on
rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept,
God-blessed, and teeming with people of all
kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with
free ports that hummed with commerce and
creativity, and if there had to be city walls,
the walls had doors and the doors were open to
anyone with the will and the heart to get here.
That’s how I saw it and see it
still.
The open doors to the shining
city on the hill Reagan had in mind were meant for
Soviet dissidents in the context of the Cold War.
Pathetically, the current battle cry on the war
against "illegal" immigrants by Reaganites is to
close all the doors of the wall of the shining
city upon a hill. The doors are closed for all
practical purposes even for legal immigrants who
routinely have to wait several years to get
naturalized because of a large bureaucratic
backlog. Multinational corporations are
complaining that they have to relocate high-paying
jobs overseas to skirt US immigration restrictions
on highly skilled foreign workers.
The
freedom myth Reagan’s "early freedom man"
Winthrop, who incidentally was a British colonial
and not a US citizen since he died 172 years
before the founding of the United States in 1776,
and who, because of his long tenure as governor of
the colony, began to assume the undemocratic role
of a feudal lord, did not have much good to say
about democracy and much less about liberty.
Winthrop saw to the hanging of Mary Latham
and James Britton in 1644, both found in adultery,
notwithstanding that he also admitted to an
illicit encounter with a Native American woman at
an abandoned settlement not far from his home.
Many volunteers searched for him all night during
his unexplained disappearance fearing for the
worst, only to find him the next morning not far
from home with a fantastic story to excuse his
awkward absence from home and family.
New
York governor Eliot Spitzer, who brought about
much progressive reform on Wall Street to protect
small investors, and in the process created more
enemies in big finance than he could handle, did
not manage to command the same moralistic
elasticity four and a half centuries later on a
similar matter of personal transgression, even
though much of the rest of the world has moved far
beyond Puritan morality.
Winthrop, like
his Puritan brethren, strove to establish a
Christian community that held rigid uniform
doctrinal beliefs that brooked zero tolerance for
dissidents, leading to his presiding in 1638 over
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