The Dangers of Collegiate Athlete Worship
by David
Yale Quarterback Patrick Witt aka Captain Douche
As a Harvard alum, I suppose I could take some obscene pleasure in the recent revelations about Yale quarterback Patrick Witt. You know, the guy who chose to play in the Harvard-Yale game instead of attend his Rhodes Scholarship interview? Yalies celebrated his upholding team and school loyalty over personal prestige–even as Harvard crushed Yale in The Game, 45-7. Except, according to this New York Times story, Witt rescinded his Rhodes application not because of the scheduling conflict, but because of a sexual assault allegation issued against him by a fellow student.
This was already a bizarre tale. Witt’s coach at Yale, Tom Williams, had lied about having been a Rhodes Scholarship candidate himself to suggest that he was in a prime position to advise his star quarterback. Then we find out that the campus paper, the Yale Daily News, had known about the sexual assault charges and been sitting on the story for months.
The thing is, I don’t take any pleasure in this at all (nor should anyone). Instead, we should lament the perils of athlete worship, which has reared its ugly head recently, most notably in the rioting of Penn State students over the firing of the late and disgraced Joe Paterno, protector of alleged child-rapist Jerry Sandusky.
I don’t know if Witt is guilty of sexual assault. But as the NY Times piece indicates from his prior arrests, he has a clear record of extreme douchebaggery. What we have here is a problem of the over-emphasis of collegiate athletics, and particularly the worship of male college athletes. These are people whose already inflated egos are fed from the moment they arrive on campus. This problem can lead to an equally inflated sense of privilege. Sometimes, this privilege just creates more and bigger douchebags. But other times, it can create atmosphere where real crimes go unnoticed, unreported, or unpunished.
The Greats
by Bronwen
This week I lectured on ‘The First World War and Africa’. My students seemed to really enjoy the topic, which isn’t surprising; in a course (African History since 1800) where so much is new to first year undergraduates, the First World War is a topic they know quite 
a lot about and for which they have an extensive frame of reference. This is because the First World War is constantly talked about here. Between high school course work on the causes of World War One, and the pervasive cultural memory – enhanced by Downton Abbey and recent BBC miniseries like Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong – students arrive at university with a pretty solid foundation in World War One history.
Obviously, the First World War was pretty devastating to Britain. Not only did 2.19 per cent of the population die in the war, but over a million and a half servicemen were wounded as well. Its social and economic impacts in the British and French colonies in Africa were similarly devastating. Contrast this with America’s 0.13 per cent casualty rate (as a percentage of the population) and its easy to see why this is a topic that has a much greater, more lasting emotional impact here. World War I was the event that catapulted Britain – like it or not – into the modern age. Add to that the historiographical line that has made its way down to the classroom level – the futility and pointlessness of the war – and it becomes clear that all my student essays this term are going to be about the impact of the Great War on Africa.
I think all of this is interesting because, although I feel like I had a really excellent high school history education, and a fantastic undergraduate history education, I arrived in Britain knowing only a few key facts about the First World War: that it had been the first major conflict in which the flame-thrower was used; it gave rise to Egyptian nationalism; and it was a major influence on Hemingway. My husband was pretty dismayed when I explained that in a lot of American schools, World War I is taught as basically the pre-World War II: the same actors, basically; the same plot-line from an American perspective (we come in late and end the war); and pretty much important (from our perspective) because it lines up the causes of the Second World War. Obviously this is not the case everywhere in America, and I’m sure that if you chose to focus on this in college, there’s loads of good teaching out there. But it is possible to come through the American education system without too much emphasis on this conflict.
Despite my explanation, I’m not sure he believed me until we (finally) watched the first season of Boardwalk Empire. Talking about it afterward, we were commenting that if this had been a story set in Britain at the same time (1920), it would have been all about the war, the changes in 
society after the war, the crumbling British institutions, etc that are all the fodder for Downton drama [in fact, the first episode of season 2 of Downton drove me nuts a little because they just wouldn't shut up about the war! even though it was supposed to have been going on for a couple of years by that point!]. Instead, the characters who fought in the war are outsiders, are really not supposed to bring it up, and are even shunned a little for having participated (especially for having volunteered).
In fact, the big cultural shared moment that pushed the US into modernity in the way most like World War I for Americans is the Great Depression, an event that really didn’t affect Britain to the same degree. For both countries, there’s a heyday for the wealthy before an almost hubristic crash, which brings about more equality and more social programs. A recent piece in the FT Magazine by Gillian Tett points out that the reality of economic austerity is much closer for those in Britain than for those in the US precisely because our big cultural shared memory of austerity in America is over a generation ago, while the memory of the pain Britain felt in the 1970s is still relatively fresh.
Perhaps, following on from Gillian Tett, this all helps to explain both countries’ recent behavior, then. If the First World War is such a dominant theme in British life and education, maybe that explains their unwillingness to get sucked into the entangling alliances of European politics and finance. And if the Great Depression is a strong cultural memory in America, perhaps the idea of austerity and life before safety nets, and the pre-modernity it implies, makes the total return to Gilded Age politics distasteful enough to prevent too many cuts. Here’s hoping, at least.
Devastating Cuts to Public Higher Education
By Peter
Education is increasingly become a central domain over which class conflict is being fought in the 21st century. Will corporate “Education Reform” succeed in privatizing our nation’s high schools, turning them into union-free charter-schools? Will there be any affordable public colleges in ten years? Will the burden of education be borne by society? Or by individuals who must go massively into debt to finance their own education? Is high-quality education a social good that benefits the whole community? Or is it a commodity, a form of individual social capital that each person should finance themselves through debt?
In this light we see the devastating cuts to public higher education:
Total state support for higher education declined 7.6 percent from the 2011 to the 2012 fiscal years, according to an annual report from the Grapevine Project, at Illinois State University, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers. As a whole, state spending on higher education—after being supported by the recovery-act money for three budget years—is now nearly 4 percent lower than it was in the 2007 fiscal year. Twenty-nine states appropriated less for colleges this year than they did five years ago.
As public colleges that were formerly free or cheap increasingly rely on donations and tuition to fix their budgets the line between public and private college further erodes. Increasingly the only difference between, say UCLA, the public school, and USC, the private school, is that UCLA gets a nominal portion of their budget from the state. At both schools, of course, students can only even come close to affording tuition through back-door Federal subsidies, via Pell Grants and various student loan deals. The average student starts life burdened with $25,000 in student loan debt (and going up every year). Its very plausible for a student to attend a public university (like say $22,000 a year UConn) and have almost $100,000 of debt when they are 21.
All of which brings out the generational warrior in me. If I hear another old white Fox News watching person talking about how he had no problem making it, back when tuition was negligible and good jobs were aplently, I’m going to fucking lose it.
The Deep Roots of Conservative Victimhood
The roots go much deeper.
By Julian
Last week, Newt Gingrich reinvigorated his presidential campaign with a fiery appeal to conservative victimhood. Questions about his past infidelities, Gingrich explained, reflected the liberal media’s efforts to destroy the conservative movement. “I’m tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” he thundered. Cue the multiple standing ovations from the rapt audience of South Carolina conservatives. Never mind the fact that Gingrich had helped build his career by denouncing Bill Clinton’s commitment to “family values” while he himself engaged in extra-marital affairs. For those in this audience, all that mattered was that they had found a politician willing to voice their grievances against the all-powerful liberal establishment.
The right-wing populism that Gingrich so effectively marshaled at last week’s debate is often contrasted with a more reasonable brand of conservative thinking that supposedly flourished in a past golden age. In this declension narrative, touted by Mark Lilla in his controversial review of Corey Robin’s new book, The Reactionary Mind, a sophisticated conservative intellectual tradition has recently descended into the swamplands of populist demagoguery. As Lilla explains, “Most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites.”
The problem with this view, as others have pointed out, is that American conservatives have been bashing the “liberal elite” now for going on six decades. It’s part of their DNA. William Buckley Jr., the most influential intellectual in the postwar conservative movement, might have rejected the conspiracy theorists at the John Birch Society, but he also supported massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, wrote a book defending Senator McCarthy, and praised the fascist government in Franco’s Spain. While he could be witty and charming, Buckley was also merciless in attacking a liberal elite that he believed had come to dominate (and enervate) American society since the New Deal.
In fact, Buckley launched his career in 1951 with a book that claims liberals had used “academic freedom” as a tool to monopolize higher education and suppress conservative thought. During a period in which over 100 professors lost their jobs because of the Second Red Scare, Buckley asserts that conservatives were academia’s true victims. In God and Man at Yale he also calls for the elimination of peer review and tenure in favor of a system that would allow those who pay for colleges and universities—typically parents and alumni—to determine their ideological content: “For in the last analysis, academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.” Universities needed to be run by the people who paid for them, not a band of unaccountable academics. It’s hard to imagine a critique more populist in character.
To be fair, right-wing appeals to populism explain why conservative intellectuals helped inspire a mass movement rather than a club for disenchanted, antediluvian curmudgeons. Still it’s worth remembering that intellectuals such as Buckley gained fame and notoriety by providing learned support for causes such as McCarthyism, Massive Resistance, and the firing of liberal faculty at Ivy League Universities. They provide a blueprint for today’s Newt Gingrichs, not an antidote.
Ron Paul and the Civil War
By Peter
Ta- Nehisi Coates has been doing invaluable work picking apart Ron Paul’s pro-confederate musings. Paul, if you listen to the speech, argues that the true cause of the Civil War was less slavery (though he magnanimously concedes that slavery did play an “important issue”), and more the desire by Lincoln and the Republicans to enhance state power and to get rid of states’ rights.
There is a lot thats insane about this view. But what’s most remarkable is the conspiratorial tone. Listen to the conscious agency that Paul attributes to Lincoln. Federal power, in this case, did not develop out of the necessities of war, but rather was the conscious goal all along. The abolitionists/Republicans “saw this opportunity and used the issue of slavery to precipitate the war and literally cancel out the whole concept of individual choice.” Slavery was a “rabbling-rousing ” issue. Yes, Lincoln just wanted to share in the glow of the notoriously popular abolitionists. Rather than just buy out the slave owners as the British had, the Republicans seized on the slavery issue in order to fight an unnecessary war under the cover of which they could centralize the government, pass a tariff (odd that they hadn’t needed to kill 600,000 people in order to get the other tariffs passed), and issue the hated fiat currency. Lincoln, then, was basically a nineteenth century Senator Palpatine.
Then, consider the extent of the treachery involved. Hundreds of newspaper editors were convinced to spend the 1850s writing about slavery while ignoring their true desire: an increase in Federal Power. An entire political party had to be developed which pretended to be formed out of outrage over the spread of slavery and pretended to want “free soil, free labor, and free men,” while really devoted to the destruction of liberty. Think of all the Jeffersonians deluded into joining the Republican Party. And then think of how clever it was to convince all the Southerners to draft secession statements in which they listed slavery, not State’s Rights, as the preeminent cause of secession. And finally extraordinary duplicity of the Fireeaters who attacked Federal Forts in order to provide the pretext for the North to invade. A conspiracy to pretend that everyone was fighting over slavery that was so vast and monstrous that an entire society was in on the secret.
Like most libertarian fantasies there is a small element of truth to what Paul is saying. The power of the Federal Government did rise, of course, during the Civil War, though the vast majority of the power was an unintended by product of modern war (War is, after all, the health of the state). Those things that were part of the Republican platform of 1860– like the Homestead Act or the tariffs– were unquestionably constitutional. More to the point, the major changes to the fundamental structure of the US Government were the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the 14th. But does Paul think there is something unconstitutional about passing a Constitutional amendment? Isn’t that what strict constructionists would want us to do?
And there is a plausible case to be made– much as the Beards did– that whatever people thought they were fighting over, the true out world-historical import of the war was that it represented a victory for the Northern industrial and merchant class over the agrarian South. But this is only an argument that can be made with some sort of “ruse of reason,” type logic, where the actors are unaware of the ultimate consequences of their actions. Paul, who I suspect isn’t much of a Hegelian, is making a much stronger argument: that the war was created in order to centralize federal power, rather than centralization being a side effect of the war.
Which brings us to the final point: Paul isn’t just some crackpot amateur historian. He’s a politician who, at least theoretically, is running for President. Giving an address about how slave owners should have been paid for their “property,” while standing in front of a Confederate Flag is sending a pretty direct message about who he imagines his supporters to be. Even if there is a theoretically race-neutral pro-Confederate argument to be made (and I don’t think there is), the simple act of choosing to present oneself that way in 2012, knowing how offensive people find the Confederate Flag, illustrates perfectly the unstated racial assumptions Paul’s ideology.
Which is all another reason why progressives should be cautious about Ron Paul. Yes, he’s anti-war and pro-civil liberties. But these positions develop from an ideological perspective that historically defines “Freedom” as defending the prerogatives of landed white men. He does not come from the broad tradition of the Left that sees emancipation as a goal, but rather a particular type of right-wing libertarianism that sees the protection of inherited privileges as the goal. The dislike of the Federal Government cannot be separated from the historical fact that the Federal Government has been, vis a vis the Southern elite at least, the friend of Southern blacks. Even listen to Paul, while talking about the Declaration of Independence, smoothly define “consent of the people,” to “consent of the states,” as if it would be impossible for a state to not be representative of its citizens.
Tony Judt Retrospective
by David
Tony Judt (1948-2010)
While Peter was participating in (and ably chronicling) the Occupy Chicago’s protest of the American Economic Association’s (AEA) annual conference, I stayed behind at the American Historical Association’s (AHA) annual meeting to attend a panel commemorating the late historian Tony Judt.
The similarity and contrast between the two events is revealing. Before succumbing to ALS in 2010, Judt became an intellectual leader to the left, most notably in his moving 2009 NYU address, “What Is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy,” later expanded into a book called Ill Fares the Land. Had he lived, I think Tony Judt would have found a lot to admire in the broader Occupy movement and in this specific protest, for as Peter notes, he was an ardent critic of “economism,” the American cult of efficiency, and he howled against the decline of the welfare state and rising rates of inequality.
On the other hand, a central theme of the Judt retrospective, and of the latter half of Judt’s life, was his militant, strident anti-Marxism. All four panelists, John Dunn (Judt’s professor at King’s College), Marci Shore (eastern European historian at Yale), Peter Gordon (European intellectual historian at Harvard and my undergrad professor), and Timothy Snyder (also an eastern European historian at Yale) made this a major focus on their talks, particularly the last three presenters. Judt would have had no use for the Marxist and anarchist platitudes of the protesters.
Mrs G goes to Parliament
by Bronwen
On a recent visit to the Houses of Parliament, I was struck by the differences in tone between British and American politicians. Although there’s still the same rivalry and competition, and certainly in these times of ‘austerity budgets’, a feeling that the stakes are high, there also seems to be more tempered feeling. And in a totally admirable way, a sense of a government of novices. Of course, this is not true, since as we know from Yes, Minister, government is really run by long-serving civil servants here. But on the political side, the majority of MPs seem to have come to Parliament after another career, Cinncinatus-style, to serve their constituencies. Despite political differences, they can all have a drink together in the members’ bar. They shout at each other in debates and Prime Minister’s Questions, but at the end of the day, they’re all trying to run a country. Meanwhile, American politics seems to celebrate the fact that our politicians refuse to even talk civilly to one another.
As my friends here like to point out, the difference is also one of tone: in America, politics and the running of the country is a serious, dramatic business (captured in The West Wing) and in Britain, it’s the butt of jokes (Yes, Minister; The Thick of It). I feel like this was probably the other way around in the early nineteenth century, maybe particularly under Jackson. Or maybe that’s just me trying to hold onto an image of a scrappy, underdog America (and an evil British empire?) when in so many ways they have reversed.
But I can’t really do justice to the differences in the system, and how their perceived by both sides, as well as Armando Iannucci can:
Obama’s Chief of Staff
By Peter
I don’t have a ton to say about Obama’s choice of Chief of Staff. I’ve written about the lovely Jack Lew before. When he was NYU’s Vice President he oversaw busting our union. I have lower wages, higher health care costs, and have seen a number of other terrible policies put into place in the years since Lew left. A union would not have fixed all these, but it would have at least let us fight back. In These Times has a good article about the situation:
In 2004, Jacob Lew was the first hire by newly-appointed New York University President John Sexton. Lew served as NYU’s chief operating officer and executive vice president for the following two years, during which NYU withdrew recognition from its graduate student employees union and punished some participants in the ensuing strike. UAW Local 2110 President Maida Rosenstein, whose local includes GSOC, says Lew was “the point person” in “representing management’s position” against the union. (Full disclosure: the UAW is an In These Times sponsor)
“Every single ruthless tactic from the playbook of union-busting was followed at NYU,” says NYU Professor Andrew Ross. Ross co-edited The University Against Itself, an anthology on the strike.
Of course, Lew, having only destroyed one union and only made a couple of million off subprime mortgages, probably has a better background than a good chunk of the other Obama appointees.
Occupy Economics?: A Report Back from the Nerdiest Protest I’ve ever been to.
By Peter
I just got back from Chicago, where, along with attending the American Historical Association, I participated in a series of protests held by Occupy Chicago, along with CACHE (Coalition Against Corporatization of Higher Education) that targeted the American Economics Association (AEA). Its not everyday that the worlds of street protests and academic conferences blend so well. But then again, part of the point was to “puncture the bubble,” that academic economists live in.
The protesters gave out “alternative” awards for Most Conflict of Interests (Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard), Intellectual Narrowness (Harvard’s Greg Mankiw), and top prize, the “Toxic Waste of Space Award” (Harvard/Obama administration’s Larry Summers). Other than a brief yelling match that one protester got in with a professor, the tone was light and fun. Protesters “accepted” awards acting as Mankiw, Hubbard, and Summers (who reminded us how much smarter he was than us) and served “Rahmon” noodles, in honor of the Chicagoans impoverished by Rahm Emmanuel’s neoliberal policies. Overall a lot of fun, albeit fun that might have gone over the heads of the random shoppers on Michigan Ave. 
According to protesters: “The bankrupt ideologies of ‘neo-liberalism’–trickle-down theory, austerity, deregulation, privatization–have all been proven empirically disastrous. Those ideas still enjoy a monopoly in the mainstream debate due to the massive scale of academic subsidizing by the bought AEA and it’s cohorts in the 1%.” Watch a great interview with an organizer at the bottom of this post.
It just so happens the protests came at a time of particularly hot debate about the ideology of the economics profession. The recent release of the minutes of the 2006 Federal Reserve Meetings well illustrates—along with Timothy Geithner’s utterly pathetic sycophancy towards Alan Greenspan—that the High Priests were asleep on the job, completely unaware of the looming housing crisis. Said one professor quoted by the New York Times:
“It’s embarrassing for the Fed,” said Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “You see an awareness that the housing market is starting to crumble, and you see a lack of awareness of the connection between the housing market and financial markets.”
“It’s also embarrassing for economics,” he continued. “My strong guess is that if we had a transcript of any other economist, there would be at least as much fodder.”
Not the discipline’s finest moment, no doubt.
I have a longstanding hatred/fascination with the foundational logic taught in modern Economics courses: its technocratic imagination, its inability to question its own premises, its ahistorical logic (see Daniel Rodgers’ Age of Fracture, Chapter 2 for more on how society, power, and history dropped out of the Economics discipline), its inattention to moral consequences, its reductionism (like the horrid Freakonimics series, which thinks all aspects of human existence can be explained by their simplistic assumptions about human behavior), and its normative amorality (seriously, studies have shown that taking economics makes students less generous people).
And this is all important because Economics inhabits a unique disciplinary position. Part academic discipline, part incubators of elite policy makers, academics in no other departments transition so seamlessly from academia to government to Wall Street. Look at a figure like Larry Summers, who has (in the last five years alone!) inhabited leading roles in all three worlds. While taking money from Wall Street while producing intellectual material about Wall Street suggests casual corruption, the influence that economists, and what Tony Judt called economism (the tendency to think of all social problems in terms of the marketplace) has deep ramifications on our public policy. The very power of economists makes it more likely that they will be captured by elites. I think, then, it is fair to target the AEA, even if many, if not most, economists are actually innocent of any corruption. It matters to the public what economists talk about, much more so than whats going on in, say, the MLA.
A silver lining, though, to the economic collaspe might be a rethinking of some economic thought.
Writing about the great shift in Economics departments that occurred in the 1970s, as Samuelson, Galbraith, and the other Keynesians lost favor, Daniel Rodgers writes:
“The economic crisis of the 1970s was, in short, not merely a crisis in management. It was also, and at least as painfully, a crisis in ideas and intellectual authority. An extremely confident analytical system had failed to explain or make sense of the unexpected.”
The results, according to Rodgers, were that the profession increasingly moved towards a more neoclassical model and microeconomics prevailed over macroeconomics. Meanwhile, the logic of markets and economic thinking invaded other disciplines: rational choice theory in political science, the “law and economics” movement in law schools, etc… One hopes that our recent crisis and the inability of our policy elites to predict or solve the problem, will produce a similar paradigmatic shift. This time, though, hopefully it will be away from such apologias for capitalism.
So in that spirit, I wanted to highlight two interesting thinkers. The first, I saw over at Crooked Timber, where New School economist Sanjay Reddy gives a fabulous interview about the need to bring moral reasoning back into the study of Economics. Reddy argues against the notion that Economics is a value-neutral science, restoring an “evaluative framework” to the discipline. It is impossible, he argues, to come to purely technical solutions to most problems. In a sense, Reddy is asking that we take moral sides before we engage in economic debate. First, for instance, we say that a goal of policy should be to aid the poor, then we figure out ways to so.
This seems to fit well with an article in the latest issue of Jacobin magazine (also featuring an excellent piece by friend of the blog, Andrew Hartman), by Mike Beggs, calling for radicals to occupy economics. Begg’s article asks economists to be less technocratic, and more openly political in their ends. Beggs takes a middle ground (for radical intellectuals), acknowledging that “mainstream economics is both an ideological bastion of capitalism and a genuine social science.” A tool for understanding the world, it is also wrapped up in a set of assumptions that are not neutral, but that favor a free market approach to the world. Nevertheless, as Begg’s points out, the stereotype that many have of a discipline of Milton Friedmans is actually unfair. A wide swath of economists agree with the need for some government intervention, and, other than a few reactionaries in Chicago or George Mason, most also acknowledge the importance of Keynes. The problem, Beggs suggests, is “not that mainstream economics was delusional, or biased to the right, but that it was technocratic.” It presumed it could manage and control, rather than take sides in class warfare.
In the opening editorial of Jacobin, the editors declare that, as the rebellion of Occupy Wall Street spreads, “we are in the last throes of the era of Ezra Klein.” What they mean, I think, is that the tepid liberalism of the technocratic elite (poor Ezra has, a bit unfairly, become a symbol of this) says nothing to the fundamental message of the OWS movement: the restoration of politics—full throated politics—to our understanding of class and economics. Class will no longer be something discussed in dry studies by the Brooking Institute or in economics seminars, but in the chants and marches in the streets, as those without challenge those with. Millions of people simply standing up and rejected these “market-based” solutions that have been crammed down our throats, will do more to change the dialogue than any polite article or policy paper ever will.
Martin Luther King, Civil Rights, and Occupy Wall Street
by David
Occupy Wall Street is the Civil Rights Movement of our time. I’m not ashamed to say it. I don’t think it’s offensive or ahistorical. I don’t think it dishonours Martin Luther King’s name or legacy. In fact, I think the broader Occupy movement honours MLK, and he would have been a proud supporter of it.
When I refer to OWS, or the Occupy movement, what I mean is the fight against economic inequality. That’s economic inequality in America, and economic inequality throughout the world.
Right-wingers, conservatives, even libertarian racists like Ron Paul like to claim King’s mantle for themselves. Heck even Glenn Beck tried. They say that King was all about colour-blindess. Equality of opportunity. We were with MLK until 1965″ they say, but after that, it became about equality of condition, of entitlement, the road to socialism or serfdom and some-such doomsday dystopia.
Well that’s bullshit. I say that as a student of history. That’s just wrong. Watch the clip. MLK calls for a “radical redistribution of political and economic power.” He says: “If a man doesn’t have a job or income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness.” And of course: “all labour has dignity.” And “it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.”
Martin Luther King was a religious social democrat. He believed in social justice. In government assisting the poor. In supporting unions. He believed in REAL equal opportunity, which can only come about when healthcare, and education, and safety can be provided to all. He was the anti-Ayn Rand: he despised selfishness. You don’t believe me? Take Paul Krugman’s word for it. Or this awesome video by Jay Smooth.
MLK would have supported the Occupiers and the 99% movement
Some people still might think this my analogy ridiculous and offensive. African Americans under Jim Crow suffered real, horrific racial discrimination. The suffering of the so-called 99% cannot compare, and thus cannot justify civil disobedience. Well it’s true that Jim Crow was horrible, and that America has made a lot of progress since the 1960s, thanks to people like MLK. But the poor in this country still suffer greatly. Poor people of colour still suffer worse, fighting against unequal opportunity, an unfair and brutal police system and prison industrial complex, racism and xenophobia, a real lack of safety net, and an unfair financial and economic system that privileges the wealthy. On a global level, the gap between the haves and have-nots is even more terrifying, and the racial divide is even starker. So I think all that is worth blocking a few streets, or yelling outside some buildings peacefully, and striking, and rallying, and demanding justice.
Maybe that’s just me. Or maybe it’s millions of people around America and the world.
Now I’m not a religious person, and MLK was not a saint. Just because he said something doesn’t make it right. But his legacy and his lesson remain valuable. For MLK was also not a Marxist or an anarchist. He was the LEADER of a broad-based social movement. He was able to achieve real change by engaging the political process, and democratically uniting people with disparate views. This is important because individuals matter in history.
The radical activists and anarchists have done the world an incredible service by getting this movement started. But their views are often undemocratic and represent a fraction of a fraction of the 99% (remember half the country votes Republican, and the other half Democrat). We should keep protesting. But we should also engage the political process, both through the Democratic party, and external channels like the idealistic but pragmatic 99% Declaration plan to hold a National General Assembly on July 4, 2012, in Philadelphia. It’s time to find leaders, make a plan, and keep moving forward, to make sure Romney doesn’t win and that Obama doesn’t kowtow to Wall Street and the 1%.
Some cynics might also think I’m over-exaggerating the importance of OWS. “Hasn’t the movement already fizzled?” Well, no. People left and right are talking about inequality, in and outside of politics. More importantly, let’s try to have some historical perspective here. When people think about the American Civil Rights movement, sometimes they think it started in 1960s. Maybe the late 1950s. Maybe Brown v. Board in the 1954. Actually, historians like to refer to the “long Civil Rights movement.” Some people date this to the end of WW2. Or Asa Philip Randolph‘s attempt to lead a March on Washington in 1944. Or to the activism of the 1930s and 1940s, often led by socialists and social democrats and communists, linking race and class. Or Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Or the end of Reconstruction in 1876. Or the end of the Civil War in 1865. With the state of America’s hospitals, schools, and prisons, some people still don’t think it’s over.
I’m not going to rehearse those academic debates. But I am going to reiterate MLK’s oft-invoked quote: “the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” This is a long, slow process. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s not going to happen in November 2012, even if Obama is re-elected. It will take time. But we’ll get there. Let’s not let MLK’s dream die.
Peter Wirzbicki
(wotty)
David Weinfeld
nemo
luce
Bronwen Everill
