Sunday, November 09, 2003
Confederate Flap: Stand Firm, Howard Dean
Good piece here from the Los Angeles Times via Alternet on the Confederate flag flap, "from the great-granddaughter of slaves--and slave owners. A civil rights lawyer, no less, who knows full well the toxic pain and pride tangled in all symbols of the slavocracy known as Dixie." Dean was clumsy, but he's right, Constance Rice writes. And she observes that what Dean and the Democrats need to figure out is how to create what Martin Luther King called "a grand alliance" between poor blacks and poor whites to fight back against the corporate plutocracy the Republicans have created.
Yes, that's exactly what needs to happen. Will it? I hope so. Would I bet on it? Not today. As I read the piece, (and another one on Alternet by Michael Moore on Aaron McGruder's comic strip The Boondocks, which talks about the explosiveness of social class as a political issue if somebody could find a way to harness it) I flashed back to my study of the Populist movement, which, in the 1880s and 1890s, attempted to unite rural Americans to strike back against unfair economic conditions and currency policy that favored big business at the expense of small farmers. As their power grew in the Midwest and South, the movement's leaders tried to draw in urban factory workers, reasoning that they were just as oppressed by corporate oligarchs as small farmers and sharecroppers, and had just as much reason to fight.
I have always thought that the tale of the Populists would make a hell of a movie, because it would have so many colorful characters and the stirring drama of an underdog's near miss--the Populists damn near did what they set out to do, and at the height of the most plutocratic era our country has ever known, the Gilded Age. (The best history of it is The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn.) In 1892, their candidate for president pulled 8.5 percent of the national vote and they won seats in Congress and even a governorship or two. In 1894, they elected several more representatives to Congress. But by 1896, the movement had collapsed from the inside.
The collapse of the Populists is a complicated tale and many factors contributed. But it's worth noting that the point at which the Populists ultimately failed was where they needed to make the precise linkage Dr. King would speak of nearly 70 years later. Many poor white voters in the North couldn't make themselves abandon the Party of Lincoln, couldn't stop "voting as they shot" in the Civil War, to make common cause with a party containing ex-Democrats and Southerners, many of whom were black. And many poor white Southerners were unwilling to abandon the Democratic Party, which had done so much to preserve the status of poor whites versus free blacks in the South since Reconstruction. The various groups couldn't recognize their common interests at that moment in history because of their focus on issues of the past that were less important (but still potent). Which is, more or less, what Howard Dean is trying to say by suggesting that guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks should be voting Democratic, but they don't.
A friend who grew up in the South tells me that to create this grand alliance, Dean and the Democrats might start by talking about job creation, improving schools, sensible gun control, and "not sending bubbas to fight for nothin'." That's enough for a start, maybe. It's hard to see that alone making it happen.
Good piece here from the Los Angeles Times via Alternet on the Confederate flag flap, "from the great-granddaughter of slaves--and slave owners. A civil rights lawyer, no less, who knows full well the toxic pain and pride tangled in all symbols of the slavocracy known as Dixie." Dean was clumsy, but he's right, Constance Rice writes. And she observes that what Dean and the Democrats need to figure out is how to create what Martin Luther King called "a grand alliance" between poor blacks and poor whites to fight back against the corporate plutocracy the Republicans have created.
Yes, that's exactly what needs to happen. Will it? I hope so. Would I bet on it? Not today. As I read the piece, (and another one on Alternet by Michael Moore on Aaron McGruder's comic strip The Boondocks, which talks about the explosiveness of social class as a political issue if somebody could find a way to harness it) I flashed back to my study of the Populist movement, which, in the 1880s and 1890s, attempted to unite rural Americans to strike back against unfair economic conditions and currency policy that favored big business at the expense of small farmers. As their power grew in the Midwest and South, the movement's leaders tried to draw in urban factory workers, reasoning that they were just as oppressed by corporate oligarchs as small farmers and sharecroppers, and had just as much reason to fight.
I have always thought that the tale of the Populists would make a hell of a movie, because it would have so many colorful characters and the stirring drama of an underdog's near miss--the Populists damn near did what they set out to do, and at the height of the most plutocratic era our country has ever known, the Gilded Age. (The best history of it is The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn.) In 1892, their candidate for president pulled 8.5 percent of the national vote and they won seats in Congress and even a governorship or two. In 1894, they elected several more representatives to Congress. But by 1896, the movement had collapsed from the inside.
The collapse of the Populists is a complicated tale and many factors contributed. But it's worth noting that the point at which the Populists ultimately failed was where they needed to make the precise linkage Dr. King would speak of nearly 70 years later. Many poor white voters in the North couldn't make themselves abandon the Party of Lincoln, couldn't stop "voting as they shot" in the Civil War, to make common cause with a party containing ex-Democrats and Southerners, many of whom were black. And many poor white Southerners were unwilling to abandon the Democratic Party, which had done so much to preserve the status of poor whites versus free blacks in the South since Reconstruction. The various groups couldn't recognize their common interests at that moment in history because of their focus on issues of the past that were less important (but still potent). Which is, more or less, what Howard Dean is trying to say by suggesting that guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks should be voting Democratic, but they don't.
A friend who grew up in the South tells me that to create this grand alliance, Dean and the Democrats might start by talking about job creation, improving schools, sensible gun control, and "not sending bubbas to fight for nothin'." That's enough for a start, maybe. It's hard to see that alone making it happen.
