Even with all
that's going on, I'm still startled that on our pediatrics SOAPM
listserve, immigrants and children of immigrants are fearful, even
though they are here legally, but they are still afraid that they
will be rounded up. I understand the nervousness of immigrants, but
I'd say, if you're legal, you're safe, no if's and's or buts.
It's not Nazi Germany and it won't be. It's certainly a more
than nasty episode, but still, their nervousness is an index of how
serious our Trump insurgency problem is.
I read an
excellent book, How Democracies Die:
https://www.amazon.com/How-Democracies-Die-Steven-Levitsky-ebook/dp/B071L5C5HG/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1529322820&sr=1-1&keywords=how+democracies+die.
The authors detail the death of democracies in some other countries,
like Peru, and the steps taken by the dictators in achieving
non-democratic power, which are exactly the steps that Trump is
trying to take. They point out how norms are so important,
because not everything can be detailed in law, and how important it
is that contenders in the political fray respect the legitimacy of
opponents, rather than viewing them as enemies of the state. They
summarize their guidelines in the words “forbearance” – don't
do something just because it is not legally forbidden, but rather
respect tradition and reasonableness of the way things have been done
– and “respect.” Political opponents are not the enemies of
the state. These are very good and important observations.
But what
particularly caught my attention was a just a sentence or two. What
they said in a very short space was this: as a rule, no ethnic group
voluntarily gives up power. Just a small sentence or two, just a
small observation in a longer book, but to me, glowing and pulsating
like a thumb jammed in a car door.
Of course, I
thought, of course. Of course. I have been wrestling with this
myself. I have realized the severe lifelong deficiency of my
understanding of the pervasiveness and devastation of racism. While
in fact there it was staring me in the face: what has led America to
continue to be glued together, to respect the norms of democracy and
to respect others as opponents and not enemies? To a certain extent,
as America was predominantly white, what both parties could agree on
was that Blacks should remain oppressed. Even in Roosevelt's
America, when the President had the the task of delivering a decent
life to the working class, he had to give obeisance to southern
senators, as in exempting agricultural workers – Blacks in the
South – from labor laws. In very stark terms, part of the basic
deal that kept American democracy together was an agreement to let
racism thrive.
And of course, as
an American, I've been part of that. Case in point: when I was 19
years old I wrote a paper for my freshman English class that I
thought was wonderful (and still do.) The title was Mr. Basketball,
or Why I Hate Bob Cousy. It was a seminal paper in that, amazingly,
now, over 50 years later, my friends and I are still discussing and
arguing over its premise, which is that Bob Cousy was severely
overrated. This is important for basketball fans! There is an
amazing amount of assumptions and detail and statistics and history
for us to chew on, and spit out on occasion.
Maybe I was
right; I actually think I was, but it's debatable. But some years
ago I reflected on my exploration of why Cousy was so overestimated.
I thought then that Cousy, a rather short guard for the National
Basketball Association's Boston Celtics, was glorified precisely
because he was short, and fans could identify with him, David against
Goliath. I think he himself made that very point. I thought that
the fans' identification with him clouded their appreciation of the
real excellence of bigger and better and more effective and less
showboaty players. But here's what I realized as I reflected: at the
time, in 1960, it never crossed my mind to think the important
thought that Cousy was white, and that the league was just then
becoming increasingly Black. Talk about opportunities for
identification. Whiteness might trump shortness.
In other words,
while I was a nice Jewish liberal boy who would go on to become a
doctor, in 1960, I was oblivious to racism except in its most obvious
forms. Since then, even though I have done good things and thought
good things and certainly done my bit for racial justice personally,
I have had my eyes opened gradually and progressively to the depth
and severity and lethality of racism in America. It was only
recently that I realized that even my Black physician friends have
experienced being pulled over by police, and followed around stores
by security, for the obvious reason. I had no idea.
I could have been
more racially conscious at the time I wrote my great paper, since it
was written in the midst of the civil rights movement's beginning,
and predated civil rights legislation by just a couple of years. But
it predated by eight years Nixon's adoption of the Southern Strategy,
by 12 years Nixon's use of Donald Segretti's dirty electoral tricks,
and it predated by 28 years the Willie Horton ads that propelled
George Bush to the 41st Presidency. Political and social
movements take time, and so does social understanding.
And now we are
engaged in another civil political war that will test whether this
nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated to democracy, can
long endure. Ethnic groups do not easily give up dominance. When
faced with a choice between ethnic dominance and democracy, what does
one choose? From this point of view it is not surprising that a
dominant group would turn to voter suppression (time honored in the
South), to electoral tricks such as gerrymandering, to the infusion
of large amounts of money to capture cleverly local and state
governments just below the radar. It is not surprising that the
Other will be demonized, that possession of weapons will be lionized,
that mutual respect and norms and expectations and decency will be
jettisoned by agents of the historically dominant faction. It just
makes sense. Hypocrisies will be revealed. The contradictions of
the ideology of democracy and the actuality of its enactment will
become evident.
So, scales have
been lifted. But I have to say, as outrageous as the Trump
Administration the ICE brown shirts and the would-be thug friends of
the President are, as scary as this can be to those most vulnerable,
as best as I can see, we are not present at the destruction; rather,
we are present at the inflection. Democracy will not die here. At
heart, we are indeed a decent nation. Many have lost their way.
Christians are having their faith tested – do their sympathies lie
with the murdered church people of Charleston who forgive their
racist murderer, or the bigotry of Franklin Graham? In the end, I'll
put my money on decency.
Could it happen
here? I guess it could. But it won't. There's too much to live
for, there's too much good in the people, there's too much good
history and there's too much good memory in being proud of who we
are. There's too much music and sports and literature and food and
drink and fun and love and racial mixture, and acceptance. It's all
here. There's too much basketball, and football and the South and
the prejudiced and those out of the mainstream will just have to
catch up. We are not dying as a nation, we just have a fever.
In the end, we
will go the way of the NBA, which learned to accept not only African
Americans, but to glory in them, to bring in foreigners Black, white,
and Asian, from all corners, women as coaches, and to glory in them,
too. It is a glorious history, and I'm sure it will not stop here.
It just can't.
As goes the NBA,
so goes the nation.
Budd Shenkin
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