Justice v. Populism

In case you missed it, at yesterday's House Judiciary Committee hearing on police violence, Rep. Cedric Richmond ate Matt Gaetz's lunch. It was not a fair fight. Gaetz tried to defend the myth that racism is a thing of the past and Richmond had none of it. The take down was a thing of beauty. Gaetz hides his race blindness in the populism of conservatism, thinking that this is justice. It is not.

Conservatives have been playing the populist v. justice compromise for a long time. The barbarian overthrow of Rome and the resulting dark ages was populism run amok - with the strong dominating the week until feudalism was created to reign in the roaming soldiers, Many consider this period patriarchal, but it may have been more classism then sexism as elite women still had a voice up until the dawn of the 18th Century. (Some of these strong women were among my ancestors, both in the colonies and in England).

After watching a snippet of the Judiciary Hearing last night, I turned over to C-SPAN3 and a lecture by Professor Mary Beth Norton on women in early America, where she talked about her work on this subject. I bought two of the three on Kindle and will send paperbacks to Catie for her birthday as part of her radical education. In Separated by Their Sex, Dr. Norton found that after the Glorious Revolution, a concerted effort was made to tear down high class women.

My take on this is that radicalizing men in for the capitalist era required silencing strong women. For those who are unfamiliar with the history of conservatism, the capitalist class always pits groups against each other so that no one attacks them. See Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind.

Modern patriarchy is not as old as we thought. Indeed, women with property could vote until Independence in New England. 75 years later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony organized the Seneca Falls Convention and included abolition on their agenda. Sadly, in another example of not yet, Frederick Douglass won the day in not adding women to the 15th Amendment. Of course, with the end of the Grant Administration, all civil rights for people of color were put on hold for another 75 year.

Women had to wait until the 19th Amendment. About then, the right-wing Democrats went after the Socialists who wanted control of the workplace. FDR threw socialism under the bus to get social democracy. After the War, Joe McCarthy went after the Reds again, showing that alcoholism and conservatism can go hand in hand well. The backlash against the White ideal (including the cultural censorship led by the Catholic Church) gave us civil rights and women's rights. It also saw the end of very progressive taxation in 1965, as JFK's tax cuts took effect.

The GOP took over the mantle of racism, sexism, militarism, law and order and tax and budget cutting. The tax cuts and tax reform of the 1980s were capitalism ascendant. It seems to have no other agenda than capitalism and bigoted populism. Trump is the natural result. Nixon was a setback for them, although some see it as their golden age and still think Nixon got a raw deal.  McCarthyism became Bircherism, Goldwater, Nixon Now, the Reagan Revolution, Judicial Watch, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Tea Party and now MAGA. Same people, different front groups.

In fighting back, we must be united. Black Lives and the mentally ill must both be priorities in police defunding. This week, the LGBTQIA rights to employment (and probably everything else where sex is a protected classification) were won. It is time for the Beloved Community to unite to put teeth in civil rights laws, starting with funding civil rights enforcement properly and changing police culture. Eventually, we must move civil rights from tort law to criminal law.

We must also remember the revolution. Not the limited political revolution, which retains capitalism while building a nice cage for workers. We must instead move to cooperation in all things (work, consumption, finance, human services), leaving capitalism - both private and state - on the ash heap of history. We really can do it all.