Maybe This Time?

New York magazine contributor Alex Carp asked Frank Rich if American democracy is at a crossroads. Frank responded with another question: "Before the murder of George Floyd, the nation’s prevailing political question was, Can Trump be beaten in November? It has now been supplanted by an existential question: Can this country even hold itself together and limp through a long hot summer to Election Day?

But you could also say that likening this year to any other is to miss the larger point about the perilous state of the American experiment. The intractable issue of race in this country has been a festering cancer each and every year of its existence, even when it seems to go into remission-- whether the “victory” over America’s original sin be marked by the Emancipation Proclamation, the legislative triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, or the election of the first African-American president. It’s only human to want to believe that history moves forward in our own lifetimes, and that we can cite milestones we’ve witnessed with our own eyes to measure that progress. But history is bigger than all of us, and from the perspective of its wide lens, America is still a young country, perennially stuck in a nightmarish Groundhog Day since its birth.

Take a small example from 1967. After urban riots left 43 dead in Detroit and 26 in Newark. Lyndon Johnson, the president who fought tirelessly to redress the nation’s racial and economic inequities, created a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate what had happened. The Kerner Commission, named after the Illinois governor who chaired it, produced a voluminous report that was published and promptly ignored as the country melted-down in 1968. Its 600-plus pages in my old paperback edition can be reduced to a single finding on page eight: The No. 1 cause of the unrest was “Police Practices,” which resulted in “a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a ‘double standard’ of justice and protection – one for Negroes and one for whites.”

It was late in 1967, as the Kerner commission was reaching this conclusion, that the police chief of Miami, Walter Headley, responded to his city’s unrest by declaring “war” on criminals, vowing to go after them with shotguns and dogs, killing them if need be: “I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he said. The coinage was echoed by the white supremacist third party candidate of 1968, the Alabama governor George Wallace, who would win five Southern states and come close to throwing the tight presidential election into the House of Representatives.

It was, of course, Headley’s message that Trump revived in his tweet last weekend-- though in Trump’s case, it turned out that he was willing to inflict violent punishment even on those who are not looting. He and his attorney general Bill Barr unleashed rubber bullets and gas on peaceful protestors, including clergy, to clear the stage for the photo op in which he held up an upside-down Bible that had been carried to St. John’s Church by his daughter in a $1,540 Max Mara handbag. This religious tableau was carried out by the President with an all-white cadre that included the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff. Soon the internet was flooded with photoshopped images of Hitler staging a similar Bible-toting photo op, and within 48 hours even Jim Mattis, the esteemed retired General and former Trump Secretary of Defense, released a statement likening his former boss’s divisive rhetoric to the Fuhrer’s.

Most Vichy Republicans in Washington are remaining silent even so-- unless you count the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who did his part to uphold Walter Headley’s legacy by calling for American troops to go to war against their own citizens to restore order. Unlike Trump, he took the trouble to pretty up Headley’s words a bit by fashioning them into an Op-Ed piece that The Times saw fit to publish-- on grounds redolent of Facebook-- despite its bloodthirsty tenor and its inclusion of a discredited Antifa conspiracy theory to justify its call for martial law.

No one should be surprised that the latest public lynching of a black American by the police-- and almost literally a lynching, with a cop’s knee substituting for the rope-- led to this conflagration. We’ve been there too many times before. Feckless liberals who did little or nothing as police abuses piled up on their watch, whether Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota or Bill de Blasio in New York, have zero excuse.

The legions of Republicans in public office who stand idly by as Trump and his MAGA claque of racists occupy the White House are indistinguishable from their forebears-- whether Democrats of the Jim Crow era, or their successors, the Republicans who took up the segregationist mantle from the Dixiecrats once Barry Goldwater ran for president in opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964. They can’t pretend now that they didn’t know Trump’s intentions from the start. Barely a month after his Inaugural address decrying “American carnage,” his attorney general, Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, started to dismantle Justice department programs monitoring rogue police departments. “We’re going to try to pull back on this, and I don’t think it’s wrong or mean or insensitive to civil rights or human rights,” he said in February 2017. Just five months later Trump gave an address to uniformed police in Long Island in which he asked that they “please don’t be too nice” when manhandling criminal suspects.

We’ve got American carnage now, all right. What happens next? In some ways, 2020 looks more like 1868 than 1968. That was the year when the racist president Andrew Johnson, who’d inherited the White House after Lincoln’s assassination, narrowly escaped conviction at his Impeachment trial. In the ensuing presidential race, the Republican party cleansed itself by nominating Ulysses Grant. The racial animus of the Democrats’ ticket was defined by the vice presidential candidate, Francis Blair. As the historian Richard White writes in The Republic for Which It Stands, he “promised to use the army to restore ‘white people’ to power in the South” by nulling the new state governments controlled by what he called the “semi-barbarous race of blacks” who had been empowered by the Reconstruction Act of a year earlier.

“The election of 1868 in the South was one of the most violent in American history,” White writes, a “reign of terror” targeting black voters. In Florida, for instance, bands of white men armed with guns kept blacks from voting. It was “the last presidential contest to center on white supremacy,” wrote the historian Eric Foner in his definitive account of the period, Reconstruction. The Democrats’ incendiary campaign raised “the specter of a second Civil War.”

Grant triumphed. America was spared that second Civil War, albeit without eradicating the systemic toxins that have deprived black citizens of their lives, their rights, and economic equality ever since. Now we have another election that is centered on white supremacy, with a president and a major political party, abetted by the John Roberts Supreme Court, determined to do anything possible to block what Trump calls “the black people” from access to the one peaceful method for going forward, the ballot box.

“There is no such thing as rock bottom,” wrote George Will this week. “So, assume the worst is yet to come.” What form will that take? We know by now that 40 percent of the public and, George Will notwithstanding, 99 percent of Republican leaders and financial backers will remain loyal to Trump no matter what. We know that none of them complained when their voters, who define “liberty” as their right to spread new lethal waves of COVID-19 with impunity, carried assault weapons into state capitols. We know that Trump pointedly vowed yet again to “protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights” in his brief Rose Garden address ostensibly deploring George Floyd’s murder before marching to St. John’s church on Monday.

You don’t need to be woke, only awake, to see what’s going on here and to ask once again, more desperately than ever, why Trump’s toadies in Washington continue to do nothing as our country teeters toward the abyss.

Robin Wilt is the progressive Democrat running for Congress in the Rochester, NY district. This morning, she told me that there has been " widespread unrest in Rochester and Monroe County as protesters take to the streets to assert that Black Lives Matter and protest the unjust slaying of George Floyd, and so many before him, at the hands of police. A local author made the connection between the most recent protests and the 1964 rebellion in Rochester to assert the civil rights of African Americans, driving through the same neighborhoods in which the ’64 unrest occurred and noting that poverty still plagues the area. Unfortunately, the disparities for which the ’64 freedom fighters sought redress persist, with the area ranking among the most impoverished in the nation, and the Congressional District ranking the second-worst place to live for Black Americans in the nation. Of note, it was in these blighted neighborhoods that police disproportionately focused their attention during the curfew and State of Emergency imposed by the Mayor and County Executive. Although racial segregation and generational systemic bias continue to produce disparate outcomes in the region, the tenor of the latest protests is decidedly different from the 1964 protests. The cry for change is multicultural and involves people from across the entirety of the district unified in the clamor for justice. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated for our communities in stark terms that we are only as strong as the most vulnerable among us. The silence of our leaders, like my opponent, is evidence of his complicity with the status quo, and this time, he cannot hide. Our movement for substantive change is taking over."




In her Slate column this week, Why This Time Is Different, Dahlia Lithwick noted that what's happening in the streets now might actually accomplish something. "It’s probably not a coincidence," she wrote, "that the legal words spiraling through the ether today are either in Latin or just plain archaic: posse comitatus, Insurrection Act, 'no quarter' orders. This is not the nomenclature of the Trump era, which has tended to coalesce around such concepts as 'Stupid Watergate' or 'Cheeto in Chief.' This is the language of the founding era, of the Civil War, of revolution and wartime. And that’s because, as much as President Donald Trump may believe that people have taken to the streets-- in the midst of a lethal pandemic-- to protest him and his policies, the very opposite is true. These protests we are seeing are not specific to Donald Trump. Yes, they are complicated and multifaceted, seeded in some cases with white supremacist agitators and gratuitous police violence that is enabled and cheered by Donald Trump. But these protests are at bottom about the original sin of slavery, inequality, and police powers used in their service.

For years now I have been asking what it would take to have Americans on the streets under Trump, and for years I have attended well-meaning marches, with ironic signs amid well-meaning, mostly white liberals, that received little attention and changed nothing. Those marches were important, they served as warnings and democratic markers, and they kept many of us sane. But I now see that I was wrong about why people take to the streets, because those were Trump protests, and Trump doesn’t matter.

The paradox of the Trump presidency is and has always been that Trump is tiny, far too tiny to matter, and also that he is at the epicenter of everything. The central koan of the Trump era was always How did someone so small come to matter so much? And because “don’t pay attention” doesn’t work when the guy you’re meant to be ignoring has the nuclear codes, it was a loop from which we couldn’t extricate ourselves. So long as we believed that Trump was the cause of the problem, we were doomed to our civil outings around Foley Square, as the police stood mildly by, and guys sold quirky anti-Trump buttons from pushcarts.

But Trump was never the cause of the problem; he is the result of the problem. As Bryan Stevenson explains (for the thousandth time), there is not one single thing about the death of George Floyd that is remarkable or new. Not the killing in plain sight, not the complicity of the officers on site, and not the fact that it was captured on video. “Everything we are seeing is a symptom of a larger disease,” Stevenson says. “We have never honestly addressed all the damage that was done during the two and a half centuries that we enslaved black people. The great evil of American slavery wasn’t the involuntary servitude; it was the fiction that black people aren’t as good as white people, and aren’t the equals of white people, and are less evolved, less human, less capable, less worthy, less deserving than white people.” The killings of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud Arbery all could have happened in the Obama administration. Killings did happen then. The fact that the current president has praised Nazis and given succor to white supremacists didn’t cause this week’s mass protests; it merely coincides with them.

Because Donald Trump is so laugh-out-loud absurd, so vain and fussy and so lacking in substance, protesting him was never quite serious. It was important, yes, and the policies he has enacted do real harm to real people, harm that should be loudly denounced. But these protests always had a bit of a street festival quality to them: Look at the silly carnival barker and laugh at his bad spelling and his bad hair and his poor captive wife. Even as he was stealing migrant children from their parents and locking them in iceboxes, the fundamental stupidity of the president was still center stage. But even these protests, often featuring tens of thousands of protesters, didn’t break through precisely because the predominantly white people in them could fist-bump the cops as we politely and whimsically strolled by.

Most Americans intuitively understand that Donald Trump, with his failures of cognition or compassion and his incomplete theory of mind, was a symptom and not a cause of America’s original, founding sin. Protesting a symptom occupied us for a while. But protesting the sin itself is what has finally brought people to the streets, in a sustained and combustible way. Why bother protesting a reality show when reality itself is a daily nightmare? Long before the advent of the Donald Trump presidency, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues declared America “over” its racism problem. Long before the advent of the Trump presidency, police departments were hiding evidence of wrongdoing and exonerating and protecting the worst malefactors.

Now, law enforcement is armed with military weapons, military leaders are parading around D.C. in uniform, the free press is being punched, and protesters are being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed by state actors who insist there was no tear gas or pepper spray. Just as the coronavirus again instructed us all on how America’s racism savages black lives and black livelihoods disproportionally, these protests are a master class in the same. The brokenness is centuries in the making.

Things are very bad, and they will get worse. They will get worse because Donald Trump’s weakness and vanity have made space for authoritarianism to creep in all around him, at a politicized Justice Department, and with a complicit GOP. The nation is shuddering to a crisis because Trump has enabled and allowed every single element of authoritarian rule to flower around him, and because even if you just play a strongman on TV, a compliant police state can happily comply to make it reality. This too was invisible to many of us, amid the preening and the clowning, but it has certainly happened.

Do you remember William Perry? Not "The Refrigerator-- the Pentagon guy who worked for Carter, Reagan and-- as Secretary of Defense-- Clinton. Today he teaches at Stanford and is a member in good standing of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex. This was, in part, his statement on Thursday about Trump's attempted coup this week:

I support the right of protesters to demonstrate peacefully, and deplore the suggestion that our military should be used to suppress them. The U.S. military is a powerful force that has served our nation well, in war and in peace. But it was never intended to be used against American citizens, and it was never intended to be used for partisan political purposes.

It is both wrong and dangerous to threaten to deploy American soldiers against American citizens unless there is a complete breakdown of law and order in a state and the governor requests that assistance. And yet President Trump has repeatedly threatened to do just that against demonstrators, the vast majority of whom are peacefully exercising their constitutional rights for the redress of very real grievances. Worse, his defense secretary has suggested that our troops, in carrying out this threat, would “dominate the battlespace.” America is not a “battlespace.” And the people he threatens to dominate are American citizens, not enemy combatants.

When I was Secretary of Defense I made it a priority to avoid any suggestion of support for partisan political actions, and I assured that the president did not use any military facilities to support his political ends. But on Monday Secretary Esper walked with the president to St. John’s Church in an implicit show of support, after peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Park had been forcibly subdued and dispersed with tear gas under the orders of Attorney General Barr. With a Bible conspicuously in his hand, the president sought to establish himself as the “law and order” president in the upcoming political campaign.

This was wrong on so many levels, but the one I personally relate to is the blatant use of the Secretary of Defense as an implicit supporter of this reprehensible political act. Secretary Esper has said that he was not aware of what the president was about to do. But he was shamelessly exploited and his office degraded. He should speak out forthrightly that he will not support using the office of the Secretary of Defense to promote partisan political actions. President Trump demands that members of his administration swear their loyalty to him, and those who demur do not stay long. But in the United States, those who serve in the government and the military swear an oath to support the Constitution, not any individual. That is what makes our nation great.