Listening to an analysis of right wing media coverage of the Super Bowl halftime show, I could hear the anxiety masked as dismissiveness in the voice of the mostly white commentators.
Racism is only one aspect of the authoritarian power play, but it's fundamental. From the 17th Century onward, slave owners and their neighbors feared slave uprisings. Later, in the 19th Century, the first super-wealthy industrial capitalists feared labor uprisings. In both cases, the power class used deadly force to attempt to break the will of the oppressed.
Frederick Douglass is quoted as saying that "power never concedes anything without a demand." Power is never willingly surrendered. Sometimes this calls for armed conflict. Much of the time, however, social and political change succeed because the holders of power succumb to some other kind of pressure, whether it's conscience, or economics, or they simply extend themselves too far and fall flat.
In the case of women's suffrage, holders of power became allies and willingly elevated the political status of women. The people who could vote had to be convinced to surrender their undiluted power. In the case of Black civil rights, holders of power in the white supremacist system had to become allies and vote for the change. Sure, there was violence associated with both movements, but it was only one factor in convincing the holders of power to give up some of it. The whole organism of resistance and change combined many elements. The same goes for the progress that labor made, before the ownership class started exploiting philosophical wedges to pit workers against each other over cultural issues. Power was conceded.
This time around, the conflict is not between a single oppressed category and a relatively homogeneous majority. The argument started back around 1980: are we a country that takes care of everyone, or one that lavishly rewards ruthless scrambling for personal wealth? Are we a united nation that recognizes the value of all contributors, all the way down the economic continuum, or one that values humans purely monetarily? Right now, a lot of people who could quiet down and make the best of it are still talking a good game about resistance and change. How long will they last when they figure out what change really means?
Make no mistake, the regime in power now is very very bad for the country and the world. But the antidote to them is for people who might be rather comfortable right now to be permanently, willingly less comfortable as part of the rebalancing of social opportunity and respect. These people are mostly white or think of themselves as white. They're well off under the current economic system, when the current economic system is largely responsible for the rise of the movement that is destroying the country. They were winners because they pleased their masters or entrepreneurially exploited the inequalities to enrich themselves, even if they faithfully voted Democratic.
Change is coming no matter what. It could be the widespread death and misery that will follow full implementation of right wing social engineering, or it could be the reordering of the economy to improve circumstances at the bottom very much to the detriment of the top and a chunk of the middle. There is no third option. The status quo is dead. We can't get back to it and we shouldn't want to. This can be done without rewriting our Constitution, although we will need an amendment or two. The fundamentals are sound as long as the full scope of We the People isn't limited to the originalist concept of We the White, Male Property Owners.
The good news is that the system that improves life at the bottom also frees up everyone along the entire spectrum to have more of their own time to spend as they wish. A well-ordered economy using the lavish talent pool available if we quit being obsessively competitive could easily have shorter work days and weeks and still get everything done that needs to be done. It will require examining our goals and the costs associated with them. It will mean the death of go-go, unrestrained consumerist capitalism. And good riddance.
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