When I 'met' Bill Svelmoe, the articulate pundit, via his "questions" for Amy Comey Barrett, I had a notion that this guy's take as an historian and reformed Evangelical might be a course in understanding the whys and wherefores of the State of the Nation: Our United States of America.
I don't edit Bill's essays. He has a lot to say. His take on the current State of the Nation is eloquent and I like to share his thoughts here because, for me, it's an easier read than the cramped format of Facebook.
Svelmoe is a college professor. For me he's a bit verbose, but he is scattering seeds of critical thinking that may have been missed in our Civics classes. Today's essay is posted with his permission. It's a civics lesson in a nutshell. Thanks, Bill.
///
Let it be recorded that, in the midst of a pandemic and a struggling economy, while Democrats worked hard to craft and pass a bill to rush desperately needed assistance to their fellow Americans, Republicans stalled, bitched, refused to provide even one single affirmative vote. A party that happily shoveled trillions in tax cuts to the wealthy in the last administration now finds trillions to the truly needy a bridge too far.
Republicans have managed to turn Scrooge and the Grinch into RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).
This rejection of aid to their own base was all done, of course, while their media allies at FOX kept the base distracted by fuming about Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head.
Keep the two fronts of the war in your mind. There is a method to Republican madness.
Indeed it is an age-old method, one that has worked virtually flawlessly throughout American history. This strategy is no new development.
This nation was founded on an argument about class. The United States was the first nation in human history created to be about the interests of ordinary people. Ordinary people believed what Jefferson wrote, that all “men” are created equal. Jefferson didn’t buy it for a second, but regular folk did.
Before the war ended, the wealthy were complaining that their servants were treating them with less respect. When George Robert Twelves Hewes intervened to keep a rich man from beating a boy, the wealthy Bostonian berated him for interfering with a gentleman and split his head open with his staff. The mob that gathered spoke for all of us when it dragged the rich man from his home and administered a catechism lesson in tar and feathers. No more taking our cues from those born with a silver spoon.
That everyone knew that class was at the center of the new nation was demonstrated in the arguments over ratification of the Constitution. The nation was flying in the face of all of human history, and it would not be an easy path forward. A hierarchical model of society was being wrenched into a more horizontal model, and hierarchies do not give up their privilege easily.
And so a Constitution we revere today on a biblical level was soundly rejected by most Americans when it first appeared. They understood perfectly well that the elites in an enclosed room had not designed a government with the interests of regular folk at heart. It was a government “of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.” When Madison and Hamilton spoke of the necessity to protect the interests of “the minority” against the power of majorities in a democratic republic, regular folk knew exactly who they were talking about. They knew the Senate, where regular folk got no vote, and a president with veto power, were specifically designed to protect the minority of wealthy elites against the votes of the rabble in the House. Only Madison’s last minute Bill of Rights let the final vote to ratify the Constitution squeak by in the affirmative.
So, if you had looked into the future and predicted that a nation founded on an argument about class would, in less than 100 years, fight a great Civil War, you would expect that war to be over the unfinished business of class.
Instead that war was only tangentially about class. Instead we fought over race, and poor whites joined their wealthy overlords to ensure that poor blacks were kept at least one peg lower on the ladder than themselves. Very few of those southern soldiers had slaves. Very few had any stake in the slave economy. By rights poor whites and black slaves should have made common cause. Instead poor southern whites rushed to enlist to keep black folk down.
Not for the first time did wealthy elites manipulate regular folk into fighting their wars, protecting their plantations, enlarging their stock portfolios.
One of the great legacies of the Civil War is how successful the wealthy and powerful have been at enlisting us, the little people, into avid support of their dreams, their concerns, their accumulation of wealth. The South was a pyramid social structure, and today we are an even sharper pyramid. What Lincoln called for at Gettysburg, a new birth of freedom for all, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” has been largely lost.
Why? We, regular folk, have allowed ourselves to be co-opted from what should be the American project by all sorts of side cultural issues and resentments that keep us at each other’s throats instead of focusing on creating the kind of equality the Civil War was fought to ensure. The kind of equality the nation was founded to create. The kind of equality the Declaration suggested was possible.
We have always answered the question, who won the Civil War, through geography. The North won. The South lost.
But perhaps a better answer would be that, in the long run, the wealthy and powerful, those at the top of the pyramid, won, and we, regular folk, North and South, lost. And what is most galling is that we keep on making war upon each other, the weak upon the weak, brother upon brother, sister upon sister, while the powerful reap the benefits of our distraction.
And our distractions are so pathetic. Our leaders give no more thought to creating them than the length of a tweet. And we march to battle over Christmas, protesting athletes, who marries whom, wedding cakes, masks, and, yes, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head.
Meanwhile our politicians line their pockets with the treasure of the nation, while voting to withhold aid from the very base that marches off to battle, and perhaps dies, in the wars the wealthy and powerful have instigated …
Bill Svelmoe
March 6, 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment