By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 6, 2023; see related articles from July 11, 2021, Media Keeps Portraying Democrats and Biden as a Mess, Ignoring Data Proving that Could Not Be Further from Truth and November 15, 2021, A BIG F**KING DEAL: Biden’s Infrastructure Bill in Historical Perspective. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request.

SILVER SPRING—It is time to acknowledge the historic greatness of the Biden Administration for what it is, and the performance the Democrats under Biden in the 2022 midterm elections is one of several strong examples of this greatness.

With the final seat of Congress decided by the Great State of Georgia after the December runoff victory of Rev. Raphael Warnock, who beat a walking public service announcement for football-related traumatic brain injury in the form of Herschel Walker (and far more emphatically than in November, by a percentage margin over three times greater), we can truly take stock of the historic overperformance of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party under his leadership.

Of course, a lot of this was about individual candidates.  And Biden has had an excellent partner in Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate (he doesn’t get enough credit) and has had an incredible ally in the House with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, certainly one of the best—one of the most effective and accomplished—speakers in U.S. history, perhaps the best.

Still, in our presidential system, midterm election performance has always been one of the major measures of how presidents are judged during their term and throughout American history: no matter what happens, it is always to a large extent a metric tied to the president’s performance and leadership as leader of his party (with only the exception of John Tyler simply not having a party by his only midterm in 1842-1843 after he inherited the presidency upon the death of Whig President William Henry Harrison, whose people did not vet Tyler enough to realize he was, well, not really a Whig).  Of course, the degree to which a midterm should reflect and does in the popular consciousness and amongst pundits and scholars can and does wax and wane due to a variety of factors and circumstances at the time, but it is there, an inescapable part of the equation of evaluating presidents.

I have already discussed in detail how legislatively and in terms of party unity in Congress, the Biden Administration in its first two years and the Democratic Party under Biden in the 117^th Congress are the most impressive since LBJ in the 1960s and, well, ever in U.S. history, respectively (in terms of party unity with the possible only exception of one Federalist Senate at the dawn of our republic).  And I have further explained how these very accomplishments are even more impressive in that they came in an era of far more division (the most divided in modern American history and with the smallest governing majorities), but here, after these midterms, we have even more hard data that places Biden’s and his party’s midterm election performance in proper historical perspective, confirming this performance is among the highest in American history, especially in the modern era.

How do I know this?  I have literally (to use a Bidenism) put together data on every president’s first midterm since the dawn of the republic, available in a full set of Excel spreadsheets I created, but I will cut and paste images of some of that data here, images you can zoom in on by clicking on them.  You can see the full data in a close-up image by clicking on images or on the link in this paragraph for the Excel version.  And if I may toot my own horn, I am pretty sure this is by far the most comprehensive presentation of data in table form of American presidents’ first midterm performances you can find anywhere (if you find a more detailed presentation do please let me know; it took me way longer that I had hoped to put this together).

Here, first, are all the first midterms for presidents from 1914 onward, as the House had the same number of seats—435—since then and also as 1914 was first midterm when every regular U.S. Senate election was determined by popular vote (as opposed to being selected by the state legislatures) with the implementation of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution; we shall call these midterms the midterm elections of the “modern era.”  Elections from this era, then, will be the most useful for comparison as the losses and gain are all from a House of the same size and the Senate’s size did not change very much, with all its races actually decided by popular elections.

This dataset includes presidents who came to power after a death (Truman in 1945 after FDR died), assassination (Teddy Roosevelt, or TR, in 1901 after McKinley was killed), or resignation (Ford after Nixon’s 1974 resignation) and had their first midterm without being elected; if applicable, in addition to the midterms for their first partial terms, I have also included when applicable their first midterms after being actually elected president as well as after their inherited midterms (Roosevelt in 1906 after 1902, Truman in 1950 after 1946; Ford never won a presidential election as he was defeated by Carter in 1976), as comparisons can be difficult and a midterm after inheriting the presidency and a midterm after actually being elected are not exactly apples and oranges (inherited term data is in italics in the tables).

This data is even more telling if we arrange these modern-era presidents in a ranking based on seats won or lost in Congress, starting with the House.

Among modern presidencies spanning more than a century, Joe Biden is tied for 5^th in terms of the best absolute performance for his party in the House of Representatives (a loss of 9 seats): only 4 modern presidents over 4 midterms—FDR and his Democrats gaining 9 seats in 1934, George W. Bush and his Republicans gaining 8 seats in 2002, JFK and his Democrats losing 4 in 1962, and George H. W. Bush and his Republicans losing 8 in 1990—did better.

It is also quite telling that in the entirety of the modern era, only 2 presidents have actually gained seats at all in the House during their first midterms: presidents almost always have their party lose seats.

Biden ties with Calvin Coolidge’s and his Republicans’ performance from 1926, only losing 9 seats (though in Biden’s case, this meant Democrats lost control of the House, while Coolidge kept control of the House for his Republicans, so I put ol’ Calvin above Joe on the tie order).  This puts Biden over 13 other presidents and 14 first midterms (per my explanation above, Truman gets 2 in our accounting) in terms their first post-elected and/or post-inherited midterms.

But not all elections are equal, and I account for some extraordinary circumstances in the notes section.  In this spirit, if we consider the conditions of each election, Biden’s specific ranking is unique and far more impressive: FDR got to have his first midterm not far from the nadir of the Great Depression; George W. Bush was riding a high-level of unity and support after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and during the early phase of the war in Afghanistan; Kennedy had literally just days earlier resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis, averting nuclear war and ending a major standoff with the Soviet Union, saving the world (partnering with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev) from destruction; and George H. W. Bush had his midterm while he was presiding over a Cold War victory (Germany was reunified just a month before the election) and during the Gulf War, Bush’s handling of which enjoyed widespread support.

But while each of those four presidents enjoyed considerable winds at their backs, Biden in 2022 had been dealing with decades-high inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the worst levels of partisanship since the Civil War and Reconstruction that are tied to an ongoing Trumpist insurrection seeking to destroy American democracy.

In other words, while those “scoring” “better” by having their parties fare better in the House than Biden saw massive levels of broad, historic support in the face of various domestic and geopolitical consensus moments—with history on their side in historic ways—Biden had the wind blowing in his face and was able still to perform as well as he did and close enough to those with far better circumstances.  In that light, Biden and his Democrats’ performance is perhaps the most remarkable performance considering the difficulties they faced and those other four presidents and their parties did not.

The biggest winner in the modern era was FDR in 1934 with a gain of 9 seats and the biggest loser Warren Harding in 1922 losing a massive 77 seats!

Biden’s modern House first midterm ranking: 5^th (4 presidents and midterms ahead, 13 presidents and 14 midterms behind, tied with 1) out of 19 presidents and 20 first midterms

Let’s also look at the Senate-side of things.

In the Senate, too, Biden is also 5^th in the modern era, tied with Richard Nixon with a gain of 1 seat each, ahead of 12 other presidents over 13 relevant midterms (Truman, again, is counted twice).  With the exception of Reagan, who oversaw Senate Republicans hold steady, the rest of those presidents all had their parties lose seats.  Only 5 other presidents also gained seats:  FDR and his Democrats (+9), JFK and his Democrats (+4), Woodrow Wilson and his Democrats (+3), and George W. Bush and Donald Trump each with their Republicans (+2; not in line with House results for Trump as he and his Republicans lost 42 House seats that same year in 2018, as the Senate can easily be out of sync with the House, especially considering all 435 House seats are up for election every two years while only a third of Senate seats are at stake in any given election).  Keeping in mind the challenging circumstances in which Biden is governing, remember also that 3 of the 5 “scoring” ahead of Biden faced very favorable circumstances, as discussed, also leading to relatively quite strong House results for them, as discussed.  Thus, Biden and Democrats’ performance Senate-side is also quite remarkable.  In fact, their performance in 2022 is the first time since 1934 a president’s party successfully defended every Senate seat up for election that they held before the election, a real history-making series of victories, indeed.

The champ is FDR with +9 seats in 1934, the biggest loser Truman with -11 in 1946 (sorry, Harry).

Biden’s modern Senate first midterm ranking: 5^th (5 presidents ahead, 12 presidents and 13 midterms behind, tied with 1) out of 19 presidents and 20 first midterms

If you want to get really meta, you can go all the way back to George Washington’s first midterm.

Which I did.

Here we are using “premodern” to refer to all midterms from Washington’s first in 1790/1791 and up through the last elections in the early twentieth century (1910) before all Senate midterm elections were conducted as popular votes, à la the Seventeenth Amendment.

And if we rank everyone from 1790 to 2022, first with the House?

Here, Biden still stands out, tied for 10^th with premodern John Quincy Adams in addition to the modern Coolidge.  Included among those surpassing him are some of greats from a much earlier period in American history where there was, relatively speaking, a lot more unity during particular midterm years: Jefferson comes in 1^st well into his “Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800”, with James Monroe and James Madison tied for 2^nd (all with their Democratic-Republican Party and the era of the latter two ending up being so unified their time in part was referred to as the “Era of Good Feelings” and was essentially one-party ruling with an overwhelming majority).  You also have giants like Teddy Roosevelt and his Republicans in 1902 after his first midterm (5^th place) after he took over after the assassination of William McKinley, and you have our first two presidents—George Washington in 1790 and John Adams in 1798 with their Federalists—tied for 6^th.

Only 12 presidents and 12 first midterms rank higher than Biden out of 45 individuals to hold the office (yes, Biden is the 46^th president, but Grover Cleveland was both the 22^nd and 24^th president since he singularly won non-consecutive terms—and let’s hope Trump does not repeat this feat—so there are only 45 people in question, and less because of exclusions and deaths, which I will discuss below), but of those 12, 1 is Teddy Roosevelt and he ranks above Biden with his non-elected, inherited midterm after McKinley’s assassination but below him with his first midterm after he was actually elected to the presidency, so take that that for what you will.  Biden ranks ahead of 25 other presidents and 26 midterms.  Except, since we have Teddy Roosevelt as 2 “others” here, 1 election ahead and 1 election behind, I suppose we could say Biden is loosely-tied as a president with Teddy and more closely tied with Coolidge and Quincy Adams—tied with 3 presidents and 2 two midterms—with only 11 presidents ahead of Biden (subtracting TR) and 12 midterms ahead of Biden’s (keeping 1 of TR’s) and 24 presidents and 26 midterms behind Biden (since he beat both of Truman’s midterms and we are including the other TR midterm).

And for some real perspective?  Even Lincoln, our greatest president, lost 23 seats (and his party’s majority in the House, but it would govern through a plurality coalition) in his first midterm in 1862-1863 during the Civil War.

The all-time winner is Thomas Jefferson gaining 35 House seats for his Democratic-Republicans in 1802 and Benjamin Harrison losing the most—a whopping 93 Republican seats—in 1890.

Biden’s all-time House first midterm ranking: 10^th (11 presidents and 12 midterms ahead, 24 presidents and 26 midterms below, 2-way tie with 1 more “tie”: tied with 3 presidents and 2 midterms) out of 39 eligible presidents and 41 eligible first midterms (see the discussion of which 6 presidents were removed from consideration in the final section)

Now, for the full Senate history:

These should not be weighted as heavily as House results because most of the premodern Senators were chosen by state legislatures and not the people directly, but, still, as the state legislators were mostly chosen by the people, it still involves some degree of (indirect) popular selection and is something of a representative choice.  The Senate also has much smaller margins and swings, so the results are all a lot closer and therefore harder to differentiate and chance plays a much wider role in variations.  So, out of our four major measures, we can confidently say that this one has the least value. 

In any case, Biden still comes out pretty well, with some of the same crowd that has outperformed him—along with some others—coming in ahead, and some surprising ties, while still being ahead of most of the competition in the end.

Biden comes in at 7^th but in a five-way tie; they all come in with a gain of 1 Senate seat (behind a five-way tie for 6^th with 2+ Senate-seat gains).  His fellow 7^th-placers are George Washington from 1790, Andrew Jackson in 1830, Abraham Lincoln in 1862, and Richard Nixon in 1970 (wow to all of that).  12 midterms from 11 presidents are ahead of Biden (including both of Teddy Roosevelt’s) and 24 midterms behind him from 23 presidents (including both of Truman’s terms).

Same champ and biggest loser from the modern era, but factoring out the modern era, among the premoderns McKinley fares the best at +8 in 1898 (but then he was assassinated, so, small consolation for his fans) and William Taft the worst in 1910 at -9 (trimming a lot of fat, relatively; sorry, I couldn’t resist).

Biden’s all-time Senate first midterm ranking: 10^th (11 presidents and 12 midterms ahead, 23 presidents and 24 midterms below, 5-way tie with 5) out of 39 eligible presidents and 41 eligible midterms

There you have all the data (remember, available in a full Excel file), with quirks and nuances explained by a key and accompanying notes in the file and the images.

I’d say that the House results are much more meaningful because, again, they reflect the mood of the whole nation and have always been chosen directly by the people, while Senate elections only reflect one-third of the country and were not always popularly elected.  And, again, perhaps the most important context to consider is that most of the people doing better than Biden in these rankings had history and some big unifying advantages on their side right at the time of the elections or at the very least did not usually have terribly divisive issues plaguing the country, while Biden had some major issues dividing the nation much more intensely during his first midterm as a time, again, of historic division.  That does not mean there were not crises those other leaders faced, but some crises—the Great Depression and WWII, for example, or 9/11 and the early days in Afghanistan, or the Gulf War or the Cuban Missile Crisis—unify the nation while others—slavery in the mid-1800s or inflation and COVID-19 for Biden—divide the nation.  This, for the most part, places Biden in his own special category, objectively speaking, especially in the modern era.

This historic 2022 midterms performance is, of course, tied to the historic legislative accomplishments of the Biden Administration, the historic and (near-?)unprecedented party discipline of the Democrats of the 117^th Congress, and the historic and unprecedented support Biden and that Congress offered Ukraine on the front line of the war for democracy and freedom against fascism and tyranny.

Contrast Biden and his Democrats with the current House Republicans, who are more than flirting with fascism (I do not use that term lightly and took some pains to define it) and showing the most dysfunction of an incoming House majority or plurality party since the 1850s, still unable to elect a House Speaker after an incredible fourteen ballots (last few of these ballots happening on the second anniversary of Trump’s Capitol insurrection in the very chamber assaulted by Trump’s insurrectionists!), much to the embarrassment of invertebrate Kevin McCarthy.

Yes, this whole first midterm thing is just one metric of several major metrics by which a president can be evaluated, some of which are qualitative and hard to measure, and, yes, even this one can be tricky to really properly measure, but the data is still clear: Biden and his Democrats stood out in league with some very good company ahead of most presidents and most of their parties, and were able to do so facing national divisions those outperforming him did not.  History has already been written here, and credit is due where credit is due.

The media should more and more be explaining all this to voters, avoiding false equivalence, and properly contrasting the options for voters, which it is, simply put, not very good at (as I have noted repeatedly before).  Yet voters need to realize these stark truths as they consider their choices in the crucial elections ahead, as the survival of both our very democracy and Western democracy itself may depend on that realization.

On My Imperfect Ranking System, Its Methodology and Data

Compared to just the modern presidents’ midterms, ranking the comprehensive set is trickier.  Again, quick summary of the combined House data: 11 ahead of Biden + 1 Biden himself + 2 tied +1 “tied” (TR) +24 behind Biden + 3 excluded + 3 who died before any midterms and you account for all 45 presidents (11+1+2+1+24+3+3=45) with 44 midterms, 2 midterms being considered each for TR and Truman, just so you see from where I got my numbers.  Depending on what you want to count, you have options your own options.

Out of 45 presidents, 3 were dead before their first midterm would have happened.  In terms of the number of midterms, there were 44 first midterms (including 2 each by my parameters for Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman, as they are the only 2 presidents to inherit a presidency, have a first midterm not after being elected, and then actually win a presidential election and have another midterm, the first after being elected), but 3 of these midterms and presidents were excluded from the rankings to make a total 6 ineligible presidents, all in the premodern era: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor died (in 1841 and 1850, respectively) before any midterm could happen and James Garfield was assassinated in 1881 before any midterm for him; as for the 1842-3 midterms of William Harrison’s successor John Tyler, Tyler had no party affiliation and this cannot be evaluated; during Reconstruction (1863-1877), Andrew Johnson and his Democrats in 1866-7 and Ulysses Grant and his Republicans in 1870-1 are excluded from rankings for very specific reason, explained in the next paragraph.

During the Civil War and after (an era known as Reconstruction), most of the Southern proslavery states that had attempted to secede were not seated for some time in the Congress, but were readmitted during a period of varying degrees of U.S. military government operating in those states in the face of white supremacist terrorist insurgencies that would eventually succeed and establish Jim Crow apartheid (let’s just be honest here) until the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s.  Therefore, the Reconstruction results of Johnson and Grant’s first midterms are not included in the rankings due to the complications of military government during major insurgencies and states being readmitted under such conditions.

Even pulling three midterm results out, there are other complications. When you include the premodern data, these rankings are a lot more complicated considering both the House and the Senate grew dramatically in size in the premodern period.  Some examples from the House of this and how tough it is to properly rank in this era and rank against presidents in much later periods within the premodern era and after it: Washington gained three House seats in 1790/1 at a time when the entire House was just 67 seats and is ranked below both FDR in 1934 (3^rd, +9) and George W. Bush in 2002 (4^th, +8) at a time when the House had 435 members to Washington’s 67 or Adams’s 106 (who with his 1798/9 +3 is tied with Washington even with significantly more House seats).

So, in the end, that means 39 of 45 different individuals who were president are considered across 41 ranked out of 44 first midterms, allowing for the flukes and deviations.  No system would be perfect and, without getting into advanced weighting and statistics (for example, calculating what a 3-seat gain for Washington in a House with 67 seats would be proportionally adjusted for a modern 435-seat House), I challenge anyone to come up with a better yet-relatively-simple system and welcome anyone who will answer that challenge.

A lot of the data initially came from Wikipedia gateways but with easily verifiable official records from Congress just a link away and with often easy-(but sometimes not-so-easy)to-access data confirming and/or clarifying what was presented in Wikipedia.  You can check my numbers against whatever you are able to find, but I did spend a lot of time reviewing and confirming the data and am highly confident in the numbers I posted, which you are free to double-check for yourselves.

And, since a lot of this involved rankings, I used numerals for single and double-digits and for rankings to stay consistent for your eyes.

Finally, if you would like the premodern data separately, well, here’s that too:

And don’t forget: all that data is available in my multiple-spreadsheet Excel file! See related articles from July 11, 2021, Media Keeps Portraying Democrats and Biden as a Mess, Ignoring Data Proving that Could Not Be Further from Truth and November 15, 2021 A BIG F**KING DEAL: Biden’s Infrastructure Bill in Historical Perspective

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)  June 13, 2020

SILVER SPRING—“I am going to take a break from my normal approach to writing and, instead, be more free-form here.  I have documented the true horrors of racism in the U.S. (and beyond) for years, in particular the persistent, living legacy of slavery and its detestable offspring embedded throughout our system confronting African-Americans in America today, the evidence for the existence of which is not only supremely compelling but overwhelmingly incontrovertible.  Each of my past pieces just linked to are base camps in which I provide many links by far more knowledgeable and accomplished people than myself for you to explore, should you want to learn more or, absurdly, if you doubt the premise itself (and then I beseech you even more to explore those sources).

Like any horror, whether terrorism, murder, sexual assault, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, genocide, etc., not all racism and not all racists are equal.  There is a spectrum, then, and the more we familiarize ourselves with it, the more we can deal with these elements in a divide-and-conquer strategy for success, whether smashing their grip on political and legal power wherever they hold any of it or peeling off some of the less nefarious on the lower-end of the spectrum into the arms of the enlightened (or “woke,” if you must).”

I categorized ten distinct stages as the best representation of the range of white racism in America, but there is certainly room for sub-categories that can exist in between and I view this as a 1.0, with future revisions a possibility.  Elements from lower tiers can be in upper tiers (e.g., I’m sure 6 applies to most in 1-5).  Also, to be clear for those who would derail this based on semantics, we are using the commonly-understood definition in which the term racism also includes discriminating against ethnicities, not just “races” (yes, sadly, I’ve heard racists tell me that that bigotry against Latinos, Arabs, Indians, Jews, etc. does not count as being “racist” because those groups aren’t races…).

So, without further ado, here are the ten main types of white racists in America, starting with the most racist:

1.) You wear a hood/swastika, burn crosses, march with tiki torches, openly say screw X group of people based on skin color/race/ethnicity, or wish you could do these things even if you’re not open about it.  Preserving the racial purity and racial hierarchy of the United States by excluding or kicking out non-whites and fighting against assertive minority-rights movements is of the utmost importance to you.  Under such thinking, whites can be viewed as “superior,” or “supremacist,” relative to most or all other races/non-white ethnicities.  You subscribe to a mini-renaissance of junk pseudoscience about how Africans and others are actually genetically inferior in terms of intelligence, and your subscription to these ideas without spending the necessary energy finding the plenty of evidence showing how this is quite easily debunked is as much proof of your racism as the other stuff.

2.) You do not openly express hate for X groups or profess fidelity to a white “superiority” over X groups, but as a white person, you express “white pride” and feel whites need to unite to stand up for each other: this makes you a “white nationalist.”  A lot of “all lives matter” people fall into this category, seeing assertion of black and other identities as a threat to them personally and to “their” fellow whites.  Politics for you is often about preserving the political power of “your” group and preserving “American culture,” by which you mean “white culture.”  You consciously believe in blocking access to power akin to your group’s own for these other groups and freely admit, at least to yourself, that you want to see whites’ privileged position in the American societal hierarchy preserved.  While not subscribing to ideas of white genetic, innate superiority, you likely subscribe to ideas of white cultural superiority and want to fight to preserve “white culture.”

(HISTORY LESSON: There’s no “black” ethnic group in Africa.  American slavers took people mostly from West Africa—a region consisting of numerous ethnic groups with distinct languages, histories, cultures, and traditions—and bred them like horses and livestock for centuries, forming them into one group that became African-American, mixing all kinds of African ethnicities into a new one that could not be distinguished by separate African ethnicities or points of origin easily and became a new, man-made ethnicity, kind of a form of a “genteel” Southern antebellum forced genetic engineering…  So African-American as a label, though artificially created by the slave trade, is still like Italian-American, Irish-American, Salvadoran-American, or Chinese-American as opposed to being analogous to white Americans.  “White-American” as an ethnicity is not actually thing, it’s a broader category; comparing it to African-American is comparing apples and oranges, like comparing Canada to Asia.  If you’re not identifying yourself in this sense mainly as your “ancestors’ countries of origins-American” but are self-selecting white as your identity, that’s not an ethnic group and it’s absurd, and if you feel the need to do that in response to African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, and others asserting their identities, you’re revealing a racist mentality.  It’s like the “Confederate” rebel monuments that were put up not in the 1860s and 1870s but mainly from 1890-1940 to assert Jim Crow inequality, in response to anti-lynching efforts, and as a slap in the face of the budding Civil Rights movement.  White pride is, thusly, basically a racist way to push back against people of color asserting their rights/identities but without explicitly aligning with the terrorist Ku Klux Klan or other explicitly Nazi or fascist hate groups.)

3.) You keep your moderately racist misgivings to yourself and do not feel yourself a “white pride” person, perhaps even feel guilty about some of your views/status, but more quietly support, with a wink and a nod, structures and politicians that will keep white privilege alive.  You know you are doing this and it’s a conscious choice because you feel it’s “your country” or whatever, that “your people” built this country, not “those people.”  Rather than consciously feeling a general unified “white culture” chauvinism, you see certain black and brown cultures as inferior and ascribe African-Americans to such an inferior category.

4.) You deny racism against African-Americans and others is a thing and claim that there are no institutional barriers or systemic racism for blacks or other non-whites in America, that these issues are “made up” by Democrats to artificially “divide” people, (as if the realities of racism don’t do this already).  You may even believe the insanity that racism against whites is as bad as or worse than racism against blacks.  All this takes an insane amount of willful ignorance, ignoring mountains of data and history and a refusal to understand how history affects the present to the relative benefit of white Americans compared with African-Americans.

5.) You actually acknowledge racism is a real thing, but subscribe to the cultural inferiority/superiority chauvinism against blacks and others described earlier.  You justify racism as not only natural, but acceptable because you think those other groups face challenges primarily because they make poor decisions as a group and that they are often deservedly targeted by police as a group (though maybe sometimes unfairly as individuals) as a result, and are discriminated against, mainly because of this.  Thus, in your view, housing discrimination is just a way for better, harder-working Americans to keep their neighborhoods safe and nice and discrimination in education and employment exists because “certain” groups of people just don’t have the same motivation and work ethic as white in general do (these people will often also point to the high standardized test scores of some Asian groups to “prove” this assertion).  Police and criminal justice issues disproportionately affect blacks, you feel, because “they commit most of the crime.”  You make these arguments while willfully ignoring other factors for no good reason and mistaking symptoms for the disease.  When there is an individual case of a questionable or even clearly wrong police killing, you (nearly) always defend the police and blame the victim.

(Not at all coincidentally, many of these people are also quite within the realm of being racist against Jews [here being considered as the ethnic-group, bound by blood and genes, as opposed to the religion which could include recent converts and older convert communities].  Much in the same way these whites view blacks as inherently inferior based on junk pseudo-science or culturally inferior based on junk cultural understandings, the same whites often subscribe to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes about Jews and their nefarious “plots” to do whatever, including, most recently, that Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros is behind the black lives matter protests and the rioting and vandalism they incorrectly see as one and the same.  And let’s remember the that those tiki-torch-bearing little Nazi marchers in Charlottesville in 2017 were chanting “Jews will not replace us.”  The overlap with anti-black and anti-immigrant sentiment is real, with anti-Semitism in the modern sense often definitely a form of racism.)

6.) You don’t feel the need to assert whiteness, deny racism exists, or subscribe to ideas of cultural inferiority/superiority, but you did and will proudly vote Trump and claim little or nothing Trump does is racist or has anything to do with racism (most of the above categories would claim this, too, but alongside one or more of the other ideas you do not embrace).  You feel that most or all accusations of Trump’s racism are just liberal or media smears.  This takes a stunning amount of willful ignorance or deliberate not caring enough about the concerns of so many Americans that would you even try to learn about the terrible racism of Trump and Trumpism or the serious threat that he and it present to people different from yourself and the damage this does at home and even abroad.

7.) You admit that there is systemic racism but go out of your way to minimize or at least lessen its effects (again, a lot of willful ignorance is required) and feel that African-Americans in particular need to just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” like other immigrant groups.  You deny the important legacy of slavery or minimize or lessen it since “that was a long time” ago. 

You fail to ask why African-Americans (that is, slave-descent) struggle far more than actual voluntary immigrants from Africa or black immigrants from other regions, again conspicuously avoiding the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.

8.) You say you support equal rights and fighting racism and, though you normally vote Republican, did not because Trump’s racism and other things about him bothered you so much, but have still voted Republican most of the time and may still after Trump, willfully ignorant and blinding yourself to the way the Republican Party has, for decades, been the party of racists and racism (though not in recent decades as explicitly as in the Trump era), all this in spite of clear, easily available evidence to the contrary.  You may have milder versions of the views held by the previous type (7), and feel that Trump is mainly the problem and that the Republican Party is mainly “fine” on racial issues without Trump.  It takes the blatant racism of Trump to partly open your eyes, but they are not nearly open enough.  A lesser version of this person (say, an 8.5) might be a swing “independent” voter who goes back and forth and votes Democratic sometimes but does not see or mostly misses the damage the Republicans have done on race in a very similar way to an 8.0).

9.) You consider yourself a solid liberal and normally vote for Democrats as part of what you feel is an obligation to fight racism, yet you regularly exhibit racist behavior or views (beyond “microaggressions”) without realizing it, though in mostly mild and subtle ways, not in more extreme ways except perhaps very rarely.  You likely have a few close friends of color and simply are not aware of how your views, comments, or behavior—often subconscious, a result or your upbringing, or simply a result of not having been exposed to the views of people of color in an intense way—are legitimately offensive and should be adjusted.  Though you occasionally do catch yourself or realize some of what you say, do, and feel is not appropriate (maybe realizing it’s racism or maybe not), you generally miss the patterns that at least make you fairly consistently a milder racist. No, voting for Obama once or even twice does no mean you are immune to being somewhat racist.

10.) You’re at least partly down with the causes of fighting racism and inequality and all but engage in some legitimately offensive “microaggressive” acts or statements unintentionally (mostly out of unfamiliarity) or have certain views or gut reactions to people who different.  You subscribe to misinformation about these groups without really bothering to look into them; you find yourself prejudging or avoiding certain people from certain racial/ethnic background without giving them a good individual shake (but let’s be honest, most people of most races and ethnicities everywhere around the world and certainly most Americans fall under this very human category).

*****

We should separate here people who fall on this spectrum and those who do not but may occasionally engage in acts that can be defined as racist, if out of ignorance, fear, convenience, or to play for some advantage.  They do not harbor racist views in general but once in a while consciously seek to practice or benefit from what has often been termed “white privilege” (though, considering the large numbers of poor whites in this country and how the best thing would be for poor whites and poor blacks to unite, during a conversation with a friend I came to the conclusion that the term “white advantage” might be a better term and might rub the literally dirt-poor whites of Appalachia a bit less offensively), undoubtedly a very real and pervasive concept regardless of how it is labeled.  Just as overall good people can do bad things and overall bad people can still do good things (Hitler really loved his dog, or whatever), so I believe that non-racists can commit some racist acts, though once they become something less than rare, we’re veering into a pattern and thus onto the above-discussed spectrum.  Discussing how generally non-racist people can still commit racist acts could be a whole conversation and exploration on its own, which we will not delve into here.

A whole further discussion still could be had on the silence and non-activism of non-racist whites being a huge part of the problem, and Dr. King has the ultimate word on that, from thoughts composed in a Birmingham, Alabama, jail cell in 1963:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.

All members of the majority have a duty to stick up for the abused minority, and I have yet to see a better expression of this sentiment than that given in a speech given by Abraham Lincoln in 1858:

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of “don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down,” for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice—“Hit him again”], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!

For now, I will leave Lincoln with the last word on that.  I will keep my focus in this piece to the above spectrum I devised that involves how people think, feel, and believe in ways that subscribe in the mind and heart to racism, including a willful, irrational denial or exclusion of information that would force them to reckon with their beliefs and acknowledge other factors as the primary drivers of racial inequality instead of the ones they incorrectly choose to inflate.  Understanding the different ways and different degrees people think in terms of and subscribe to racism in their minds and hearts, their consciousnesses and worldviews, is crucial, and I feel confident in the above spectrum as a way to be able to do this and its rough accuracy.

One would hope that, over time, more and more of the people in the lowest rungs of this racism spectrum can be pulled out of it and into the light (I prefer “enlightened” as a term, harkening back to the Enlightenment—the grand intellectual revolutionary movement that helped birth our nation—over the Millennialspeak “woke”), and, indeed, such gradual realignment and enlightenment over time has been the story of slow—sometimes excruciatingly slow—progress for our nation on race from even our colonial era.  And this story has, though sometimes suffering setbacks, reverses, and a few dark ages, been one overall a gradually improving arc rising towards justice and equality.

Yet unquestioningly, our present Trumpian era is undoubtedly one of those moments when the upward arc is being pulled down, and there is never a guarantee that that curve (not to be confused with the coronavirus curve) will eventually resume an upward trajectory.  The most immediate question for now is “How much lower will the arc curve down and when will we (or even will we) see the arc move back up?”

There are reasons to be cautiously hopeful that the current “black lives matter” moment after the killing of George Floyd by police—a moment that seems to have exploded into a fierce global movement—may really be something special, may really bring about change.  We are already seeing a spate of much needed local-level reforms enacted that is quite encouraging, but only time will tell if the systemic change we need in this country—not just in some localities and states, nor only in structures, laws, and institutions, but in our hearts and minds—is really upon us or, if, as in so many other similar situations before, public outrage and demands for change will be thwarted by the system itself, with public attention and efforts eventually waning and moving onto some other new or old distraction.

In the end, far fuller justice and a forceful, rapid upward shift in the arc will only materialize with serious movement of people down and off the spectrum I delineated above.  We should think of racism, then, not as a black-and-white thing or a box checked as a “yes” or a “no,” but as my wide spectrum that invites differing approaches and solutions for individuals depending on where they are on it in order to make those deeply necessary spectrum-shifts far more likely, far more soon, and far more powerful.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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*****

The worst thing about Trump? Globally, people like him and his supporters are everywhere and their politics maddeningly banal, as the ethno-centric politics of hate in the Caucasian Republic of Georgia demonstrate frightening similarities to the same politics in the Unites States of America.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 10, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 10th, 2016

Patrick Robert/Corbis/Getty; EPA

AMMAN — Amid all the talk of the issue of the “normalization” of Trump, perhaps the most disheartening realization that comes to those who ponder such a concept is in how many ways how utterly banal are figures like Trump and the movement he is cultivating/exploiting, both in the wider world and throughout history. Georgia—the Republic of, in the Caucasus, not the one of peaches, the Atlanta Braves, and America’s Deep South—is as illustrative of this sad reality of the human condition as any other place, and is thus deeply relevant to understanding our own predicament with Mr. Trump and his fans.

To illustrate this point, I will steal from my own graduate school work in 2009 on conflict in Georgia involving Georgians, Abkhaz, Ossetians, and Russians, inserted in italicized blocs (apologies for all the parenthetical citations as we had a very strict and I would argue frustrating series of guidelines; here is the full paper). 

As will be demonstrated, much of Georgian history involves internal and external forces managing the relationships between ethnic Georgians on one hand and ethnic Abkhaz and ethnic Ossetians and others on the other in what can loosely be understood to be Georgian territory and in what comprises the internationally recognized borders of Georgia today. Since 1800, Russia dominated the country and has been nearly the sole major outside actor involved in these ethnic conflicts, and in recent years has acted to allow both Abkhazia and South Ossetia to become de facto independent from Georgia and to become de facto parts of the Russian Federation. After the period of the rule of the Czars over the Russian Empire ended, the ethnic minorities in Georgia competed for favor and power to be bestowed from the Soviet Union’s governing elites, elites whose behavior ranged from accommodating ethnic Georgian nationalism to addressing concerns of minorities in Georgia as a way to check Georgian nationalism when it became too anti-Russian/anti-Soviet (something which continued after the fall of the USSR up through today).

Much of American history, likewise, is the story of race relations between white masters and black slaves in the South and the relationship between the rest of the country and the South when it came to limiting the institution of slavery. Since 1865, slavery ended in America but attempts at legal and political equality for freed slaves in the South failed in the face of a terrorist insurgency that finally succeeded in overthrowing the post-Civil War order everywhere in the South by 1877. It was not until a long period of first oppression and later unrest that legal and political equality for African-Americans was imposed on the South by an activist U.S. federal government by 1965.

Creating Identities

“The creation legend of Abkhazia and Georgia is identical, a sad fact that has not led to unity and fraternity between these two peoples,” writes Goltz (2009), “but rather to a disputation of basic history and the denial of the very humanity of the other group” (Goltz 2009, 21). For most of its history, Georgia had a stronger eastern kingdom which dominated a weaker western Georgian kingdom, and Abkhazia (then called Abkhazeti) was often ruled by a local prince who might submit to another prince or one of the Georgian kings, or might not, and managed to stay free, and eventually grew in power into its own kingdom, supplanting the west Georgian state and rivaling the east Georgian kingdom for several centuries until the latter unified both into a single Georgian kingdom in 1008 C.E. (Suny 1994, 11-33; Braund 1994, 152-313; Rapp 2000, 576; Gvosdev 2000,1). This kingdom would be a “decidedly decentralized state,” where local rulers often flouted the authority of the “kings” and reached out to foreign powers independently for leverage against them, some trying to take the throne (Suny 1994, 33- 38). Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Georgia “remained…primarily rural” and its “towns…were largely inhabited by Muslims, Armenians, and other foreigners” until the nineteenth century (Ibid., 38-39). Mongols and plague fragmented Georgia, and Abkhazeti was one of three western regions “ruled as semi-independent” principalities; Georgia would not see reunification “until the annexation by Russia in the nineteenth century” (Suny 1994, 38-59; Gvosdev 2000, 2-5).”

Note how divided and difficult to control the region was.

“Because, arguably, interests are tied to identities,” writes Suny (1999), “self-understandings… must be investigated as prerequisite to analyzing the security requirements of states” (Suny 1999, 139- 140). Georgia is among certain former Soviet states where “uncertainty about current politics and future possibilities are deeply embedded in more general confusion about who ‘we‘ are and where ‘our‘ interests lie” and he writes that “[n]ational identity is a particular form of political identification” in a world where “nation is not natural or given but must be worked for, taught, and instilled, largely through the efforts of intellectuals, politicians, and activists who make the identification with the ‘imagined political community‘ of the nation a palpable and potent source of emotional and intellectual commitment” (Ibid., 140, 144-145). For Suny, “[m]odern nations are those political communities made up of people who believe they share characteristics…that give them the right to self-determination… they can be thought of as arenas in which people dispute who they are, argue about boundaries, who is in or who is out of the group, where the ‘homeland‘ begins and ends, what the ‘true‘ history of the nation is” (Suny 1999, 145; 4 Suny 2001, 866). He argues that many wars in the modern era are fought over such issues, and that “longlived ‘nations,‘ [like]…Georgians… who have written traditions that go back millennia, have in modern times reconstructed and made consistent the varied and changing identities and ways of conceiving themselves that existed in the past;” “earlier identities” have been molded into “frame[s] of later templates, particularly that of the nation” (Suny 1999, 146). He describes Georgia as one of several former Soviet Republics where “the problems of ethnicity, identity, and the appropriate political forms to sustain the new state in the future were at the base of the devastating and violent crises that fractured” them (Suny 1999, 154). For Suny (1994), Georgia is “reinventing its past;” and “[t]the key to the future lies in what a people selects from its past, how it imagines itself as a community and continues to remake itself as a nation” (Suny 1994, 334-335).

Several authors besides Suny articulate a similar position, that the intensely-felt ancient identities of the Georgians and the Abkhaz are important components to understanding their modern struggles conflicts with each other. Grant (2009) comments that these ancient Abkhaz and Georgian identities were so strongly felt that Russia “never entirely convinced…[these people] that they were full partners alongside the rest” of the Russian Empire and the USSR, and Georgia‘s current President, Mikheil Saakashvili, “took a holy oath” as part of his presidential inauguration ceremony at Gelati, where the “greatest Georgian king of the eleventh century…is buried. By receiving the blessing at Gelati, Saakashvili, who wants a strong Georgian state, was symbolically alluding to a period of history when Georgia had such a state” (Grant 2009, ix-x; Nodia 2005, 78).

On the use of history in this debate, Zverev (1996) notes that it is a “salient factor” in understanding “why conflicts break out,” that “in Abkhaz literature, one finds references to the Abkhazian kingdom which existed in the 9th and 10th centuries. This is instrumental to the Abkhazian claim for sovereignty over the region even though the same kingdom could equally be described as a common Georgian-Abkhazian state, with a predominance of Georgian language and culture;” he points out that on the other side, Georgians “stress the allegedly non-Abkhaz character” of the historical Abkhazia, and that some even think of Georgians as “hosts” and that everyone else, including Abkhaz, are “guests” in Georgian territory (Zverev 1996, part I par.7). This debate, for Zverev as it was for Suny, is about presenting a case for who has the right to govern where and over whom, and this representation of the debate is also corroborated by the recent EU report on the August 2008 war (2009), by Khazanov (1996), by the International Crisis Group (ICG) (2006), and by Nodia (1998) (EURII, 66-69; Khazanov 1996, 6; ICG 2006, 3-4; Nodia 1998, 14). Nodia sums up Georgian views: “Abkhazia is Georgia, because it has always been part of Georgia when it was united. Georgians cannot see Abkhazia as a ‘foreign‘ land which was once conquered by them, and the accusation of imperialism usually makes them furious” (Nodia 1998, 19). Jans (1998) sums up the intersection of Georgian and Abkhazian thought, in that after the Cold War they were engaged in a quest for identity since “[d]emocracy, understood as the rule of the people by the people, begs the question of what is to be understood as ‘We, the people.‘“ (Jans 1998, 109) He further argues that “Ethnonational identities base their credibility and legitimacy on an interpretation of the historical past;” so for Georgians and Abkhazians, the past is of very present relevance to them (Ibid., 110). Lynch (2002) says that Abkhaz claims to the right of self-determination are, among other things, “based” on the idea that modern Abkhazia can claim to be the latest incarnation of “a long historical tradition;” he then quotes Abkhazia‘s foreign minister as saying “Abkhazia has a thousand-year history of statehood since the formation in the 8th century of the Kingdom of Abkhazia. Even within the framework of empires, Abkhazia kept this history of stateness. No matter the form, Abkhaz statehood remained intact” (Lynch 2002, 837). Departing from the more neutral posture of others, Chirikba (1998), writing as an Abkhaz government official, argues that Abkhaz history shows more independence from Georgians than not, and thus provides its people with “legitimate grounds for their claims to statehood and sovereignty” (Chirikba 1998, 48).”

Now, if some of this sounds familiar, it should: for much of American history, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants constructed an American identity that was based on their supposed superiority over other whites—Irish, Eastern and Southern Europeans—in addition to Africans and others, and defined being true “Americans” as their exclusive domain, working actively to frame these other groups as non-Americans and undeserving of the same rights, if any. Over time the different whites generally unified when it came to ethnic politics and redefined “American” as being white, which over much of the last century meant seeking to exclude blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other non-whites from sharing in the spoils of being an “American.”

*****

Perceptions of Meddling

“Areshidze posits the theory that the Soviet “system of ethnic autonomies was…in reality…a time bomb that Moscow could blow up at its leisure by pushing the ‘protected‘ minorities towards separatism. Thus, this situation gave Moscow a means to weaken and destabilize” Georgia; Zürcher (2005) echoes this analysis (Areshidze 2007, 22; Zürcher 2005, 99). Castells (1996) claims that “the strong development of nationalism in the post-communist period can be related…to the cultural emptiness created by 70 years of imposition of an exclusionary ideological entity, coupled with the return to primary, historical identity (Russian, Georgian), as the only source of meaning after the crumbling of the historically fragile sovietskii narod” (Soviet people) (Castells 1996, 24). Eventually all these trends culminated on the Georgian side with the idea that “their further evolution was hindered by the restraints placed on them by the Russians. An attitude arose that, left to themselves, the Georgians could more quickly realize their historical potential;” “the erosion of Marxist ideology within the Soviet Union cleared the way for its replacement” by the forces already pent up even before Stalin and released after him. Released, they “produced an increasingly potent nationalist mood in all parts of Georgian society—and counternationalism among the ethnic minorities within the republic;” this in turn “stimulated a rapid escalation of ethnic politics in Georgia;” “[t]he specific goals of Soviet nationality policy, the rapprochement and eventual merging of nationalities, were further from realization in the 1980s than they had been at any time in Soviet history” (Suny 1994, 313-316, 320-321; Remington 1989, 145).

Such Georgian views are remarkably similar to those of many conservative white Americans: if the federal government would just get out of the way, they would be free to realize their full potential, and they deeply resent and oppose federal efforts to protect minority rights or to divert any common resources specifically in the direction of minorities; for these white Americans, this is taking what is “theirs” as “true Americans” as they define that concept and they seek to exclude or place limits on other groups that they view as less “American” and worthy than themselves. For them, their concept of their own freedom involves their ability to restrict the freedoms of others as they please. 

It was no coincidence that the election of a black President—America’s first non-white president—who campaigned heavily on giving poor uninsured people (the way conservative whites incorrectly read it: non-white) healthcare gave rise to the Tea Party which was in many ways white nationalism run amok (one only has to look at the many polls and multiple studies that showed that huge numbers of Tea Partiers thought Obama was a Muslim, doubted he was a Christian, believed he was not born in America, and had more prejudicial, insensitive, and extreme views on racial issues than most Americans, even when compared to non-Tea Party conservatives); those Tea party forces have morphed into the Trump movement, which has taken over the Republican Party, one of two major political parties in America, and clearly those people now carry the same noxious and extreme views on race that they did when they were members of the Tea Party; in fact, racial concerns seem to be the largest motivators behind people choosing to support Trump: in other words, Trump is the candidate of white ethno-centrist nationalism in America.

Weaponizing History

Suny (2001) claims that Soviet policy created a tendency for ethnic groups like Georgians and Abkhaz to invent imaginary histories that can bolster “the legitimacy of the nation and particular claims to territory and statehood” while at the same time becoming become “exclusivist” and encouraging “desperate policies of deportation and ethnic cleansing” (Suny 2001, 895-896). The EU report concludes that in the atmosphere discussed, there was “no political framework that would have been strong enough to integrate the conflicting national demands” (EURII 2009, 63). Violence, war, and revolution would soon erupt as Soviet rule ended in Georgia.

One only need to look at how conservatives in America, particularly in the South, have created a fantasy about the Civil War that they maintain to this day: Lincoln was a tyrant while the South was bravely fighting for freedom and small government, despite a clear and overwhelming preponderance of evidence that, without question, slavery and white supremacy were at the heart of the Civil War—were actually its primary drivers—and at the heart of the ideology of the self-styled “Confederate States of America.” White ethno-centrists even try to force textbooks into public schools that downplay the issue of slavery, minimize discussion of racial oppression, and falsely frame America’s founding in a Christian context. Georgians and Abkhaz and others fight among themselves over their founding myths and over their histories, trying to distort and weaponize history as a way to delegitimize certain groups and assert exclusivity over this or that, but Americans are clearly no different.

*****

Zero-Sum Mentalities on Minorities: Identity and the Meaning of Independence

“Many Georgian nationalists are apprehensive of minorities like Ossetians and Abkhaz having too much autonomy and see this as a threat to Georgia; it was ethnic Georgian protests against the Abkhaz request for separation from Georgia in 1989 which sparked the rapid acceleration of Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s nationalist, anti-ethnic minority agenda and “radicalized” Georgian nationalism; it became more belligerent towards perceived threats from minorities, especially Ossetians and Abkhaz” (Suny 1994, 317-323; Zürcher 2005, 90). For Devdariani (2005) Gamsakhurdia and his movement “perceived Abkhazia and South Ossetia as simply tools for Russian pressure directed against Georgian independence… “[C]oncerns of [their] local elites…[were ignored and]…tensions spiraled into violent clashes…[They failed] to see how…[their] own quest for independence challenged the identities of the Abkhazians and Ossetians” (Devdariani 2005, 161)…

Jones (2006), seeking to downplay ethnic tensions in favor of economic ones, disagrees that the protests were about Abkhazia and argues they were more about “Georgian independence,” but Jones still describes Gamsakhurdia as “using nationalist slogans to gain authority” and “manipulat[ing] a formerly moderate Georgian populace into a chauvinistic mob;” Zürcher maintains with others that the Abkhazian call for secession “led” to the protest (Jones 2006, 257; Zürcher 2005, 89). The EU report and Zürcher take care to mention Georgians, especially those in Abkhazia, saw concessions to minorities as too generous, and that this explains the rise of leaders like Zviad Gamsakhurdia (EURII 2009, 69; Zürcher 2005, 89)

When ethnic minorities tried/try to assert themselves in America, there was/is almost always a hostile backlash from the white majority, and these backlashes are often violence and can take on a form of terrorism. This was the plight the Irish faced as famously depicted in the Scorcese’s Gangs of New York, and of freed slaves who suffered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan in the aftermath of the Civil War and for a century after, and violence spiked again when they asserted themselves in the later 1950s and 1960s. Today, with racial, gender, and sexual orientation movements, there has never been a more diverse array of loud assertions of minority groups for their deserved place in public and private life, and the discourse is richer and more diverse than it has ever been as a result. But with the rise of the Tea Party and Trump after the election of a black president and the codification of homosexual marriage as a right protected by the Constitution (both good things), with the yet further proliferation of oversensitivity, an extreme form of politically correct discourse, and complaints of microaggressions (no so much good things), we are seeing a major backlash and Donald Trump’s rise to a height of just a few percentage-points of votes away from the presidency is the face and spirit of that backlash. Many of Trump’s supporters look at groups like blacks, Hispanics, and the LGBT community as tools for an unholy alliance between such groups and a liberal activist federal government—led by a black president they generally believe is a foreign-born Muslim—that these whites perceive has come to oppress them in order to favor brown people and gays and non-Christians (more or less non-Americans to them). Hence, we have whites chanting All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, with many whites condemning Black Lives Matter and some even trying to frame it as a terrorist group; too many and too often, whites feel they must have a virtual monopoly on group victimhood and cannot stomach the idea of recognizing and legitimizing the grievances of other groups.

Trump is therefore in many ways just America’s Zviad Gamsakhurdia. And it should be noted that Gamsakurdia propelled his country onto a path of ethnic hatred and violence that led to civil war. I don’t think Trump would push America into a civil war, but, as I’ve noted before, I do see America at an already dangerously high level of racial tension and violence not seen since the Civil Rights Era half a century earlier, with the one major exception being the 1992 L.A. riots, and I do see American society becoming far more divided than it is even now should Trump be at the helm, and view Trump as a danger to Western democracy. 

Still, it is clear that the nativism and ethno-centrism that are driving today’s Republican Party and have handed it to Trump are parts of a longstanding American tradition, best exemplified by the “Know-Nothings” for which Abraham Lincoln harbored such disdain, Southern Civil-War slaver secessionists and Redeemers, and George Wallace’s movement from the Civil Rights Era. And, as in Georgia, these often regional movements are both about hostility towards other ethnicities and about independence, and independence from a federal government perceived almost as a foreign power and from a foreign power for the U.S. and Georgia, respectively. Such a concept of independence is tied to spheres both public and private that are seen to be contested with these other ethnicities in a landscape that has long been ethnically and/or racially polarized.

In America, people, locations, and states that are very anti-federal government hardly look at what they deem interference from Washington—in particular from Democrats, and in particular from the African-American-led Obama Administration—differently from how Georgian chauvinists look(ed) at Russian/Soviet efforts to accommodate Abkhaz and other minorities in Georgia; likewise, minorities in America have long looked to the federal government to establish and protect their rights against a white majority that, to varying degrees depending on location, has often sought and still seeks to infringe or even outright destroy those rights, much like Abkhaz and Ossetians have appealed to Soviet/Russian authority to protect them from abuses at the hands of Georgians.

A most salient case-in-point in America involves recent controversies in North Carolina; as one of the states that had used state laws to institutionalize the oppression of African-Americans until 1965, the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) had included North Carolina along with a number of states and localities in a list of places—mostly in the South—that had to receive “preclearance” from federal authorities before changing any of its voting laws, with this preclearance provision on component of an effort to prevent the re-disenfranchisement of black voters. This system worked quite well until 2013, when the narrowly conservative U.S. Supreme Court issue a partisan 5-4 ruling that basically said the VRA was no longer needed and that it constituted federal oppression of state sovereignty. Almost immediately after the Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina was one of several states that enacted controversial restrictive voting laws under Republican leadership. These laws were criticized to varying degrees as thinly veiled attempt to suppress the votes of African-Americans, and at the end of August of this year, that is just what the federal court system decided: a federal appeals court had ruled that the North Carolina law sought to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision” and struck it down as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court in a 4-4 partisan tie issued on August 31st (with a vacant seat since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, perhaps the most conservative justice on the Court) was unable to alter this decision (but almost certainly would have had Scalia been alive; a close call indeed).

Thus, as American Republican right-wing white ethno-centrist nationalists seeks to curb and flout federal authority and prodding on many issues related to minorities, from accepting refugees and affirmative action to voting rights and Medicaid expansion to LBGT rights and imposing sectarian religious agendas, so Georgian ethno-nationalists long sought to fight Soviet/Russian attempts to protect and ensure minority rights for Abkhaz and Ossetians. Georgia has been a part of the Russian Empire for over 200 year until the end of the Cold War, so though this involves two separate sovereign nations today, many of the dynamics still resemble those of Russian/Soviet intranational politics; conversely, the South of the United States experimented with secession as a unit from 1861-1865 and tried to form its own nation, an experiment which failed miserably but which still helps to explain why the South above all other regions of the United States exhibits a staunch resistance to the rest of the national will and to attempts by the U.S. federal government to bring it along with other national projects, from segregation to the ACA (Obamacare) and any of a whole host of other items.

As in the case with Georgia, at the heart of all this tension are ethnic tensions between those in a majority that see any concession to minorities as a loss of their “rightful” power and societal position on one hand and ethnic minorities that depend on outside forces for protection from outright oppression and domination at the hands those in that majority on the other. And, much as Trump is galvanizing a backlash in minority consciousness and activism in America, so, too, did Gamsakhurdia galvanize Abkhazians and others to resist him.

Conclusion: All Politics Is Local (Exclusion of “The Other?”)

The bottom line is that the sad identity politics of hate and division and resentment are hardly anything exceptional in America and can be found all over the world throughout history and up through today, from Burma to Turkey, from Israel to Burundi, from France to Syria. Americans can only hope that Trump is not nearly as successful as Gamsakhurdia and that America will not follow Georgia in fracturing itself over ethnic hatred. Even if it manages to stave off such a scenario, that will only be a starting point for much needed healing and mending of racial and ethnic fences.

On a final note: Russia at one point gave military support to Gamsakhurdia, after he had been overthrown, as a way to weaken Georgia’s overall position before turning on him after Russia had wrested concessions from the new Georgian leadership. Trump might be interested in such history, with Putin’s Russia today interfering in America’s election and trying to help Donald Trump get into the White House.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse May 13, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 13th, 2016

AMMAN — The more I watch the current American political proceedings, the more I am increasingly convinced of an increasing chance that the presidency of George W. Bush will be remembered as the moment when American democracy began rapidly unravelling.

Our Unravelling, “Unwinding” Democracy

The trends that resulted in this unravelling (or, to use George Packer’s word for it, “unwinding”) could be traced back decades to the so-called Reagan Revolution, coupled with the political incivility and onset of hyperpartisanship that resulted from the so-called Gingrich Revolution. Later, with tax cuts that went almost completely to the wealthiest 1% after we had a surplus, the damage of the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing grossly mismanaged wars, Hurricane Katrina, and the Great Recession after the mortgage and financial crises at the end of Bush’s presidency, George W. Bush had a record of disaster unmatched in modern times and was one of the worst presidents in all of American history, at least if one is to judge according to the effects of his policies.

Some people read a lot into Obama’s election that I did not: many saw it a sign that we had dramatically changed. I saw the election of a black man like Obama, born to and raised by a white mom and who ran as a centrist and went out of his way to not talk about “black issues,” but, rather, to be post-racial and post-partisan, more as an example of the type of minority candidate America would vote for in stark contrast to more outspoken, consciously racialized minority candidates that America would not vote for (Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Marco Rubio are examples in this year’s election cycle who share this approach of campaigning mainly away from their ethnic/racial identity along with Obama). To white America, Obama, Carson, Cruz, and Rubio are “less black” and “less Latino” than other candidates who would not earn as much support from them (if Obama was the exact same person but looked and spoke like Cornell West, does anyone think white America could have supported him at the same level? If Cruz and Rubio were exactly the same but looked and spoke like George Lopez, does anyone think they would have the same support with Republicans that they do now?).

But I realized something else that Obama’s rise and victory represented: the only way that Obama was able to win in 2008 is because the Republicans and George W. Bush has messed up so badly and so completely that America was absolutely desperate for whatever was the least-Bushlike thing they could find. Bush was such a categorical disaster that people wanted to reject the system and class that had produced Bush as a leader as much as possible: the less it acted and sounded like Bush, the better. Without Bush and his presidency creating such a terrible series of crises, it is impossible to imagine that voters would have been willing to try out such a wild card like Obama in 2008. In 2016, it’s incredibly in vogue to talk of candidates as “Establishment” and “anti-Establishment.” That sentiment was not described then the way it is now, but undoubtedly, much of Obama’s support came from people who were desperate for something new, desperate for something different, desperate to reject the past eight years, desperate to reject a system that had done what it had done to us (never mind that WE, first and foremost, empowered those people who ran the system so badly). Basically, at least in 2008, a President Obama was not possible without a President Bush. While many were celebrating Obama’s win in a way in which they were giving American voters an enormous amount of credit, I was saying that it was kind of embarrassing that things had to be that bad before we elected a black president.

The American electorate is funny; in 2000, they more or less rejected Al Gore because he was too “nerdy,” wasn’t “cool” and affable like Bush (I bet they’d take that surplus and invest it now into Social Security in a “lockbox” as Al Gore said he wanted to do in 2000, when he was ridiculed for saying so!). In 2004, they chose Bush to continue his wars his way; in 2008, they voted for someone to get American out of Iraq just 4 years after they voted for someone to keep us in there. In 2010, voters empowered the Tea Party; in 2012, voters rejected multiple Tea Party extremists, which dragged Romney down, in favor of allowing Obama to continue a modest recovery from a historic recession and rejected Republican arguments that Obama’s national security and foreign policies made America less safe. Now, in 2016, voters think Obama is not tough enough on ISIS and many of them chose Donald Trump to be the nominee of one of America’s two major parties and are flirting with a democratic socialist to be the nominee of the other (yes, Clinton will win, but by a narrower margin than many thought would be the case). Fickle, indeed.

How America Took a Huge Gamble on Obama (and Mostly Won)

I voted for Obama in 2008. But not before: I had voted for Hillary Clinton in my local primary. I am still convinced that Hillary would have been a better president, that she would not have made the same rookie mistakes Obama made, that should would have accomplished more with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, but, as I wrote recently, that does not mean I don’t think Obama did not do a good job: I think he did do an overall good job and deserves a lot of credit, even if I think he could have, and Hillary would have, done better.

The thing is, experience counts. Hillary had a lot of it, Obama did not. And what was frustrating for me in 2008 was that so many voters got caught up in the story and style and “coolness” factor with Obama, and paid so little attention to his lack of experience. We basically elevated a man to the highest office in the land who had no executive experience, who has spent precious little time on the national stage, and with whom we as a people had very little familiarity. We did not properly vet him and fell in love with him partly because he was the new guy with an inspiring story and amazing stage presence.

America basically dodged a bullet with Obama. With someone who was so new, and who had so little experience on the national stage, it could have turned out much worse than it did. But in Obama, a man of vast intellect, poise, calm, and composure, and who understood history and the system well from an academic standpoint, if not from an experiential one, the United States of America made out pretty well, and is well on the path to recovering from the calamitous W. Bush presidency even if that recovery is slow, understandably slow, though, since Obama took office in the midst of the worst American and global economic crises since the Great Depression.

Yes, Obama overpromised and oversold ideas of postpartisanship, but he never promised anything ridiculous in terms of policy.

One thing the history of the ancient Roman Republic teaches you about democratic politics is that once a certain type of character rises to certain political heights, it paves a way for others who are similar; once certain behaviors succeed in propelling someone to power, it paves a way for such behavior to used in the same way again; once certain traditions or rules are circumvented or ignored, it paves a way for those traditions and rules to be pushed aside even more forcefully in the future.

Obama, Trump, et al.: The Experience Factor, 2008-2016

The rise of Obama and the fact that his candidacy was able to triumph over both Hillary Clinton and John McCain, both seasoned political hands that were objectively more qualified resume-wise for high office, opened the door for candidates with historically low levels of national-level or executive political experience. In fact, during this election cycle, the Republican Party fielded three candidates—Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, and Dr. Ben Carson—who had never, ever held elected office or any political office whatsoever; Trump won, and Dr. Carson was one of the top-polling candidates for most of the election season (even briefly leading), before he was one of the final candidates to drop out, outlasting twelve other candidates; Fiorina, too, was even one of the top-tier candidates, if only briefly.

This tells us something very simple and very disturbing: American voters care less about experience and qualifications than they possibly ever have, and this trend is only increasing. “Outsider,” “anti-‘Establishment’” politics have become wildly popular and wildly successful. 

There were signs that this was coming. 

With the Democrats, before, we he had a freshman U.S. Senator (Obama) defeat two of the most recognizable, experienced hands in American politics (Clinton, McCain) in 2008. 

On the Republican side, we saw signs with the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 and after—including some of the most unqualified, looney people ever to make it into Congress—and with seasoned, major political figures in the Republican Party being “primaried” and defeated from their right—people like veteran Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana and House Majority Leader (arguably the most powerful legislative position in Congress after Speaker of the House) Eric Cantor of Virginia, the latter losing to an obscure college professor. In 2012, only Herman Cain had never held political office before among Republican presidential candidates, and he still led in the polls for close to a month; still, the field was dominated by people with decent to serious experience in executive government positions or national-level politics, but the nomination contest felt more like a ritual, a wooden Mitt Romney never generating much enthusiasm (Trump must have looked at how weak the 2012 field was and realized there was a chance for someone with charisma and personality to really make a mark). 

In this 2016 cycle, the Republican field had three freshmen U.S. Senators and three candidates who have never held national-level or executive government office, representing over a third of all candidates, and the last man standing, Trump, has never, ever held a position in government.

What will be the situation if trends continue on this path in 2020? 2024?? 2028??? 2032!???! Will the typical office-holder of 2016 bear any resemblance to his or her counterpart of 2032? Given today’s situation, the answer is very likely no.

*****

Trump & Today’s Scary Precedents for Presidential Politics

Time

Only once in American history has the nominee of a major party never held government office: in 1940, when Republicans nominated businessman Wendell Willkie to challenge Franklin Delano Roosevelt as fascism was taking over the world; when Willkie lost, he became a huge supporter of FDR’s war effort in an extraordinary show of bipartisanship; in other words, he was no Trump or Tea Partier.

Only once, that is, until now, until 2016, when Trump is already the de-facto nominee.

I am scared far less of Trump than I am scared about the barriers he has broken for men seeking high office, the behaviors he has set up as examples of ones that lead to political success, and the traditions and decorum he has smashed. I am scared far less by this election and its smashing of precedent in 2016 than by what—and who—this election paves the way for in the future.

In 2008, the winner of the presidency was a freshman senator with little national-level experience and no executive experience in government. In 2016, about one-sixth of Republican candidates were freshmen senators who had no national-level or executive government experience prior to entering the Senate (Cruz, Rubio, Paul), and roughly one-sixth had never held any government office before (Trump, Carson, Fiorina). All but one (Ohio Gov. John Kasich) of the final five Republican candidates were in one of these two categories, and the man who essentially has the nomination, Trump, has no government experience. How much larger proportionally will such candidates be out of the whole field in 2020, 2024, and beyond? How many people, like Rubio and Cruz, are going to run for the House or Senate and care little for the office they seek, but, rather, seek to use it merely as a platform to run for president? Instead of one-third as it was in 2016, will be in half in 2020? Two-thirds? While people have complained about the dumbing-down of American politics for years, perhaps with what is now happening today it has never been more inarguably clearly so.

Make no mistake, as I have written before, Trump is a threat to Western civilization and democracy as we know it today. But a big part of what is scary about him—is the most frightening—involves not Trump himself whether he wins or loses, but what comes after.

A case in point from ancient Rome: for nearly four centuries, that Roman Republic’s evolving democratic (small-r) republican system avoided any serious internal political violence until 133 B.C.E., when a Pandora’s Box of political violence was unleashed; less than half a century after that was the Roman Republic’s first civil war, and less than a half-century after that, its final one between Caesar and Pompey that would see the destruction of republican government in all but name.  The point is, once precedents are broken, there are serious consequences, especially when new “norms” delve into dangerous territory.

Another case in point: the Romans very much valued experience, and they had not only age requirements for someone to hold their highest political office—the consulship with its two annually elected consuls, on which the American presidency and vice presidency are based—but also required the holder of that office to have been elected to and held two other lower offices (praetor and quaestor) before being considered eligible (see Part II here). Considering that the Roman Republic lasted roughly twice as long as America’s republic has thus far existed, Americans might want to take note of this.

In Conclusion: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Even without the specter of political violence (at which Trump has lightly hinted and at whose rallies there have been sporadic incidents of mild violence), the precedents of 2016 and especially Trump will be remembered collectively as a watershed moment. But this moment would not have been possible without the extraordinarily destructive policies and gross incompetence of the experienced career politicians of the George W. Bush Administration, without which the stage would not have been set, the desperate hunger for something different established, for the precedent-breaking candidacy of Barack Obama, whose victory was both the beginning of a shift of large portions of America turning away from the familiar in favor of the risky and a harbinger of a much larger shift in this direction to come. 

With Obama, the American people certainly gambled on an unknown but came out pretty well in the end, but it was still a big risk. Without the W. Bush Administration disaster, it is hard to envision American voters in 2008 taking such a big risk in an election. But if electing Obama can be said to have been a risky gamble on the part of the American people, Trump’s winning the Republican Party’s nomination in 2016, powered by voters and grassroots support above all else, as well as his having a real shot at winning the presidency, is a move of a far greater level of risk on the part of the American people, one that is unlikely to pay positive dividends like 2008’s gamble did, and is far more likely to damage us in ways many of us now cannot even begin to imagine.

Right now, the new political rulebook clearly states to win as a candidate to be the nominee of one of America’s two major political parties, Trump, Trump’s behavior, and Trumpism are all acceptable, when literally less than a year ago, they were not (and far from it!). 

These are dangerous and exciting times we live in, but, then again, when any society take a giant leap forward towards self-destruction, there is always plenty of excitement. There was plenty of excitement when Rome’s republic fell, as was the case in Revolutionary France, Russia, and China. As many voters are feeling the energy for candidates like Trump and Sanders, hoping they will tear down the current system, one can only hope that the more passionate and frenzied political noise-makers will be outnumbered by the moderates who will back Hillary Clinton over Trump in the end. People are angry and suffering today, but as Hillary Clinton knew since her days as an undergraduate, and as Barack Obama recently told graduating Howard University students, “Change requires more than righteous anger.” He also told them “It may sound like a controversial statement—a hot take—given the current state of our political rhetoric and debate, but America is a better place today than it was when I graduated from college. It also happens to be better off than when I took office, but that’s a longer story.” 

And he’s right; and these improvements were accomplished not by disruptive and divisive anger, not by the far left castigating everyone who is not immediately on board to seismic reforms, but, in reality, by “Establishment” politics, seeking not to destroy the system, but to work within it. 

This is the approach Obama took once elected, and it’s the approach the Hillary Clinton has taken her whole career. It’s not as exciting as promising free college and that millions of new manufacturing jobs will be won from renegotiating all of our existing trade deals, but unlike the other promises, Clinton’s promises of working within the system are not in the realm of laughable fantasy. Declaring war on reality might please many voters, but it also pushes more and more people to give up on a system that, even creakingly and grudgingly, has delivered an enormous amount of positive change across generations, if imperfectly and unevenly. But politics is always imperfect and uneven, regardless of what candidates like Trump and Sanders pump into the heads of their oft-rabid followers. And the solution is not to give up on the successful if sometimes frustrating incremental success of successful reforms of the past century, but to realize that all those increments add up over time into something big and revolutionary; heck, even revolutions take many years and are hardly instant. And yet those who are the youngest voters often seem the most impatient for change; yes, we face many problems now, but our chances of success are far less if we give up on the system and allow our leaders to destroy our confidence in it, if we forget how and why America has been great, how it is still relatively great though currently in serious decline and in sore need of improvement, and how the past shows us a recipe for making American even greater than before if we can roll up our sleeves to work towards reasonable expectations and can do so with a degree of patience as well as optimism.

With Trump and even Sanders, we have creaked open the door to demagoguery, which thrives when people have low to zero expectations for the system and foolishly high expectations for their savior who will deliver them from it. When a population moves too far away from the politics of the system to the cult of personality, the health of democracy is unquestionably in decline. It is not clear how many of Obama’s supporters fell more for his personality and style than his substance and intellect, but I imagine it would be a level that is higher than with which many would be comfortable; when it comes to Trump, we can be certain his supporters are not behind him for his intellect and substance.

Americans should be concerned. Only now are we truly seeing the political consequences of the calamitous two terms of George W. Bush and other trends in place for decades before; I shudder to think of what seeds are being sown today in the era where Trump could win the nomination of the party of Lincoln, and may even win the presidency.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 15, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) February 15th, 2016

Mort Kunstler

For a PDF of this paper will full endnote citations, click here

RELIGION AND LINCOLN

By Brian E. Frydenborg
12/2/02

A recent book about Lincoln was entitled The Lincoln Enigma. Perhaps no other aspect of Lincoln may be more accurately referred to as an enigma than his views on religion and its influence on him. As William Miller points out, there is even a book that claims Lincoln had a “Jewish” spirit; Mark Noll notes that Lincoln “never joined a church and … read only a little theology.” Yet, to draw from this the conclusion that religion mattered little to Lincoln and bore no real influence on him would be far from accurate.

So how does one analyze how religion impacted a man who never joined a church and who never publicly gave a precise account of his own beliefs? In stark contrast to President George W. Bush who, when asked which historical figure influenced him most, said Jesus Christ, Lincoln himself avoided bringing his personal religious beliefs into the public eye as he thought they should be considered irrelevant to his politics.

Still, a person’s beliefs are mirrored in his actions far more than in mere words, and in the category of the former, Lincoln provided countless examples that the discerning historian and student of politics or even of theology can use to ascertain how religion influenced the man whom most experts agree was America’s greatest President.

Thus it is that by looking at Lincoln’s life through the prism of religion, and through analyses of his actions in a theological context and what they reveal about religion’s impact on him, this paper will attempt to give its reader a survey portrait of religion’s influence on our nation’s greatest President.

This paper is not an exploration of Lincoln’s views on the more general role that religion should play in democratic self-government, nor is it an examination of Lincoln’s use of Biblical references, nor is it an examination of Lincoln’s dealings with different religious groups, nor is it an exploration of Lincoln’s idea of “political religion”; though aspects of some of these will be discussed in terms of the overall influence of religion on Lincoln’s life, it is a concise exploration of the influence of religion on Lincoln in a broad context that will remain the focus of this paper.

Lincoln’s father, described by Noll as a “hardshell Baptist layman,” had helped build a local church when Lincoln was young. In stark contrast to his father’s direct connections with his denomination of Christianity, Lincoln could be described in his youth as a skeptic and was never directly tied to any one branch of a religion. When one realizes that Lincoln grew up during the Second Great Awakening—an age of religious revival and of fiery traveling preachers—in the area most directly affected by this movement, this is all the more startling. His parents and sister all underwent adult baptism (Baptists did not believe in infant baptism) in Kentucky; yet, when they moved to Illinois, 17-year-old Lincoln sought no such membership, though he was more than old enough to have received it. In Illinois, he took a fancy to readings that attacked the self-righteousness of the religious movements, such as Paine’s Age of Reason and de Volney’s Ruins of Civilizations, and was never drawn toward “the militant and dogmatic Calvinism” of those around him. As Miller states, “… he was not sitting there in the pew absorbing what he learned with heartfelt agreement.” In fact, in the words of Donald, Lincoln “turn[ed] away form the emotional excesses of frontier evangelism,” subscribing to belief in a greater being but reluctant to choose one faith or sect’s conceptualization of this being. Barton even goes further and says that young Lincoln “revolted” against the “interpretation of God and of human life” that was presented to him by the religious leaders, practices, and thoughts that were common in his day.

One of the earliest theological principles he espoused was a general trust that a well-meaning Being had a plan for the world and was guiding all, but that this plan was difficult if not impossible to ascertain. He called this principle the “Doctrine of Necessity,” his belief that “the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” The core of this belief, though it seems he later refined it to accept the general Christian God, would stay with him all through his life. Donald chose to open his entire work with a single quote, on its own page, that came from Lincoln the year before his death: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” What is seen both here and in the “Doctrine of Necessity” is a humble submission to some sort of divine will. Perhaps this does not seem altogether remarkable or that different form the strict Calvinist belief of predetermination. Yet its tone is as far from this as possible, and that is where Lincoln, taken in the context of his contemporaries, shines brightest. Lincoln, ever the ambitious, ideologically-driven politician, was clearly much more comfortable and confident in his ability to ascertain what his country’s path should be than in determining and proclaiming the will of God; thus his political confidence and ambition on the one hand were balanced by his religious humility on the other, and they coexisted peacefully within him.

From temperance to abolition to daily sermons, Lincoln lived in an age of self-righteousness, intolerance, and remarkable ease with which both laity and clergy in America claimed to have both authoritative divinations of God’s will as well as keen insight as to who was, and was not, in God’s favor, leading them to pass swift and severe judgment on those with whom they disagreed. As Dewitt notes, “He lived in a day when excesses of emotional evangelism and doctrinal extravagances were commonplaces of preaching and frontier religious literature.” These excesses of the Great Awakening period turned Lincoln away from all organized religion as it existed in America and formed the core of some of his most admired traits. Seeing his contemporaries’ absolute certainty of the correctness of their own moral high ground, he would discuss his own side’s culpability and peppered his speeches and remarks with a homely self-deprecating humor. “From Lincoln’s fatalism derived some of his most lovable traits: his compassion, his tolerance, his willingness to overlook mistakes.” His distinct brand of “fatalism,” as discussed earlier, was a humble one, and it kept him from being so self-righteous that he could not understand or have sympathy for those who disagreed with him; rather, his ability to do just that would be one of his hallmark traits, contributing to his famous pragmatism. In an age of passion, Lincoln’s “fatalism” helped to build a pragmatism that allowed him to calmly sit back and look at a situation with a clear and level head, letting his mind, not his passions, bring him to his decisions when passions drove those around him to rash excess

Yet Lincoln, ever the moderate, chose not to scoff and dismiss religion. Edgar DeWitt Jones perhaps best summed it up when he wrote “If it is easy to make Lincoln out to be a skeptic, it is easier to prove him a staunch believer and a Christian in all save actual church membership.” When he was attacked during his congressional campaign of 1846 for his religious “infidelity,” he responded by saying, “That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” He continues to say that the “Doctrine of Necessity” was, in fact, in his understanding, “the same opinion to be held by several of the Christian denominations.” He finished his letter to the Illinois Gazette by saying:

I do not think I could myself, be brought to support a man for office, whom I knew to be an open enemy of, and scoffer at, religion.—Leaving the higher matter of eternal consequences, between him and his maker, [in other words, not passing moral judgment on the man] I still do not think any man has the right thus to insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live.—If, then, I was guilty of such conduct, I should blame no man who should condemn me for it; but I do blame those, whoever they may be, who falsely put such a charge in circulation against me.

Lincoln, then, while harboring no love for any particular sect of Christianity and never becoming a member of any one church, clearly had a deep respect for religion. He would often read the Bible when growing up on the prairie, would be able to mention biblical quotes at the drop of a hat, and found that the Bible was “the best cure for the “Blues” could one but take it according to the truth,” and professed to “read it regularly.” Without the Bible, he said, “we could not know right from wrong.” It was not the God of a sect or a preacher he accepted, but the God of the Bible. Lincoln had a deep and profound respect for the mysteries of life; his speeches are full of references to some mighty, unstoppable, difficult if not impossible to discern divine will, and the Bible further bolstered Lincoln’s primitive “Doctrine of Necessity” from his youth. As Edgar DeWitt Jones writes, “The place of the Bible in Lincoln’s education is conceded by all who have written about him,” and cites his ample use of Biblical references as being “interwoven into the fabric of his fifty-six years.” Miller’s assessment is particularly insightful:

In any case, Lincoln as an adult not only affirmed the central moral importance of the Bible to his own understanding, but showed its moral importance in practice. But he did so as a man in conversation with the Bible, making up his own mind.

Noll informs his readers that this was not as uncommon as one may suspect, for many growing up on the frontier had an intense spirituality and sense of religion while shunning away from committing to any one particular sect. It was not God they rejected, but human self-righteous interpretations of His will and how to honor Him. Noll too sees the influence of the bitter infighting among various sects as turning Lincoln away from Church membership, sees the deaths of so many relatives and friends at difficult times of Lincoln’s life, starting with his mother as a young boy and up to his own son Willie in 1862, as drawing him closer to a deeper awareness of “the mysteries of God and the universe.”

Clearly Lincoln was a somewhat unorthodox skeptic, but he still had a respect for a “Higher Power” that, perhaps not early in life but in his middle and later life, came closer to the God the Father of Abraham and of Moses and Jesus. So, if at a simple level, anyway, we can characterize Lincoln in such a way, the question still remains: how did his unique understanding of God distinguish and shape Lincoln?

The answer is that Lincoln’s unique understanding gave him a unique—and uniquely appropriate—approach to the problems of his day.

The first thing to notice in Lincoln’s unique religion is his unwillingness to proclaim that he knew the will of God. A group of Chicago Christians writing to Lincoln to urge emancipation, claiming their moral authority from knowing the will of God, was met with the somewhat humorous reply “It is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is I will do it!” In one of the few examples in which Lincoln made a strong, but still relatively reserved claim into understanding the will of God, he says before the battle of Antietam that “he made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation.” This was one of the few times Lincoln ever did anything like this, in contrast to the other prominent public figures of his day, North and South, who “made no bones about saying [that they knew the will of God].”

Things looked especially bleak at this point for the Northern war effort, and, his son Willie having recently died as well, Lincoln was turning to God, the Christian God almost certainly now, in a way he had probably never done before. Barton, Noll, and Donald, among others, all agree that during 1862, Lincoln had a personal turning point in his religious life. He had always subscribed to belief in a Divine Being, a Higher Power, at least the Deist God of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, but when faced with such dire times, he looked for a more concrete, more tangible, more compassionate God, and while he still did not join a Church in an official sense, he did frequent the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church at this time, engaging in many conversations with the reverend there. Lincoln himself called this period a “process of crystallization” of his religious beliefs. Dewitt calls this period the “flowering of his personal faith,” and notes that “[e]vidence of Mr. Lincoln’s religious faith piles up particularly in the war years.” As Allen C. Guelzo writes, “By midlife, Lincoln had tempered some of his early religious skepticism.”

One could say his beliefs after this period became more sophisticated, as Lincoln’s understanding of God actually underwent a change in this period, and theology figures more prominently in his public and private life. Miller notes that “he does seem either to have held all along or to have come to during the terrible pressure of the war—perhaps more strongly after his son Willie’s death in 1862—a belief in the God that Bible-believers believe in.” Noll states:

Like a figure from Israel’s ancient history, Lincoln was arguing with God. But it was no longer a domesticated deity, an American God, but the ruler of nations. The truth had begun to dawn on Lincoln that this God was not at the nation’s beck and call, but the nation at his. His thinking was beginning to diverge from the paths followed by…the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries.

Even before this time, Lincoln had told several close confidants, as interviewed by his old law partner, Herndon, that he did not believe in Hell, but, rather, that all men were destined one day for salvation. As Miller poses the question that was on Lincoln’s mind, “What sort of God would that be, who would in his omniscience and foreknowledge create all those souls whose destiny was to roast forever in the flames of hell?” Lincoln saw a forgiving God, and in turn he displayed remarkable forgiveness and magnanimity in his life. This new view of God was also more respectful, more uncertain. Before, Lincoln had fallen into the trap, though to a remarkably lesser degree than most of his contemporaries, of seeing America as God’s chosen land, full of his favor. Noll confirms this, citing Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address to show that “he talked of divine realities as if their main purpose was a utilitarian one to serve the nation,” that “[h]e even spoke as if God existed as a kind of celestial umpire waiting only to dignify the decisions of U.S. citizens.” But the failures of the Union Army and the death of his son Willie made him question that America, or even the North, had this favored status. This would culminate in an idea of shared responsibility for the war, most visible in his Second Inaugural:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

Here can clearly be seen Lincoln’s understanding of the war as having two sides, and while he shows he himself cannot understand slavery, he asks his fellow Northerners not to pass judgment, suggesting shared blame and that the war may be divine punishment. He never says that this was the exact will of God, but suggests only that it may be. As Miller points out, “Lincoln did not make his moral affirmations by grand authoritative proclamation, as from on high, speaking on behalf of God.” In contrast, as Wills, Noll and Miller note, his contemporaries had no problem doing so. In an era where both sides spewed angry invectives of damnation against each other and claimed for themselves an exclusive moral high ground, Lincoln talks about forgiveness and the possibility of his own side’s culpability. For Wills, “Lincoln was the exception in that his goals and rhetoric did not escalate” with the escalation of the war, and it is this that he calls “Lincoln’s distinctive mark, one almost unique in the history of war leadership… his refusal to indulge in triumphalism, righteousness, or vilification of the foe.” Noll more or less says the same thing: “Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to claim the moral high ground exclusively for the North was even more extraordinary than his charity to a nearly defeated foe,” adding that

none of America’s respected religious leaders—as defined by contemporaries or later scholars—mustered the theological power so economically expressed in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. None probed so profoundly the ways of God or the response of the humans to the divine constitution of the world. None penetrated as deeply into the nature of providence. And none described the fate of humanity before God with the humility or the sagacity of the president.

Given his background as a skeptic and a non-church member, for Lincoln to so grandly surpass the theologians of his day is extraordinary. These striking differences stemmed from his unique understanding of religion, of a more forgiving world where all could be saved, that God’s will was “mysterious, not manifest,” and these are all in a sense a part of his homespun “Doctrine of Necessity” that grew out of his “revolt” against the way religion operated in his time and place. These views of his on religion made him who he was, gave him his defining characteristics by which he is most remembered. Never accepting the extreme, judgmental Christianity of American Evangelical Protestantism, he nevertheless examined the Bible deeply and took in its greatest teachings, those of forgiveness, and striving to do your own personal best while not condemning others for their faults. When North and South used religion as means to destroy each other, Lincoln brought in religion for its true purpose, to unite and heal:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Though possibly not a Christian himself, Lincoln displayed more of a Christian spirit than any of his contemporary theologians. Clearly, both what Lincoln liked and did not like about religion contributed significantly to the shaping of his core beliefs and traits; his views on human nature, arising from both that which he rejected and accepted, helped build the traits that made Lincoln, made him truly great, and made him, in a sense, a religious prophet (he never would have called himself that) unequaled in his time or arguably ever in American history. As Jones concludes, “With the passing years, the limitations of Abraham Lincoln’s religious views, which were intellectual and technical, will grow less and less apparent, while the great basic principles of the Christian faith which found such large expression in his daily life, will grow from more to more until they quite transfigure him, if indeed they have not already done that.”

WORKS CITED

Barton, William E. The Life of Abraham Lincoln. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers, 1925.

Basler, Roy P. Abraham Lincoln, his Writings and Speeches. Cleaveland, Da Capo Press, 2001.

Guelzo, Allen C. Lincoln and the Abolitionists. The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 24 Issue 4.

Jones, Edgar DeWitt. Lincoln and the Preachers. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948.

Miller, William Lee. Lincoln’s Virtues. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Morel, Lucas. Lincoln’s Sacred Effort. New York: Lexington Books, 2000.

Noll, Mark. America’s God: from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Noll, Mark. The Puzzling Faith of Abraham Lincoln. Christianity Today, Vol. XI, No. 1.

Wills, Gary. Lincoln at Gettysburg. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

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Anti-immigrant Americans in the mid-nineteenth century were known as “Know-Nothings,” a title well-deserved for Republicans when it comes to the immigration issue today.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 27, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 27th, 2015

AMMAN — Illegal immigration is seldom not in the political spotlight these days. Prominent Republican politicians, in particular, are quick to emphasize the supposed massive harm that illegal immigration causes the United States and its legal citizens and residents. Calls to deport all illegal immigrants are now routine and regular among leading contenders for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination for the 2016 election. In fact, the consistent Republicans leader and front-runner in the polls of late, businessman and reality-TV personality Donald Trump, seems to talk about this issue more forcefully and more prominently that any other candidate. Add to this fact that he seems to be getting a nearly unlimited amount of press coverage and the situation is clear: illegal immigration is currently one of the most talked about political issues, possibly the most talked about issue, and looks to be a dominant topic throughout the 2016 election season, with or without Trump.

Leading Republicans, especially Mr. Trump, have made some bold claims about illegal immigration: who the immigrants are, what effect they are having on our country and economy, what solutions will best work towards addressing the problem. Here, we will get to bottom of the real nature of the human beings who come to work and live in the United States illegally and the effects they collectively have on America as a whole and the states where they are most numerous. Then we will look at what some of the leading Republicans are saying, and see how that squares with the reality of the situation.

The Current State of Illegal Immigration

Pew presents research that shows illegal immigrants living in the U.S. peaked after a steady increase of many years in 2007 when they reached 12.2 million people (about 4% of America’s population then). That level has since reached a relatively stable level and has declined from its 2007 peak of 12.2 million to 11.3 million in 2014 (3.5% of the U.S. population), and was as low as 11.2 million in 2012. These people represent 26% of America’s foreign-born population, down from 30% in 2007. That means that, roughly, for every four foreign-born people that enter the U.S. and stay, three do so legally. A little over half of the illegal population (52 %) are Mexicans as of 2012 but this percentage is in decline, as are their absolute numbers, to 5.9 million down from 6.4 million in 2009.  At the same time, illegal immigrants from other some other parts of world have slightly increased. After Mexico, for 2013 only El Salvador had an illegal immigrant population that is more than 5% of the total illegal population, and only slightly so. The country with the next highest number of its people living illegally in the U.S. is Guatemala, with a little under 5%. India comes next, in the middle between 4% and 3%, followed by Honduras and then China, with a bit under 3% each. The only other country that broke 2% was the Philippines, and only slightly. The Dominican Republic follows at close to 2%, with South Korea slightly behind. The only other countries that are each contributing at least 1% of the total illegal U.S. population, in descending order, are Ecuador, Colombia, Haiti, Vietnam, Peru, and Brazil, the last three at 1% and the others only slightly above this.

As of 2013, almost sixteen percent had arrived just recently (less than five years prior), over 24% had been in the U.S. from five to nine years, over 28% percent had been in the U.S. from ten to fourteen years, 14.5% had been in America for fifteen to nineteen years, and 17% for at least twenty years. Combining elements of this data, we can see that in 2013 over 40% of illegal immigrants had been living in the U.S. for less than a decade, while almost 32% had been here for at least fifteen years. The largest number of illegal immigrants, over 28% of the total, arrived from 2000 to 2004 and about 24% arrived from 2005-2009. This means that about a little over one-half the total illegal immigrant population arrived in the decade of 2000-2009 (for those looking for political “blame,” George W. Bush was president for almost that entire time, meaning more of the current illegal immigrants arrived under his presidency than under any other president). About 17% arrived from 1995-1999, and about 11% from 1990 to 1994 (28% overall from that decade). About 12% have arrived from 2010 on, and only about 8.5% before 1990, although it should be remembered that in 1986 the Reagan Administration gave legal status to about 2.7 million illegal immigrants who had entered the U.S. before 1982 after Congress passed a law authorizing Reagan to do so in 1986. Further action by Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush, added to this number and brought it closer to three million than 2.7 million. In addition, many Cuban immigrants have legal status in the U.S. as the special situation between Cuba and the U.S. over the decades since Castro’s revolution gave way to special policy, law, and agreements for people arriving to the U.S. from Cuba, giving them legal status in ways that if they were not specifically Cuban would have left them part of the illegal immigrant community. As of 2013, over 1.1 million people born in Cuba were living in the U.S, the product of a half-century of these special policies.

The recent decline in illegal immigration is in part due to the Great Recession; since 2009, about 350,000 people each year (100,000 of them Mexican) have entered the U.S. illegally, but this represents a dramatic decline in the number of immigrants from over a decade ago, when far more people were coming to the U.S. illegally and far more illegal immigrants as a share of the total pool were recent arrivals, with the proportion of illegal immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade almost doubling since 2000 while the proportion who have been in the U.S. for less than five years being more than halved since 2000.

Also, from 2009 to 2012, the illegal immigration population fell in fourteen states and rose in only seven. Illegal populations decreased in Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, New York, Massachusetts, and grew in Idaho, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Jew Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and Florida. The six states of Texas, Florida, California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey together have 60 % of the illegal immigrant population in the country, and Nevada is the state with the highest proportion of its population (8 %) consisting of illegal immigrants. Nevada also stands out as the state with the highest percentage of K-12 students who have at least one illegal immigrant parent (18%), while next-highest are the states of California, Texas, and Arizona, where that number is between 13% and 11%. Overall in the U.S., about 7% of all K-12 students fall under this category, with almost four-fifths of those being born in the U.S.  Illegal immigrants also make up 5.1 % of the labor force, a rather high percentage considering they just account for 3.5% of the population. The states with the highest percentage of illegal immigrants in their labor forces (ranging from 10% to 8%) are Nevada, California, Texas, New Jersey, and, again, Nevada leads the pack with 10% (for those wanting more data on illegal immigrant populations state-by-state you can look here and here).

As far as their socio-economic status, in 2013 illegal immigrants were almost twice as likely be living in poverty (27.6%) than the population as whole (14.5%, taken from census data including illegal immigrants), are far less educated—only 13.6 % of illegal immigrant adults had at least a college degree and only a little more than half had successfully finished high school compared with 31% and almost nine out of ten for the whole population, respectively—and are much less likely to have health insurance, with only about one-third of illegal immigrants having coverage compared with over 86.8% of Americans in general.

Republicans might be particularly surprised to learn about illegal immigrants’ contributions to the U.S. system overall. At the federal level, their tax contributions far outweigh any financial payments they receive. For example, Illegal immigrants pay about $15 billion in payroll taxes each year into Social Security, but only take about $1 billion in benefits, and over the years they have paid about $300 billion into Social Security, accounting for 10% of the contributions even though they are only about 3.5% of the population (and never more than their 4%-2007-peak) and are only about 5% of the labor force. They also paid $11.84 billion in 2012 alone in state and local taxes with about 8% of their income (compared with 5.4% of the income for the richest 1% of Americans). Only a small percentage of illegal immigrants receive any type of federal benefits, even though they still often pay payroll taxes that go to Social Security and Medicare. Giving all illegal immigrants temporary legal work permits could bring in as much as $2.2 billion more in state and local taxes. President Obama is trying to do this for a 5.2 out of America’s 11.4 million illegal immigrants through executive action (which would generate about $845 million in new state and local taxes if fully implemented), despite lawsuits from twenty-six states, twenty-four of which have Republican governors, that have put his program on hold.

While there is some variation at the state and local level, state and local costs associated with illegal immigration are an overall small percentage of state and local spending, and have only a “modest” effect on state and local budgets (averaging 5% of the relevant programs), an impact that is greatly offset by state and local taxes paid by illegal immigrants and by federal assistance for covering these costs, though not wholly offset, with some states pulling in modestly less revenue relative to expenditures related to illegal immigrants and other states (e.g., Texas) pulling in significantly morerevenue from them than they spend on them. These numbers only relate to state revenues and expenditures, and do not even factor in other much-harder-to-measure but very significant economic benefits for the states’ economies (e.g., illegal immigrant consumer spending, productivity and contribution to states’ GDPs, and the costs employers save by paying relatively low wages to them).

Thus, for America as a whole, illegal immigration would seem to bring in more economic benefits than costs.

As for crime, immigrants tend to be imprisoned less often than native-born Americans (one-fifth the rate of native-born Americans and decreasing significantly over the years), seeming to have either or a combination of less of a crime-committing tendency or being “more responsive to deterrent effects” and going out of their way to avoid any problems with law enforcement. This is also true across all immigrant groups, from Indians and Bulgarians to Mexicans and Guatemalans. However, it should also be noted that the data of this study was not able to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Crime also decreased nationally as illegal immigration increased and crime decreased even more so in states with large immigrant populations, with immigration even seeming to actually decrease crime in cities. Even statistics that show proportions of illegal immigrants in federal prisons are relatively high for violent crimes are incredibly misleading, as almost all of these crimes are handled by state and local authorities; for example, the statistic that illegal immigrants in 2013 were 9.2% of all federal prisoners held on murder charges might seem bad, but this only involved eight cases. In short, there is no data linking illegal immigrants or specific groups of them, such as Mexicans, with higher rates of committing violent or drug-related crimes than the native-born American population. In fact, four out of five drug-related arrests by the U.S. Border Patrol—and this does not include normal domestic arrests, only those made by the Border Patrol—involved American citizens. This suggests the problems are not so much about Mexicans bringing drugs into the U.S. from Mexico, but, rather, Americans bringing drugs in from Mexico and, more generally, the high American demand for illegal drugs.

Many Republicans “Know-Nothing” About Immigration As an Issue or How to Handle It and Their Harsh Approach to Immigrants Matches Their Harsh Approach to Everything Else

The current leader—and dominantly so, from polls to media coverage—among the Republican presidential candidates, real estate mogul and reality-TV-personality Donald Trump—has called for deporting all 11+ million illegal immigrants, as well as any of their American-born children, whom are derisively called “anchor babies” by Trump and those with harsh views on immigration but whom are widely accepted to be defined as citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  Such a move would cost at least hundreds of billions of dollars to well over a half-trillion and take as long as twenty years, and if associated economic costs are included, could cost closer to $1 trillion for America overall.  Trump’s comments also suggest he clearly believes that many illegal immigrants are criminals: drug traffickers, murderers, rapists, etc. But Trump’s plan and views on illegal immigration, like many Republicans and conservatives’ views on this issue, are based on a highly inaccurate fantasy of “false assumptions” that is light on facts and heavy on mythology. Trump seems to be dragging other candidates down with him on this issue, too.

Critics of the Tea Party and the Republican Party often find a dearth of rationality and practical or forward thinking; that in 2015 the number one issue in the Republican nomination contest—illegal immigration—is, as noted above, a problem that has dramatically lessened in severity, volume, and proportionality has done little to reduce the incessant importance of this issue in the conservative/Republican mind. With America as a nation facing real-life severe, looming crises and with most of the of the oxygen in the political discussion of one of America’s two major political parties being burned focusing on a problem that is becoming far less of an actual problem while other problems only increase with severity, there is little to respect in that party—the Republican Party—as being worthy of serious consideration for taking over the reins of governance of our modern super-state replete with crises requiring serious, rational, and grown-up solutions. America is hardly the only place where such xenophobia is growing, for one only needs to look at Europe in recent years, for example, to dispel such a notion. And as alarming as the recent nativist wave should be for all Americans and people in the world for whom a well-governed, rational America tackling its crises head-on and being an example worthy of emulation and alliance throughout the world, the emergence of xenophobia in this time of crises should also hardly be surprising. There is nothing new in America having a fluctuating undercurrent of nativism, or anti-immigrant feeling, hinged with anything from a hint of intolerance to outright bigotry and violence (just watch Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York to get a loose sense for this vibe in years past), but in the year 2015, to see a party—its leaders and base of constituents—so crudely consumed by blind, ignorant, and irrational fear and hatred of “the other” is banal in the most tedious and hackneyed sense.

While many of us are ready to move forward into the twentieth century, too many others are stuck in the nineteenth. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton came out with a bold new plan to tackle the $1.2 trillion student loan debt-bubble and college financing, put forth a detailed economic plan that emphasizes raising median and women’s income, proposed a bold environmental/energy policy that even exceeds President Obama’s recently proposed plan, laid out an immigration policy that would give millions of hard working, law-abiding illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, and spoke out passionately about the racism in American society and in its criminal justice system.  A Republican Party that lost the last two presidential elections by losing a majority of all American gender and ethnic categories by more than ten percentage points (and often far more) except males as a group and whites as a group  is running on defining an exclusive America that rejects or ignores others—illegal immigrants, homosexuals, the poor and uninsured (Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Scott Walker both just released health care plans that would dramatically lessen assistance for the poor and uninsured, those people most in need of healthcare)—is now seeking to build a community and constituency of Americans based on existing affluence, privileges, rights, and opportunities and that takes care of it members through the distribution of benefits through the system while excluding from these benefits those who are currently shut outside of this community.  How this party expects to win in the face of changing American demographics that very much do not favor white voters and will only make such strategieseven less likely to succeed than in the past is a mystery for which no one has an answer. It is the 2012 election’s “makers vs. takers” debate all over again, and is the political equivalent of a town election campaign based on shifting resources to the nice, gated communities of homeowners and away from those outside these gated community—immigrants, the poor, the uninsured, perpetual renters, homeless, and those struggling while working part-time jobs with no benefits.

For such a campaign, America is a gated community where those with means should band together; in the immigration debate, this is about keeping “non-Americans” out of the community and shutting the gate, but this theme runs rampant through all the other Republicans’ policies, generally speaking, except those who are to be shut out are no longer illegal immigrants without American citizenship, but American citizens of much lesser means looking for ways into the gated community but whose chances are all but crushed by a society that keeps punishing them for their lack of means. All this is part of a general redistribution of wealth, energy, and resources away from the needy and to the affluent. If many Republicans want to deport millions of illegal immigrants, this same crowd also wants to deport millions of Americans not from the soil of our nation but from the rolls of welfare, Medicaid, educational assistance, affirmative action, Obamacare, and other programs that make a major difference in the lives of those Americans without means. Thus, immigration warfare and class warfare are in many ways one in the same, from the same exclusive heart and spirit that captures so much of today’s conservative movement.

One final point: 72% of Americans are against forcing illegal immigrants to leave America, with only 27% against letting them stay; this even includes a majority of Republicans (56%), but you would not know this from listening to many of the leading Republican candidates.

Time for Republicans to Look to Lincoln

In thinking about immigration as an issue, perhaps the greatest Republican—Abraham Lincoln—can be the most instructive even 150 years later. In Lincoln’s time and before the Civil War, a new political party emerged, popularly called the “Know Nothings” and officially called the (Native) American Party (it doesn’t get more nativist than that for an official title!). They were virulently anti-immigrant and would likely capture the same people that in today’s America that are so angry and paranoid about immigration. For Lincoln, the anti-immigrant sentiment was dangerously similar to proslavery sentiment.  In a speech given shortly after Independence Day in 1858, Lincoln noted how that holiday was often celebrated by the descents of the Americans who fought the Revolution as a day to celebrate both their ancestors and their connection to these ancestors. He continues:

But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, [loud and long continued applause] and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. [Applause.]

Thus, for Lincoln, a shared love of freedom and equality within immigrant and native-born alike united all as Americans. But also for Lincoln, discriminating against a black man in America was the same as discriminating against a German man or anyone else:

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of “don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down,” for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice—“Hit him again”], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!

In an 1859 letter of Lincoln’s in which he wrote why he would not support certain anti-immigrant initiatives, Lincoln expressed his disdain of any measure based on the exclusion of people:

Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them. I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.

An earlier 1855 letter has Lincoln expressing a deep sadness with the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “ all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal,  except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes,  and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.

Well, it sure seems Lincoln would feel despair in reaction to his own Republican Party today on the issue of immigration (not to even mention others). As usual with Lincoln, I find myself as a writer humbled in reading him, and at this point I cannot “add or detract” to his poetic words. Perhaps no other American can so beautifully and simply express how anti-American it is to be anti-immigrant. Trump and other Republican presidential hopefuls are missing the facts of reality in their framing of this issue. But when it comes to the spirit of their sentiment, it is their own Lincoln they should read to can see how deeply wrong they truly are.

More Election 2016 coverage from this author:

The Republican Field & Debate: Substance vs. Style: What Trumps What?

Don’t Dismiss The Donald: 4 Reasons Why Trump Could Win GOP Nomination

All Hail Hillary! Her Political Nature Is Just What Washington Needs

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

…or, almost everything you need to know about the rebellion of the so-called “Confederate States of America” and its values in one series of in-depth articles, this being Part III and looking at what the Southern slaveowning elites—who manipulated and dragged and coerced their states and people into voting for secession and into starting a war that they had very little chance of winning—said at the time they orchestrated their secession conventions and voted for secession.  Their most omnipresent and constant themes were clear and undeniable then as they are now: the glories of black slavery, the need for its preservation and expansion, fury at the North and Northerners for daring to speak against slavery or seeking to limit it through the Federal Government in any way, and the idea that all these reasons justified secession from the Union.

Other articles in this series:

Black & White I: Confederate Flag Nothing to Celebrate: SC Debate

Black & White II: The REAL Confederate Cause & Its Southern Opposition,

Part IV (coming soon)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 23, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) 

Continued from Part II

IV.) Why the South Wanted to Secede, in the South’s Own Words at the Time of Secession (HINT: SLAVERY!)

As for a detailed look at why the South seceded and the war was fought, there are huge numbers of readily available primary historical documentsmaking it clear that the whole secessionist and rebel enterprise rested firmly and primarily upon the institution of slavery.  For this reason, there can and should be no excuse for the mis-and-disinformation that has become gospel in all too many circles. The rebel confederation’s “Constitution” is one example; whereas the United States’ Founding Fathers were so embarrassed by slavery that they did not use the word “slave” or its derivatives even once in the Constitution, opting for clever euphemisms, the rebels in their imitation document which explicitly used the word “slave” or its derivatives ten times.

The below section details what each of the eleven rebel states’ leaders at each of their secession conventions officially proclaimed as their reasons for why they were doing what they were doing and/or what they said during the debates on secession at their conventions in regards to slavery. Let’s see what Southerners said at the time in question, in their own words, completely ignoring apologetics that came after the war and continue to be spread today (though we will deal with the apologetics soon).

Without further introduction, then, here, in their own words, are the leaders of the eleven states which illegally declared themselves seceded from the Union, in order of their attempted illegality:

South Carolina: In its act of attempted illegal secession, the South Carolina state government produced a document that that explained why it had had taken this course of action. This document used words built from the root words slave and slavery eighteen times. It cites in detail Article IV of the Constitution, of which Section 2 details the obligations of non-slave states to turn over any human beings forced into slavery in a slave state trying to escape in pursuit of their freedom into their states to turn these human beings back over to their slave-state owners, regardless of the state’s own views on slavery or the propriety of such an act. That’s right, the first major reason why South Carolina highlighted as an explanation as to why it wanted to secede from the Union was because it had a problem with states that felt differently than they did and expected the Federal Government to impose and enforce their pro-slavery views and wishes on the states that were anti-slavery. So when all the people who claim that the South fought the Civil War primarily over “states’ rights” and not slavery, well, they should attempt to read something from the period in question. In any event, that was the first reason cited for the justification of attempted secession, but in addition the very fact that other people in other states exercised their First Amendment right to criticize slavery was cited as another reason. A further reason cited was the election of Lincoln, and the reason this was an issue was because in the view of the authors this was something that threatened slavery’s survival. In the end, all the justifications for attempted secession involved slavery.

Mississippi: From the very beginning of its explanation of attempted secession document, Mississippi identified slavery as the main issue causing it to have a desire to secede, even maintaining its identity as being intimately tied to slavery:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

 It then enumerates a long list of points related to slavery, in order, the drafters say, “That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution [i.e., slavery],” which includes references, like South Carolina, to the issue of slaves escaping into the North and not being returned to their owners, and the document even faults the North since “It advocates negro equality, socially and politically.”

Florida: Florida’s very short secessionist document does not mention slavery directly or indirectly or go into reasons for secession. And yet, in addition to speeches from the state’s secession convention citing slavery as the main issue, the convention did prepare a rough document (which for unknown reasons was never published) which did detail the reasons behind secession and did explicitly and repeatedly cite slavery as the issue driving secession:

[African Slaves’] natural tendency every where shown where the race has existed to idleness vagrancy and crime increased by an inability to procure subsistence. Can any thing be more impudently false than the pretense that this state of things is to be brought about from considerations of humanity to the slaves.

Like the previous states’ reasons, issues with the fugitive slave laws are cited by the document, as are “denunciation and vituperation of the slave holding States…[with] gross and constantly repeated insults” over the issue of slavery by Northern politicians, writers, and press. As for Lincoln, it notes that “A President has recently been elected, an obscure and illiterate [!?] man without experience in public affairs or any general reputation mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them” even though Lincoln had never campaigned or spoke for abolition as a candidate by the time this was written.

Alabama: Alabama’s short secession ordinance begins by complaining about “the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama, preceded by many and dangerous infractions of the constitution of the United States by many of the States and people of the Northern section.” The “domestic institutions” and “dangerous infractions” refer to slavery and the non-repatriation of fugitive slaves along the same lines as South Carolina’s document, respectively. These are the principal justification given for Alabama’s desire to secede from the United States. The document also mentions a possible desire for Alabama to form a new nation with other “the slaveholding States of the South.”

Georgia: Georgia’s document explaining secession immediately gets into slavery, starting with the second sentence: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.” Like its sister states’ documents, issues with fugitive slaves laws are expressed. So are issues with limits to the expansion of slavery into the Western Territories. Still in the first paragraph, the documents states: “A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia,” and that “the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all” at the Founding of America. It goes into a very lengthy discussion of the evolution issue of the spread of slavery into the Western Territories, and accuses the Republican Party of standing for “The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.”

Louisiana: Like Florida’s official secession ordinance, Louisiana’s ordinancewas very brief and did not mention slavery or reasons for secession. It should also be noted that Louisiana’s convention was quite divided on secession, so much so that those adopting secession declined to submit their decision a referendum (violating their own constitution) or to release the voting tallies of the convention. However, over 108 years later, the secret numbers on the secession vote were finally discovered and published, showing that the vote was even closer than publicized at the time. In any event, the Journal recording of the speeches and resolutions of the convention clearly show the prominence of slavery as the principal driver behind Louisiana’s secessionist movement. It is a long record, but a few highlights:

Whereas, it is manifest that Abraham Lincoln if inaugurated as President of the United States, will keep the promises he has made to the Abolitionists of the North; that those promises, if kept, will inevitably lead to the emancipation and misfortune of the slaves of the South, their equality with a superior race, ere long, to the irreparable ruin of this mighty Republic, the degradation of the American name, and corruption of the American blood.

Here is another extract proclaiming how wonderful slavery is for black slaves:

Fully convinced as we are that the slavery ingrafted on this land by France, Spain. England, and the States of North America, is the most humane of all existing servitudes; That, to the slave of the South, it is far preferable to the condition of the barbarians of Africa, or the freedom of those who have been liberated by the powers of Europe. That it is in obedience to the laws of God, recognized by the Constitution of our country, sanctioned by the decrees of its tribunals. That it feeds and clothes its enemies and the world, leaves to the black laborer a more considerable sum of com-fort, happiness and liberty than the inexorable labor required from the free servants of the whole universe: and that each emancipation of an African slave, without being of any benefit to him, would necessarily condemn to slavery one of our blood and our race.

There is also a motion, which is adopted, to amend Louisiana’s Constitution so that “No person coming into this State after the passage of this ordinance shall be allowed to vote, unless he shall have been the owner of a slave or slaves twelve months previous to the election at which he shall offer to vote,” removing any doubt as to the fact slavery was the defining political trait of the state.

It also, like other states’ secession ordinances, contains complaints about Northern rhetoric against slavery, the issues regarding slave expansion into the Western Territories, and implementation of fugitive slave laws by the North.

Texas: Texas’ explanation of secession document, produced during a secession convention that met over the intense objections of Texas hero and then-current-Governor Sam Houston, also emphasized slavery as the primary impetus for secession, noting that Texas entered the Union with the United States

…as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery – the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits – a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slaveholding States of the [Union]…

Then the document makes it clear the Texas was unhappy with subsequent United States government and action as well as the actions of some “non-slave-holding States.” In particular, much like the states that had illegally declared secession before Texas, the document mentions the limits placed on spreading slavery to the Western Territories and specifically the instance of how things played out in Kansas, as well as in regard to non-compliance by Northern states with fugitive slave laws. Texas’s fear that this newly elected U.S. government will begin “destroying the institutions [i.e., slavery] of Texas and her sister slaveholding States” is stated, and complain that Northers have united

…based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color – a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the…[Union], the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.

and also further complain of the expression and publication of antislavery sentiment by Northerners.

After listing its litany of complaints, the document declares

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable. 

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.

and then declares secession.

Virginia: Virginia’s secession document is very short and does not mention reasons for secession, merely declaring Virginia seceded, with only the exception of a brief mention of “the Federal Government having perverted…[its] powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States.” Thus, even without getting into specifics, it is clear that Virginia is casting its lot with that even it defines first and foremost as “slave-holding.” Yet at first Virginia’s leaders were hesitant to vote for secession and voted against it, but after Lincoln called for military volunteers—including volunteers from Virginia—to put down the rebellion after South Carolina rebel forces had fired on Fort Sumter, the delegates voted swiftly for secession after months of deliberation.

Virginia, unlike the previous states who had voted for secession, was not pushed in this vote for secession by a radical faction of extreme secessionist slaveoweners, though to be sure, that faction still had much power in the state. Rather, the fact that the Federal Government of the Lincoln Administration had called for force to coerce a state—in this case South Carolina—was perhaps as big, perhaps even bigger an issue than slavery. But slavery was still a dominant and principal topic throughout the long proceedings of Virginia’s convention, with the words “slavery” and “slave”being mentioned a dramatically high number of times, and with other words such as “property” and “rights” indirectly referring to slaves and slavery, too. In fact, few other issues besides slavery and coercion related to states attempting secession over slavery were discussed at all, and slavery and its related issues take up many long discussions in the proceedings. In particular, there were many complaints about Northern anti-Slavery sentiment and action.  Like in most of the rest of the south, Unionists and secessionists alike, especially at the convention(s), were not against slavery and supported it as an institution. And even the issues of secession, rebellion, and coercion of a state by the federal government using force were all intimately tied at the time of deliberation to the issue of slavery. And regardless of the vote, the secessionist slaveowning faction was already moving, before the convention even voted for secession, to attack and capture Federal military armory at Harper’s Ferry and the Federal Naval Yard in Norfolk, illegally conspiring with leaders of the Virginia State Militia at the instigation of Virginia’s ex-Governor Henry Wise, who was a major slaveowning secessionist and a delegate at the convention. Wise even bypassed the current governor in the process. Clearly, the secessionist faction in Virginia neither cared for the deliberations of the convention nor for democratic process; Wise even told the convention, while showing everyone his large pistol, of the plot for elements of the militia to attack the arsenal and Navy Yard. Very soon after, the convention then voted for secession. In the end, when forced to choose between two sides in a conflict, between their fellow Southern slave states and antislavery Northern states, Virginia’s delegates chose 88 to 55 to secede and side with the South.

During the convention, a major slaveowner made clear that his

point…is that the hatred of our Southern institutions and our system of slavery, is deeply, irradacably ingrafted into the minds of the Northern people. It is an opinion, sir, which has been deeply fastened the re, and an opinion which, I fear, can never be eradicated. Sir, the children in their primers see a print of the slaveholder with scourge in hand, and the suffering negro in chains at his feet. Every kind of effort is made to indoctrinate into the Northern mind the sentiments of abolitionism. The press, the pulpit, the school house—all are made subservient to its purpose…And, Mr. Chairman, whenever there occurs a war of opinion, that war will never stop; it will go on from time to time; it will increase in volume and either one or the other of the parties must submit or must be conquered. A war of opinion is sure, in the long run, to be a war of the sword.

Another delegate bluntly noted that the divisions within Virginia and the whole South over the issue of slavery should be taken into consideration:

To have a divided and distracted people, will bring upon us at once the most awful calamities that any one can imagine. There is no use in endeavoring to disguise the fact that the institution of slavery is one of the acting causes that brought about this calamity. Look at the state of feelings in respect to this institution in the South, and you will find that most of your slaveholding States are divided upon this question. Your own State is divided upon it in a very considerable degree. Look down from the valley, down to Augusta, to the extreme Eastern counties-to the city of Norfolk. Look to the county of Frederick, and other adjacent counties, and there you will find thousands of slaves, while the gentlemen representing these counties on this floor, have all through identified themselves with the party whose zeal in behalf of the institution of slavery, if measured by their efforts in behalf of the Southern or Secession cause, as some would seem disposed to measure, would indeed be at a very low standard. We find some members who represent a much larger amount of property than those just referred to seeking to defer action, while others, representing large slaveholding interests, and some representing that interest but to a limited extent, are for immediate secession.

In addition, there are the usual complaints about fugitive slave laws’ lack of enforcement, limits on the expansion of slavery, and antislavery agitation, with one resolution calling for a permanent ban on antislavery expression in the U.S. Congress, stating that “the interests of both sections of the country imperiously demand that the slavery agitation should be removed now and forever from the halls of Congress,” with another limiting Congress’ ability to legislate on slavery to occur only with the consent of every single state. In another, “negro slavery” is declared to be “an institution…of vital importance to the social and industrial systems, of this and the other Southern States…”

Another adopted resolution argued that

…the point of substantial dispute, from which all minor disputes radiate as from a common centre, between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States, is whether negroes are property; and that the observance, in all legislation by the Federal Government and by the States, of the constitutional fact, in our complex system, as we understand it, that negro slaves are property, is the orbit in which the Federal Union, now in the darkness of disaffection and disloyalty, must henceforth move, in order to make that Union again illustrious with the beam of the old time brotherhood; and that that orbit alone, and no other, is competent to make the wasting powers of that Union and the drooping prospects of the whole country revive and rejoice.

Arkansas: Like Virginia, Arkansas adopted its secession ordinance after the fight at Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for state volunteers to put down the rebellion. Thus, this sequence of events is where Arkansas begins in listing its reasons for secession. Like Virginia, it, too, at first voted down secession. But inside the record of its proceedings, slavery, is, as usual with these conventions, front and center.

One resolution was adopted that cited these reasons for justifying secession:

…the platform of the party known as the black republican party, contains unconstitutional dogmas, dangerous in their tendency and highly derogatory to the rights of slave states, and among them the insulting, injurious and untruthful enunciation of the right of the African race in this country to social and political equality with the whites… 

…the seceded states have ample justification for having dissolved the ties which bound them to the old Federal Union, in the constant and unconstitutional political warfare made by the party, known as the black republican party, upon the institutions of the slave states, which warfare has culminated in the election of a president by that party, by a purely sectional vote—upon an unconstitutional platform, the principles of which, if carried out, would utterly ruin the South.

An address from the governor noted that the slave states’

…offence, like our own, in the eyes of the northern people, isslavery. This institution, co-existent with the remotest periods of civilization, and sanctioned by divine authority, is declared by the president elect, to “be in the course of ultimate extinction.” He has declared, and that truly, that the United States government -‘cannot exist half slave and half free.” An irrepressible conflict, says, he, is going on between freedom and slavery. That institution is now upon its trial before you, and if we mean to defend and transmit it to our children, let us terminate this northern crusade, by forming a separate government, in which no conflict can ensue.

He complains about the limits on slavery’s expansion west into the Territories, argues that expansion of slavery is necessary for its survival, that “The extension of slavery is the vital point of the whole controversy between the North and the South, as is plainly manifested by the persistent opposition of the northern people to its being engrafted upon any newly acquired territory, whether south or north of the negro line.” The adds that “God in his omnipotent wisdom, I believe, created the cotton plant—the African slave—and the lower Mississippi valley, to clothe and feed the world, and a gallant race of men and women produced upon its soil to defend it, and execute that decree.” He very simply sums up the whole of the conflict between North and South by saying that “They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble.”

One resolution referred to committee noted

That it is the deliberate sense of this convention, that African negroes, and the descendants of the African race, denominated slaves by all the constitutions of the southern slaveholding states, is property, to all intents and purposes, and ought of right to be so considered by all the northern .states, being expressly implied by the constitution of the United States, and a denial on the part of the people of the northern states, of the right of property in slaves of the southern states, is, and of right ought to be, sufficient cause, if persisted in by northern people, to dissolve the political connection between said states.

Another adopted resolution enumerated the issues Arkansas had with Northern states; all six had to do with slavery, and it complained that Northerners did not comply with fugitive slave laws, were seeking to limit expansion of slavery into the Territories, and, as the last point, noted that “They have degraded American citizens by placing them upon an equality with negroes at the ballot-box.” It then proposed seven amendments to the U.S. Constitution as redress, all designed to protect and promote slavery, with an eighth requiring all these amendments to have every state of the Union agree to amend them if any changes to them were to happen. It ended by saying all this was the only way Arkansas would stay in the Union. There are further motions and discussions about slavery’s preservation, perpetuation, and regulation at the national and state level.

North Carolina: Late in February, voters had narrowly rejected even having a convention to debate secession at all, and when a convention was later approved, less than one-third of the delegates were secessionists.  But the Unionist delegates has staked much on the belief than Lincoln would not use force against North Carolina’s sister Southern states; like Virginia and Tennessee, support for secession in North Carolina was not strong until Fort Sumter and the subsequent call for the use of force by the Lincoln Administration, and even then it was grudging.  Yet another example of a state with a secession convention simply producing an ordinance declaring session but not explaining it, North Carolina, like all those states that voted for secession, had slavery at the heart of the convention’s proceedings.  The records of the state secession convention show that North Carolina, at this point, thoroughly identified with its sister slave states and that the initial resolution for secession, as with other states, began with a complaint that Lincoln and the North were hostile to slavery, but then most of the rest of the text is devoted to complaining about the attempt to coerce with military force the states that had voted for secession.  Still, even though slavery is briefly mentioned, is is clearly outlined as the main difference between North and South, as well as the cause for both the other states’ votes for secession and the brewing crisis in a general sense.  This ordinance was rejected for the much shorter one that did not offer any explanation for the vote for secession.  The convention then quickly ratified the explicitly proslavery “Constitution” of the rebel confederation, thus joining the rebellion.  On a side note, an issue that came up repeatedly was the taxation of slaves as property.

Tennessee: Tennessee voters had resoundingly rejected secession in a February 1861 referendum pushed by the state’s governor, but, like Virginia before it, public opinion had shifted with the hostilities at Fort Sumter and the Lincoln Administration’s subsequent call to use force to coerce the rebel states. The state legislature, at the prodding of the governor, bypassed having a formal secession convention and an extended debate, and instead approved a “Declaration of Independence” in May that was backed up by a public referendum vote of Tennesseans approving “separation” by a more than two-to-one margin in June. Like some of the secession conventions’ documents, Tennessee’s “Declaration of Independence” did not elaborate on the reasons behind its vote to declare independence and join the confederation of rebel states.  

And yet, again, what was said by the legislators and the governor around the time the “Declaration” was adopted proves quite instructive.  Governor Isham Harris was very clear and direct that January when he had addressed the first special secession of the legislature that had arranged the first referendum that had voted down secession that the main issue at hand was slavery, stating that

To evade the issue thus forced upon us at this time, without the fullest security for our rights, is, in my opinion, fatal to the institution of slavery forever. The time has arrived when the people of the South must prepare either to abandon or to fortify and maintain it. Abandon it, we cannot, interwoven as it is with our wealth, prosperity, and domestic happiness.

He stated that “the Southern man…is unwilling to live under a government which, may by law recognize the free negroe as his equal.” Like others in similar positions before him, he went through, in detail, the usual litany of complaints about the North and Northerners: Northern non-compliance with fugitive slave laws, Northern efforts to use the Federal Government to restrict the expansion of slavery, the North’s “systematic, wanton, and long continued agitation of the slavery question,” and that Lincoln had “asserted the equality of the black with the white race.”  Then, the governor proposed a lengthy amendment to the U.S. Constitution designed to protect and expand slavery, an amendment that could only be changed by unanimous consent of all the slave states and the non-acceptance of which would be justify Tennessee seceding from the Union.

When the state legislature reconvened late in April to take up the issue of leaving the Union for a second time, an address from the governor was read in the state senate that thoroughly identified Tennessee’s position to be with that of the other slave states, as did various resolution of various senators.  Not long after, the legislature approved joining the rebels and put the issue to the popular referendum that was approved in early June.

*****

Thus, for many Americans, “that flag” represents some pretty awful, traitorous, disgusting things, and a cause which millions of Southern slaves and large portions of the South’s whites even thought was offensive. It represents a slaveowning elite who essentially demanded that they retain the dominance of the Federal Government in exchange for both not attempting to destroy this government through attempted secession and not making war upon it.  And when the idea of secession was even discussed, slavery took up the overwhelming majority of the discussion.  Thus, all the flags of the failed rebellion clearly represent slavery—and Southern defiance tied inextricable to slavery—beyond any reasonable doubt or counterargument.  Now that we have explored what the rebellion and its values were actually all about using clear evidence ranging from the rebels leaders’ publicly-stated reasons for wanting to secede to looking at the rebel confederation’s “Constitution,” in Part IV it will be time to explore how the flag of the rebellion was used after the war and through to the present day, as well as look at how the realities of the war, the prewar South, the rebellion, and Reconstruction’s aftermath become corrupted in a sea of lies centering around the mythology and distortions of the “Lost Cause” that still envelop and cloud our understanding 150 years after the rebellion was defeated. 

Continued in Part IV (coming soon)

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

The rebel “Confederate” flag is much less of a problem than the values and system it represents. The romanticization of the South’s traitorous slaveowner-led rebellion is an insult to America and American values and 150 years after the defeat of the that rebellion, the blatant, offensive distortions of history cannot be tolerated by this nation anymore…

…or, almost everything you need to know about the rebellion of the so-called “Confederate States of America” in one series of in-depth articles, this being Part II and looking at the actual system and values of the so-called “Confederate States of America” and the untold story of huge numbers of Southerners who opposed its values and actions, fought against it, and/or remained loyal to the United States.

Other articles in this series:

Black & White I: Confederate Flag Nothing to Celebrate: SC Debate

Black & White III: Why Southerners Voted to Secede, in Their Own Words

Part IV (coming soon)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 23, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 23rd, 2015

Continued from Part I

III.) The Untold History of the Civil War: the “South’s Inner Civil War,” and the Real Values of the Rebellion

The above characterizations by defenders of the rebel cause is an appallingly false understanding of pretty much everything involved, pure nonsense at its best.

The rebel states that formed an illegal (and never formally recognized by any sovereign national government) confederation had some very clear principles for which they and their confederation stood, the most overarching and dominant principle being the preservation and expansion of slavery and the principle of the states being able to determine their positions and practices, yes, in general, but with this ability very specifically, explicitly, and clearly tied primarily to the issue of slavery and to expand slavery freely and without any limitation into what were then the new Territories in the West, thus allowing slave states to continue their dominance of the Federal Government. This dominance is indisputable, for as James McPherson notes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, part six of the Oxford History of the United States:

During the first seventy-two years of the republic down to 1861 a slaveholding resident of one of the states that joined the Confederacy had been President of the United States for forty-nine of those years—more than two-thirds of the time. In Congress, twenty-three of the thirty-six speakers of the House and twenty-four of the presidents pro tern of the Senate had been southerners. The Supreme Court always had a southern majority; twenty of the thirty-five justices to 1861 had been appointed from slave states.

The New York Times

For the Americans who voted Lincoln into office, the 1860 election was about the corrosive dominance of America by the slaveowning elite of the Southern states and the problems of the institution of slavery. Slavery was very much an issue on the mind of the public. Even if American abolitionism was a relatively small movement in the years before the Civil War, it was still comprised of hundreds of thousands of people who were able to find a lot of support outside of their movement, garnering some two million signatures for antislavery petitions (and roughly three million up through 1863). In fact, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 famous antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—banned in most of the South—was the century’s bestselling novel not only in America (where 300,000 copies were sold in its first year alone), but also the world; the only book which sold more copies in the nineteenth-century was the Bible.  For most Northerners who weren’t abolitionists, there were still significant reasons to oppose slavery and is expansion. Because of the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths clause, allowing for three of every five slaves to count towards apportioning the number of Congressman seated in the U.S. House of Representatives for slave states, white Southern voters had far more power and representation per capita than white Northern voters. Lincoln made sure to emphasize this point, pointing out that while both Maine and South Carolina had equal numbers of presidential electors and Congressmen, Maine had well over twice the white people, and therefore citizen voters, as South Carolina had. As Lincoln said in a famous speech from 1854:

The South Carolinian has…the…advantage over the white man in every other free State, as well as in Maine. He is more than the double of any one of us in this crowd. The same advantage, but not to the same extent, is held by all the citizens of the slave States, over those of the free; and it is an absolute truth, without an exception, that there is no voter in any slave State, but who has more legal power in the government, than any voter in any free State.

This, in effect, diluted the vote of a free white Northerner relative to a free white Southerner. When the South was no longer guaranteed that dominance, the South was willing to destroy the Union, and the very concept of democratic republicanism, at the time when the rest of the world was hostile to this very experiment of American democracy. As The Economist notes, the Union victory in the Civil War was a victory for democracy and for all of humanity.

Thus, the people speaking as if “that flag” does not first and foremost embody slavery totally miss the mark and misunderstand and/or mischaracterize the issue people have with the rebel flag of the illegal slave-power confederation: the issue is not with the flag, and the issue is not so much with people who have “co-opted” or used the flag as members or racist or hate groups (though these issues are important factors). Rather—and what is amazing to me is that even in 2015 so many of the people speaking in support of the flag or of having an alternate banner of the rebellion and its forces displayed seem to either deliberately or unwittingly miss this—the issue that many people have with the flag is not the flag itself, per se, but mainly and primarily that is was associated with and was a major symbol of the rebellion both during and after the Civil War. That the particular flag that flew by the South Carolina House until last week was used by many hate groups and terrorists in the 150 years since the formal end of the Civil War is hardly insignificant, but the original sins of the rebellion and slavery, which are to be understood as the most patently grievous offenses, are the real issues at hand. Even if freed black slaves had perfect freedom and equality after 1865, and there had never been any Ku Klux Klan, “that flag,” representing the rebellion, the rebel army, the traitorous rebel leaders, and the values they professed and strove to promote and enforce is what all Americans should have a problem with, particularly when all this is promoted and sanctioned by the government flying any flag associated explicitly with and created for the slaveowner’s rebellion.

It is also incredibly ironic today that the people who—and the region of America that—are the most stridently anti-taxation and anti-government assistance for both the poor and especially African-Americans are whites living in the South, often the very same people whose descendants practiced or supported slavery, built up a would-be aristocracy of slave-owning planters who owned large amounts of land, benefited from very low property taxes and low taxation in general, to the degree the South generally did not even have much support for public education. This translated to an illiteracy rate among white adults that was forty times higher (20%) than that of New England (less than 0.5%) in 1850. Virginia, for example, even had a massive tax loophole for the tax on slaves, so that slaveowners paid far less in taxes than a fair assessment of their slaves would have required. The slaveowning planters’ overbearing power also meant that a small percentage of people owned an increasingly huge portion of the land, and they dominated the state governments of the South even though they were just a disproportionately tiny minority. In fact, slaveowners fell as a percentage of the proportion of the South’s population throughout the 1850s, yet slaveowners rose in terms of the percentage of them who were state legislators. In many ways, the South was an inherently undemocratic society. As one North Carolina newspaper editor wrote,

This great national strife originated with men and measures that were…opposed to a democratic form of government. The fact is, these bombastic, hi-falutin aristocratic fools have been in the habit of driving negroes and poor helpless white people until they think…that they themselves are superior; [and] hate, deride, and suspicion the poor.”

The confederation rebel government, both in its legislative body’s and in its “President” Jefferson Davis’ approaches, would only increase the undemocratic tendencies of the prewar South, grossly and repeatedly violating during the war in reality nearly every principle of liberty, legality, and constitutionality it was claiming in both practice and principle (all in contrast to the restraint and moderation of the Lincoln Administration). An extensive study from the Virginia Law Review catalogs many of these violations by Davis and the rebel confederation government, as well as the rebel politicians who spoke out against them. An exception to these violations, of course, was the fidelity of Davis and the rebel confederation government to slavery and slaveowners. 

This tiny minority of slaveowners propagandized and mobilized many of the vastly larger numbers of ignorant and uneducated poor white Southerners to fight a war whose chief aim was the perpetuation of the chattel-slavery system of bondage for Africans and their descendants even though these masses of poor whites were themselves not slave-owners. David Williams’ Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War, details how thoroughly divided the South and its people were over secession and the war and how these divisions became major fault lines in Southern society all throughout the earthquake of the war; many of the details in this section come from his fine and important work that effectively dispels the myth that Southerners almost all united behind secession, slavery, the war, the rebellion, and governments of both the rebel states and their illegal confederation. In addition, Pulitzer Prize-winner Eric Foner’s  article/chapter titled “The South’s Inner Civil War” also provides much of the information on Southern disunity presented in this section. He notes that “scholars today consider the erosion of the will to fight as important a cause in Confederate defeat as the South’s inferiority in manpower and industrial resources[emphasis added].”

A look at some maps and voting data can help to paint a vivid portrait of the scale and scope of diverging views in the South. One very telling thing to do is to take two steps: 1.) look at the map (more detailed info here) below, produced by the U.S. Government in 1861 using census data from 1860, of the distribution of slaves as a percent of the population in each state in slave states (darker means more slaves):

And then 2.) look at the maps of 1860-1861 below, and note how in most of the areas where slavery did not have a strong presence as indicated in the previous map, voters in the election of 1860 (South Carolina did not even have a popular vote) did not vote for the very proslavery Southern Democratic candidate (red) in large numbers but instead either voted for the staunchly pro-Union Constitutional Union Party candidate (green) or were very divided in their voting, and many of the delegates to the secession conventions from those counties subsequently voted against secession. These areas would form much of the core resistance within the South against the rebellion and its pseudo-government, both in terms of political dissent and through armed resistance. Where Union military forces came into these regions, they often found themselves greeted as liberators by people waving United States, not rebel, flags, and found many people willing and eager to assist them. Thus, throughout the South, different regions had varying degrees of slavery, enthusiasm for secession, and loyalty to the Union, with some regions remaining deeply loyal to the Union and the United States; sentiment was far from uniform.

Without endorsing Marxism, a Marxist could have a field day analyzing Southern society in this period, and the original Marxist, Karl Marx himself, did just that as a newspaper correspondent based in the United States and covering the war for several newspapers. Marx not only saw the oppression of the black man in slavery, but saw that Southern society oppressed all who were not slave-owners in favor of this slave-owning elite. Many of the non-slaveowners at the time felt the same way, even before the Civil War. The Civil War only intensified these feelings and saw them spread. Conversely, those poor white non-slaveowners in the South who supported slavery, secession and rebellion were heavily influenced by their religious, political, and community leaders who usually propagated a culture and an ideology of intense pro-slavery white superiority in unison with the dominant slaveowning elites. In the words of just one prominent and popular pastor in New Orleans in 1861:

The particular trust assigned to a people becomes the pledge of the divine protection; and their fidelity to it determines the fate by which it is finally overtaken…If then the South is such a people, what, at this juncture, is their providential trust? I answer, that it is to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing…This trust we will discharge in the face of the worst possible…Not till the last man has fallen behind the last rampart, shall it drop from our hands.

This culture formed a reassuring bedrock of Southern society to which vulnerable poor whites could mentally cling (so long as slavery was preserved). Today in the South, most white people idealize a system and a rebellion that oppressed everyone who was not a slave-owner and forced non-slaveoweners—both white and black alike—to do the bidding of and/or serve the interests of slaveowenrs. When one dispels the myth of a unified South by understanding all of this, it is easy to see why many whites and blacks alike came to resist the slave system that propelled them into war in 1861, and continued to resist their being forced to be subservient parts of the society that advocated it.

Roughly one-third of the south was composed of black slaves, and of the white population, three-quarters owned no slaves, and most of these three-quarters “made it clear” they were against secession when secession was debated in 1860-1861. The delegates to the state conventions that voted for secession firmly represented the slaveowners, not the common masses of Southern whites.

The Southern rebel illegal confederation government and its rebel member states had a litany of major problems with their own white population. When the slave-owning class could not get enough volunteers to fight their extremely bloody and likely-to-lose war against the Federal Government of the United States and a strong plurality of the people of America who disliked the slavery system and had voted for Lincoln specifically to limit the spread of slavery into the Western Territories, they had their rebel confederation government resort to conscription, passing America’s first major military draft in 1862, one that exempted any slaveowner who owned at least twenty slaves (later reduced to just fifteen in 1864) and for some time allowed those with a lot of money to legally hire a substitute (to be fair, the U.S. Federal Government also allowed a fee to be paid or a substitute to be hired for its later draft when that was instituted in 1863, but that fee was relatively low and far more substitutes were hired than draftees inducted, with less than six percent of the Union military forces being drafted while far more people proportionately were drafted into the rebel military forces). The rebel states had much greater problems finding volunteers and had about double the percent of draftees in their army as the Federal Government’s Union Army.

Needless to say, the slave-owning exemption was one bitterly detested by the fighting men and the Southern people. Among the common people and enlisted soldiers of the rebel states and their confederation, the cry “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” became a common slogan for a widely-held sentiment throughout the war (an 1864 editorial from a North Carolina paper vividly illustrates such feelings). Obscenely, the same landed slave-owning planters who orchestrated secession and pushed their states to war spent most of their energy planting cotton and tobacco for export and neglected planting food even while soldiers and the common people went hungry, with rebel armies and homes underfed due to the selfishness of the slave-owning planter class. Many of these planters actually did better during the war as prices rose sharply. Furthermore, speculators horded much of the food that was available and shortages became “severe.” All over the South from 1862 onward, riots over the lack of food became  frequent. Additionally, tax policy in the rebel confederation exempted or was light on many in the slaveowning planter class and the tax burden fell disproportionately on poor white non-slaveowning farmers; in fact, in slave states, the burden of taxation had been heavily skewed regressively towards the poor and away from slaveowners throughout the decades before the war as well, especially compared to Northern states. The rebel confederation’s government also took an active approach to confiscating property from citizens for the war effort, but a libertarian (to borrow the modern term) approach to helping those most affected by the confiscations and the poor in general, who suffered greatly throughout the war as families’ breadwinners were conscripted or died in combat and the wives/mothers who stayed behind were subject to having their horses and food and farm equipment taken either by corrupt government officials tasked with confiscation or any number of roving bands of marauders/deserters. It is telling how little the slave-owning elite and “Confederate” government cared for the rights of their own masses by resorting to conscription (and so quickly) in pursuit of their reckless war and by doing little to look out for the welfare of their own people; their selfishness in a society that was already heavily stratified was rampant and spoke volumes about the society that they led.

As for Southern Unionists who remained loyal to the United States, about 300,000 Southern whites and 200,000 Southern slaves joined the U.S. Government’s Union military forces, about one-quarter of the U.S. forces’ overall military strength, and rebel forces were understrength due to many Southerners not wanting to serve or choosing to fight for the Union instead. Huge portions of the rebel confederation outright rebelled against the rebel confederation government and against their own state governments and/or remained loyal to the Union, with whole counties more or less attempting to secede from their own state (including, for example, Winston County, Alabama, which formally voted to secede from the rebel confederation in July 1861). Whole sections of rebel states, in particular most of the upcountry and mountain regions (and in particular Appalachia), would remain outside any effective control of the rebel confederation government or the rebel state governments, while other areas would remain violent for long periods on-and-off (or) throughout the war. Inside these eras, loyal Unionists and supporters of the rebellion often engaged violently with each other as civilians all during the war, as did rebel forces and Unionists; roaming partisan bands, murder, and atrocities were common as these areas devolved into anarchy and a war of neighbor against neighbor; very little is known of the total death toll in this Southern civil war within the Civil War because these places were often remote, with scant media or official reports, or with those doing the killing not leaving a record of their acts for posterity. 

The Unionists of the South suffered greatly during the war, subject to violence and reprisals from both their neighbors and what constituted their “government.” Whole communities were shattered, suffering both privation, devastation, and constant harassment. They were often driven from their homes and into the mountains, hunted down like wild animals, imprisoned and sometimes even executed/murdered, and enjoyed little protection from any authorities, unless they were fortunate enough to come under occupation by Northern military forces. Other simply left their homes to cross into Union-held territory, Unionist strongholds, or left their states altogether. If rebel authorities managed to successfully conscript those Unionists who stayed behind into the rebel army, Unionists were even forced to fight for a cause that went against everything in which they believed. In the subsequent “histories,” especially written after the postwar Reconstruction governments had been overthrown, their stories often remained untold and, if they were told at all, quite ironically, they were characterized as traitors by Southern historians for not supporting the rebellion.

Part of Virginia left that state, choosing to remain loyal to the Union, and became the State of West Virginia in 1863. The same thing came close to happening in East Tennessee, as well, which remained a stronghold for Unionists throughout the war. There is also the special case of North Carolina. During 1863, a massive peace movement in the state (a state that was home to many Unionists and had large levels of dissent against the illegal rebellion and its illegal government throughout the war) arose, with even a majority of the state’s representatives to the rebel confederation’s self-styled “House of Representatives” who won election that year running on some sort of peace platform and an end to the war. The rebel confederation’s leader, Jefferson Davis, permissive of liberty and freedom of speech when it was not against the rebel cause, saw to it that confederation and state authorities enacted repressive measures, including the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus (This was hardly the only state to suffer from the rebel confederation government’s, and Davis’s, hypocritically imperious approach to “state’ rights;” as examples, Georgia’s state governor during the rebellion and even the rebel confederation’s “Vice President” denounced Davis and confederation policy throughout the war as a violation of liberty and both state and individual rights). Still, the movement gained enough momentum that it seemed for a while in 1864 that the state might elect a candidate for governor, William Holden, who was calling for ending the war and making a peace with the Union before the movement was defeated, and without a large degree of voter suppression, intimidation, and propaganda on the part of Holden’s incumbent opponent, Zebulon Vance, who readily abused his power to hold onto his position. When soldiers who had supported Holden deserted en masse and began waging an insurgency in North Carolina, the governor illegally arrested and held the families of the soldiers as hostages in prison camps to get them to stop their resistance.

Desertion and lack of enthusiasm for the Southern enlisted soldier became yet another problem after the war’s first major battle at Manassas and remained a problem throughout the war. Desertion became only dramatically worse for the rebellion in 1863 and 1864, at which point roughly two-thirds of rebel soldiers were absent from duty. The problem of desertion was a much larger issue for the rebels than for the Union forces because of the South’s much lower levels of manpower. But the problems with rebel deserters did not end with manpower; all over the south, many of these deserters would become bandits, armed gangs, and even anti-rebel-confederation guerillas and partisans, weakening the rebel home front and contributing further to the “inner civil war” in the South that put the rebels in a two-front war against Federal Union forces and many of the South’s own people who remained Unionists. Into this mix, deserters often sided with Unionists or at least organized resistance against rebel forces and authorities that were sent after them.

There were even important practices and ideological similarities with the state-sanctioned racism of the South and with those of Nazi Germany nearly a century later, even though there were also major differences, the main one being that the Nazis attempted to exterminate Jews by committing genocide, while Southern slave owners did not try to exterminate blacks, merely to treat them as property, pets, animals, and beasts of burden. Still, many of the same institutional discriminatory practices and ideological affirmations of pseudo-superiority and pseudo-inferiority, of imaged superiority for whites/Aryans and imagined inferiority or Africans/Jews, can be found in both societies. This state-sanctioned racism led to some horrible atrocities committed against black Union troops, usually former and/or (recently) emancipated/runaway slaves. Jefferson Davis made it official rebel government policy to execute or re-enslave black Union soldiers captured by rebel forces (even if they had never been slaves, though this one aspect was later slightly modified) and to execute their white officers. Though this policy was inconsistently carried out, atrocities were common and this led to some infamous incidents like the massacre at Fort Pillow, where many black (and some—in proportionately lower numbers—white Southern Unionist and rebel deserter) Union soldiers were executed when they tried to surrender, and the massacre during the part of the Siege of Petersburg known as the Battle of the Crater, where likely over 200 black Union soldiers were executed after hostilities had ceased And there were certainly many otherless famous incidents of massacres, atrocities, and executions against black Union troops.

If there is any doubt about the absolute primacy of slavery for the rebel confederation government and its leaders, in Part III we will look at the words of the secessionists themselves, in each state that had a convention that voted to secede and at the time of secession.

Continued in Part III

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

…or, almost everything you need to know about the rebellion of the so-called “Confederate States of America” and its values in one series of in-depth articles, this being Part I and looking at the recent debate in South Carolina over the “Confederate” flag.

Other articles in this series:

Black & White II: The REAL Confederate Cause & Its Southern Opposition

Black & White III: Why Southerners Voted to Secede, in Their Own Words III

Black & White IV (coming soon)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 15, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 15th, 2015

“The Bloody Angle,” at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, May 12, 1864, by Mort Kunstler

I.) Introduction

America must be one of the most tolerant nations on earth. Period. Full-stop. End sentence. The simple fact, that few people want to state this way, is that now, over 150 years after the end of the Civil War (1861-1865), the bloodiest war in American history—begun by an illegal rebel confederation in response to the lawful, legitimate election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, after which at the end of 1860 and early 1861 first seven and then four more Southern state governments voted to illegally secede from the Union very clearly over the issue of slavery and formed an illegal rebel confederation that began illegally seizing federal property and when militia forces of the rebel government of first state to illegally vote for secession, South Carolina, opened fire on Federal Government forces at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina on April 12th, 1861 and lasting formally until May 9th, 1865—the flag and other emblems of the traitorous rebel slave-power states that almost destroyed this nation are allowed to fly in unrepentant defiance on both national and state and local government land, even including the seats of state government, including (until three days ago) the Capitol grounds in South Carolina’s capital city, Columbia, and including statues of rebel leaders in the in the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. (talk about controversy of installation) .

I can’t think of a modern national government that tolerates itself or any of its regional governments publicly flying flags of past rebellions in any official capacity. Yet 150 years later, here we are. Perhaps it should not be a surprise then, in such a permissive culture, that so many Americans are close to clueless as to why the war was fought and over what issues and how each side conducted itself both before and after the war. Instead, many have been brainwashed by post-Civil War apologist and apologetic revisionists (and it is important to note that these rationales and explanations only originated after the War) who sought to lionize and romanticize a cause which was described in this famous passage of the memoirs of General U. S. Grant that discussed his feelings after meeting Gen. Robert E. Lee to accept the surrender of Lee’s army in April of 1865:

I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.

Keeping in mind that we are not talking about the individual motivations of rank-and-file soldiers who believed they were fighting to “defend” their homes or for other reasons (we will talk about that in Part IV), but, rather, why leaders of the South attempted secession and chose war. Still, there are some of you reading this, I am sure, who would completely disagree with the characterization of the preceding paragraphs. To you I say, you are a product 150 years of brainwashing and whose minds have been poisoned by a diet of consumption of the most biased, ignorant, and deceitful sources that dominated our “histories” of the subject for far too long (more on this in part IV). Beyond that, there is nothing to say to you until you can educate yourself with the actual, as opposed to the imaginary, historical record. But on this, I will elaborate further in Parts II and III, going through what actually happened and linking to numerous period and scholarly sources so you can read for yourself what really happened.

II.) The Recent Debate in South Carolina

What was amusing about watching the debates in the South Carolina House of Representatives is the number of people who kept suggesting that if it was “that flag”—meaning the rebel battle flag carried into battle by many rebel troops fighting against troops that marched under the United States flag—that bothered people, another flag honoring the rebellion and/or the rebellion’s values should replace it. The rebel battle flag, in the words of its defenders, is said to have been “co-opted” and “abducted” by racist groups and hate groups. This assumes some sort of clean, noble cause, and that somehow racism and hate found its way into the flag because of bad people who misunderstood the flag’s true meaning. Many of the speakers spoke during the debate of the need to honor the military veterans who fought for the rebellion, and that getting rid of the rebel battle flag would be an insult to the memory of the veterans who, in their words, gave their lives “in defense of their state,” an insult unless it was replaced with another flag of the rebellion, different from the more recognized rebel battle flag. It is terribly amusing, as well as sad, that so many people, including some of South Carolina’s state representatives, insist that the rebel battle flag represents a fight against an “over-oppressive federal government.”

Particularly insulting was that so many of the people arguing for some sort of flag representing the proslavery rebellion and/or its military forces to remain flying noted the “grace” (a term repeatedly used) shown by the black families of the black victims (including a South Carolina State Senator, Clementa Pinckney) of the recent terrorist shooting in Charleston by an avowed white supremacist when the families forgave him, and then these politicians citing that forgiveness asked for “grace” to be shown to them and the rebel proslavery cause by allowing a different flag of the proslavery rebellion to fly on the Capitol grounds. After listening to several representatives complain about being threatened politically over supporting the flag, one Representative Christopher Murphy, a Republican,asked a pointed question of one of the flag’s most ardent defenders:

…when people of Charleston showed grace, they showed tremendous grace, and did you know that I cannot understand how substituting one Civil War banner for another Civil War banner shows grace to the people of Charleston and the people of this state. In fact I think… it’s a slap in the face the city of Charleston, to the people, the victims, their families… to place this banner in a place of honor, did you know, is just plain wrong, and for us to worry about being threatened politically, we need to quit worrying about June 2016 [the upcoming elections] and let’s worry about June 2046 what’s in the best interests of our state and not our political careers.

Perhaps the most outrageous of the proposed amendments involved proposing for the South Carolina Capitol grounds of the creation of a memorial for African-Americans who “fought” for the rebel cause. This involves pure myth, very popular among Southern apologists of the rebellion, that large numbers (“thousands”) of African-Americans actually chose to fight for and serve the rebel states and their illegal confederation government during the Civil War. Nothing of the sort happened. Yet only a few years ago, such lies made their way into a Virginia textbook for fourth-graders.

Rep. Jonathon Hill, Republican, importantly noted that one of his constituents who was an activist reminded Hill that Hill had never had a cross burned on his front yard but that she had. He continued:

Whether you believe that current battle flag is appropriate next to the…[rebel] memorial, which those soldiers fought and died under that flag, or not is a moot point, because the fact is it does not require that flag in order to teach the history of the sacrifice of those soldiers and the lives that were lost. Now, unfortunately we did fight the states’ rights battle on the issue of slavery, and any of the heritage folks, so to speak, who would deny that, simply have to read the ordnance of secession from South Carolina,” and then had the presence of mind to read from the actual Ordnance of Secession produced by South Carolina’s State Legislature ‘”Now, let’s let the irony of that sink in for a minute. Here we are complaining about the federal government breaching contract while South Carolina breached the very right to life and liberty of people they called slaves.

Rep. Jenny Anderson Horne, Republican, in perhaps the most reported replayed portion of the debates (video), noted how “this flag offends” several of her friends and colleagues in the House, and added tearfully and passionately:

I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday, if any of you vote to amend, you ensuring that this flag will fly beyond Friday, and for the widow of Sen. Pinckney his two young daughters, that would be adding insult to injury, and I will not be a part of it…I’m sorry I have heard enough heard enough about heritage, I have a heritage, I’m a lifelong South Carolinian, I’m a descendant of Jefferson Davis, but that does not matter… because this issue is not getting any better age…

African-American Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, Democrat, after a slightly contentious exchange with Rep. Rick Quinn, Republican, who had the podium, pointedly asked

Did you know that I personally am so offended by the references to us showing grace to this amendment and compromise, did you know that I am offended by that, because, in my view, for this body, and the people in this body who are making that request, to say to those of us “ Show some grace, like the people, like those nine families did toward the shooter, show us some grace by agreeing to a compromise [on removing the rebel battle flag],” did you know that your intention, and I say your not meaning you personally, but for all of those people who have come to that podium and said that, that whether they are aware of it or not, there are some of us in here who are extremely offended by that comparison, we believe, did you know, that it’s comparing apples and oranges, and that we would really, I would, I’m not going to speak for anybody but me, I would ask you Mr. Quinn, since you are in the leadership, if you would you please share with your caucus, if you would please not take the podium again and ask us to show grace in this effort like the folk who were so generous in forgiving of the shooter in Charleston, thank you so much Mr. Quinn.

Another African-American, Rep. Cezar McKnight, Democrat, very passionately told his South Carolina House colleagues:

So now, what will we do? What will we say to the world that looks at us right now and says “South Carolina, will you step into the twenty-first-century and say, resoundingly, that symbols of hate and division will not be allowed to decorate the yard of the people’s house? Or will you play to the lowest common denominator, to those people who claim heritage…We have a decision to make. Are we going to continue to tarry in the foolishness of 150 year ago? I sat here in disbelief as I saw to colleague after colleague who wouldn’t call the Civil War the Civil War. They wanted to paint over it and call it the “War of Northern Aggression.” That is a misnomer. It is a civil war. It divided this nation. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and we came together in 1865 under one flag, and that is the Stars and Stripes. You cannot serve two masters, you cannot pay homage to two flags. I served my country in the United States Army…I pledge allegiance every morning to the flag of the United Statesof America. It isour flag, and we need to hold it as such and take anything else and put it in its proper place…The world is watching, and in the words of the great abolitionist William Wilberforce, “You may choose to look away, but you can never again say that you did not now.” You know that that flag divides our state. You know that is embarrassing and shameful and promotes all types of division.

Yet another African-American, Rep. John Richard King, Democrat, added that

That flag is painful to many of us. And we understand and respect the heritage that many of you all call it. But to many of us, we hurt. You talk about family, you talk about “Oh, how I love you, and how much I care about you”… if we are hurting, and if you cared, we would not be where we are right now. I am embarrassed about my state.

To anyone who wants any of the flags of the rebellion flown, I ask them this: if this for you is about state pride, “states’ rights,” and honoring the soldiers who died, as you put it, “defending” their homes, why not just fly the state flag of whatever state you live in? Why do you need to fly the flag of a failed attempt to create an entire separate nation based on slavery and of tearing the United States and its precious Union apart? Those state flags today represent states that existed then, but that today do not stand for racism, slavery, or destroying the United States. They represent a flawed past, yes, but also a commitment to the future and an ability evolve, change, and undo some mistakes of the past. Isn’t that much better?

The problem is, these proponents of replacing one rebel flag with another rebel flag or of keeping the current blue-crossed, red-background flag that is the most recognizable flag of the rebel, pro-slavery faction in our Civil War are in effect asking us—demanding of us—respect that includes government-sanctioned publicly prominent respect of the values and causes of the rebel state governments and the illegal confederation they formed. To me, and to all Americans with a proper understanding of American history that claim to profess American values as embodied by our Declaration of Independence, this is intolerable, insulting, and disgusting, and amounts whitewashing a very ugly episode and period in our history. To be fair to them, these people do genuinely seem to believe that Civil War was not really about slavery, or that slavery was only a secondary or tangential cause (before the more informed of you may laugh, let it be known that Texas, the second largest state and a state that often sets national trends for American textbooks, just approved a textbook for all its public schools that calls slavery a “side” issue in the Civil War).

There are a number of instance above where the cognitive dissonance of some people regarding the flag’s and the rebel states’ confederation’s cause are truly astounding, and one wonders if these people have any sense of irony or self-awareness at a times. A close look at the historical record can explain firstly why so many people are so outraged and why the flag in question and the rebel confederation itself are the epitome of racism, oppression, and hate and secondly why widespread delusions and myths persist even today among those who ignorantly and naively romanticize the horrors of the true ideals of both the rebellion and the flags that represent it. The latter group do not know their history, so in Part II we will go into a detailed explanation of just how very wrong they are about this history.

Continued in Part II

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Perhaps the most substantive difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton involves style, with one shunning politics and the other understanding that nearly all of all America’s most successful presidents embraced, thrived, and enjoyed politics from the top to the bottom as a very necessary evil that empowered them and their agendas and made them more effective leaders.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse April 20, 2015   

by Brian E. Frydenborg, LinkedIn,Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at @bfry1981) April 20 2015.

The U.S. is, simply put, not a terribly progressive country today. An out-and-out progressive can’t win a national election for some time yet, though we do seem to be moving in the right direction. Obama was a moderate who presented himself as such. Hillary is selling herself as a moderate but if you look at her long career she is generally very liberal and very willing to fight publicly in ways Obama clearly disdained. Yet since she has held office she has realized that the Elizabeth Warren style of “TAKE ON EVERYONE AND SHOUT IT FROM THE RAFTERS!” does not get you the best results even if you can win a Senate seat in Massachusetts. It works about well as Obama’s “let’s hold hands with the Republicans so they can weaken everything I am doing or stop my efforts in their tracks” dance. Even on Iran, it seems Obama caved in and is maddeningly giving the GOP a chance to wreck this deal. I love Warren but the biggest role she has had is as a liberal spokesperson, as she exists as more of a voice on the margins than either anyone with any power to do something or as a senator able to win over colleagues and pass legislation. Mark my words, Hillary will (likely) win as a perceived moderate but once in there she is a fighter and will win some big fights that will move this country to the left and bring the moderates and independents further left on the spectrum. She will do it not by spewing ideology but by delivering results. The non-liberals will not even realize they will be moving left, they will just think they are being practical. But two terms of Hillary will move this country far in the direction in which it needs to go.

Obama, Warren, Kucinich, they all meant well but ultimately couldn’t work the system. People like Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, FDR, LBJ, Teddy Roosevelt (TR), even Lincoln all knew how to work the system, cut shady deals, get off their high horse, and compromise politically, getting a heck of a lot done as a result.  Take Lincoln and slavery.  Lincoln was a political animal in the best sense of the Aristotelian phrase, and though he was always against slavery, he made offer after offer to slaveowners, made deal after deal of incremental half-measures against slavery, up to and including the Emancipation Proclamation and leaving slavery alone in loyal border states, which, rather than evidence of Lincoln not really being against slavery, was evidence of someone who knew when to strike a critical hit against an institution that could not be brought down in one blow just yet.  In the end, all these half-measures and wheeling-dealing laid the ground for the total eradication of slavery, most importantly by moving the country gradually in the direction of being ready for just that.  TR and FDR and LBJ likewise were exemplary political animals, never shying away from a fight and frequently able to compromise to get results.  Because of the first, we have national parks and a government able (it not always willing) to fight big-business and special interests and to protect the common man.  Because of the second, we have Social Security, won WWII, and made remarkable progress even during the war on racial and gender issues (the racial and gender-related progress also largely due to his remarkable wife and First Lady, Eleanor).  Because of the third, we have Medicare and Medicaid and the crowning triumph in civil rights legislation that built on Lincoln’s and FDR’s earlier work. When you sell yourself as an anti-Washington outsider, like Obama and Warren did, you get to Washington and find out, that, SURPRISE, the city and its machinery does not jump to that tune very well and you end up more as a spectator than a leader.

All Hail Hillary, who will sell herself as an experienced Washington hand able to get stuff done not by preaching utopia and revolution but by gleefully wading into the muck of the swamp of DC. Our most accomplished leaders (with the exception of George Washington) all enjoyed the game of politics and were political animals, from Lincoln to FDR and LBJ. Warren and Obama did not want to play the game and look at their relative lack of accomplishments.  Obama is hardly a failure, though, and especially early in his presidency, he dug the U.S. out of the giant hole into which Bush Administration had thrown the country and signed the Affordable Care Act into law.  But that latter, signature piece of legislation was far weaker than what could have possibly passed had Obama immediately thrown the full weight of his presidential bully-pulpit into the fight instead of handing off and delegating the fight to Congressional Democrats.  We will never know, because Obama avoided that fight until Ted Kennedy had died the mood of the country had significantly worsened after the Tea Party’s unseemly gestation.  That absence of leadership could also very well have contributed to some of the vulnerabilities and shortcoming of the legislation that have left and continue to leave it open to legal challenges that threaten to undermine the entire legislation.  Still, Obama’s presidency is a historic one, albeit more for symbolism and recovering from the previous president than for its own accomplishments or agendas.  A politician needs to play politics to really thrive and get results, and perhaps the greatest difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is that the former sought to distance himself from politics in a form of idealism that was self-defeating, and the latter understands the urgent need to wade into politics, muck and all, in a form of pragmatism that for her is self-empowering.

Originally Published on LinkedIn Pulse January 7th, 2015

By Brian E. Frydenborg- LinkedIn,Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at @bfry1981) January 7th, 2015

This article was republished by the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), Stupidparty Math v. Myth, and Ammon News.

It is times like these when we are reminded how thin our veneer of civilization truly is, how frail the social fabric that binds us together is, how easily it can all come undone. We did not see this after 9/11 in New York: New Yorkers united to help each other, did not panic. But we did see this after Hurricane Katrina and gross incompetence from everyone from Mayor Ray Nagin to President George W. Bush devastated New Orleans.

It was not some sort of freak coincidence that people both in America and the Middle East, as well as elsewhere, looked at images coming out of Ferguson and images coming out of Egypt, the Palestinian Territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and other places in the region and saw significant similarities. The images of mass protests turning violent and/or security forces’ violent responses, often involving tear gas, were, at times, difficult to tell if they were taken in Ferguson or Ramallah or Cairo. Some in the Middle East, far more accustomed to dealing with tear gas than Americans, posted advice for their fellow protesters in America. There was a genuine solidarity felt between protesters in both regions. For many, especially white Americans and Jewish Israelis, this might seem incomprehensible. What could African-Americans and Palestinians have in common with each other?

There was a genuine solidarity felt between protesters in both regions.

Well, despite all the differences, quite a lot actually. America in particular can very much look at the situation in Israel/Palestine as a cautionary tale.

And the sad reality of all of this is that this whole incident of young Michael Brown being killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and its aftermath is but one single brick in a Berlin Wall of America’s racial divide, separating not East and West Berlin, but most American whites from most American blacks and many other people of color.

Or, if you will, a brick in the Israeli Separation Barrier of America’s racial divide might be a more apt metaphor. The Berlin Wall separated white Berliners from other White Berliners. But, like America’s invisible wall, Israel’s physical wall is based on race/ethnicity, separating Arab Palestinians from Israeli Jews. I will not claim here that slave-descent African Americans in America are the equivalent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But there are important similarities between the recent violence in Ferguson and current violence in Jerusalem, between historical unrest in America among blacks and historical unrest among Palestinians under Israeli control, that are worth exploring.

Black in America: A Brief History

Unless you are a more recent voluntary immigrant from Africa or the Caribbean (and they generally were not allowed until relatively recently but have, as groups, been more successful than slave-descent African-Americans), if you have black skin your ancestors were almost certainly brought over here in chains as slaves, bartered for and sold as human chattel, bred like animals, and tortured, sexually abused, and raped at will by their masters for generations. Through colonial and pre-Civil War American history, there are sporadic slave rebellions, but most of these are relatively minor affairs compared with events in Haiti and ancient Rome; there was no American Toussaint L’Ouverture or Spartacus.

Unless you are a more recent voluntary immigrant from Africa or the Caribbean, if you have black skin your ancestors were almost certainly brought over here in chains as slaves, bartered for and sold as human chattel, bred like animals, and tortured, sexually abused, and raped at will by their masters for generations.

Then, the election in November of 1860 of Abraham Lincoln as president by the American people to limit the spread of slavery into the West was met by preemptive declarations of secession, the seizing of federal property by Southern militias, and then the attack on Ft. Sumter in Charleston, SC. In the ensuing war caused by the disagreements over the institution of slavery, Lincoln even at his inauguration gave Southerners and Southern states an open invitation to rejoin the Union peaceably and cease rebellion (including in the Emancipation Proclamation) while preserving slavery, and later offered compensation repeatedly for their slaves in an effort towards gradual emancipation even as the American soldiers, government, and people—not least of all President Lincoln—increasingly moved towards abolition and emancipation throughout the war; the South refused the offers every time. In Reconstruction governments set up in the Southern states starting in 1863 and lasting until 1877, former slaves that were liberated throughout the course of the war and eventually by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, passed just months before the assassination of Lincoln, began to assert their freedom and participate fully in government; they were elected as U.S. Senators, U.S. Congressmen, state senators and representatives, and included a governor.  The Constitution was further amended two more times in 1868 and 1870 to extend citizenship to slaves, give them and all American citizens equal rights and protections under the law, to give black men the right to vote, and to empower Congress to be able to enforce these changes.

Many Southern whites bitterly opposed these changes. In particular, they felt that freed slaves, who had nothing and very little education, should get no assistance from the federal government, and sought to undermine the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was supported by the federal troops in the region and something of a precursor to a modern welfare and/or development agency. The arguments of this era quickly evolved to say the freed blacks were lazy and undeserving of any assistance, that being free meant they should stand on their own, and that the Freedmen’s Bureau and the new postwar order amounted to taking money from the hard-working white man and giving it to lazy blacks so that the Republican-dominated government could corruptly buy votes among the freed slaves. From 1865 forward, much of this has formed the core of conservative Americans’ arguments against things like welfare and affirmative action. With the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the vanguard, the new order, severely undermined by Lincoln’s post-assassination replacement, Andrew Johnson, was overthrown by a white supremacist terrorist and guerrilla insurgency in every Reconstruction Southern state by the end of 1877. Violence overcame order and Black Codes were established, ushering in the Jim Crow era in the South, an era of legal tyranny, terror, violence, deprivation, and discrimination, of the lynching of thousands of blacks and their allies, and of mass incarceration and virtual slave labor, of blacks being denied the right to vote, and of blacks being kept on the bottom rung of society and denied advancement as a group while much of the rest of America had opportunities to experience social mobility and passed on wealth from generation to generation.  This was an era that would not formally end until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, after years of tumult and the need to deploy federalized troops, again, to prevent Southern whites from continuing their reign of terror over blacks.

This era gave way to the Vietnam era, which combined with the Civil Rights Movement, would see many violent riots, the assassination of JFK, MLK, and Bobby Kennedy, and a severe strain on the American social fabric. Even today, there is still a lot of discrimination even if legal segregation and regular KKK attacks are a thing of the past. That we currently have a man with black skin in the White House, whose mother raised him alone and was white, and whose father was Kenyan, is not a reflection of any kind of change or progress for slave-descent African-Americans. In fact, in almost every conceivable way black Americans have a far inferior existence in America compared to whites, so that, if separated, their socio-economic statistics would be like that of a fragile “Third-World” state by the standards of the Fund for Peace. And the links to the past are undeniable: in American counties where slavery existed in higher proportions, today there is greater inequality, so there is an exceedingly good case that not only has a vast, centuries-long injustice been perpetrated upon these people, but that they are entitled to compensation for the crimes a whole nation has inflicted upon them.

In fact, in almost every conceivable way black Americans have a far inferior existence in America compared to whites, so that, if separated, their socio-economic statistics would be like that of a fragile, “third-world” state by the standards of the Fund for Peace. And the links to the past are undeniable: in American counties where slavery existed in higher proportions, today there is greater inequality, so there is an exceedingly good case that not only has a vast, centuries-long injustice been perpetrated upon these people, but that they are entitled to compensation for the crimes a whole nation has inflicted upon them.

Palestinian in Palestine and Israel: A Brief History

If we look at the conflict with Israel and Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, it is both vastly different and one which is hauntingly familiar. While the enslavement of blacks by Americans goes back to the early seventeenth century, the conflict between Arabs and Jews in what is today known as Israel and Palestine (West Bank and the Gaza Strip) only dates to the late nineteenth century, when mainly European Zionist Jews began settling the area, then under the control of the Ottoman Empire.

At the beginning of WWI, before the British Empire conquered Palestine from the Ottoman Turks, even after several waves of Jewish immigration there were roughly only 60,000 Jews to 81,000 Christians, 650,000 Muslims, and 7,000 Druze; Jews were only about 7.5% of the population of Ottoman Palestine.

At the beginning of WWI, before the British Empire conquered Palestine from the Ottoman Turks, even after several waves of Jewish immigration there were roughly only 60,000 Jews to 81,000 Christians, 650,000 Muslims, and 7,000 Druze; Jews were only about 7.5% of the population of Ottoman Palestine, though tens of thousands of Arabs and some Jews left or were forced out during the war, shifting the balance of Jews to almost 7.9% in 1918. True, a significant number of these were of the community of Jews who had survived the Roman wars and expulsions of the first and second-centuries C.E., but they were always a small minority from not long after that period forward. Yet in the years from the end of WWI until 1948, though, the British, committed to providing a “national home” for the “Jewish people” in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration and through a general policy of allowing large-scale immigration of Jews into Palestine, ended up shifting this balance during the course of their Mandate so that by the time major fighting broke out late in 1947 in the civil war between Jews and Arabs and in the later 1948-1949 war that a brand new Israel fought against its Arab neighbors, there were 650,000 Jews to 1.2 to 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs; under the British, the Jewish population had easily more than quadrupled its proportion and grown more than eleven times in absolute terms.

The majority Palestinians had never consented to Jewish immigration, let alone allowing a sovereign Jewish state to be created by British Europeans and mainly European Jews on land in which they had been the majority population for many centuries, though as a community, they and their neighboring non-Palestinian Arab brethren never came close to the cohesion, organization, efficiency, and planning of the Zionists, nor did they in general in any subsequent war, conflict, or intifada, up through and including the latest lopsided encounter in Gaza in the summer of 2014. Their leadership decimated by a failed revolt against British rule in Palestine in the 1930s, the Palestinian Arabs were a mess when the British, exhausted emotionally and materially from WWII and facing Jewish terrorism in Palestine, announced their decision to leave and transfer responsibility to the fledgling United Nations. In the ensuing conflict, Israel established a state, but some 700,000 Arabs fled because of direct expulsion at the hands of Jewish forces, direct or indirect pressure from Jews, voluntarily, or with encouragement from fellow Arabs. Roughly one-third fled outside what is now known as Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, but the rest ended up as refugees in the latter two, joining the Palestinians who were already living there.

Then, Israel took both Gaza and the West Bank over in the 1967 Six-Day War, and from 1967 until today, Israel has maintained military rule of the West Bank, and as of now we are approaching 400,000 Jewish colonists, or settlers, living in settlements established after 1967 in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, which was also occupied in 1967 and which Israel completely controls today. The nearly 400,000 settler-community, whose population has dramatically increased in recent decades, live among at least 2.5 million Palestinians. Despite previous agreements, all Palestinians living in the West Bank are totally subject to the authority of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF, or Israeli military), though when Israel permits some Palestinian parts of the West Bank are subject to varying degrees of partial local control. Israel’s policies also greatly weaken the Palestinian economy. From 1967 until 2005 Israel also ruled Gaza through its military and and occupation that also saw Jewish colonization until Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005. Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist resistance and terrorist movement, took over in 2006, and since then, Israel has maintained a debilitating siege/blockade of and de facto control over Gaza, especially in terms of sovereign matters (air space, coastal waters, land borders/crossings, the Palestinian population registry, taxation, most utilities, travel rights, etc.) as I have written before.

In the end, West Bank Palestinians (and Gazans until 2005) have been subject to a brutal military occupation since 1967 denying their basic rights and freedoms and, since the settler movement grew, subjecting them to a system—not wholly dissimilar from apartheid and Jim Crow if not exactly the same—that explicitly favors the Jewish settlers over them and subjects them to different standards, restriction, and laws, and also mostly fails to stop or prosecute violent crimes committed by those the system favors (Jews) against those the system does not (Palestinians).

In the end, West Bank Palestinians (and Gazans until 2005) have been subject to a brutal military occupation since 1967 denying their basic rights and freedoms and, since the settler movement emerged and grew, subjecting them to a system—not wholly dissimilar from apartheid and Jim Crow if not exactly the same—that explicitly favors the Jewish settlers over them and subjects them to different standards, restriction, and laws.  This system also mostly fails to stop or prosecute violent crimes committed by those the system favors (Jews) against those the system does not (Palestinians). And even Palestinian-Israelis (also called Israeli-Arabs) with Israeli citizenship and living in Israel are subject to systematic and routine discrimination even though they are not living under a military occupation or siege.

Defusing Structural Violence Is the Key to Defusing Physical Violence

So Palestinians were not brought over in chains like African-Americans and have not been subject to slavery. But on a day-to-day basis, Palestinians do occupy the bottom rung in the social and political system set up by the Israeli state, working low-skilled and labor-intensive jobs, facing all sorts of discrimination (including housing), brutality from security forces, neglect in resource allocation, and general racism in ways a black American would find very familiar or at least somewhat similar. The structures oppressing Palestinians under Israeli control are massive and overwhelming, and, experiencing little or no progress or even regression, Palestinians have resorted to violence to make themselves heard, to feel empowered, to let the building and boiling rage loose on a society and a world that at best plays lip service to their plight. How is this any different than what happened in Ferguson? How can any aware, caring, empathetic person not see the disturbances and realize that it is in part the primal, rage-filled scream of a people who have been shackled, trampled-upon, cast aside, and ignored? Surrounded by a majority culture that stigmatizes and fears them, teases them by surrounding their ghettos and enclaves with an overwhelmingly higher standard of living and lifestyle that mocks them with a sight of the opportunities and privileges they might have known, forces them to choke on generations of deprivation and inequality, and treats them in an inferior way in almost every possible way, so that even young black kids unconsciously negatively associate the “bad” with black skin and the “good” with white skin, would not any people explode with such rage after decades of regression and being ignored, and would not some of this rage inevitably devolve into violence?

Surrounded by a majority culture that stigmatizes and fears them, teases them by surrounding their ghettos and enclaves with and overwhelmingly higher standard of living and lifestyle that mocks them with a sight of the opportunities and privileges they might have known, forces them to choke on generations of deprivation and inequality, and treats them in an inferior way in almost every possible way, would not any people explode with such rage after decades of regression and being ignored, and would not some of this rage inevitably devolve into violence?

Sure, some can argue that that was a lot of media attention and people projecting symbolism onto a specific event. But people projected onto the Dred Scott decision, on John Brown’s violent raid, on the Rosa Parks bus incident, on Rodney King’s incident. Many white Americans projected their concerns onto Officer Darren Wilson’s situation just as many blacks projected their grievances onto Michael Brown’s death. Tunisians projected theirs onto a single fruit vendor self-immolating; Israelis projected when three Israeli teens—Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar, and Eyal Yifrach—were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood and Palestinians projected when Muhammad Abu Khdeir was burned alive and murdered in turn. In fact, on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict it is very common for funerals to turn into political rallies or protests, with Israelis and Palestinians projecting vociferously against each other and using the funerals as a platform to do so. This is human nature and common in any conflict. Regardless of whether or not the media chose to focus on the events in Ferguson, the grievances, emotions, and rage are all very real, just as the brutality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank would be there whether or not it was in the media spotlight. Israelis will project their insecurity of living in a relatively new state with neighbors that have not signed a peace treaty with them and with terrorist groups that say they want to destroy them, and Palestinians will project their rage at a decades-old occupation, serial abuse, and continuous theft of their land carried out by the Israeli government. And black Americans will project their frustrations on a society that has never treated them justly and ignores them as their conditions worsen. Furthermore, it is particularly hypocritical, as I noted in one of my recent podcasts, that so many white, conservative Americans hold the belief that weapons in the hands of the individual citizen, a bearing of arms which they erroneously believe is an individual and unrestricted right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, provide an appropriate threat of violence that is a perfectly fine check on the federal government’s authority but at the same time are so strongly disapproving of and unsympathetic to the protests and violence of a frustrated black community, frustrated by what they see as regular abuse of government authority in the wake of incidents like those in Ferguson and when Eric Garner was accidentally choked to death in Staten Island by a police officer in the process of being arrested for merely selling cigarettes illegally, among many other similar incidents.

And let’s be clear: both black Americans and Palestinians are in conflict with state systems that do not hear their causes, do not address their conditions or concerns, and do not generally represent them. When a Palestinian looks at Israeli security personnel, they do not see public servants there to protect them, but instead see a tool of oppression, and it is the same with many black Americans looking at their local police. And, historically, in both conflicts the security forces were used very directly by the state as tools of oppression against both peoples; they still are today, and one only has to check the news to confirm this.

Let’s be clear: both black Americans and Palestinians are in conflict with state systems that do not hear their causes, do not address their conditions or concerns, and do not generally represent them.

Conclusion: Wake Up!

We cannot endorse rioting in American streets or killing Israeli Jews in their synagogues, attacks targeting American police officers or Israeli civilians(anyone who wants to can see my harsh condemnation of Hamas right here or hear my denunciation of recent attacks against police here). But neither can we endorse a state and society-perpetuated assault on black Americans, their opportunities, and their chance at equal justice, an assault that that has mostly strengthened their unequal status in all facets of American life. Nor can we endorse an Israeli occupation that ignores the basic human rights of Palestinians, steals their land, and whose existence is based solely on brute force without any acceptance by those it occupies.

Americans and Israelis should be concerned about the physical violence they have seen; if they want to address it in the long run, they must end their structural violence of racism and/or occupation. Because to not do so is to simply encourage violence on the part of peoples whose respective systems leave little alternative. The violence is not the problem, it is a symptom, for people do not generally resort to violence when the system they live under is responsive to their needs. America’s system is not responsive to black Americans and has not been for centuries, and Israel’s system is not responsive to Palestinians and has not been for decades, and this is the true problem both societies face. Of course, righting these wrongs will not totally eliminate violent behavior on the part of black Americans or Palestinians, but it would make such behavior incredibly rare. And if we white Americans do not work towards ending this structural violence? If white Americans continue to fail to understand the legitimate grievances of the black community and do nothing out of ignorance or worse? We can expect more Ferguson Intifadas, and to find more protest photos and videos in which it is not easy to tell the difference between America and the Middle East.

The violence is not the problem, it is a symptom, for people do not generally resort to violence when the system they live under is responsive to their needs. America’s system is not responsive to black Americans and has not been for centuries, and Israel’s system is not responsive to Palestinians and has not been for decades, and this is the true problem both societies face.

Related article: America Staring into Abyss of Racial Terrorism After Shootings; Up to White America if USA Falls in, Sees Israeli-Palestinization of Race Relations

If you want to learn more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, feel free to look at my piece on this summer’s Israel/Hamas Gaza conflict and its context beginning right here.

What Cosmos, Abraham Lincoln, The Leftovers, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars Can Tell Us About 9/11

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 12, 2014 

By Brian E. Frydenborg-LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at @bfry1981) September 12, 2014

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE LEFTOVERS AND STAR WARS: CLONE WARS FOLLOW

Often, there are times in life when an experience is so overpowering, that life and art not only continue, as always, to imitate each other, but you find life and art continually imitate such an experience. 9/11 is one of those experiences. It has now become so a part of our memory and our living consciousness that the effects on our culture are broad and deep and ever present. And while is it natural for the anniversary of any event to lead to thoughts tying it and other things together, I have been deeply impacted by certain recent shows—Cosmos, The Leftovers, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, each among the best the television medium has had to offer in recent memory—in such a way that their connection and significance to 9/11 and our post-9/11 America should be clear on any day of the year.

In both life and art, people have an intrinsic tendency to want to ascribe meaning, and to have themselves attached to this meaning. This is a concept which Neil deGrasse Tyson tackles early on in Cosmos, in episode three: “When Knowledge Conquered Fear,” when he talks of man’s unique ability for pattern recognition. In fact, it’s so strong it has created a tendency to find patterns when there aren’t even any there:

“The human talent for pattern recognition is a two-edged sword. We’re especially good at finding patterns, even when they aren’t really there, something known as ‘false pattern recognition.’ We hunger for significance, for signs that our personal existence is of special meaning to the universe.

To that end, we’re all too eager to deceive ourselves and others, to discern a sacred image in a grilled cheese sandwich or find a divine warning in a comet. Today, we know exactly where comets come from and what they’re made of.”

When it comes to 9/11, we must be especially careful for our tendency for “false pattern recognition.” For 9/11 is all about 9/12. It’s about whether we can look back at 9/11 one day and see it as a catalyst for our growth and self-improvement or, instead, for our ruin and self-destruction. When speaking about the Battle of Gettysburg and helping his nation to search for meaning amid incredible death, division, and destruction, Abraham Lincoln said, in his famous Address, that “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Likewise, the world will little note, nor long remember, what we said after 9/11, but it will never forget what we did and continue to do in response to it. Our actions over time, not our words, will give 9/11 its true meaning, at least on the macro level, anyway. In the meantime, we have to suffer through the grand pronouncements and baseless wishful or doomsday thinking of many an ignorant or devious person, but here, too, Tyson’s Cosmos offers us a road map for how we can analyze our own society in the wake of 9/11 using the scientific method as first formally conceived a millennium ago by Ibn al-Hazen in Basra, in what is now Iraq. He

…was the first person ever to set down the rules of science. He created an error-correcting mechanism, a systematic and relentless way to sift out misconceptions in our thinking: ‘Finding truth is difficult and the road to it is rough. As seekers after truth, you will be wise to withhold judgment and not simply put your trust in the writings of the ancients. You must question and critically examine those writings from every side. You must submit only to argument and experiment and not to the sayings of any person. For every human being is vulnerable to all kinds of imperfection. As seekers after truth, we must also suspect and question our own ideas as we perform our investigations, to avoid falling into prejudice or careless thinking. Take this course, and truth will be revealed to you.’

Tyson then adds that “This is the method of science,” but it is no less relevant to understanding our nation or ourselves, for we must look at the facts, results, and realities of our behavior for us to truly have self-awareness, we must be vigorous in separating myths from reality, and avoid seeing and believing what we want to be the truth as part of a natural tendency to seek comfort.

There is another great truth about 9/11 that Tyson’s Cosmos can show us: just because we can’t see something, doesn’t mean it’s not there, or that it’s not extremely powerful and affecting everything around it. The show talks about John Michell, an eighteenth century British astronomer, who

…imagined a star so big, so massive, that nothing, not even light, could escape its gravitational grip. Can you find the dark star? You can’t see it with your eyes, not directly, but it may leave a kind of footprint on the cosmic shore. Michell realized that we might be able to detect some of these dark stars because of their extreme gravity. If one happened to be near a smaller, luminous companion star, that star would appear to travel in a tight orbit around nothing. Even though we can’t see it, we know something with a lot of mass has to be right there. A dark star, or what today we call a black hole.

Well, that’s what 9/11 is, especially in lower Manhattan: a black hole, an invisible star of massive, undeniable size and power, pulling on everything that is in its orbit. Today, there is no smoking, rubble filled-crater; a truly inspiring memorial and museum fill the void left by the Twin Towers, and the new Freedom Tower stands almost in their places. I remember the first time I saw the Freedom Tower, from a distance, and as beautiful as it looked, it felt almost as odd to see a new anything in place of that void as it did when I saw that former gaping void for the first time a few months after 9/11, a void left by the destruction of the Twin Towers. This void may have been partially physically replaced, though the sites of the towers are building-free waterfalls ringed by the names of the victims set in bronze, but it is still very much there: an invisible dead star, pulling on history, pulling on hearts, pulling a city and a nation into its orbit. It is massive and huge and there—you can feel it, if you knew New York before 9/11—and it is a part of us, our very own black hole.

Which brings me to HBO’s The Leftovers and a major point that all should realize about 9/11. The Leftovers is a truly unique and remarkable program, different from anything I’ve ever seen on television. We are taken in this series to a small town in suburban New York State, when all of a sudden, people disappear. They simply vanish into thin air, and are never heard from again. No explanation, no message from above. Just disappearances. Globally, about 2% of the world’s population in an instant, to be more exact. Some lost their entire immediate family, one character loses her unborn child, others lost no one. Nearly three years later, we begin to follow the lives of people in this town as they cope with and attempt to understand the loss of these people. On the one level, most people try to continue to go about their daily lives, but everyone knows things are different. As people everywhere search for meaning, many cults spring up and try to make this point about things being different in very provocative ways, to the degree that the small town we come to know is truly ripped apart at the end of the first season, and descends into anarchy. The catalyst for this is a cult deciding to break into the homes of the people who lost loved ones in the vanishings and to place life-like replicas of these disappeared people in the same dress and positions they were when they disappeared. Even after three years of time to recover and heal from these losses, the reaction is swift, base, primitive, and very human: after many months, perhaps years of this cult obnoxiously harassing the whole town, the town becomes a mob, all semblance of law and order gone, that descends on the cult members and their compound, motivated purely towards death and destruction. All along, over the course of three years, the wound of losing loved ones for these people was always there, perhaps not as raw, but always there, ready to be reopened and to become just as raw if ripped open too harshly. That is what the cult did: open those wounds so harshly that young and old, meek as well as strong, became animals wailing in grief, animals bent on violence and destruction. The pain, sorrow, and loss of suddenly and unexpectedly losing a loved one, especially when it happens to so many people at the same time, is not something that ever does go away, and it is not something you “get over;” there is no “moving on,” no future where that black hole is not a part of you, pulling on you no matter how hard you try to escape its gravitational pull, for as Tyson notes in another episode of Cosmos, “one thing never changes: gravity.” In the finale of the first season of The Leftovers, this was made perhaps most clear in the moment when one character who lost her husband and two children, who all vanished from the breakfast table while she was looking in the fridge, sees the life-like dolls the cult set up of her whole family at her own breakfast table, dressed in replicas of their own clothes (the cult had broken into people’s homes earlier and stolen pictures so they would know how to dress the human replicas). Three years of progress in trying to move on from losing her entire immediate family is shattered, and she lets out a primal scream of despair and pain, anguish and grief. She’s right back to that moment of the vanishings; soon we hear her voice reading what sounds like a suicide note to one of the other major characters with whom she has become romantically entangled:

Dear _____ [trying to reduce spoilers here], I need to say goodbye to someone I care about, someone who’s still here, so I’m saying it to you. You were good to me _____, and sometimes when we were together, I remembered who I used to be before everything changed, but I was pretending. Pretending as if I hadn’t lost everything. I want to believe it can all go back to the way it was, I want to believe I’m not surrounded by the abandoned ruin of a dead civilization, I want to believe it’s still possible to get close to someone. But it’s easier not to. It’s easier because I’m a coward and I couldn’t take the pain, not again. I know that’s not fair, _____. You’ve lost so much too, and you’re strong. You’re still here. But I can’t be, not anymore. I tried to get better, _____. I didn’t want to feel this way, so I took a shortcut. But it led me right back home. And do you know what I found when I got there? I found them, _____, right where I left them. Right where they left me. It took me three years to accept the truth, but now I know there’s no going back, no fixing it. I’m beyond repair. Maybe we’re all beyond repair.

I was only yesterday watching the ceremonies at Ground Zero—the former site of the Twin Towers—and even after thirteen years, the raw pain was still amazing. The ceremony is very simple: family members and friends of victims stand in pairs, and each pair reads a small portion of the nearly 3,000 names of the victims. String instruments, or a flute playing “Danny Boy” or “Amazing Grace” or the like, fill the background, along with the rushing water of the reflecting pools in the spots where the towers once stood. A uniformed member of the NYPD, the FDNY, and other local uniformed services who tried to rescue people and had many of their own perish on 9/11 stand behind each pair. After each pair reads the names, each member of the pair says the name of his or her loved one, usually with a brief message about how missed he or she is, or something about his or her Yankees, Mets, Jets, or Giants, or about the son or niece he or she would never know. Sometimes the readers are totally calm and then break down right when they utter the name of their loved one. Sometimes, you can see the police officers or firefighters standing right behind them struggle to keep their emotions in check. The readers they read and people in the crowd as they listen often hold pictures of their loved ones, holding them up for all to see. But it is clear for many of them that the pain is very much there, is with them even now, all these years later, like an invisible star that surrounds them which they continually orbit. Like the people in The Leftovers, they, too, are unable to let go. Like the sudden rapture-like vanishings in the series, the real-life deaths of 9/11 were also very sudden, leaving a black hole in the lives of those who orbited them that is impossible to fill or escape.

The damage is clear on the individual, micro level, but what about the macro level? That is what The Leftovers season finale does such of great job of showcasing: the falling apart of many individuals converges on one point in time, from micro to macro, and we see an entire town fall to lawlessness and anarchy, certainly provoked but choosing to be this way nonetheless. Star Wars: The Clone Wars shows such an occurrence brilliantly over the course of its five-and-a-half seasons. It may be CGI animated, but it’s also one of the most underrated shows in recent years, dealing adeptly with a number of difficult, deep, and pressing issues, from emotional ones to political ones, from terrorism and loyalty to war and peace. Set in the era when Anakin Skywalker is fighting side-by-side with his best friend, mentor and master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, in the Clone Wars, it is the tale of how war and manipulation undoes an entire Galactic Republic of a democracy, how the moral-bedrock-of-the-Republic Jedi Order loses its way, how an Emperor rises to destroy democracy and create an Empire. And, of course, it is the very human story of how Anakin loses his faith in the Jedi and the Republic and how the war consumes him, the Republic, and the Order. We steadily increasingly see Anakin being put into uncomfortable positions, where the war pushes him and his relationships with the Order, his padawan (trainee), his master Obi-Wan, and his secret (and against the rules!) wife, Padmé Amidala, to the breaking point, and not without good reason. The whole show does a great job of showing how the Republic is crumbling on the inside, and how the Jedi Order gets caught up in the politics of the day and makes questionable decisions, all in a mature, well-written, believable way that shines a brilliant, morally ambiguous gray. It is a show, written and produced while the U.S. was itself at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where both sides are shown to have heroes and villains, and where even the cloned soldiers who make up the bulk of the Republic’s army question why they are fighting, wrestling with their identity as warriors bred and engineered for war. This show is about how a hero can fall, how good can lose, how evil can win, how those closest to you can unintentionally and intentionally betray you, and how good intentions are not always enough. It is very appropriate for both kids and adults in our post-9/11 world, this show that was called one of the most political shows on television several times and causes us to question some important things about our own society and actions.

At the end of the fifth season, a major character is accused of sedition and of committing terrorism against the Republic. In one of the most powerful scenes of the series, just when the leader of the Republic, Chancellor Palpatine (later the Emperor in the old Star Wars movies, and at this point voiced by none other than Tim Curry) is about to read the verdict of a military tribunal, determining the fate of this character, Anakin breaks in and saves this character, to whom he is extremely close, by presenting the real culprit, a young member of the Jedi Order who is actually the accused and on-trial character’s best friend and who can barely contain bitterness in exclaiming

I did it. Because I’ve come to realize what many people in the Republic have come to realize. That the Jedi are the ones responsible for this war. That we’ve so lost our way that we have become villains in this conflict. That we are the ones that should be put on trial, all of us! And my attack on the Temple was an attack on what the Jedi have become: an army fighting for the Dark Side, fallen from the Light that we once held so dear. This Republic is failing! It’s only a matter of time.

And, for those who don’t know the story, it is very close to the time when the Jedi will be wiped out by their own Clone Troopers in Order 66, when Palpatine will turn and twist the good man Anakin Skywalker into the evil shell of a man, Darth Vader, and when Palpatine will transform the democratic Republic into an autocratic Galactic Empire ruled by fear and oppression. No one listens to the young traitorous Jedi, and we don’t know how much that Jedi knows, but the words spoken ring ever so true: the Republic has become hopelessly corrupt and it has given up much of its power to Chancellor Palpatine, who is preparing to use the war to assume dictatorial powers and to wipe out the Jedi, themselves being used by him to further his nefarious purposes and to increase his power and control. The Republic very much was failing when those words were spoken. Early in the Clone Wars series, Jedi Master Yoda troublingly observes that “In this war, a danger there is, of losing who we are,” though he probably did not know how right he was at the time. And even though Anakin saved his friend, who was also a member of the Jedi Order but had been expelled by the order prior to being put on trial, this friend saw the Order and the Republic up close in a new light and did not like what was revealed; this character rebuffs an offer from the Jedi Council to return to the order, leaving the Order and Anakin after five seasons of both being this character’s “life,” crushing Anakin and his belief in the Order and the Republic. He tells his friend, just before the friend leaves, “I understand. More than you realize, I understand wanting to walk away from the Order,” to which the friend replies: “I know,” and walks off into the sunset. A shattered and battered Anakin is now perilously close to becoming consumed by his own black hole, which will soon transform him into Darth Vader.

Do I think the U.S. is about to become the evil Empire in Star Wars? Hardly. Is it too late for us? I don’t think so, but I have written about how we’ve already lost a decade to the disasters of our decisions after 9/11. We, too, have been provoked by 9/11 into less-than-stellar reactions and we, too, ultimately chose these actions as a society. Clone Wars shows how easy it is even for the best of us to get wrapped up in the momentum of war and politics to the degree that we lose sight of why we are fighting or campaigning and whether or not we’re having the effect we wish to. These were questions the Jedi Order and the citizens of the Republic should have been asking during the Clone Wars, and they are questions our leaders and we should have been asking over the many years we fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, which I’ve also previously expressed.

If there is any discernible lesson yet that we should take from 9/11, it is that we need to avoid falling for easy answers and solutions and that instead we should be asking ourselves tough questions in the method of Ibn al-Hazen as shown in Cosmos, and that our own black holes of death and loss can pull us in the wrong direction, for, as Yoda told Anakin in Episode I (the movie), when he first met him, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you,” and also later when he told him “Careful you must be when sensing the future Anakin. The fear of loss is a path to the dark side.” In both The Leftovers and Star Wars, we see how our fears and pain and loss can bring out the worst in us, one of Cosmos’ black holes constantly pulling us and keeping us in its orbit, and how there is no fully recovering from loss. Clone Wars reminds us that if we don’t rationally and critically examine our decisions carefully, we risk losing ourselves in war and scorched-earth politics. By asking tough questions, Cosmos-style, we can avoid having our pain consume us like certain characters in The Leftovers and Star Wars. But each show also leaves open the possibilities of new hopes, new beginnings, and redemption. May 9/11 always motivate us to keep those options available to us and help us to avoid falling into the black hole of fear, grief, despair, and anger, which truly are paths to pain and the Dark Side.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 17, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter: @bfry1981) February 17th, 2017; a condensed, edited version of this article is featured on War Is Boring, and a Kindle edition, a Nook edition, an Apple iTunes iBook edition, and an EPUB edition are available with previously unpublished content; part on defining fascism excerpted for January 1, 2023, article An Urgently Needed Definition of “Fascism” as the West Fights It Anew at Home and Abroad

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”— Henry A. Wallace, 1944, Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people’s bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1983, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, “Introduction to the Abridgment”)

AMMAN — One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athens’ democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were democratic in that a majority had power and chose leaders or voted on legislation, but with that being the extent of the democracy. In fact, as happens all too often, people—especially when consumed by fear and hate—will choose someone who merely reflects the base instincts of their majority, will use democracy to create a political culture of persecution, intolerance, and even brutalization of those who are not in the majority, will create a system designed to favor and perpetuate the rule of this majority, and will actively suppress those speaking, acting, and organizing against it. 

This is a Tocquevillian tyranny of the majority on steroids, a system where only the people in power and those who support them can even approach having the feeling they live in a democracy or that their opinions count in the public square, while everyone who feels differently is made to understand that even expressing their counternarrative, their dissent, their dissatisfaction will carry consequences for their level of freedom, or even their health, up to and including the lethal variety. Such “democracies” exist to empower the majority or the plurality of those supporting the current leader/government/system and only them; the rest of the population is made to feel that they are tolerated at best by the good graces of those in charge and to embrace their second-or-third-class status meekly and enthusiastically, to be deferential to their oppressors’ views and whims, or else…

Such a system uses democracy to destroy it. Such a system embraces limited (and the most salient) forms of democracy, mainly elections and the right of those winning the elections to rule (and in this case, rule uncontested); these elections are often fair in a strict sense, but the party in power is often subtly rigging the system in legal ways to restrict the process of voting so as to favor itself and disenfranchise those not subscribing to its program to enough of a degree as to give that ruling party a substantial advantage; when elections are held in such a system, the deck is already stacked in the ruling groups’ favor, and crude tactics like voter fraud, harsh media censorship, and election-day voter intimidation are cast aside in favor of things like redistricting, restrictions on voter registration, and explicitly partisan oversight of elections, where even subtle voter suppression actions can make differences that decide outcomes. Especially when such parties control the system over time, they are able to stack the courts with judges favorable to their intolerant vision and thus legal challenges to their misrule and abuse of power are stopped by legitimate means, with the very interpretation of what constitutes “abuse” or “illegal acts” watered down in a partisan way so that the legal precedents and judges’ opinions justify the very abuse being questioned, shutting down the courts as any kind of a venue usable by the opposition; this, in effect, makes these courts simply another tool for the ruling party to further its agenda and its consolidation of (and eventual stranglehold on) power. 

These systems can also use a—free, even—press to twist and mold public opinion and in ways quite harmful—even fatally so—to democracy; such a press can help bring out the worst in the citizens themselves, something on which the tyrannical majoritarian system is counting; but, perhaps, their citizens may be good enough at bringing out their own worst tendencies without the press fanning the flames, either by themselves or with the help of a charismatic leader, though the three often work in tandem.

Extreme examples of systems today playing these games, or worse, involve Turkey, where both journalists and political leaders critical of President Erdoğan and his party have wound up in jail, and Russia, where journalists and political critics of Putin and his party have wound up dead, up to and including the major leader of Russia’s political opposition, Boris Nemtsov, shot dead in sight of the Kremlin on a major public thoroughfare early in 2015 (sometimes, even when not necessary, these “democracies” favor the crude methods to make their point even more bluntly).

The true spirit of democracy is not merely in holding elections and then allowing the prevailing winners to do whatever they please to whomever they please; it is the recognition that the rules after the election apply equally to winner and loser alike, that the same protections of the basic rights of the winners must needs also apply to the losers, and the winners, while enjoying certain natural advantages electorally from having won the reins of power, will not use the very machinery of government to explicitly entrench and expand those powers in ways that violate the equal application and protections of the law in regards to losers and winners alike. Thus, Lincoln attacked slavery not merely as something inherently morally abominable, but something which allowed an elite to decide among themselves who was worthy of rights and who was not; criticizing both slavery and an anti-immigrant movement, Lincoln wrote in 1855 that

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal .” We now practically read it “ all men are created equal,  except negroes .”When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “ all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics .” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty— to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy .

Many of the millions of whites in America, not only in the North, but also in the South, who were against—and voted against—slavery, certainly did not lose this point in their thinking, as their leader Lincoln made sure to reemphasize time and time again. They didn’t need to be black to recognize the poison of discrimination and how it can spread.

And this is why current developments all over the world in democracies that are hardly new are so terrifying: people are increasingly unable to link their own (as conceived in identity terms) plights with the plights of those whom they deem “others” by their identity, with these “others” increasingly seen as the source of whatever problems—real or imagined—are fashionable to discuss.

I despise both hyperbole and conspiracy theories, but make no mistake about it, we live in an era of rising democratic fascism and of the weakening of traditional democracies and the values with which they were established and upheld. And rest assured, I did not come to the use of this term lightly; even a year ago, I would not have even considered using the term “fascist” to describe anything major in American politics, not the Tea Party, not the Republican Party; apart from when the Ku Klux Klan was a major force in American life in the 1920s, and apart from the South during the Jim Crow era, during Reconstruction, and especially during the terrifying vision of government attempted by the so-called “Confederate States of America” during the Civil War and the Antebellum slavery South would this term be widely applicable in America. Yet it is hard to describe what is happening in America, Europe, and elsewhere as anything else but democratic fascism (I’ve been coming across the term “illiberal democracy,” but that’s far too benign-sounding a term for the truly insidious happenings to be discussed herein even if it is broadly accurate; and this is far more than merely a rightward lurch; the Tea Party was a rightward lurch, and this is beyond even that insanity).

There are many reasons for this shift, but the following quote illustrates, if in a slightly oversimplified way, some of the dynamics behind this as far as people and mentalities are concerned:

The following joke circulated in Italy in the 1920s. According to Mussolini, the ideal citizen is intelligent, honest, and Fascist. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, which explains why everyone you meet is either intelligent and Fascist but not honest, honest and Fascist but not intelligent, or honest and intelligent but not Fascist.—Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Yes, as before, a cadre intelligent people willing to be extremely dishonest are leading a new move towards fascism that wins the hearts and minds of the unintelligent who are honest with their backwards beliefs, leaving a cadre of intelligent, honest, non-fascists to be in the unenviable positions of selling less attractive trusts juxtaposed to often more attractive fascist lies. Sure, there are rich exceptions, but you could do far worse as far as accuracy than categorize most people in politics these days into one of these three categories.

No, it’s not the 1930s, but today, the democracies of the world are collectively facing a cancer of populist, and, yes, democratic fascism that threatens to erase democratic norms, destroy liberal democratic values, and that seeks to remake many of the world’s leading democracies in the image of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its “democracy” that relies on an intolerant majority that understands democracy simply as the gratification of their emotional desires, with dissenters, minorities, and others who don’t agree with them be damned, their complaints of abuse at the hands of the state dismissed and ignored.

Yet terms like democracy and fascism are thrown about quite casually, and not necessarily in a way that is accurate; in fact, I earlier engaged in an exercise in defining the word “terrorism” usefully that amply demonstrates how important it is for a reasonable and universal definition of certain commonly-used-in-our-political-discourse terms to be sounded out so that the terms are spared from being bandied about in a way that virtually anyone can use to make any point, rendering them meaningless and their use pointless.

In his seminal 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell expressed his understanding of how slippery the uses of both “democracy” and “fascism” not only could be, but were when he wrote that

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Such tendencies that flourished in Orwell’s time still, sadly, flourish today, over 70 years both after Orwell penned those thoughts and after the defeat of fascism in Europe. We shall do our best to avoid such traps in the discussion below by discussing the definitions of both “democracy” and “fascism.”

1.) Defining Democracy

In a pure, technical sense, there are no democracies: every modern national system avoids direct rule by the demos, the people, in favor of a system in which the demos choose from among themselves a number of representatives who by virtue of their election become an elite political class that represents the demos in the government, governs on behalf of the demos,and whom the demos hold accountable in a continuing series of recurring elections in which they can reinstate or replace said elite representatives. In every modern instance of true democratic government, the systems are set up along representative lines in the form of one or some combination of a republic, a constitutional monarchy where the monarch has relatively limited powers, and a parliamentary or a presidential system; the people may occasionally weigh in on referenda, but other than these occasional referenda, their participation is limited to voting for their representatives (sometimes including voting for a national prime minister or president), and the governance is left to these representatives.

Thus, in the pure sense, these systems are not democracies ruled by the demos, but systems in which the demos are ruled by elites chosen with the consent of the demos, with the wider demos consenting to a system in which many of them will choose representatives that lose electoral races or are part of parties not powerful enough to be in power but still consent to abide by the legitimate results and will seek to fight for a different result not through violence but through legal means, most importantly the chance to participate in a future free and fair election where the result can, potentially, be different. Some particularly naïve people—many Bernie Sanders supporters, for example—confuse the concept of a free and fair election with one in which a brand new party or a candidate who wants to engage in a hostile takeover of an existing party is not at any material disadvantage against other candidates and longstanding parties who have accumulated material and human capital resources through many years of efforts and relationships; even in a truly free and fair election, most candidates will not start with an equal chance or equal access to resources, but, rather, their own careers and decisions will determine their starting points in those regards.

Thus, in modern times democracy has come to be understood as a system that has the forms of mass popular input through free and fair and repeated elections of representatives and through effectively equal applications and protections of law and justice for all citizens on an equal basis, regardless of their political or any other affiliations (or something at least approximating this). This functions basically as a promise to both winners and losers: performance will matter and people can punish the winner or reward the loser next time around, with the winner not cheating using its governmental power to stay in power and the loser not losing simply because he cannot access the same power as those already in power; this is not, again, to naively say that winning and being an incumbent doesn’t come with certain natural advantages, but said advantages should not be collectively so powerful as to be insurmountable for an opponent if the people are not satisfied with the performance of said incumbent and/or want change. Thus, again, free and fair does not mean perfect, merely the ability for non-incumbents to compete with a realistic chance of victory if the people are not happy with the current leaders and/or desire change; if people are happy with current leaders, it should, naturally, be far more difficult to defeat them, absent extraordinary circumstances or scandals.

Of course, other ingredients are vital: the American Founding Fathers recognized the massive importance of both freedom of speech and of the press (hence the First Amendment is first), so that the people could have accurate information about the good, bad, and ugly of what their government was doing and make decisions based on such information, not government-controlled propaganda; likewise, a population educated and informed enough was also understood to be vital so that the people could make wise decisions and be able to tell the difference between propaganda and actual news. Modern democracy, then, can be understood to transcend the 1.) necessary but not sufficient mechanism of popular elections and to extend to include among the sufficient conditions: 2.) a justice and law enforcement system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool of self-empowerment and oppression of others by those in power (this necessitates some degree of judicial independence), i.e., “rule of law”, 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, 4.) and a population free to express itself not stupid enough to be manipulated by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality (although organized differently, this roughly lines up with the UN General Assembly’s list of the “essential elements” of democracy).

The dire threat to democracy today is not the abolition of elections, then, but the use of elections to empower leaders who—and parties that seek to—use the justice and law enforcement systems as a tool to stay in power, punish opponents, and control or bend the media to its will in a way that either cynically plays on the stupidity of the people to not realize what is happening or, perhaps far worse, that plays on their prejudices and fears to create a popular mentality that is aware of much of this abuse but cares not to speak out against it because those abuses are against despised minorities and, thus, those abuses are not minded by large swaths of voters because they are seen to be benefiting those voters. In such conditions, elections can serve to undermine democracy, strange as it may seem. This new form of democracy is not really democracy in our modern understanding at all, then, but is, instead, democratic fascism; here, elections are simply tools of certain groups of voters and political parties, coalitions, or leaders to legally seize power and then turn the instruments of the state into a spoils system that rewards the winners and the voters who empowered those winners and into a tool of oppression against many who aren’t (or even everyone else who isn’t) on board (including those critical in the press); if this is allowed to happen, it is always with some combination of the ignorance of those voters who buy into the rulers’ propaganda, voters’ tacit approval, or voters’ enthusiastic embrace of a system that explicitly favors them because of their politics (increasingly tied to identity in terms of race, ethnicity, or religion in this day and age) and explicitly discriminates or otherwise punishes those with differing politics (and usually different identities; in some ways, in democratic fascism the words “politics” and “identity” can be interchangeable, though this is common in many systems that are not democratic fascism).

2.) Defining Fascism

Which brings us to a discussion of what we should understand fascism to be…

“Fascism” as a word in English comes into English in the 1920s from the Italian fascismo, describing the movements (maybe gangs is a better word) that would eventually put Mussolini in power in Italy but a word also alluding to the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the fasces. The English definition of “fascism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is mainly twofold: “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization” and a subdefinition: “(in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices;” both are useful, and, especially, the subdefinition is applicable here, but a further, less vague, and more detailed definition is needed for our discussion.

Like “terrorism” and “democracy,” “fascism” as a term can easily become overly and poorly used. Writing in 1944, Orwell noted how “there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist.” Still, even noting the sharp disagreements of the people of his day over who or what was fascist, he noted that “[b]y ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.”

The enthusiastic admirer of Orwell and recently (and very sadly) late Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, echoes some of what his hero had to say, but goes farther; for Hitchens, “[h]istorically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure,” is “based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind…[and is] hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons).” He also describes fascism as “bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories,” as “obsessed with real and imagined ‘humiliations’ and thirsty for revenge,” as “chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia),” as “inclined to leader worship,” and as a “threat…to civilization and civilized values;” perhaps Hitchens’ most pithy description is as follows: “[t]he historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.”

For Rebecca West, writing in 1935, “Fascism…is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought…persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.”

In his preface to the Third Edition of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in 1942, Wilhelm Reich notes that:

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere “prejudice.” The violence and the ubiquity of these “race prejudices” show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression.

For U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), one of the handful of men who can be said to have been a primary architect of the successful plan to defeat fascism in the 1940s, he felt that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,” and what stood out for him was that “[t]hat, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” In other words, when one ruler/party/faction/group considers that it owns the state and that the state’s machinery, power, and largesse exist as personal tools for those in power, when that controlling entity does not feel it needs to share the state, and its machinery, power, and largesse with others different from themselves, we have fascism.

Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s Vice President before Truman, told The New York Times in 1944 that

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

Wallace notes how American fascism is different from Nazi German fascists in a way that is quite relevant today when we are attempting to discuss democratic fascism:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

For Umberto Eco, whose own childhood took place in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, fascism was something that could be any combination of a number of key elements. Writing in 1995 in an incredibly prescient and far-too-underappreciated essay on what he termed “Ur-Fascism”—that eternal and incoherent fascist current within humanity—the Italian master saw fascism as something that espouses a “cult of tradition” in a way that was “syncretistic” and produced little if anything original (in this, Eco’s fascism resembles the evil forces in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is described here in The Lord of the Rings in a discussion of the nature of Sauron’s orc minions: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”). He also saw it as a “rejection of modernism” and, in turn, an embodiment of “irrationalism.” For Eco, fascism values “action for action’s sake” in a sense that despised deliberation and intellectual discourse and the intellectual world in general; building upon this, he also noted how fascism is unable to “withstand analytical criticism” to such a degree that “disagreement is treason.” As a natural follow-up to this, he notes fascism’s hatred of diversity and its “exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference,” that (nascent) fascism’s “first appeal…is an appeal against intruders,” making fascism “racist by definition;” it feeds on “individual or social frustration” in a way that is an “appeal to a frustrated middle class” that is “frightened by the pressure of lower social groups;” Eco feared that “the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” The psychology of fascism is obsessed with identity, particularly appealing to those lost and confused in a changing and challenging world, and offers them a crude way out based on nationalism (for Orwell, “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”), a nationalism defined by exclusion of “enemies” of the nation; this psychology is based on “the obsession with a plot” against them, domestically and internationally. Those subscribing to such a fascist movement “must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies” but also “be convinced that they can overwhelm” them (leaving them “constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”) With such movements, “pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” and “life is permanent warfare” such that even in victory, there is still a pervasive sense of insecurity, unspoken inferiority, and anxiety. Eco’s fascism is also embodied by a “contempt for the weak” that is crucial for its “popular elitism:” the leaders of the movement convince their mass followers that they are the true elite, even as they thrive by exploiting the weaknesses of their captains and both, in turn, exploit the weaknesses of their mass followers, who feel superior to those not in the movement in a dynamic of trickle-down elitism (“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,” as Sinclair Lewis writes in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a man remarkably like Donald Trump becomes president running a campaign remarkably like Trump’s and ends up transforming America into a fascist dictatorship). Here, Eco continues, “everybody is educated to become a hero” in a sense that engenders a constant hero martyr-complex (often literally reached by death or sending “other people to death”). In fascism, Eco also finds a misogynistic, homophobic machismo that addresses its sexual inadequacy through the “ersatz phallic exercise” of “play[ing] with weapons.” He also finds fascism to be based on a “selective populism” that is “qualitative” not “quantitative” in nature; “the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction,” and “[t]here is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Fascism, then, is “against ‘rotten’ parliamentary [i.e.., democratic] governments,” and “[w]herever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

Pondering the reality of a fictional German Nazi and Imperial Japanese-occupied America in the 1960s in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, a Nazi defector to Japan’s Pacific States of America defines the fascist system of insanity and its adherents as one explained by:

…something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, I intuit it. But—they are purposelessly cruel… is that it? No, God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans…Something frenzied and demented…

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time…

…They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.

For long-time New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik,

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true.

*****

From these writers, thinkers, and leaders, then, like democracy, we can approach a definition of fascism that avoids the pitfall of being too specific but is still meaningful past use as a simple pejorative, thus avoiding Orwell’s trap as well.

For a brief, poetic, and literary understanding of what we may now say about fascism, allow me to satirize Paul’s lovely passage on love from First Corinthians (by far “Saint” Paul’s best work when compared to the rest of his generally contemptible legacy):

Fascism is impatient, fascism is cruel. It is jealous, is pompous, it is inflated,it is rude, it seeks its own interests, it is quick-tempered, it broods over injury, it rejoices over wrongdoing but does not rejoice with the truth. It bears only itself, believes only itself, hopes only itself, endures only itself. Fascism always fails.

Furthermore, fascism is hateful, irrational, fearful, childishly boastful; it thrives and survives on misinformation and disinformation, lies and deceit; it brooks no criticism and is an eternal enemy of intellectual discourse, debate, diversity, inclusion, and being part of the wider world, relies on racism, bigotry, ignorance, misogyny, and brute bullying in all manners of ways, loves cultish leader-worship, lusts after a false imagined past and “tradition,” is corporatist, nationalistic, incoherent, and contradictory, and is all of these things not mildly but intensely; it takes more typical, offensive, intolerant, and reactionary right-wing politics to a far more elevated level, so that even liberals will wistfully miss their old right-wing nemeses with the advent of the new fascism. There may not be a clear line where it is absolutely obvious where one has passed the realm of the more banal, typical right-wing politics into the realm of the far more dreadful (but still banal) and less manageable fascism (democratic or otherwise), but when one is well past that ill-defined line there can be a sickening clarity, a retroactive realization of one’s fetid new surroundings and a sheer terror that there may not be any going back anytime soon.

So that is our understanding of fascism in a general sense; now, we may fuse that with our discussion of democracy into an understanding of fascism’s relatively-cleaned up, ready-for-(network)television, outwardly milder but arguably even more dangerous step-child from a loveless marriage of some 70 years with the American-dominated post-WWII international order: democratic fascism.

3.) Democratic Fascism: A More Presentable Fascism for the Twenty-First Century

Much like Bernie’s Sanders’ “democratic socialism” differs quite markedly from other forms of socialism and is far less “socialist” than many of those, so too is “democratic fascism” markedly different from the fascism and famously fascist governments of the twentieth century. For Eco, even if fascism in Europe experienced a rebirth, it would be shaped by the new circumstances of its birth and will hardly be a repeat “in its original form” of the same fascism that arose before WWII. 

And as Henry A. Wallace noted and we previously mentioned, unlike the fascist movements in the past—in particular Germany, Italy, Japan, and in Latin America—fascism in the United States would not use violence as a major vehicle to its power, but would, rather, primarily come to power through using media and twisting the concept of “news.” Of course, Wallace was onto the same truth that Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In his earlier-cited essay, Eco also identified Orwell’s Newspeak as the final enumerated element of fascism, noting how it makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.” Eco also echoed Wallace when he noted that

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.

The typical (small-“d”) democratic candidate asks you to vote for her to use the system and improve it to benefit you, the voter; the democratic fascist (and, we may also note, the democratic socialist à la Bernie Sanders) candidate campaigns to go to war with the system, to destroy, that by his virtue and abilities and/or with the power of the people behind him, he will sweep away the bureaucracy, institutions, politicians, laws, rules, and norms that apparently hold us back; there is no love or praise of the system or working within, or even the political party he is trying to hijack; the system, the party, are rotten to the core, there’s nothing to work with, they only have flaws; nothing short of a revolution (or “political revolution”) is required. The democratic fascist (and democratic socialist) needs to take existing legitimate problems and grossly exaggerate their intensity or to completely fabricate problems that do not exist but that play into people’s preconceived notions and prejudices; anger, contempt, and derision are some of the core emotional foundations the democratic fascist’s (and democratic socialist’s) campaign pitch; equal, or ever larger, than any hope for the future is the joy of destroying the existing order and of seeing the elites who have been in control be forced out of power and/or damaged in unconventional ways, so much so that even if the promises of a better future fail, the rest may be enough for the democratic fascist’s supporters to be content with, and continue to support, the new order; they will “feel” better and as if they are “on top” and “in charge” simply by virtue of the discrimination against the groups they despise, which they see as a restoration of “justice” and the natural order even without any true improvement in their own situation; thus, the democratic fascist appeals to the emotions of his supporters, independent of any reality and with plenty of lies and deceit ready to counter reality, a political puddle that will be eagerly lapped up by their followers who have reduced themselves to loyal canines so long as they are emotionally coddled like puppies no matter how irrational their beliefs and perceptions.

Since this democratic fascism combines many elements that can be attributed to fascism, but far fewer of the elements we attribute to democracy, the term fascist democracy is not really applicable in the same way that democratic fascism is; yes, at least some major elements of democracy are present, but are twisted to serve undemocratic ends, with democratic fascists weaponizing the press and with it, in turn, weaponizing the people, who, in turn, weaponize the elections, which, in turn, weaponize the justice and legal system to serve the political empowerment of democratic fascists and the oppression or suppression of their rivals, corrupting all four of the key elements of what we noted defines true democracy; thus, these emerging democratic fascist movements are more fascist than democratic in our vetted understandings of those words.

So democratic fascism, even though it is far less jarring in it relative lack of violence compared to past historical fascist movements, can still amply demonstrate qualities of fascism even if in less overtly threatening ways (because how many things can be more overtly threatening politically than uniformed armed political operatives utilizing violence in their own country for political ends). At the same time, it is harder to stop democratic fascism or even to call it fascism because of its more subtle approach. So even while using democratic means—specifically elections and a free press—for decidedly undemocratic ends, democratic fascism demonstrates how it is a much more of a fascistic phenomenon than a democratic one; after all, some of our thinkers have warned how democratic fascists, especially, can deceive the public into supporting them, using the freedom of the airwaves to disseminate effective lies in a weaponization of information itself that enables them to reach a critical mass of support absent a critical mass of united, intelligent voters, so that, more or less, the democratic fascists can legitimately win an election; from there, they capitalize on their media influence within the free press and the lack of an informed, discerning population to turn the final element of successful democracy—a relatively independent legal and justice system that is generally fairly applied when it comes to politics and adheres to equal application regardless of political affiliation—into a political tool enabling democratic fascists to suppress opposition and/or favor themselves just enough (at least initially) in elections so as to create a one party state supported by a large swath, even a majority, of the voting public (it is important to note here in America that because Republicans blocked so many of Obama’s judicial appointments, Trump will have the opportunity to appoint more federal judges in his first term than any president in the last 40 years); such a program is harder to attack as undemocratic when the government is not rigging votes and not taking over the free press and, instead, allows the appearance of a competitive democracy to still convince a huge portion of the population that this false perception is reality; with enough public support and enough support within a free media, democratic fascists in power may not may not need to entertain the aforementioned overt measures in order for them to maintain power and disadvantage the opposition enough to make that opposition’s ability to win elections—now far less free and fair—extremely difficult or even non-existent, especially when they firmly control the judiciary. 

Thus, first with the media, then with the people, then with elections, and, finally, with the legal and justice system, democratic fascists succeed in bending the key components of healthy democracy into supporting the establishment of democratic fascism in a tipping-then-falling domino-like effect.

4.) Spin vs. Lies and the Weaponization of Information in a War on Reality That Fuels Democratic Fascism

It all starts, again à la Wallace, with enough of the free press attacking reality itself.

Which bring us to a discussion of lies vs spin. Spin is a normal part of politics; it is simply how politicians and their supporters, whether in government or the media, try to put their best foot forward in making their case and defending their actions; much like lawyers in a courtroom, then, spin represents an effort to put something forward in the best possible light (or, if they are against someone/something, the worst) in light of the available facts. More often than not, spin is rooted in truth, but is presented selectively in a way that only or mainly includes that which is most favorable to whatever position is being made. Like the situation with lawyers in a courtroom, then, here, the truth is somewhere in between the two positions: even when a lawyer “wins” a case, it is hardly accepted that every point he made was true; it is simply the role of the jurors or the judges to decide who made the better case and weigh the burden of proof into this as well. In many respects, the news media is our courtroom of public opinion, and it is hardly a coincidence that many of the people on TV representing various political people and agendas are lawyers themselves, as is the case of many of the people formally representing political parties and other groups within the government itself. Spin certainly includes false suggestions and distortions, often driven by unfavorable context being deliberately omitted; and lies certainly do get told sometimes in the art of spinning. Spin itself comes from the term “spin room,” which for decades has referred to the area where the press and representatives of politicians  would engage with each other after a debate between two or more politicians, and pretty much every representative would tell the press that his or her candidate had won (from that, we have the unintentionally farcical “No Spin Zone” on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show). 

Like the line between democracy and democratic fascism, the line between spin and lies is not always clear, and lies are hardly unheard of in politics; but we have clearly entered a new era where, as opposed to spin, we have politicians and their surrogates and supporters, particularly on the right, creating an alternate reality when reality doesn’t match their talking points, an alternate reality based on “alternative facts” (more on that in a bit) and reported as the gospel truth by (usually self-styled) “alternative” media. As a spectacularly salient example, immediately after his first debate with Clinton, Trump himself entered the spin room (an act itself unheard of), and, among other lowlights, Trump denied that he had said something that he had clearly just said during the debate with millions watching and the debate well-recorded for posterity.

Let that single example sink in for a moment.

Reality is not subject to partisanship, so the fervent partisan will create his own reality to suit his own ends. Yes, led by right-wing media outlets at first, and coupled with Trump’s campaign machine later on (which, to be honest, mainly consisted of Trump’s Twitter account and a handful of shameless surrogates), this brazenly-reality-challenging environment was the catalyst of the successful internal democratic fascist coup (aided considerably by Putin, and more on that later), with an alternate universe of “alternative facts” that a huge portion of the electorate—willfully or otherwise—confused with the real universe of just plain ol’ facts; so influenced, that electorate ended up enabling someone like Trump to win an election when never before would an American electorate have chosen him, for, as Orwell wrote, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” And in Orwell’s 1984, this concept is taken to an extreme: “…if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past;” thus, there can be little more dangerous to democracy than people uncritically accepting junk fake news news—and I don’t mean a slant or an opinion on the news, but accepting blatant falsehoods and entirely false stories—designed to further a political end. 

And now, all that stands in the way of democratic fascism twisting all four main components of democracy in America is the last main pillar of democracy: the legal and justice system not being political tools and not applying the laws to benefit Trump et al. and punish/cower his opponents (Trump is already tweeting and uttering fighting words at the judiciary and intelligence community, neither of which are immune from his considerable influence and Executive authority), a pillar which is likely only to stand if either Trump’s own Republicans stand up to Trump or Democrats manage to start winning again, and neither (let’s be honest here) is likely (just see the horrid newly-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s confirmation vote or check out the DNC race, the strident Bernie Sanders, and left-wing voters). It did not get this way overnight (Republicans especially have been denying reality on a whole host of issues for years, including immigration, gun control, ISIS, Iraq, racism, and climate change), but we are definitely in an era where the facts are far more loosely played with, even if they are stubborn things.

A conversation journalist Ron Suskind had in the summer of 2002 with (it was later revealed) top W. Bush advisor Karl Rove is quite revealing of the mentality that conservatives have when it comes to their adversarial relationship with the media and with the intellectual community:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” 

To be fair to the George W. Bush Administration, though this mentality should be quite troubling, it was never taken in its eight years to the heights that Trump, his crew, and his supporters collectively have taken us through today, not even a full month into his presidency, and, as I’ve already noted, democratic fascism is, in part, what it is because of how far it takes things, oftentimes times just greatly metastasizing trends that were already both in place and problematic to whole new dimensions. 

The Bush Administration didn’t generally outright lie, but it did tend to selectively present the best evidence for its case while deliberately avoiding or downplaying any information that didn’t help said case; this “spin” is not terribly uncommon in politics, as noted, but its heavy use in launching what turned out to be the largest U.S. military intervention since the Vietnam War certainly justifiably raised many eyebrows, to use understatement (more accurately, it was a sharp, sudden military escalation unlike anything before in American history, what Tom Ricks called “the biggest mistake in American history”). Yes, the intelligence assessments did estimate that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs and Hussein pretended to still have them for his own reasons (explaining why Hillary Clinton and many Democrats voted to authorize to allow Bush to use force if necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein as a tactic to pressure Hussein and were not voting “yes” for “war”), but the credible parts of this intelligence were only based on old information and their estimates were not expressed as certainties; thus, the biggest lies of the George W. Bush Administration were generally lies of omission, of exaggerating the degrees of certainty, or of rationales (though Donald Rumsfeld should get some sort of special recognition for the alternate reality he set up for himself and even seems to have believed in, to boot).

And yet, the factual contortions of Trump and his team that occur on a (virtually?) daily basis almost make the misleading statements of the Bush Administration see quaint in principle.

Andrew Sullivan hits the nail right on the head with his hammer in his latest piece on “the end of Western civilization, the collapse of the republic”:

I want to start with Trump’s lies. It’s now a commonplace that Trump and his underlings tell whoppers. Fact-checkers have never had it so good. But all politicians lie. Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth [much as I love Sullivan, this seems pretty harsh on Clinton]. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal democracy to function at all. Trump’s lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission. That first press conference when Sean Spicer was sent out to lie and fulminate to the press about the inauguration crowd reminded me of some Soviet apparatchik having his loyalty tested to see if he could repeat in public what he knew to be false. It was comical, but also faintly chilling…

…What are we supposed to do with this? How are we to respond to a president who in the same week declared that the “murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 45 to 47 years,” when, of course, despite some recent, troubling spikes in cities, it’s nationally near a low not seen since the late 1960s, and half what it was in 1980. What are we supposed to do when a president says that two people were shot dead in Chicago during President Obama’s farewell address — when this is directly contradicted by the Chicago police? None of this, moreover, is ever corrected. No error is ever admitted. Any lie is usually doubled down by another lie — along with an ad hominem attack…

…With someone like this barging into your consciousness every hour of every day, you begin to get a glimpse of what it must be like to live in an autocracy of some kind…

…it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago…

…[since] [w]e cannot avoid this surreality all around us.

In discussing Trump’s presidency just a few days into it, The New York Times’s Paul Krugman went into some realistic predictions of how thing will go under Trump (which is badly); his discussion of Trump’s response to these challenges is key:

So how will Mr. Trump handle the bad news of rising unemployment, plunging health coverage, and little if any crime reduction? That’s obvious: He’ll deny reality, the way he always does when it threatens his narcissism. But will his supporters go along with his fantasy? They might. After all, they blocked out the good news from the Obama era.

Yes, Trump likes to say he has “a running war with the media,” which is true (just watch his February 16th, 2017, thus-far-singular first full press conference as president, contrasted with a fact-checked/annotated transcript) and a war in which his close advisor Steve Bannon plays a leading role—and Trump regularly calls information that reveals unflattering truths about him “fake news”—but Trump and his team have an even bigger running war against reality, which sums up the bulk of his war with the media. 

I have been following politics since the mid-1990s, and closely since 1998; I’ve never seen a president, let alone a major party nominee, fights basic facts and reality the way I have seen candidate Trump and now President Trump do so, nor have I ever seen a team of top advisors so dedicated to lying and creating an alternate reality. I have lost track of the number of times I have literally heard and seen the president say and/or do something, only hours later, sometimes even less, to hear and see him or one or more of his team flat-out deny what I had just seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, led by several at the top of his inner-circle—the triumvirate of: the former serial purveyor of fake news à la Breitbart and admirer of WWII-fascist/Nazi-associated Italian intellectual Julius Evola, Steve Bannon, now Trump’s Chief Strategist; the circus-level contortionist of truth, master of “alternative facts,” and serial spouter of shameless lies Kellyanne Conway, now Counselor to Trump; the forceful fudger of facts and understudy for his namesake Sean Hannity, Sean Spicer, now our new White House Press Secretary and Communications Director (he is about to lose the latter position)—and followed by a whole host of eager distortionists incredulously given far too much regular television airtime, effectively dumbing down the airwaves. To be sure, some of these people have been on TV and in other media for years, particularly on Fox News and on fringe, extremist outlets; but in the course of a year, they and their outrages have been normalized and mainstreamed in way unprecedented for their kind; the volume of their presence coupled the intensity and shamelessness of their deceits truly is a brave new world that goes far beyond “spin.”

Alex Wong; Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Even among the traditional, far more respectable media outlets not cheerleading for Trump, this election season was plagued by inadequate coverage, frenetic and thoroughly lacking essential context or rigor (or the rigor being misapplied), and saturated with a blithe false-equivalence, with the way the Clinton e-mail server story was handled only being the most salient example out of an entire election season’s worth of examples; combined with misleading or outright fake news, there was a critical mass of media being consumed by Americans that distorted reality just enough—and I mean just enough in an election that came down to less than 38,600 votes in 3 swing states where large numbers of Trump voters there (and nationally) made their decisions to vote for him in the final weeks and month of the election as orchestrated fake news harming Clinton and helping Trump flooded people’s newsfeeds and even overcame the degree of engagement of traditional reality-based news in terms of top stories—to hand Donald Trump the White House through an Electoral College win. 

Not only, then, did we have a presidential campaign that trafficked and reveled in fake news and constantly denies both reality and his own indisputable statements and actions, but we now have a president and his administration doing the same, with a truly huge portion of the American electorate accepting this fake news, lying, denying, and deception as reality. Competing against an alternative reality that generally tells voters what they want to hear are candidates that try to be far more honest with voters, who try to guide them to understanding “hard truths,” to quote Hillary Clinton, about problems and what is required to achieve solutions to them, which is about as unfair a fight as one can imagine in a democratic election. As the British historian Simon Schama noted earlier this month, “The indifference about the distinction between truth and lies is the precondition of fascism. When truth perishes so does freedom.”

Continued in Part II: Trump, the Global Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related article: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

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