Death of a Nation Page 3
Now we are in a position to lay out the progressive narrative of American history, a story so familiar that it infuses virtually every textbook, every media account, every Hollywood movie and every dinner-table conversation. It is, in fact, the conventional wisdom about how America came to be what it is today. I call it the meta-story of American politics because it is the “story behind the story,” the underlying white supremacy narrative that directs and shapes the innumerable retail theses, news accounts and TV and movie plots flowing from academia, Hollywood and the media. For many Americans, this conventional wisdom about white supremacy seems obvious, irrefutable, the sine qua non of being an educated person; to question it is to reveal either malice or supreme ignorance, indeed to establish oneself as part of the problem.
No one more clearly lays out the progressive narrative than Ta-Nehisi Coates, a young African American writer for The Atlantic and author of the best-selling Between the World and Me. Coates’ writing, elegant, passionate and engaged, is the product of a thorough immersion in the historiographical writings of the left; consequently, it stands out for eloquence rather than originality, and therefore it reliably reflects currents of thinking that go beyond Coates himself and mirror the expression of the progressive conventional wisdom itself. Coates writes with the zeal of a prosecutor, and from his indictment we get a full progressive account of the crime as well as the entire cast of villains, past and present.17
Coates goes right to the heart of the matter, diagnosing white supremacy as the ideology of “torture, theft, and enslavement.” White supremacy “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” This type of racism, he says, “ascribes bone-deep features to people” in order to “then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them.” White supremacy, he makes clear, represents not only the ruin of blacks and other minorities; it represents the death of all that is good and decent in America. It is “an existential danger to the country and the world.”
Coates does not hesitate to say that “racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. To be black in America was to be plundered. To be white was to benefit from, and at times directly execute, this plunder.” Coates’ selection of the year 1776 is not accidental; white supremacy is a crime that in his view began with the founders. They were the ones who unleashed slavery—what Coates terms the plunder of the body, the plunder of the family and the plunder of labor—and also the “power of whiteness,” which is our “awful inheritance,” America’s “bloody heirloom.”
Coates is unimpressed by Jefferson’s 1776 declaration that “all men are created equal”; what significance can that have, coming from a racist slave-owner who, together with other racist slave-owners, approved slavery in the Constitution and the founding documents, showcasing their vile hypocrisy? The meaning of the founding, for Coates and other progressives, is that “America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary.”
If the founders invented white supremacy, Coates promptly traces the migration of that vicious ideology to the American South. “In the 1850s,” he writes, “the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom.” Thus the South was not one slave society among many but “a moral offender on a grand scale, plying its trade at a point when much of the rest of the world had moved forward.”
The trade of course was cotton, the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution and the American economy, first cultivated on the slave plantation and then through generations of sharecropping extending well into the twentieth century. Coates describes the depredations of the Southern slave patrols, the South’s readiness to go to war to protect slavery, the subsequent Southern resistance to Reconstruction, the murderous terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and the crushing imposition of segregation and state-sponsored discrimination by Southern legislatures and Southern officials. Here Coates identifies white supremacy with such slavery apologists as John C. Calhoun, “South Carolina’s senior senator,” and later with racist segregationists such as Theodore Bilbo, “a Mississippi senator and proud Klansman.”
Coates draws his white supremacy narrative right through the second half of the twentieth century. Coates points out that during the 1930s and 1940s, African Americans were routinely excluded from government benefits like Social Security. In the 1950s, they were largely excluded from the college access that the GI Bill made possible for a whole generation of white veterans. From the 1930s through the 1960s, blacks were mostly excluded from the home-mortgage market. Thus a century after black emancipation, white supremacy “continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.”
For Coates, the civil rights movement represented a modest progressive accomplishment, by at least creating a facially neutral set of laws for all Americans. Yet Coates insists that despite what President Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights movement did, the basic structure of white supremacy remained intact; racism may have migrated underground but it continued to exercise its covert power. More significant was the Obama presidency, whose symbolic power “assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries.”
Throughout his writings, Coates takes it for granted that Obama’s party—the Democratic Party—is, for all its inadequacies, the party of progress and civil rights, and the Republican Party is the party of racism and white supremacy. “Hate and racism,” he insists, is “stoked at the party’s base.” But how did it get there? Coates embraces the progressive narrative, which holds that the two parties switched sides on civil rights. Like others on the left, he blames Nixon’s infamous Southern Strategy for courting the racist vote and winning white Southerners—Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis included—into the ranks of the GOP.
For Coates, the culmination of this national tragedy is the accession of Trump, whom Coates terms America’s first white president in the sense that he was elected essentially by a white constituency and “his ideology is white supremacy in all of its truculent and sanctimonious power.” For Coates and many progressives, Trump and the Trumpsters represent far more than a continuation of America’s racist history; they represent an attempt to revivify its most potent, destructive elements.
Coates claims that “Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed.” Whiteness, Coates writes, is “the very core of his power.” His objectives are to undo “an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform . . . thus reifying the idea of being white.” And when white supremacists organized a hate rally in Charlottesville to protest the removal of a monument to Robert E. Lee, Coates said it “makes complete sense” that white supremacy, “nakedly activated” by Trump “from the base of the Republican Party,” would then “rally around the cause of the Confederacy.”
Coates calls for the strongest type of resistance to a regime that is the modern-day descendant of the slave-owners, the segregationists, the fascists and the racial terrorists. Yet even as he joins the fight against Trump—“I would like to see him resigning and leaving the White House”—Coates in his writings and media statements conveys a mood that is dark, foreboding, apocalyptic. America, for him, seems to be slipping away, and so rotted is the body politic that he may not be sorry to see her go.
To sum up, the progressive narrative of American history reflected by Coates is a grand tour of the horrors of racism that exposes three white supremacist villains: the founders, the South and modern-day conservatives and Republicans, with Trump at their helm. Ultimately, these villains turn out to be all in the same camp, stacked on the same side of the aisle, as it were, because the historical villains can all now be mounted on the back of the Republican elephant.
In other words, modern American conservatism is based on conserving the principles of the founders, and moreover the So
uth is today the political base of the Republican Party. So the sins of the founders and of the South become the legacy of modern-day conservatives and Republicans, and we have a Manichean narrative in which the white supremacist right is arrayed against a progressive antiracist left in a life-and-death struggle for America’s survival as a multiracial democracy.
“KNOWING” WHAT ISN’T TRUE
This progressive narrative is so entrenched, so deeply lodged in our brains, so familiar, that it seems almost heresy to ask: is it true? What if it’s not? What if this widely taught and widely accepted truth is a lie? If so, we would not be talking about one lie but a series of lies, lies upon lies, all woven together into a grand narrative of falsehood and deception. Could this be the case? Can it be that what Americans “know” to be true is not, and that even educated Americans have been conned about their own country’s history and turned into suckers?
I want to say at the outset that, unlike some conservatives, I am not raising these questions to minimize the horrors of history. This book does not seek to vindicate Trump, Republicans or the right through a racism minimization strategy. When progressive historians Michael Omi and Howard Winant describe U.S. history as characterized by “implacable denial of political rights, dehumanization, extreme exploitation, and policies of minority extirpation,” I find myself nodding my head in agreement.18
Racism is real enough; the crimes of history are real enough; the question is: who perpetrated them and where can racism be located today? My contention is that the progressive narrative is faked—not fake news but fake history—that the accused are not guilty and that the perpetrators of bigotry both past and present can be found, incredibly enough, on the prosecution’s team.
America is not to blame, and the South is not exclusively to blame. Some Americans perpetrated these crimes and other Americans stopped them. So it is essential to distinguish good Americans from bad ones. Moreover, while the secession debate was a North-South debate, I will show that the slavery debate was not. The slavery debate was between the pro-slavery Democratic Party and the antislavery Republican Party. Blame-the-South progressives must contend with all sorts of anomalies: only one in four white Southerners owned slaves or belonged to a family that did; more than 100,000 Southern men joined the Union army in the Civil War.19
As we will discover in this book, progressive Democrats are in fact the inventors of racism and white supremacy, and the Republican Party fought them all the way. Progressives and Democrats were also the groups that were in bed with fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 1930s, while Republicans opposed this cozy alliance. All the villains of the civil rights movement—Birmingham sheriff Bull Connor, Selma sheriff Jim Clark, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, Georgia governor Lester Maddox, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace—were Democrats.
So we have the remarkable spectacle today of the party of racism, fascism and white supremacy blaming the party of antiracism and resistance to fascism and white supremacy for being racist, fascist and white supremacist.
In my two previous books Hillary’s America and The Big Lie, I explored how big lies about racism and fascism are effectively promulgated. I noted the dominance of the progressive left in academia, the media and Hollywood, the three biggest megaphones of our culture. Big lies typically originate in academia and are then marketed through the media and the entertainment industry. They become conventional wisdom through refraction from one medium to the other, so the various retellings confirm the narrative and make it seem true and even obvious. So this is how one gets away with big lies.
But here I want to raise a deeper question: what are the lies for? By this I do not mean, what is the psychological disposition of the people who tell such lies, but rather, what do they gain by telling them? What is the ultimate game plan of the liars? What ugly truths are they trying to camouflage through the lies that they tell?
My main objective is not merely to expose lies about white supremacy but to tell a new story of the making of the Democratic Party. We all know about the Democratic Party as it is; very few people know how it became this way. My story is a novel genealogy of American politics that exposes the progressive left, together with its political arm, the Democratic Party, as the party of the plantation, the party of enslavement.
The plantation—viewed as a complete ecology involving exploited inhabitants, rented overseers and the plantation boss or “Massa” running things from the Big House—defines the Democrats not merely in the past but also in the present. Part of the interest of this book is to see how this system in modified fashion operates today, with new bosses, new overseers and new types of exploited inhabitants.
In the past, the Democrats sought to enslave only blacks; now they seek to turn all of America into a plantation, with every ethnic group dependent on and controlled from a new Big House, which is the centralized state. In the book, I will show not merely how the Democratic Party originated as the party of the plantation but also how the plantation in various forms and adaptations provides the inspiration and model for the evolution of the Democrats right up to the present.
If the notion of a Democratic plantation stretching across the entire country seems implausible, let’s recall that the man who first predicted it was Abraham Lincoln. In his House Divided speech, Lincoln insisted that Americans would either become all free or all enslaved. “Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new—North as well as South.”20
Lincoln explicitly included whites in his prophecy, arguing that to embrace slavery in principle is to condone the captivity of whites no less than blacks. Long before me, Lincoln accused the Democrats of his day—or “The Democracy,” as they were then called—of seeking to turn all of America into a plantation.
Lincoln’s stark dichotomy—a nation entirely free or completely enslaved—was in part inspired by the Democratic champion of slavery as a positive good, George Fitzhugh. Toward the end of his pro-slavery tract Sociology for the South, Fitzhugh predicted that “one set of ideas will govern and control after awhile the civilized world. Slavery will everywhere be abolished, or every where be re-instituted.”21 Fitzhugh, of course, hoped slavery would become universal and Lincoln hoped it would become extinct. Even so, Lincoln studied Fitzhugh carefully and incorporated his fateful prediction into the House Divided speech.
Lincoln’s plantation prophecy was not delivered, Nostradamus-style, as a mere speculation. Rather, it was based on close reasoning drawn from the 1857 Dred Scott decision permitting slavery in the territories. Chief Justice Roger Taney, an Andrew Jackson protégé and lifelong Democrat, argued that since “the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution,” neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could outlaw it.
After making the obvious point that the right of property in a slave is not distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution, Lincoln pointed out that, following Dred Scott, the Supreme Court might issue a second decision, concluding by its exact same reasoning that no state could outlaw slavery. In this way slavery would become legal nationwide and the way of the plantation would become the American way. It took a mighty war from 1861 to 1865 to prevent this from happening.
But it is happening now. My argument holds that Lincoln’s nightmare of a national plantation is now being realized, and once again the culprit is the Democratic Party. If the progressive narrative constitutes the conventional wisdom, I will make my case through a rival narrative; mine will be the unconventional wisdom.
I introduce figures that may be new for many—the pro-slavery apologist George Fitzhugh; the man known as the Little Magician, Martin Van Buren—and also familiar figu
res like Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama, whom I will reveal in a new light. These are the villains of my story—a very different cast than the villains of the progressive tale—and throughout they are contrasted with the brooding figure of Lincoln, America’s first Republican president and her greatest one yet. Lincoln is the hero of my story and, as in the Civil War period, his philosophical statesmanship defines the American experiment and provides the most penetrating critique of as well as the best alternative to the Democratic plantation.
It is worth mentioning at this point that this is not a narrative where I have my facts and the other side has its facts. This is not a matter of my truths versus someone else’s truths. Throughout this book I rely on the indisputable evidence of history, drawn from primary sources and from the most reputable scholars of slavery, racism and fascism: Gordon Wood, David Brion Davis, Orlando Patterson, Eugene Genovese, James McPherson, George Fredrickson, A. James Gregor, Ira Katznelson and others. The facts I present can easily be verified thanks to the technological marvels of the internet.
This body of facts and evidence sets the fixed parameters of debate and narrows the scope for big lies, because while progressives are entitled to their own opinions, they are not entitled to their own facts. In the end, everything turns on whose interpretation of the evidence is right, whether their story or mine is true. This is something that you, the reader, must decide for yourself. You are my judge and my jury.
PRISON OF THE MIND
I will admit that at first glance and for those unfamiliar with my previous work, this argument will seem far-fetched, even crazy. The plantation system, after all, was involuntary; it was based on forcibly confining slaves. Today, the Democrats don’t have anyone penned up in this way, and they certainly aren’t forcing anyone to work.