Behold a Pale Horse: The Secular and Spiritual Crisis of American Politics

Bill Strickland is the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where he teaches political science in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies.

...Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
--W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

I think that one has to be at least fifty years old to appreciate truly the abyss into which America has fallen. Because, having lived in--and through--the past half-century, one is linked to historical experiences that comparatively contextualize today's reality.

Maggie Wade, who traveled to Washington, DC from Indiana with her daughter, sitting aat the Pentagon with her embroidery panel of the Ribbon Project, 1985. Photo © Ellen Shub

We know, for example, that "the way it is" is not the way it has always been. We know that capitalism is not God's gift to political economy because we know that it failed in the Great Depression and, further back, midwifed the international slave trade. We know that America is not invincible in war (Korea) and not even on the right side of history (Vietnam). We know that people, little people, unknown people, and even children, can confront an unjust social order, make it falter, and even sometimes bring it down (Montgomery, Little Rock, Soweto, Greensboro). And we know that moral men and women have walked the earth and empowered their people's struggle for freedom, independence, and national liberation (Gandhi, King, Mandela, Ms. Ella Baker). So we know that this current era of "Conservatism" is not Yeats' "Second Coming," but rather a tawdry counterfeit, a propaganda-manufactured illusion that substitutes The Right for right, exhales death and calls it Life, and seeks to slay the moral identity and vision of justice at the heart of the American social contract.

Politically, the American Rightists give us offal and call it manna. But how did this happen? How did America become this "rough beast slouching" not toward Bethlehem but toward Hades?

Since the beginning of the republic, we have been taught that the essence of democracy resides in the system of "checks and balances" manifested in our three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. But since the elections of 1994, a right-wing party--which is anti-choice, anti-Labor, anti-city, anti-mass transportation, anti-public housing, anti-public education, anti gun control, anti-black and Brown folk, anti-clean air and water, anti-raising the minimum wage, anti-national health insurance, anti-culture (at least as represented by the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities), anti-immigrant, anti-nuclear test ban treaty, ad infinitum--now controls the House and Senate of the United States, orchestrates a five-vote majority on the Supreme Court, and has appointed two-thirds of all the federal judges on the bench. (Didn't you ever wonder how Kenneth Star kept winning all his appeals?) Now, in the year 2000, they covet the White House to complete their coup. Then the last political domino will have fallen and the unchecked reign of the troglodytes will have begun.

Yet, despite this unprecedented threat--which Ronnie Dugger described in The Nation five years ago as "feeling as if American democracy has been bombed," there is no opposition worthy of the name, no Paul Revere calling the nation to political arms. That is what is so different from the "old days" when people routinely understood, as Martin Luther King's trusted lieutenant, Reverend C.T. Vivian, put it in the 1965 Battle of Selma, that folk "have to stand up to evil, have to confront it, wherever they find it."

This basic failure to "stand up to evil" is what has caused many of us to watch with dismay and despair the basic unwillingness of Democratic party leaders to oppose or expose the race and class politics by which the Republican Right has successfully polarized Americans. They've done it along racial lines on the one hand while transforming the country into the most class-stratified nation in the western world on the other.

Like Humpty Dumpty, the two-party system as we knew it is tumbling down.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Right's foremost ideological weapon, anti-communism, lost its time-honored effectiveness as a mobilizing and hysteria-generating ploy. In its stead, Republican Reaction turned to its other fail-safe strategy, the politics of race-baiting. Race-baiting has been the linchpin of its California, southern, and national strategy since 1980 when Ronald Reagan kicked off his Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi--1964 killing ground of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. After cementing those Southern ties and sending the racial signal they intended, Reagan's handlers disavowed the Klan endorsement--which had instantaneously followed Reagan's appearance--and journeyed North to take their "welfare queen" harangue on the road. It was a pretty two-step which none dared call racism.

So from Ronald Reagan's "Southern strategy," to George Bush's and Lee Atwater's demonized Willie Horton, to today's "welfare reform" and party-led attack on affirmative action, "wasteful social spending," "parasitic immigrants," and countless other issues trailing a thinly-veiled racial subtext, Republicans have redefined political discourse, molded public opinion, and lampooned Liberalism out of political clout. Nor has their political triumph, grown fat on the scapegoating of Blacks and Browns, confined itself to people of color. It has also, only a little more circumspectly, fired its salvos against the gay, the non-Christian, the "Femi-Nazis," the "socialist" editorial writers of the "left-leaning" press, the environmentalists, and anyone reluctant to join their partisan witch hunt against Bill Clinton.

Thus an incredible political contradiction now haunts the land. Unconscionably manipulating the 'race card,' Republicans have clouded voters' minds, garnering forty million votes from an electorate whose interests it auctions off daily. If this is not Orwell's 1984, it is the next best thing.

This metastasizing evil brings to mind the famous warning of the German theologian, Martin Neimoller:

Sixty years later, the moral should be clear to us as well: We are being "divided and conquered," neatly, systematically, surgically.

Among other reasons, we are less effective than the Right because we lack their money and their organization. Characteristically, when liberals are aggrieved, they protest. They form temporary coalitions to contest a Supreme Court nominee like Clarence Thomas or to respond to attacks on individual artists like Robert Mapplethorpe. Whereas when the Right attacks, it tries always to influence or seize state power. The Right unleashes thousands of phone calls, writes thousands of letters, and does so over and over again. They lost, for example, the abortion rights decision with Roe v. Wade in 1973, but they have been pecking away at it relentlessly ever since until they have, for all practical purposes, reversed the Court's decree.

Thus, while not so very long ago we smirked at the zealots of the far right, they have gone from being an often-caricatured element in American politics, to a hegemonic power bloc in American political culture. They define social issues and frame the terms of political, social, and intellectual debate. And they are determined to remake America in their own image.

Against this onslaught, Liberalism has proven itself totally ineffective, dissolving into a soft me-too centralism that seeks "compromise" and "bi-partisanship." But that road is a dead end, since, as Bob Dole candidly admitted on the campaign trail in '96: "What we mean by 'compromise' is getting 90% of what we want now and the rest later."

First, they want to destroy the capacity of government to serve the public interest--"Down with Big Government!"--or to punish Big Business for its transgressions against the citizenry--underfunding regulatory agencies, putting a cap on corporate liability, for instance. Secondly, they want to destroy the Democratic party. Remember Newt giving Republican candidates a list of words to associate with Democrats: "evil," "vile," "un-American," "atheist," "degenerate," "sleazy," and so forth. It is silly then to act as though this is an opposition acting in good faith. Deceit is their stock in trade, character assassination is in their blood. Most of all, they want to loot the public treasury by eliminating taxes upon their wealth and by hiring their friends to "privatize" education, housing, health care, prisons, Social Security, sports stadia, you name it. It is a pretty game plan which, if enacted, means the kidnapping of America.

The Great Triumph of the Right, therefore, is that they have made their agenda and their world view conventional wisdom. They have left the rest of us boxed in and intellectually disarmed, lacking the ideology and analysis to successfully combat the self-serving nostrums projected as self-evident "truths." Jesse Helms going before the United nations claiming to speak "for the American people" is simply a measure of how low we have fallen, and how brazen the enemy has become.

Something must be done. Time is running out. But what?

"We wrestle," the Bible tells us, not only "against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the ruler of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

What this means in secular terms, I think, is that we fight not only against individuals but against a contemporary mindset that wants to turn universities into vocational schools and give American children only so much education as they can pay for; a mindset that wants to "gag" doctors so they cannot inform you of "costly" medical procedures that may save your life; a mindset that is closing down public hospitals and mental institutions, raising rents to "fair market" value and turning the fixed-income elderly into the new homeless; a mindset that you only get organ transplants if you know the right people, or only get the combination AIDS therapies if you can afford the many-thousand-dollar cost.

This mindset has suborned both morality and humanity in America, turning us into an indifferent nation, numbed to evil.

So we need "truth squads," people willing to risk opprobrium and slander to mobilize Americans, especially young Americans, against the prostitution of the country's heritage and the mortgaging of our collective future. We need a new politics and a new vision for the twenty-first century that corresponds to the great "We" of whom James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time:

Amen.