Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
As I've been struggling with what to put in, leave out, or abandon altogether in my own statement on the “state of the nation” (tentatively entitled "A Society Without Solidarity") I've been wondering why I have not been able to find anything current from Michelle Alexander, who "owns" most of this intellectual territory. Finally, I found this billmoyers.com/...
I found that her delving into the details of the backgrounds of the two most infamous recent victims of violence from law enforcement brought her out very close to the Harvard Law Review article, "Policing and Profit," that so disturbed me, and which led to my long April essay "The Rape of Justice: How Neoliberalism Destroys 'Equal Justice Under Law.'" (Still available here www.dailykos.com/...) The first third of that essay has now appeared in the journal of the World Economics Association as "Karl Polanyi and the Coming U.S. Election, free and online for downloading here; (I was able to finish "The New Jim Crow" and incorporate it into this new essay"...www.paecon.net/... )
I haven't yet heard her referred to, or her book, "The New Jim Crow" on CNN, despite their saturation coverage, and I haven't detected any reference to her work in the Presidential addresses of recent days; it took her a modest sized book to delineate how "it" happened, and her explanation proceeded chronologically, and included the intended direction of Reagan's "War on Drugs," which wouldn't be conducted in upper middle class neighborhoods or college campuses with the same ease it was in poor black neighborhoods...despite equal drug usage among the races, and the long unfolding of court decisions that transferred enormous discretion to police for stops, searches and seizures, and how the court system has repeatedly refused to consider ample evidence collected to show discriminatory patterns in stops and searches...blatant ones…
What I am trying to say is that the system of Jim Crow has evolved in a complex way, all under the cover story of a neutral, "color-blind" criminal justice system...and ironically now, under the two terms of our first black President. I don't know how anyone gets to the bottom of the causal chain here without her help, and then expanding the logic, which she herself now seems to advance, where I went with my essay, that this new racial system is part of a larger economic picture and I will not repeat the name I give it, a "given name" in many circles, but not the ruling ones, one that cannot be discussed in mainstream media. (Chris Hedges repeatedly used it in his weekly column this past Monday, here www.truthdig.com/...)
I'll leave you with one more incongruous fact, which comes from Alexander's own book, and makes me want to retain to my tentative title, while fully recognizing that this is the time national leaders and especially Sec. Clinton most want to present a "united front" if not quite yet (far from it) getting to something like a genuinely "Popular Front," the one from the 1930's: Ms. Alexander admitted, in the Introduction to "The New Jim Crow," that her own husband (Carter Stewart) who works in the "criminal justice system,"did not agree with her conclusions, despite his support and care that helped her work to proceed. I think that summarizes just how hard reaching even an outline of an understanding of the new system will be, much less correcting it, which I, and she, increasingly seem to think cannot be accomplished fully, despite major reforms to the criminal justice system, short of an economic revolution on at least the scale of the New Deal.
The bleakness of my tentative title, and the facts on the ground, are tempered by the recognition that American society has always teetered, by its design and ideals, including the American Dream itself, against everything meant by the term solidarity, and whenever it has imperfectly approached the best meanings of that term (and the 1920's and 1930's were full of examples of horrendous methods of achieving it, in Europe and Russia, with unsuccessful intimations of the worst here domestically) the achievement has not lasted very long. I was encouraged by what I read and heard of the proceeding at the People's Summit in Chicago in June, the new leaders, many women who came forward into the public eye for the first time, and the overall presentations and tone of John Nichols' and Robert McChesney's new book People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and A Citizenless Democracy, which covered much the same ground, and reached most of the conclusions I have over the past ten years, especially endorsing FDR's Second Bill of Rights and its emphasis on the Right to a Job (versus the Universal Income approach.). And the need to build a new and more robust infrastructure of Democracy.
In my own mind, I have had a running argument with which historical “analogy” fits best to describe our troubles: the one from our own 1850’s, when the political system failed to keep the country together, or the 1930’s, especially in Europe, when the Western democracies struggled mightily to craft a solution to the collapse of capitalism which threatened, and delivered stalemate or chaos to standing political systems. In my formal writings, I have leaned towards a “mild” version of what happened in Weimar “culture,” yet the events of the past week, especially the shootings in Dallas, remind me that the 1850’s also are possible. A touch of both? Three striking findings coming from the economic realm remind us that matters economic don’t remain within the academic boundaries claimed by the field: we know that working class Americans without college degrees have watched their life spans shorten, their suicide rates, alcoholism and drug addiction rates soar...and the Federal Reserve own surveys tell us that between 50-60 percent of our nation does not have $400-1,000 in savings to meet even a small economic emergency. And we are “chronologically due for another recession, with the possibility of another financial crisis, perhaps not one originating in our own economy, is always possible, as the Brexit reminded us...the vote being preceded by the murder of Jo Cox, a member of Parliament. Ways I use to measure the political temperature of the body politic. And in America, perhaps the hardest threads to unravel are those between culture matters and economic ones, as the Trump campaign shows how they weave together in sometimes destructive ways.
Right now, it's anyone's guess which way the country turns: Right or Left, or what has proven to be a Center, one that cannot hold. Whether a more genuine "Center-Left," unlike the Clinton "model" from the 1990's, can do the job, was the unanswered question at that People's Summit...I have my doubts, but a good portion of the answer is in Sec. Clinton's hands now, although I strongly suspect the direction will be turned, if not determined, by "events" beyond anyone's immediate control. Nonetheless, we strive for our ideals.