Category Archives: Political philosophy

We Shall Overcome Together

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Imagine watching a mean-spirited white farmer shoot your father dead in the cotton fields shortly after taking advantage of your mother in the shed. Then imagine, after several years of serving as a household servant, walking away into a world unknown, with few possessions, and walking past two black men hanging from nooses on a public street in Georgia. And somehow you first find a job serving affluent white people and ignoring their comments, and then finding your way to a fancy hotel in Washington, D.C., on the recommendation of your boss, who turned down the opportunity, and after several years finding that your performance leads you to the White House to serve as a new butler. By now it is 1957, Dwight Eisenhower is president, and you are a witness to history as he sends federal troops to Arkansas to enforce desegregation of public schools.

That is only the beginning of the story in Lee Daniels’ The Butler, the movie my wife and I saw at the theater last night. The violence, however, is not at all gratuitous but instructive about a piece of American history that many would still prefer to forget or ignore. Cecil Gaines served under presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan, and lived long enough to see the inauguration of Barack Obama. His wife, played by Oprah Winfrey, lived almost but not quite long enough. Along the way, they witnessed the assassination of John Kennedy and watched their oldest son, Louis, attend Fisk University in Nashville, where he joined the Freedom Riders—against his father’s wishes—survived numerous encounters with the law before the law finally changed, and suffered the death of their younger son, Charles, in Vietnam. He was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, at a time when Cecil and Louis were estranged as a result of Louis’s involvement in the Black Panthers. Louis eventually returned to school, earned a Master’s degree in political science, ran for Congress, and led protests against apartheid in South Africa. His father finally reconciled with him at that time after retiring from his job during the administration of Ronald Reagan, who opposed sanctions against the South African regime. The movie depicts Reagan, as Cecil announced his retirement, wondering whether he was on the wrong side of history with regard to civil rights. As ever, Gaines tried to avoid answering the question. But he proceeded to reconcile with Louis by joining his protest.

Although the pace of such a biopic is sometimes uneven, as would be the case with most movies whose story stretches over nine decades, it is nonetheless an extremely worthwhile contribution to public understanding of where our nation has been with regard to race relations, and how far it has come, and more importantly, how it got from point A to point B. It shows that division of opinion and perspective was every bit as alive and poignant in black as in white America over those many years. We watch presidents and others change their hearts and minds as a result of experience. It is important, in 2013, to remember that awareness of the full range of the American experience was not as prevalent a century ago as now, that we have not always had 24-hour news, whatever that has contributed, and that for many blacks in the Old South, leaving home was a frightening experience because their world had been so narrow. It took real fear and despair to push people northward.

But the sight of those hanging men, the vicious responses to lunch counter sit-ins, and the burning of freedom buses by robed Klansmen helped provide that impetus, along with the sense that there had to be new opportunities elsewhere. But the violence also has long troubled me in another sense.

As a Christian, I have never, ever found it possible to reconcile such behavior by the southern white community with the so-called Bible Belt affinity for religion. I grew up in Ohio, with some distance from the Old South, but I knew of it even as a teenager, watching television news footage of civil rights protests in Alabama and Mississippi. It just did not add up. I am well aware of the tendency to accept the way things are, and tradition and the status quo are not always bad things. But the sheer brutality required to enforce segregation cannot be reconciled with the teachings of Jesus no matter how hard one tries, no matter how desperately one wants to believe in his own privileges in an oppressive system. There is a willful stubbornness about clinging to such beliefs in the face of all the evidence of their unfairness. I am well aware that these things were not limited to the South, though the lynchings largely were.

The reconciliation of father and son in The Butler is the reconciliation of two very different paths to personal and political liberation, and the discovery that Cecil and Louis, coming from two different times and generations, had more in common in the end than either realized during most of their long estrangement. Their conflict is a reminder to us all of the stress imposed on all of us who struggle to find a path to a better world. Both made meaningful contributions, and both were heroes, each in his own way. If this movie has a core lesson to impart, I believe that is it.

Jim Schwab

Labor Day Special

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This is the first time since creating this blog that I have posted twice in one weekend. I have limited my posts to once a week, for the most part, because of the press of other business. This fall, as has been the case since 2008, that includes teaching a University of Iowa graduate class in the School of Urban and Regional Planning, “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery,” on top of existing duties, including extensive travel, with the American Planning Association. I have not wanted to establish a pace I could not maintain.

But I was struck this morning by a headline column in the Chicago Tribune Business section by Rex W. Huppke, titled, “Don’t demean jobless.” Huppke is generally a very well-balanced, thoughtful writer who does not engage in hyperbole. Nor do I believe he does so today. What he does is excoriate certain politicians for their own hyperbolic fulminations. While I was not present to hear the speeches of which he writes, I am fully inclined to accept the veracity of what he reports.

What he reports is that on August 26, in South Carolina, Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, told supporters there that “more than 100 million Americans . . . . are simply not in the workforce” and compared them to stubborn children who refuse to do their chores. Huppke goes on to note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 11.5 million unemployed Americans, with another million that have dropped out of the labor market. That is a tiny fraction of King’s number, which is nearly one-third of the entire American public, children included.

So where does King get such a number?

The only way to do so is to replicate the kind of colossal statistical assumption committed at one point, before a private audience, by 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who noted that about 47 percent of the voters were beholden in some way to public handouts and thus likely to vote for his opponent. How so? You include everyone on a public pension, Social Security, unemployment, Medicare, Medicaid, and so on. There is no other way to compile such numbers, and Romney was quickly taken to task by numerous commentators at the time for the sheer arrogance that underlay his statement. You might think that the response to his comment might have cured others of such foolishness, but apparently not. Stay-at-home parents? Do your chores! Just got laid off when a factory moved overseas? What’s the matter with you?

Now let’s get serious. I know, that’s a challenge in a political environment that actually honors such discourse. If you want to bank on anecdotal evidence, we all know of people, young and old, who never quite learned how to accept responsibility and are happy to live off others. Some are the children of relatively affluent but overly indulgent parents. I know of such people. But I also know that they are a tiny fraction of the people I know because they represent a tiny fraction of the American public as well, nowhere near the numbers people like Rep. King  toss around in such careless speeches. Then there are millions of elderly, living in whole or in part on Social Security, who simply retired because they had reached a point in their life where they were entitled to claim some benefit from the money they had paid into retirement benefits over decades of work. If they are deadbeats—and they must be included to get to King’s numbers—then so are we all, or at least the vast majority of us. So is my wife, a retired school teacher, one among many slowly but steadily being pushed out of the Chicago Public Schools. Me? Healthy and busy for now, but who knows? The day may come when I have to stop. I could become sick or disabled, as can anyone else. But I will certainly not apologize to the likes of King and Joyce if that day arrives. After all, when their constituents tire of them, or they retired, they will have their congressional pension.

And speaking of Congress, it’s time they start doing the chores for which they are already getting paid. That includes doing some honest research before spouting off.

Jim Schwab

Reflections on Independence Day

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Yesterday we celebrated Independence Day. In Egypt, protesters celebrated the removal from office of an elected president by the military. On the 237th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is worthwhile to reflect on all the ramifications of that event over the last two and one-third centuries. Those ramifications are not always as obvious as most Americans, including political commentators, may think. The wheels of history often turn slowly, and sometimes they seem to switch directions with lightning speed, but there is an underlying logic that bends that arc toward freedom, born of desires that run deep in the human psyche.

This essay is decidedly not a book review, though it is the product of decades of reading and thinking and, at times, direct involvement in protest and politics and community affairs, plus whatever knowledge was instilled in me by degrees in political science, journalism, and urban planning. Readers can find a plethora of writings on the topics of political movements and protests and revolutions, ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine in the 18th century to Samuel Huntington and Fareed Zakaria more recently. For my own benefit, I recently completed a 16-year quest to read, sequentially, biographies of all the U.S. presidents, Washington through Obama. The exercise taught me respect for the forces that launch men (and, hopefully, women) into high office and either keep them there or cause their removal. National leaders only seem to be in control of events. They can bend the needle of history, and often do, but ultimately they are also the lucky few in the right place at the right time.

That brings me first to the subject of just who led the American Revolution. These men clearly pledged their “Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” to the cause of independence, a noble sentiment in view of what many were in a position to lose. These were not the paupers of American society. Paupers undoubtedly served in the revolutionary army, but they did not lead it. These were men of the middle and upper classes, educated men who understood the revolutionary ramifications of their aims. Americans, at the time of the revolution, were already relatively prosperous by global standards of the times, raising the question of what they had to complain about. They had had some taste of liberty in governing their own local affairs, but they wanted more. That word more is critical to the theme of this essay. To spur protest and revolution, two ingredients are essential: first, some sense of what is possible in life; and second, some sense that gaining more of it is possible despite some present political obstacles. The reason that protests do not occur more often in the very poorest of societies is that the element of hope is typically missing, replaced by acceptance or resignation. One can change a society’s expectations, of course; Mohandas Gandhi was a genius at doing exactly that. But the expectations are vital in creating the urgency for protest in the first place.

Repeatedly, we have seen emerging societies with growing economies and a mushrooming middle class explode in protest. It is a theme common to both the American Revolution and the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and many other movements in between.

What is particularly interesting today is that the new element is the speed of communication among protesters, facilitated by social media like Twitter and Facebook. It has been a common element in recent protests from Turkey to Egypt to Tunisia to Brazil and even to China. It is fair to say that the Chinese leaders’ biggest nightmare is a social media-driven protest that spins out of their control. In the midst of this phenomenon, it is worth noting that, while one need not be wealthy to have access to such tools, it certainly does not help to be desperately poor. The use of social media depends on education and a modicum of wealth every bit as much as the dissemination of revolutionary tracts did in George Washington’s day.

There are variations and exceptions. It is worth noting here that the very first successful anti-colonial rebellion in North America, in 1680, occurred when the Pueblo Indians rose up against the Spanish in what is now New Mexico. The social media of their day were well suited to their environment. Long-distance runners, common to the Pueblo culture, disseminated the news of the planned uprising, with its identical timing in all pueblos, by counting the number of days it took for each runner to reach his destination, so that all could strike at the same time, thus catching the Spaniards off guard. It worked, and the Spanish did not return again until 1692, somewhat chastened by the experience (but probably not nearly penitent enough). People work with the tools available.

So let’s return to the policy dilemma facing the West regarding events in Egypt. Here we have, under a president elected just a year ago, a sagging economy where the public was looking forward to improvements following the end of the Mubarak regime. President Mohammed Morsi, somewhat an accidental president, led an administration dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, which emerged from decades of repression and imprisonment under authoritarian regimes and with little sympathy from the military. With this history, it is entirely natural that leaders of the Brotherhood felt their time had come, and that it was now their privilege to govern the country as they saw fit. The problem was that their priorities were at odds with those of vast segments of the Egyptian population, which was more interested in economic gains than in Islamist ideology. The protesters had tasted better, even briefly, just a year ago, and had both the education and social media with which to conceive of a path forward, however sketchy it may sometimes seem. Morsi’s leadership, instead of providing a democratic outlet for those frustrations, seemed instead to become a growing obstacle, and the fire was lit. The problem is that their vision of leadership was cramped. An Egyptian-American friend commented to me that Morsi was “intransigent,” and that “there is more to democracy than the ballot box.” Yet the Muslim Brotherhood seemed to view their election as a form of entitlement. Their entitlement, however, meant a form of disenfranchisement for their opponents. Democracy works that way to a certain extent, of course; the question is just how much, and the ability of leadership to compromise and to navigate through troubled waters. In a true democracy, electoral majorities are seldom permanent or long-lasting.

In contrast, consider the case of Nelson Mandela. He had every bit as much reason to view election as entitlement after years of imprisonment, but he used those years to craft a vision of a post-apartheid society that would be inclusive and forgiving. Like Washington, who set the two-term precedent for U.S. leaders, Mandela chose to step down after serving once. He had set the tone, and that was enough. Clearly, South Africa has a long way to go, and Mandela’s leadership only scratched the surface of the problems it sought to address, but he did not suffer from hubris. Quite the opposite. Likewise, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, facing protests both unexpected and widespread, chose not to crack down but to respond with measures seeking to respond to the more reasonable grievances. Brazil has made enormous progress in the last 20 years; the protests demonstrate that Brazilians, given a taste of prosperity, have learned that they can push hard for even more—without the military repression of half a century ago. Given her commitment to improving public transit infrastructure, some of Rousseff’s promises may serve to improve Brazilian society anyway, much as the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights measures were an entirely sensible response to the American civil rights movement in the 1960s.

I am not saying any of this to comment directly on whether military involvement in Egypt’s struggle to achieve a functioning democracy is good or bad, a step forward or back. The relationship between the Egyptian public and the Egyptian military is fraught with features unique to Egyptian history, which is worth studying before one jumps to too many conclusions about what it all means. But I am saying that there is a relationship between our Independence Day and their protests, and there is a common cord in humanity that responds to the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the fact that we can see through the tunnel to perceive that light in the first place that motivates us.

 

Jim Schwab