Category: History

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Trump, Miller, and the Indiana Klan, Part II: History Revisited

[Note to readers:  Part I of this essay can be found here.]

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Mark Twain isn’t the only close observer to have noted that history has its own cycles, especially of human folly.  The philosopher George Santayana wrote the famous line, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  The social theorist Karl Marx put it this way: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”  The famed American attorney Clarence Darrow said that, “History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.”

One hundred years after the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920s, American history is again rhyming.  Sometimes in precise iambic pentameter, sometimes in shambolic doggerel.

No one since DC Stephenson in the 1920s has so mimicked and pursued the Indiana Klan leader’s recognition that “he could make far more money from the renewable hate of everyday white people than he could ever make as an honest businessman”1 than has Donald J. Trump. Continue reading “Trump, Miller, and the Indiana Klan, Part II: History Revisited”

  1. Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.  Viking, 2023, p. 338.[↩]
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Criminaloids Take Over The Government

The criminaloid is really a borderer between the camps of good and evil, and this is why he is so interesting. To run him to earth and brand him, as long ago pirate and traitor were branded, is the crying need of our time. . . . Every year that sees him pursue in insolent triumph his nefarious career raises up a host of imitators and hurries society toward moral bankruptcy.

These words, written well over 100 years ago by the American economist and sociologist Edward A. Ross1, speak to our present moment in ways that he would not even have been able to imagine, to a time that he could not ever imagine.

He was writing about what later would become known as white collar criminals, people who broke the laws to their advantage in their professional work in business, politics, the law itself, and elsewhere.  He noticed the way they played subtly between virtue and vice, presenting themselves as avatars of leadership and merit while grossly preying upon others–and even the nation–to further grow both their wealth and power.  And long before his peers and later generations, he saw the connection between uncontrolled “criminaloids” and the end of morality. Continue reading “Criminaloids Take Over The Government”

  1. In his book, Sin and Society, 1907.[↩]
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Running for President with Jesus and Hitler

For as long as it has been said that politics makes strange bedfellows–and it has been a while1–I would offer that there has never before been such a strange set as those joined in this year’s Trump campaign for U.S. president.  Riding sidecars on Trump’s chariot toward ultimate power are one of history’s most inspiring and loving religious leaders and perhaps the most evil person to darken American politics.

The Bible tells a loosely similar story, but with a twist or two, in describing the Fall of Lucifer.  Lucifer was once one of God’s most powerful angels, until his lust for worship caused him to rebel against the Creator, resulting in his fall from grace and eternal life to become the destroyer of worlds.  It has been said that Lucifer took at least a third of the angels with him in his rebellion and fall, and that he did so by deceiving them with lies.2

What the Bible does not foretell is that Lucifer ever again joined forces with God or Jesus.  His exile was to be in perpetuity.  So:  How in the world did we reach today’s pairing of this political Odd Couple? Continue reading “Running for President with Jesus and Hitler”

  1. The American writer Charles Dudley Warner offered this statement to the world in his 1870 book, My Summer in a Garden.[↩]
  2. See “What Was the Fall of Satan in the Bible,”  in The Collector.[↩]
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Remembering the Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968

     I was still too young to vote.  But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer.

The convening of the Democratic National Convention last night in Chicago takes me back more than five decades, to that other Democratic Convention in Chicago.  It was August 1968, and I was 18 years old that summer before my sophomore year in college.  I was just coming of age politically.

By that August, 1968 had already been a very rough year for the nation.  Martin Luther King, Jr., the country’s civil rights and moral trailblazer, had been assassinated on April 4, shocking the conscience of the country.  Two months later, on June 5, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, just a day after he had seized the momentum in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.1 The country–and the Democratic Party–were splintered by nationwide protests against the Vietnam War and racial inequality.  More than 100 cities had erupted into riots and arson after the King assassination.

I was a high school freshman when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, an unimaginable event.  Perhaps I was too young then–13–to feel the full effect of that national trauma.  But the events of the spring and summer of 1968 had landed more heavily against my idealistic self.

I was still too young to vote.2  But I was not too young to go to Chicago for the Convention that summer. Continue reading “Remembering the Democratic Convention, Chicago, 1968”

  1. On June 4 Kennedy, who had announced his campaign only that March, won the Democratic primaries in California and South Dakota.[↩]
  2. The 26th Amendment to the Constitution changed the legal voting age from 21 to 18 when it was ratified in 1971.[↩]
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GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it

Almost 75 years after it was published, George Orwell’s novel 1984 has nothing on today’s Republican Party when it comes to language.  The novel features such ideological practices as “newspeak” and “doublethink” that conform language to the needs of a society’s authoritarian leadership to maintain control of its population.  Newspeak is a minimalist language designed to make the utterance of heretical thoughts–those that challenge central authority–impossible.   Doublethink refers to the ability to believe and say that black is white, in contradiction of plain facts, in order to uphold the regime.

Does any of this sound familiar today?  Since the rise of “Trumpism” in the Republican Party, we have seen the explosion not only of blatant lies, but also the creation of “alternative” facts to support law-free rule.  We have seen “Don’t say gay” restrictions for the early grades of schools in Florida, and the deletion of critical race theory from curriculums ranging up to college level.  Lately we’ve seen an apparently new development in the distortion of language in the service of ideological manipulation:  the notion that one can speak of things without mentioning what they are about.

This rang a bell for me, one that rings back half a century in my work life and that I have always since associated with the most destructive elements of conservative politics in the U.S.  Perhaps it is no small coincidence that Orwell’s book was published on my mother’s birthday in the year that I was born. Continue reading “GOP Speak: You can talk about it, just don’t mention it”

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Thoughts on an Indictment

The first indictment of Donald Trump has landed.  Certainly there are more to come.  In the meanwhile, the indictment by the New York City grand jury and prosecutor has already created feverish media reactions and the expected bombast from the former U.S. president.  What to make of it all?  These thoughts come to mind.

The Media

In our digital age, the mainstream (traditional) media are also all about attracting eyeballs, most especially our television news programs.  Thus, the coverage to this point–before the indictment charges are even revealed–has been, well, hysterical.  It’s odd, isn’t it?  Trump refers to them as the “Fake News” media, and yet he is able to play them to his advantage like a fiddle.  They cannot get enough of him, his antics and his predicaments.  He is addicted to their attention, and they are happy to provide it. Continue reading “Thoughts on an Indictment”

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Whither the Supreme Court? Notes on Law, Abortion and Religion

For more than 30 years I taught the sociology of law to both undergraduate and graduate university students.  We considered how American law developed, how it was applied to persons and groups, and with what effects on them and on the broader society.

When discussing the U.S. Supreme Court, I emphasized that the traditional law school approach to its decision-making was wrong.  There, students have been commonly trained that legal reasoning is a learned skill much like that in scientific work.  It is based on principles of deduction, according to which judges make decisions about laws by logically figuring out how the principles established in earlier court decisions–precedents–apply to the current dispute before them.  In this perspective, judicial decision-making–especially in the higher courts with the best trained lawyers–is a matter of technique.  It produces the correct legal answers based on facts and reason, free of bias and personal belief.  Competent practitioners, therefore, should reach the same, right, answers.

Although the American legal establishment placed a lot of faith in this account, and asked the nation to do the same,  it was never a true story.

Of course, if it were, how could the Supreme Court issue so many decisions with 5-4 votes?  More dramatically now, how could it be that today’s Supreme Court appears to be little more than a radical Right redoubt, one on the verge of retracting a basic right finally granted to women by the Court almost 50 years ago? Continue reading “Whither the Supreme Court? Notes on Law, Abortion and Religion”

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The GOP Is Ground Zero for American Racism

For a while there have been versions of this saying:  Not all Republicans are racist, but if you are a racist the Republican Party is the party for you.

Now this may be taken in either of two ways in terms of the GOP.   The less consequential–even somewhat anodyne–meaning is that American racists are attracted to the Republican Party because it has long favored tough-on-crime policies and low taxes/small government policies, which have always translated into harsh punishments of and weak federal support for poor people, among whom minority populations figure disproportionately.  This view can seem to insulate the Party itself from charges of racism and racial animus.

The other way of reading the statement is not only less forgiving–it is condemnatory.  This view asserts that the Party itself is racist at its core.  Its basic principles and fundamental operations are racist.  They are dedicated to the protection and strengthening of white dominance–and domination–in the United States.  They are racially exclusionary.  Today, in the 21st century, the Republican Party is the nation’s beating heart of systemic racism at both the national and state levels.  It is the principal mechanism of institutional discrimination against minorities of color.  As a result, whether or not individual Republicans feel that they are racist, supporting today’s GOP while remaining silent on its racist policies is itself a racist act.

Sadly, there is no plausible argument against this second reading.  There is no rational or factual way to challenge this conclusion.  There is only the denial of truth, something else that the GOP has adopted as a routine part of its operations that serves its racist purposes. Continue reading “The GOP Is Ground Zero for American Racism”

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The Impeachment Trial and the Assault on American Democracy

If the impeachment trial of Donald Trump for the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress continues on the path set for it on the first day by Senate Republicans and the President’s defense team, it will constitute the greatest assault on American democracy since the Civil War.  More so than the President’s campaign’s efforts to coordinate with the Russians to favor his election.  Even more so than the behavior in the impeachment’s own charges against the president:  that for his personal political benefit he used the power of his presidency to withhold funds mandated by Congress for Ukraine’s military defense against Russian aggression, in order to extort that country to announce an investigation of a political rival (Joe Biden), and that in unprecedented fashion he obstructed the Congress’s investigation of those events.  As such, it will either portend the end of our democracy or so diminish it that it will take generations to repair. Continue reading “The Impeachment Trial and the Assault on American Democracy”

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Five Cliff Notes on the Mueller Report

The much-anticipated (redacted) Mueller Report was released today by the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr. Here are five brief initial observations on it.

I. There is a very important distinction in American law between decisions not to prosecute crimes and whether or not crimes were in fact committed. Decisions not to prosecute potential criminal cases are commonly NOT based on prosecutors’ judgments that the suspects are innocent of crimes. Continue reading “Five Cliff Notes on the Mueller Report”

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