“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity”
— Martin Luther King
Thank you, Mr. President.
But we still have a long way to go and a lot of conscientious--willful--stupidity to overcome.
Showing posts with label President Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label President Obama. Show all posts
Monday, January 21, 2013
MLK/ Inauguration
Thank you, Mr. President.
But we still have a long way to go and a lot of conscientious--willful--stupidity to overcome.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
IT'S OBAMA!
I am crying with relief and joy! We now have a chance!
This is a great day!!!
http://www.barackobama.com/
Monday, November 5, 2012
A Matter Of Great Urgency: The Choice Is CLEAR
"The morning was cold and the sky was bright. Aretha Franklin wore a large and interesting hat. Yo-Yo Ma urged his frozen fingers to play the cello, and the Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, a civil-rights comrade of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s, read a benediction that began with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the segregation-era lamentation of American realities and celebration of American ideals. On that day in Washington—Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009—the blustery chill penetrated every coat, yet the discomfort was no impediment to joy. The police estimated that more than a million and a half people had crowded onto the Mall, making this the largest public gathering in the history of the capital. Very few could see the speakers. It didn’t matter. People had come to be with other people, to mark an unusual thing: a historical event that was elective, not befallen.
Just after noon, Barack Hussein Obama, the forty-seven-year-old son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan, an uncommonly talented if modestly credentialled legislator from Illinois, took the oath of office as the forty-fourth President of the United States. That night, after the inaugural balls, President Obama and his wife and their daughters slept at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a white house built by black men, slaves of West African heritage.
Obama succeeded George W. Bush, a two-term President whose misbegotten legacy, measured in the money it squandered and the misery it inflicted, has become only more evident with time. Bush left behind an America in dire condition and with a degraded reputation. On Inauguration Day, the United States was in a downward financial spiral brought on by predatory lending, legally sanctioned greed and pyramid schemes, an economic policy geared to the priorities and the comforts of what soon came to be called “the one per cent,” and deregulation that began before the Bush Presidency. In 2008 alone, more than two and a half million jobs were lost—up to three-quarters of a million jobs a month. The gross domestic product was shrinking at a rate of nine per cent. Housing prices collapsed. Credit markets collapsed. The stock market collapsed—and, with it, the retirement prospects of millions. Foreclosures and evictions were ubiquitous; whole neighborhoods and towns emptied. The automobile industry appeared to be headed for bankruptcy. Banks as large as Lehman Brothers were dead, and other banks were foundering. It was a crisis of historic dimensions and global ramifications. However skillful the management in Washington, the slump was bound to last longer than any since the Great Depression.
At the same time, the United States was in the midst of the grinding and unnecessary war in Iraq, which killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and four thousand Americans, and depleted the federal coffers. The political and moral damage of Bush’s duplicitous rush to war rivalled the conflict’s price in blood and treasure. America’s standing in the world was further compromised by the torture of prisoners and by illegal surveillance at home. Al Qaeda, which, on September 11, 2001, killed three thousand people on American soil, was still strong. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was, despite a global manhunt, living securely in Abbottabad, a verdant retreat near Islamabad.
As if to intensify the sense of crisis, on Inauguration Day the national-security apparatus informed the President-elect that Al Shabaab, a Somali affiliate of the Al Qaeda network, had sent terrorists across the Canadian border and was planning an attack on the Mall, possibly on Obama himself. That danger proved illusory; the others proved to be more onerous than anyone had imagined. The satirical paper The Onion came up with a painfully apt inaugural headline: “BLACK MAN GIVEN NATION’S WORST JOB.”
Barack Obama began his Presidency devoted to the idea of post-partisanship. His rhetoric, starting with his “Red State, Blue State” Convention speech, in 2004, and his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” was imbued with that idea. Just as in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” he had tried to reconcile the disparate pasts of his parents, Obama was determined to bring together warring tribes in Washington and beyond. He extended his hand to everyone from the increasingly radical leadership of the congressional Republicans to the ruling mullahs of the Iranian theocracy. The Republicans, however, showed no greater interest in working with Obama than did the ayatollahs. The Iranian regime went on enriching uranium and crushing its opposition, and the Republicans, led by Dickensian scolds, including the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, committed themselves to a single goal: to engineer the President’s political destruction by defeating his major initiatives. Obama, for his part, did not always prove particularly adept at, or engaged by, the arts of retail persuasion, and his dream of bipartisanship collided with the reality of obstructionism.
Perhaps inevitably, the President has disappointed some of his most ardent supporters. Part of their disappointment is a reflection of the fantastical expectations that attached to him. Some, quite reasonably, are disappointed in his policy failures (on Guantánamo, climate change, and gun control); others question the morality of the persistent use of predator drones. And, of course, 2012 offers nothing like the ecstasy of taking part in a historical advance: the reëlection of the first African-American President does not inspire the same level of communal pride. But the reëlection of a President who has been progressive, competent, rational, decent, and, at times, visionary is a serious matter. The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—the $787-billion stimulus package—was well short of what some economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, thought the crisis demanded. But it was larger in real dollars than any one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal measures. It reversed the job-loss trend—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many as 3.6 million private-sector jobs have been created since June, 2009—and helped reset the course of the economy. It also represented the largest public investment in infrastructure since President Eisenhower’s interstate-highway program. From the start, though, Obama recognized that it would reap only modest political gain. “It’s very hard to prove a counterfactual,” he told the journalist Jonathan Alter, “where you say, ‘You know, things really could have been a lot worse.’ ” He was speaking of the bank and auto-industry bailouts, but the problem applies more broadly to the stimulus: harm averted is benefit unseen.
As for systemic reform, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in July, 2010, tightened capital requirements on banks, restricted predatory lending, and, in general, sought to prevent abuses of the sort that led to the crash of 2008. Against the counsel of some Republicans, including Mitt Romney, the Obama Administration led the takeover, rescue, and revival of the automobile industry. The Administration transformed the country’s student-aid program, making it cheaper for students and saving the federal government sixty-two billion dollars—more than a third of which was put back into Pell grants. AmeriCorps, the country’s largest public-service program, has been tripled in size.
Obama’s most significant legislative achievement was a vast reform of the national health-care system. Five Presidents since the end of the Second World War have tried to pass legislation that would insure universal access to medical care, but all were defeated by deeply entrenched opposition. Obama—bolstered by the political cunning of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi—succeeded. Some critics urged the President to press for a single-payer system—Medicare for all. Despite its ample merits, such a system had no chance of winning congressional backing. Obama achieved the achievable. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the single greatest expansion of the social safety net since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, in 1965. Not one Republican voted in favor of it.
Obama has passed no truly ambitious legislation related to climate change, shying from battle in the face of relentless opposition from congressional Republicans. Yet his environmental record is not as barren as it may seem. The stimulus bill provided for extensive investment in green energy, biofuels, and electric cars. In August, the Administration instituted new fuel-efficiency standards that should nearly double gas mileage; by 2025, new cars will need to average 54.5 miles per gallon.
President Obama’s commitment to civil rights has gone beyond rhetoric. During his first week in office, he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which protects women, minorities, and the disabled against unfair wage discrimination. By ending the military’s ban on the service of those who are openly gay, and by endorsing marriage equality, Obama, more than any previous President, has been a strong advocate of the civil rights of gay men and lesbians. Finally, Obama appointed to the Supreme Court two highly competent women, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the Court’s first Hispanic. Kagan and Sotomayor are skilled and liberal-minded Justices who, abjuring dogmatism, represent a sober and sensible set of jurisprudential values.
In the realm of foreign policy, Obama came into office speaking the language of multilateralism and reconciliation—so much so that the Nobel Peace Prize committee, in an act as patronizing as it was premature, awarded him its laurels, in 2009. Obama was embarrassed by the award and recognized it for what it was: a rebuke to the Bush Administration. Still, the Norwegians were also getting at something more affirmative. Obama’s Cairo speech, that same year, tried to help heal some of the wounds not only of the Iraq War but, more generally, of Western colonialism in the Middle East. Speaking at Al Azhar University, Obama expressed regret that the West had used Muslim countries as pawns in the Cold War game of Risk. He spoke for the rights of women and against torture; he defended the legitimacy of the State of Israel while offering a straightforward assessment of the crucial issue of the Palestinians and their need for statehood, citing the “humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation.”
It was an edifying speech, but Obama was soon instructed in the limits of unilateral good will. Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hu Jintao, and other autocrats hardened his spirit. Still, he proved a sophisticated and reliable diplomat and an effective Commander-in-Chief. He kept his promise to withdraw American troops from Iraq. He forbade torture. And he waged a far more forceful campaign against Al Qaeda than Bush had—a campaign that included the killing of Osama bin Laden. He negotiated—and won Senate approval of—a crucial strategic-arms deal with the Russians, slashing warheads and launchers on both sides and increasing the transparency of mutual inspections. In Afghanistan, he has set a reasonable course in an impossible situation.
The unsettled situations in Egypt and Libya, following the Arab Spring of 2010, make plain that that region’s political trajectory is anything but fixed. Syria shames the world’s inaction and confounds its hopes of decisive intervention. This is where Obama’s respect for complexity is not an indulgence of intellectual vanity but a requirement for effective action. In the case of bin Laden, it was necessary to act alone and at once; in Libya, in concert with the Europeans; in Iran, cautiously but with decisive measures.
One quality that so many voters admired in Obama in 2008 was his unusual temperament: inspirational, yet formal, cool, hyper-rational. He promised to be the least crazy of Presidents, the least erratic and unpredictable. The triumph of that temperament was in evidence on a spring night in 2011, as he performed his duties, with a standup’s precision and preternatural élan, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, all the while knowing that he had, with no guarantee of success, dispatched Navy SEAL Team Six to kill bin Laden. In the modern era, we have had Presidents who were known to seduce interns (Kennedy and Clinton), talk to paintings (Nixon), and confuse movies with reality (Reagan). Obama’s restraint has largely served him, and the country, well.
But Obama is also a human being, a flawed and complicated one, and as the world has come to know him better we have sometimes seen the downside of his temperament: a certain insularity and self-satisfaction; a tendency at times—as in the first debate with Mitt Romney—to betray disdain for the unpleasant tasks of politics. As a political warrior, Obama can be withdrawn, even strangely passive. He has sometimes struggled to convey the human stakes of the policies he has initiated. In the remaining days of the campaign, Obama must be entirely, and vividly, present, as he was in the second debate with Romney. He must clarify not only what he has achieved but also what he intends to achieve, how he intends to accelerate the recovery, spur employment, and allay the debt crisis; how he intends to deal with an increasingly perilous situation in Pakistan; what he will do if Iran fails to bring its nuclear program into line with international strictures. Most important, he needs to convey the larger vision that matches his outsized record of achievement.
There is another, larger “counterfactual” to consider—the one represented by Obama’s Republican challenger, Willard Mitt Romney. The Republican Party’s nominee is handsome, confident, and articulate. He made a fortune in business, first as a consultant, then in private equity. After running for the Senate in Massachusetts, in 1994, and failing to unseat Edward Kennedy, Romney relaunched his public career by presiding successfully over the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. (A four-hundred-million-dollar federal bailout helped.) From 2003 to 2007, he was the governor of Massachusetts and, working with a Democratic legislature, succeeded in passing an impressive health-care bill. He has been running for President full time ever since.
In the service of that ambition, Romney has embraced the values and the priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society. A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.” Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P. would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression that Romney’s remarks about the “forty-seven per cent” were a matter not of “inelegant” expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction.
Romney’s conviction is that the broad swath of citizens who do not pay federal income tax—a category that includes pensioners, soldiers, low-income workers, and those who have lost their jobs—are parasites, too far gone in sloth and dependency to be worth the breath one might spend asking for their votes. His descent to this cynical view—further evidenced by his selection of a running mate, Paul Ryan, who is the epitome of the contemporary radical Republican—has been dishearteningly smooth. He in essence renounced his greatest achievement in public life—the Massachusetts health-care law—because its national manifestation, Obamacare, is anathema to the Tea Party and to the G.O.P. in general. He has tacked to the hard right on abortion, immigration, gun laws, climate change, stem-cell research, gay rights, the Bush tax cuts, and a host of foreign-policy issues. He has signed the Grover Norquist no-tax-hike pledge and endorsed Ryan’s winner-take-all economics.
But what is most disquieting is Romney’s larger political vision. When he said that Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist democrats in Europe,” he was not only signalling Obama’s “otherness” to one kind of conservative voter; he was suggesting that Obama’s liberalism is in conflict with a uniquely American strain of individualism. The theme recurred when Romney and his allies jumped on Obama’s observation that no entrepreneur creates a business entirely alone (“You didn’t build that”). The Republicans continue to insist on the “Atlas Shrugged” fantasy of the solitary entrepreneurial genius who creates jobs and wealth with no assistance at all from government or society.
If the keynote of Obama’s Administration has been public investment—whether in infrastructure, education, or health—the keynote of Romney’s candidacy has been private equity, a realm in which efficiency and profitability are the supreme values. As a business model, private equity has had a mixed record. As a political template, it is stunted in the extreme. Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity.
Private equity has served Romney well—he is said to be worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Wealth is hardly unique in a national candidate or in a President, but, unlike Franklin Roosevelt—or Teddy Roosevelt or John Kennedy—Romney seems to be keenly loyal to the perquisites and the presumptions of his class, the privileged cadre of Americans who, like him, pay extraordinarily low tax rates, with deductions for corporate jets. They seem content with a system in which a quarter of all earnings and forty per cent of all wealth go to one per cent of the population. Romney is among those who see business success as a sure sign of moral virtue.
The rest of us will have to take his word for it. Romney, breaking with custom, has declined to release more than two years of income-tax returns—a refusal of transparency that he has not afforded his own Vice-Presidential nominee. Even without those returns, we know that he has taken advantage of the tax code’s gray areas, including the use of offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. For all his undoubted patriotism, he evidently believes that money belongs to an empyrean far beyond such territorial attachments.
But holding foreign bank accounts is not a substitute for experience in foreign policy. In that area, he has outsourced his views to mediocre, ideologically driven advisers like Dan Senor and John Bolton. He speaks in Cold War jingoism. On a brief foray abroad this summer, he managed, in rapid order, to insult the British, to pander crudely to Benjamin Netanyahu in order to win the votes and contributions of his conservative Jewish and Evangelical supporters, and to dodge ordinary questions from the press in Poland. On the thorniest of foreign-policy problems—from Pakistan to Syria—his campaign has offered no alternatives except a set of tough-guy slogans and an oft-repeated faith in “American exceptionalism.”
In pursuit of swing voters, Romney and Ryan have sought to tamp down, and keep vague, the extremism of their economic and social commitments. But their signals to the Republican base and to the Tea Party are easily read: whatever was accomplished under Obama will be reversed or stifled. Bill Clinton has rightly pointed out that most Presidents set about fulfilling their campaign promises. Romney, despite his pose of chiselled equanimity, has pledged to ravage the safety net, oppose progress on marriage equality, ignore all warnings of ecological disaster, dismantle health-care reform, and appoint right-wing judges to the courts. Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices are in their seventies; a Romney Administration may well have a chance to replace two of the more liberal incumbents, and Romney’s adviser in judicial affairs is the embittered far-right judge and legal scholar Robert Bork. The rightward drift of a court led by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito—a drift marked by appalling decisions like Citizens United—would only intensify during a Romney Presidency. The consolidation of a hard-right majority would be a mortal threat to the ability of women to make their own decisions about contraception and pregnancy, the ability of institutions to alleviate the baneful legacies of past oppression and present prejudice, and the ability of American democracy to insulate itself from the corrupt domination of unlimited, anonymous money. Romney has pronounced himself “severely conservative.” There is every reason to believe him.
The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama—and exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act—takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb.” That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has been under way for at least three decades. But we’ve already seen the future that Romney represents, and it doesn’t work.
The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney—a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country deserves."
—The Editors of The New Yorker magazine
from the October 29, 2012 issue
http://www.newyorker.com/
Just after noon, Barack Hussein Obama, the forty-seven-year-old son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan, an uncommonly talented if modestly credentialled legislator from Illinois, took the oath of office as the forty-fourth President of the United States. That night, after the inaugural balls, President Obama and his wife and their daughters slept at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a white house built by black men, slaves of West African heritage.
Obama succeeded George W. Bush, a two-term President whose misbegotten legacy, measured in the money it squandered and the misery it inflicted, has become only more evident with time. Bush left behind an America in dire condition and with a degraded reputation. On Inauguration Day, the United States was in a downward financial spiral brought on by predatory lending, legally sanctioned greed and pyramid schemes, an economic policy geared to the priorities and the comforts of what soon came to be called “the one per cent,” and deregulation that began before the Bush Presidency. In 2008 alone, more than two and a half million jobs were lost—up to three-quarters of a million jobs a month. The gross domestic product was shrinking at a rate of nine per cent. Housing prices collapsed. Credit markets collapsed. The stock market collapsed—and, with it, the retirement prospects of millions. Foreclosures and evictions were ubiquitous; whole neighborhoods and towns emptied. The automobile industry appeared to be headed for bankruptcy. Banks as large as Lehman Brothers were dead, and other banks were foundering. It was a crisis of historic dimensions and global ramifications. However skillful the management in Washington, the slump was bound to last longer than any since the Great Depression.
At the same time, the United States was in the midst of the grinding and unnecessary war in Iraq, which killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and four thousand Americans, and depleted the federal coffers. The political and moral damage of Bush’s duplicitous rush to war rivalled the conflict’s price in blood and treasure. America’s standing in the world was further compromised by the torture of prisoners and by illegal surveillance at home. Al Qaeda, which, on September 11, 2001, killed three thousand people on American soil, was still strong. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was, despite a global manhunt, living securely in Abbottabad, a verdant retreat near Islamabad.
As if to intensify the sense of crisis, on Inauguration Day the national-security apparatus informed the President-elect that Al Shabaab, a Somali affiliate of the Al Qaeda network, had sent terrorists across the Canadian border and was planning an attack on the Mall, possibly on Obama himself. That danger proved illusory; the others proved to be more onerous than anyone had imagined. The satirical paper The Onion came up with a painfully apt inaugural headline: “BLACK MAN GIVEN NATION’S WORST JOB.”
Barack Obama began his Presidency devoted to the idea of post-partisanship. His rhetoric, starting with his “Red State, Blue State” Convention speech, in 2004, and his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” was imbued with that idea. Just as in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” he had tried to reconcile the disparate pasts of his parents, Obama was determined to bring together warring tribes in Washington and beyond. He extended his hand to everyone from the increasingly radical leadership of the congressional Republicans to the ruling mullahs of the Iranian theocracy. The Republicans, however, showed no greater interest in working with Obama than did the ayatollahs. The Iranian regime went on enriching uranium and crushing its opposition, and the Republicans, led by Dickensian scolds, including the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, committed themselves to a single goal: to engineer the President’s political destruction by defeating his major initiatives. Obama, for his part, did not always prove particularly adept at, or engaged by, the arts of retail persuasion, and his dream of bipartisanship collided with the reality of obstructionism.
Perhaps inevitably, the President has disappointed some of his most ardent supporters. Part of their disappointment is a reflection of the fantastical expectations that attached to him. Some, quite reasonably, are disappointed in his policy failures (on Guantánamo, climate change, and gun control); others question the morality of the persistent use of predator drones. And, of course, 2012 offers nothing like the ecstasy of taking part in a historical advance: the reëlection of the first African-American President does not inspire the same level of communal pride. But the reëlection of a President who has been progressive, competent, rational, decent, and, at times, visionary is a serious matter. The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—the $787-billion stimulus package—was well short of what some economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, thought the crisis demanded. But it was larger in real dollars than any one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal measures. It reversed the job-loss trend—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as many as 3.6 million private-sector jobs have been created since June, 2009—and helped reset the course of the economy. It also represented the largest public investment in infrastructure since President Eisenhower’s interstate-highway program. From the start, though, Obama recognized that it would reap only modest political gain. “It’s very hard to prove a counterfactual,” he told the journalist Jonathan Alter, “where you say, ‘You know, things really could have been a lot worse.’ ” He was speaking of the bank and auto-industry bailouts, but the problem applies more broadly to the stimulus: harm averted is benefit unseen.
As for systemic reform, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in July, 2010, tightened capital requirements on banks, restricted predatory lending, and, in general, sought to prevent abuses of the sort that led to the crash of 2008. Against the counsel of some Republicans, including Mitt Romney, the Obama Administration led the takeover, rescue, and revival of the automobile industry. The Administration transformed the country’s student-aid program, making it cheaper for students and saving the federal government sixty-two billion dollars—more than a third of which was put back into Pell grants. AmeriCorps, the country’s largest public-service program, has been tripled in size.
Obama’s most significant legislative achievement was a vast reform of the national health-care system. Five Presidents since the end of the Second World War have tried to pass legislation that would insure universal access to medical care, but all were defeated by deeply entrenched opposition. Obama—bolstered by the political cunning of the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi—succeeded. Some critics urged the President to press for a single-payer system—Medicare for all. Despite its ample merits, such a system had no chance of winning congressional backing. Obama achieved the achievable. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the single greatest expansion of the social safety net since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, in 1965. Not one Republican voted in favor of it.
Obama has passed no truly ambitious legislation related to climate change, shying from battle in the face of relentless opposition from congressional Republicans. Yet his environmental record is not as barren as it may seem. The stimulus bill provided for extensive investment in green energy, biofuels, and electric cars. In August, the Administration instituted new fuel-efficiency standards that should nearly double gas mileage; by 2025, new cars will need to average 54.5 miles per gallon.
President Obama’s commitment to civil rights has gone beyond rhetoric. During his first week in office, he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which protects women, minorities, and the disabled against unfair wage discrimination. By ending the military’s ban on the service of those who are openly gay, and by endorsing marriage equality, Obama, more than any previous President, has been a strong advocate of the civil rights of gay men and lesbians. Finally, Obama appointed to the Supreme Court two highly competent women, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the Court’s first Hispanic. Kagan and Sotomayor are skilled and liberal-minded Justices who, abjuring dogmatism, represent a sober and sensible set of jurisprudential values.
In the realm of foreign policy, Obama came into office speaking the language of multilateralism and reconciliation—so much so that the Nobel Peace Prize committee, in an act as patronizing as it was premature, awarded him its laurels, in 2009. Obama was embarrassed by the award and recognized it for what it was: a rebuke to the Bush Administration. Still, the Norwegians were also getting at something more affirmative. Obama’s Cairo speech, that same year, tried to help heal some of the wounds not only of the Iraq War but, more generally, of Western colonialism in the Middle East. Speaking at Al Azhar University, Obama expressed regret that the West had used Muslim countries as pawns in the Cold War game of Risk. He spoke for the rights of women and against torture; he defended the legitimacy of the State of Israel while offering a straightforward assessment of the crucial issue of the Palestinians and their need for statehood, citing the “humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation.”
It was an edifying speech, but Obama was soon instructed in the limits of unilateral good will. Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hu Jintao, and other autocrats hardened his spirit. Still, he proved a sophisticated and reliable diplomat and an effective Commander-in-Chief. He kept his promise to withdraw American troops from Iraq. He forbade torture. And he waged a far more forceful campaign against Al Qaeda than Bush had—a campaign that included the killing of Osama bin Laden. He negotiated—and won Senate approval of—a crucial strategic-arms deal with the Russians, slashing warheads and launchers on both sides and increasing the transparency of mutual inspections. In Afghanistan, he has set a reasonable course in an impossible situation.
The unsettled situations in Egypt and Libya, following the Arab Spring of 2010, make plain that that region’s political trajectory is anything but fixed. Syria shames the world’s inaction and confounds its hopes of decisive intervention. This is where Obama’s respect for complexity is not an indulgence of intellectual vanity but a requirement for effective action. In the case of bin Laden, it was necessary to act alone and at once; in Libya, in concert with the Europeans; in Iran, cautiously but with decisive measures.
One quality that so many voters admired in Obama in 2008 was his unusual temperament: inspirational, yet formal, cool, hyper-rational. He promised to be the least crazy of Presidents, the least erratic and unpredictable. The triumph of that temperament was in evidence on a spring night in 2011, as he performed his duties, with a standup’s precision and preternatural élan, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, all the while knowing that he had, with no guarantee of success, dispatched Navy SEAL Team Six to kill bin Laden. In the modern era, we have had Presidents who were known to seduce interns (Kennedy and Clinton), talk to paintings (Nixon), and confuse movies with reality (Reagan). Obama’s restraint has largely served him, and the country, well.
But Obama is also a human being, a flawed and complicated one, and as the world has come to know him better we have sometimes seen the downside of his temperament: a certain insularity and self-satisfaction; a tendency at times—as in the first debate with Mitt Romney—to betray disdain for the unpleasant tasks of politics. As a political warrior, Obama can be withdrawn, even strangely passive. He has sometimes struggled to convey the human stakes of the policies he has initiated. In the remaining days of the campaign, Obama must be entirely, and vividly, present, as he was in the second debate with Romney. He must clarify not only what he has achieved but also what he intends to achieve, how he intends to accelerate the recovery, spur employment, and allay the debt crisis; how he intends to deal with an increasingly perilous situation in Pakistan; what he will do if Iran fails to bring its nuclear program into line with international strictures. Most important, he needs to convey the larger vision that matches his outsized record of achievement.
There is another, larger “counterfactual” to consider—the one represented by Obama’s Republican challenger, Willard Mitt Romney. The Republican Party’s nominee is handsome, confident, and articulate. He made a fortune in business, first as a consultant, then in private equity. After running for the Senate in Massachusetts, in 1994, and failing to unseat Edward Kennedy, Romney relaunched his public career by presiding successfully over the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. (A four-hundred-million-dollar federal bailout helped.) From 2003 to 2007, he was the governor of Massachusetts and, working with a Democratic legislature, succeeded in passing an impressive health-care bill. He has been running for President full time ever since.
In the service of that ambition, Romney has embraced the values and the priorities of a Republican Party that has grown increasingly reactionary and rigid in its social vision. It is a party dominated by those who despise government and see no value in public efforts aimed at ameliorating the immense and rapidly increasing inequalities in American society. A visitor to the F.D.R. Memorial, in Washington, is confronted by these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.” Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P. would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression that Romney’s remarks about the “forty-seven per cent” were a matter not of “inelegant” expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction.
Romney’s conviction is that the broad swath of citizens who do not pay federal income tax—a category that includes pensioners, soldiers, low-income workers, and those who have lost their jobs—are parasites, too far gone in sloth and dependency to be worth the breath one might spend asking for their votes. His descent to this cynical view—further evidenced by his selection of a running mate, Paul Ryan, who is the epitome of the contemporary radical Republican—has been dishearteningly smooth. He in essence renounced his greatest achievement in public life—the Massachusetts health-care law—because its national manifestation, Obamacare, is anathema to the Tea Party and to the G.O.P. in general. He has tacked to the hard right on abortion, immigration, gun laws, climate change, stem-cell research, gay rights, the Bush tax cuts, and a host of foreign-policy issues. He has signed the Grover Norquist no-tax-hike pledge and endorsed Ryan’s winner-take-all economics.
But what is most disquieting is Romney’s larger political vision. When he said that Obama “takes his political inspiration from Europe, and from the socialist democrats in Europe,” he was not only signalling Obama’s “otherness” to one kind of conservative voter; he was suggesting that Obama’s liberalism is in conflict with a uniquely American strain of individualism. The theme recurred when Romney and his allies jumped on Obama’s observation that no entrepreneur creates a business entirely alone (“You didn’t build that”). The Republicans continue to insist on the “Atlas Shrugged” fantasy of the solitary entrepreneurial genius who creates jobs and wealth with no assistance at all from government or society.
If the keynote of Obama’s Administration has been public investment—whether in infrastructure, education, or health—the keynote of Romney’s candidacy has been private equity, a realm in which efficiency and profitability are the supreme values. As a business model, private equity has had a mixed record. As a political template, it is stunted in the extreme. Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity.
Private equity has served Romney well—he is said to be worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Wealth is hardly unique in a national candidate or in a President, but, unlike Franklin Roosevelt—or Teddy Roosevelt or John Kennedy—Romney seems to be keenly loyal to the perquisites and the presumptions of his class, the privileged cadre of Americans who, like him, pay extraordinarily low tax rates, with deductions for corporate jets. They seem content with a system in which a quarter of all earnings and forty per cent of all wealth go to one per cent of the population. Romney is among those who see business success as a sure sign of moral virtue.
The rest of us will have to take his word for it. Romney, breaking with custom, has declined to release more than two years of income-tax returns—a refusal of transparency that he has not afforded his own Vice-Presidential nominee. Even without those returns, we know that he has taken advantage of the tax code’s gray areas, including the use of offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. For all his undoubted patriotism, he evidently believes that money belongs to an empyrean far beyond such territorial attachments.
But holding foreign bank accounts is not a substitute for experience in foreign policy. In that area, he has outsourced his views to mediocre, ideologically driven advisers like Dan Senor and John Bolton. He speaks in Cold War jingoism. On a brief foray abroad this summer, he managed, in rapid order, to insult the British, to pander crudely to Benjamin Netanyahu in order to win the votes and contributions of his conservative Jewish and Evangelical supporters, and to dodge ordinary questions from the press in Poland. On the thorniest of foreign-policy problems—from Pakistan to Syria—his campaign has offered no alternatives except a set of tough-guy slogans and an oft-repeated faith in “American exceptionalism.”
In pursuit of swing voters, Romney and Ryan have sought to tamp down, and keep vague, the extremism of their economic and social commitments. But their signals to the Republican base and to the Tea Party are easily read: whatever was accomplished under Obama will be reversed or stifled. Bill Clinton has rightly pointed out that most Presidents set about fulfilling their campaign promises. Romney, despite his pose of chiselled equanimity, has pledged to ravage the safety net, oppose progress on marriage equality, ignore all warnings of ecological disaster, dismantle health-care reform, and appoint right-wing judges to the courts. Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices are in their seventies; a Romney Administration may well have a chance to replace two of the more liberal incumbents, and Romney’s adviser in judicial affairs is the embittered far-right judge and legal scholar Robert Bork. The rightward drift of a court led by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito—a drift marked by appalling decisions like Citizens United—would only intensify during a Romney Presidency. The consolidation of a hard-right majority would be a mortal threat to the ability of women to make their own decisions about contraception and pregnancy, the ability of institutions to alleviate the baneful legacies of past oppression and present prejudice, and the ability of American democracy to insulate itself from the corrupt domination of unlimited, anonymous money. Romney has pronounced himself “severely conservative.” There is every reason to believe him.
The choice is clear. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents a constricted and backward-looking vision of America: the privatization of the public good. In contrast, the sort of public investment championed by Obama—and exemplified by both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act—takes to heart the old civil-rights motto “Lifting as we climb.” That effort cannot, by itself, reverse the rise of inequality that has been under way for at least three decades. But we’ve already seen the future that Romney represents, and it doesn’t work.
The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney—a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country deserves."
—The Editors of The New Yorker magazine
from the October 29, 2012 issue
http://www.newyorker.com/
Still Racist After All These Years
Dear followers, I found the following article incredibly enlightening (and a bit disappointing to see exactly how history is repeating and that we are still dealing with the same issues). I always say that if I can know how a situation came to be, and if I can understand the psychology involved, then I am better equipped to face it and handle it. And in this case, to combat it. I hope it inspires you to a greater understanding of the issues we face and perhaps it will help you to make clear choices tomorrow. Again, to our friends in other countries, please understand that we are apparently still fighting a civil war: not everyone in the United States is a racist, homophobic, misogynist who thinks the world is only 4,000 years old and that climate change is happening because some imaginary God in the sky is punishing us for letting gay men and women get married in New York. It's just that those people scream loud and get all the attention.
Parallels to country's racist past haunt age of Obama
By John Blake, CNN
(CNN) - A tall, caramel-complexioned man marched across the steps of the U.S. Capitol to be sworn into office as a jubilant crowd watched history being made.
The man was an African-American of mixed-race heritage, an eloquent speaker whose election was hailed as a reminder of how far America had come.
But the man who placed his hand on the Bible that winter day in Washington wasn't Barack Obama. He was Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate.
His election and that of many other African-Americans to public office triggered a white backlash that helped destroy Reconstruction, America’s first attempt to build an interracial democracy in the wake of the Civil War.
To some historians, Revels' story offers sobering lessons for our time: that this year's presidential election is about the past as well as the future. These historians say Obama isn't a post-racial president but a "post-Reconstructionist" leader. They say his presidency has sparked a white backlash with parallels to a brutal period in U.S. history that began with dramatic racial progress.
Some of the biggest controversies of the 2012 contest could have been ripped from the headlines of that late 19th-century era, they say: Debates erupt over voting rights restrictions and racial preferences, a new federal health care act divides the country, an economic crisis sparks a small government movement. And then there's a vocal minority accusing a national black political leader of not being a "legitimate" U.S. citizen.
All were major issues during Reconstruction, an attempt to bring the former Confederate states back into the national fold and create a new era of racial justice. And many of the same forces that destroyed Reconstruction may be converging again, some scholars and historians say.
Ruha Benjamin points to this as proof that change is fragile - and reversible. The backlash that swept aside Revels lasted nearly a century.
"When white Americans helped put this African-American in the Senate, it seemed that they were really welcoming African-Americans and they wanted them to have full equality," said Benjamin, an African-American studies professor at Boston University. "We know in hindsight that it was about to get worse."
The notion that the country is poised to enter a new post-Reconstruction era may seem outlandish, even offensive. That period, known as the Jim Crow era, saw the establishment of American apartheid: segregated public facilities, race riots and white racists murdering blacks and their white allies with impunity.
Today, too many white Americans are "militantly anti-racist" for the country to return to the post-Reconstruction era, said Mark D. Naison, a history professor at Fordham University in New York City.
"You hold a racist demonstration in this country and the anti-racist protesters will have as many whites and blacks in their group, maybe more," Naison said. "We are definitely not post-racial, but we aren't going back to the days of legal segregation."
Yet there is another slice of white America that seems stuck in a time warp, as if it never left the post-Reconstruction era, other historians argue. While not calling for the return of Jim Crow segregation, some white Americans are recycling the same political rhetoric and legal strategies that snuffed out Reconstruction, these historians say.
They are also resurrecting some of the most racist images from the post-Reconstruction era, some black commentators say.
While it is no longer acceptable to call a black person the N-word publicly, people do it all the time in social media, video games and in the comment sections of online news stories, said Nsenga Burton, a writer for The Root, an online news site with an African-American perspective.
Much of this racism is aimed at Obama, she says. Among examples, he’s been called "tar baby" and "the ultimate Affirmative Action N******" and depicted as a chimp. People are not shocked anymore by overt displays of racism, she says.
Burton said in a Root essay entitled, "It's a Great Time to be a Racist," that Obama's presidency didn't inaugurate a post-racial era. "Try post-Reconstruction," she said, "because the harmful slurs and images being tossed around the public space hark back more to a racist past than to a racially ambiguous future."
A recent Associated Press online poll concluded that racial prejudice in America has slightly increased since Obama's election. The survey said that a majority of Americans, 51%, express explicit racial prejudice toward blacks, compared to 48% in 2008.
While the poll on its own doesn’t prove the country has become more racist in the last four years, it does offer evidence that the “post-racial” world some thought Obama’s inauguration would bring has yet to materialize.
"We're in a racist renaissance," Burton said. "It's a rebirth of the oldest forms of racism. It's not new, not different. It's like the 1800s, the most archaic abusive terms are applied to black people every single day."
Some conservatives have a different take, on history as well as current events. Everyone who criticizes the president is labeled a racist, they say. And describing Obama as a post-Reconstruction president is absurd.
"It's race-baiting of the highest order; it's bunk," said Niger Innis, a black conservative and son of civil rights activist Roy Innis who has defended the Tea Party movement against accusations of racism.
"The America of today is not the America of the 1870s," Innis said. "When the American people voted for their first black president, the Union Army didn't occupy the country."
Some conservative commentators also say Obama isn't a victim of racism, but to the contrary has inflamed racial divisions to advance his political agenda.
"Obama was falsely portrayed in his campaign as a post-racial president who would bring healing to the nation's racial divisions," said Larry Schweikart, co-author of "A Patriot's History of the United States."
"Obama has done everything he can to ensure that there were stark racial differences. … Obama has focused his entire administration around racism, a sort of reverse racism on his end," Schweikart claimed.
It is a view that has been reflected by conservative talk-show hosts such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh’s brother David, author of "The Great Destroyer." David Limbaugh would not talk to CNN for this story.
Hope and change in another time
Reconstruction, which lasted from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1877, was filled with dueling perceptions of race as well. The political changes unleashed by the Civil War unnerved many white Southerners: As blacks achieved positions of power that previously had been reserved for whites, historians say, many whites felt like their country didn't belong to them anymore.
After the Civil War, the U.S. Congress passed the 13th, 14th and 15th "Reconstruction Amendments" that abolished slavery, granted citizenship rights to blacks and prohibited denying the right to vote to newly freed slaves.
The term "civil rights" was coined during Reconstruction, said Eric Foner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution." A century before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a segregated bus, Congress passed the 1866 and 1875 Civil Rights Acts, which banned the discrimination of blacks in "public accommodations" such as streetcars and theaters.
The reforms provoked what some historians say was white Southerners' greatest fear: "Negro Rule."
During Reconstruction, at least 2,000 blacks were eventually elected to political offices throughout the South. They included congressmen, judges, tax collectors, sheriffs, even a governor, said Philip Dray, author of "Capitol Men," which examines Reconstruction through the lives of the first black congressmen.
"Expectations were high," said Dray, who has also written books about the rise of labor unions and lynchings in America. "People felt like there was change, and they were going to be part of it."
Revels rode that wave of optimism into high office. In 1870, he became the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate when the Mississippi legislature appointed him to fill a vacancy left when the state seceded from the Union.
Opponents initially insisted he wasn't a legitimate U.S. citizen because the Constitution required a senator be a citizen for at least nine years. He also had an unusual background, having been born to a free black family in North Carolina when slavery was legal.
"He wasn't radical or over the top," Dray said of Revels. "He was a minister, a conciliatory figure. The idea was that it would be easier for him to weather the scrutiny."
Revels himself would anticipate the white backlash that would follow when he told the Senate early in 1871: “I find that the prejudice in this country to color is very great, and I sometimes fear that it is on the increase.”
Obamacare, 19th century style
Beyond Revels, there are other parallels between today and the post-Reconstruction era, according to some historians.
The most commonly cited link revolves around the debate over voter ID laws. Since Obama's election, 34 states have considered adopting legislation requiring photo ID for voters, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Seven have passed such laws, which typically require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls.
During the post-Reconstruction era, many white Southerners viewed the onset of black voting power in apocalyptic terms. They created a thicket of voting barriers - "poll taxes," "literacy tests" and "understanding clauses" - to prevent blacks from voting, said Dray.
"The idea was to invalidate the black vote without directly challenging the 15th Amendment," Dray said.
Many contemporary voter ID laws are following the same script, he said.
"It just goes on and on. They've never completely gone away. And now they're back with a vengeance."
Some opponents of the voter ID laws note that these measures disproportionately affect the elderly and the poor, regardless of race.
Supporters of voter ID laws say they're not about race at all, but about common sense and preventing voter fraud.
"That is not a racial issue and it certainly isn't a hardship issue," said Deneen Borelli, author of "Blacklash," which argues Obama is turning America into a welfare nation.
"When you try to purchase over-the-counter medication or buy liquor or travel, you present photo ID. This is a basic part of everyday transactions."
Historians say there are other ways the post-Reconstruction script is being dusted off and that some of them appear to have nothing to do with race on the surface.
Consider the debate over "Obamacare," the nation's new health care law. The controversy would be familiar to many 19th-century Americans, said Jim Downs, author of "Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction."
The notion that the federal government should help those who cannot help themselves wasn't widely accepted before the Civil War. There were a few charities and municipal hospitals that took care of the sick, but most institutions ignored ordinary people who needed health care, said Downs, a Connecticut College history professor who studies the history of race and medicine in 19th-century America.
Reconstruction changed that. Post-Civil War America was marked by epidemics: yellow fever, smallpox and typhus. Freed slaves, who were often malnourished and had few clothes and little shelter, died by the "tens of thousands," he said.
The federal government responded by creating the nation's first-ever national health care system, directed at newly freed slaves. It was called the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau. The division built 40 hospitals and hired hundreds of doctors to treat more than a million former slaves from 1865 until it was shut down in 1870 after losing congressional funding, Downs said.
"It absolutely radicalized health care," he said. "You can't argue that government intervention in health is something new or a recent innovation. It originated in the mid-19th century in response to the suffering of freed slaves."
Critics at the time said the new health care system was too radical. They said it would make blacks too reliant on government. The system was expanded to include other vulnerable Americans, such as the elderly, children and the disabled. Yet some still saw it as a black handout, Downs said.
"The whole notion of the modern day "welfare queen" can be traced to the post-Civil War period when people became very suspicious of the federal government providing relief to ex-slaves," Downs said. "They feared this would create a dependent class of people."
A campaign to 'save' America
Economic fears in the post-Reconstruction era also fueled the white backlash, a pattern that some historians say is repeating itself today.
A national economic collapse took place just as freed slaves were gaining political influence. The Panic of 1873 started with a banking collapse and a stock market dive. The result: Tens of thousands of workers, many Civil War veterans, became homeless. People lined up for food and shelter in cities across America.
"It made it more economically competitive for everybody," Dray said. "You saw whites become even less generous to African-Americans [than] they might have been."
Some white Southerners channeled their economic anxiety into a systemic attack on the federal government, historians said.
Before the collapse, Southern states controlled by Northern politicians and their allies had built hospitals and public schools and created social services to help freed slaves as well as poor whites, said Jerald Podair, a historian at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
But the notion of an activist federal government helping blacks amid tough times created an opening for Reconstruction opponents. One group that took advantage of that opening was the Redeemers, a popular movement led by conservative, pro-business politicians who vowed to "save" the South, said Podair, who is writing a book on Bayard Rustin, a close aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Redeemers gained control of most Southern statehouses and pledged to reduce the size of government. They defunded public schools, closed public hospitals and halted road construction, Podair said, all while cutting taxes for the wealthy plantation owners, the 1 percenters of their day.
The Redeemers cloaked their rhetoric in the need for more government efficiency, but their goals were also racial, Podair said.
"The Redeemers were interested first and foremost in power," Podair said. "If freed slaves received education and medical care, they were that much closer to economic and, eventually, political power. And if the federal government had a major role in the South, that also meant less economic and political power for the Redeemer class."
Podair said some contemporary governors are recycling the same talking points used by the Redeemers. They are invoking the need for austerity while cutting government jobs that employ a high number of blacks and reducing public services that help the poor, a disproportionate number of whom are black.
"There may well be a new post-Reconstruction era of slashed federal budgets and policies that transfer power and resources to state and local governments," Podair said. "Once again, initiatives that sound race-neutral on their face will have a devastating racial impact."
Innis has a different take.
He said state and local governments can't afford to keep the same number of jobs because of generous benefits negotiated by unions. Race has nothing to do with it.
"If you have a government job and the pay and benefits is more than a private sector job, something is wrong," he said.
Government cutbacks are designed to help the economy, not inflict pain on any particular group.
"Until we get our economy on track, black and brown people are going to suffer," he said.
'White Girl Bleed a Lot'
The primary weapon white Southerners used to halt Reconstruction was violence. Mobs attacked and killed blacks gathering to vote. They assassinated black officeholders and their white allies. Newspapers sparked race riots and warned of race wars by printing false accounts of black-on-white attacks.
We are not seeing anywhere near the level of violence toward black people that followed Reconstruction. But some people fear that the inflammatory rhetoric that helped trigger racial violence in that era is returning.
A Google search of the phrase "black mobs attack white people" yields tens of thousands of hits. Conservative bloggers and columnists say a "wave" of black mobs attacking whites at random has spread across the nation in places such as shopping malls, downtown tourist spots and even "Beat Whitey Nights" at Midwestern fairs.
Syndicated conservative columnist Thomas Sowell - himself African-American - wrote in a May 15 column for National Review Online that "race war" has returned to America because black gangs are "launching coordinated attacks on whites in public" across America. A Republican state legislator in Maryland, Patrick L. McDonough, warned earlier this year in a letter to the governor that "roving mobs of black youths" had been attacking white tourists in Baltimore.
One author, Colin Flaherty, wrote a book about this alleged wave of racial violence called, "White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Race Riots to America." The various accounts follow the same pattern: Black "flash mobs" suddenly attack whites in public, followed by a media cover-up.
Flaherty, also a talk radio show host, said he first noticed the attacks in 2010. Since then, he claims he has seen "thousands" of videos of black mobs attacking whites.
People have called him racist, but Flaherty said he's just a "guy standing on a corner" reporting what he sees.
"White liberals go nuts on this," he said of his book. "When people use names like 'racist,' they're using it to shut down conversation, not engage in it."
The return of race war rhetoric has disturbing historical echoes, said David Godshalk, author of "Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations."
Godshalk said neither Sowell nor Flaherty have offered any statistical evidence that reports about "black mobs" are anything more than isolated cases. Sowell did not respond to interview requests.
Scores of blacks died during the post-Reconstruction era because newspapers spread false or grossly exaggerated reports of blacks as predators, particularly accounts of black men raping white women, Godshalk said.
Some whites used those reports to justify violence and political oppression against blacks, he said.
"Longstanding notions that African-Americans were criminals were used to argue that they shouldn't be leaders in society because they didn't have the same capabilities as whites, and they weren't trustworthy enough to hold positions of authority," said Godshalk, a history professor at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania who has also written about Reconstruction and lynchings.
Those notions of black inferiority eventually infected the legal system during the post-Reconstruction era, historians say.
The post-Reconstruction Supreme Court played a major role in destroying what Congress had created through its racial reforms. The court delivered a series of decisions that nullified the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 as well as additional laws designed to protect blacks from mob violence at the voting booth, said Peter Irons, a civil rights attorney and author of "A People's History of the Supreme Court."
In 1883, the court imposed a judicial death sentence on Reconstruction in the "Civil Rights Cases" decision, which allowed private individuals and businesses to discriminate against blacks. Associate Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in the decision that freed slaves should stop being "a special favorite of the laws."
The most notorious post-Reconstruction decision involving race took place in 1895 when the Supreme Court legally sanctioned Jim Crow laws by enshrining the "separate-but-equal" doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson. The court upheld a Louisiana law requiring that federal rail cars provide different facilities for white and black passengers.
By the late 19th century, the Supreme Court had "turned its back on the claims of blacks and opened its arms to those of corporations," Irons said. It was the onset of the Gilded Age, an era of widening income inequality that saw the court first introduce "corporate personhood," the concept that a corporation has the legal rights of a person.
"People were getting tired of concerns about racial minorities," said Irons, an activist whose book on the Supreme Court was partly inspired by the late liberal historian Howard Zinn and his book, “A People’s History of the United States.”
"The court is generally a mirror of the broader society, and that was the way most people felt at the time."
Irons and other liberal observers fear the current Supreme Court is drifting in a similar direction and anticipate that it will overturn or weaken a key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as affirmative action in college admissions.
The court is expected to hear a challenge from Shelby County, Alabama, to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires nine Southern states and parts of others to "pre-clear" with federal officials any voting measures that could potentially restrict black voters.
The court is also due to rule on a case on affirmative action in college admission policies in Fisher v. University of Texas.
Irons said the conservative majority on the contemporary court would be doing what their counterparts did during Reconstruction, avoiding a frontal assault on civil rights laws and other measures that protect women and workers, while eviscerating the laws.
"It's unlikely that the court would render any decisions that would be totally reactionary on issues of race," said Irons, "but what they're doing in the current court is whittling away and cutting back very gradually on things like racial, gender and wage discrimination."
From post-racial to most racial
Some conservatives, though, have a different perspective on Reconstruction and any modern parallels.
Most historians say Reconstruction ended with the disputed presidential contest of 1876. An election too close to call was resolved when candidate Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to pull Northern troops out of the South in exchange for the presidency.
Schweikart, co-author of "A Patriot's History of the United States," said the United States abandoned Reconstruction because the nation could not call itself a democracy while keeping half its population under military occupation.
"Reconstruction ended, pure and simple, because the North could not afford economically, politically or socially to maintain a standing army in a part of the U.S. for an indefinite time and still call America a democratic republic," said Schweikart, a history professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio.
Borelli, author of "Blacklash," does see one contemporary link with 19th-century America. She argues that Obama is actually encouraging a new form of servitude to what she calls the "Big Government Plantation."
Since Obama became president, a record number of Americans, at least 46 million, now receive food stamps. And one in six Americans receives some form of government aid as the nation struggles to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
"There are a lot of people who are relying on government for their basic everyday needs: food, clothing and shelter," said Borelli, who is outreach director for FreedomWorks, a Washington-based group that advocates for smaller government and lower taxes. "When you rely on government, your liberties are reduced."
Another conservative said Obama has tacitly endorsed reverse racism.
"You can't have a legitimate disagreement with the president if you're white without being called a racist," said Stephen Marks, creator of FightBigotry.com, a Super PAC that produced a television ad accusing Obama of not standing up to racism.
Marks said Obama said nothing when Vice President Joe Biden recently told an audience of black and white voters that Republicans were "going to put y'all back in chains."
"They're the ones who play the race card, 100% of the time," Marks said of Obama and Democrats. "The Republicans don't have the gonads to respond because they're so afraid of being called a racist."
What happened to Revels?
There's little disagreement among contemporary historians about what happened to the South when the nation abandoned Reconstruction. The region became a divided society where race filtered into everything, said Dray, author of "Capitol Men."
"It had a paralyzing effect. Business interests didn't want to invest there. Immigrants didn't want to go there," Dray said. "The South became this tainted place. Instead of moving into the 20th century, it stayed put in the 19th century."
The Jim Crow laws that marked the end of Reconstruction stayed put for at least 60 years. It would take a century before the contemporary civil rights movement restored the political and civil rights of blacks. Some historians argue that the United States did not actually become a democracy until 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Black pioneers like Revels disappeared from the history books. After serving his Senate term, he didn't seek reappointment and returned to Mississippi, where he eventually became president of Alcorn State College and pastor of a church.
He lost much of his black support for not speaking out against the abuses that ended Reconstruction, said Benjamin, the Boston University professor.
"He was an accommodationist," Benjamin said. "He was in the Senate standing up for white folks and telling people not to be so hard on Southern plantation owners. He didn't use his platform to represent African-Americans."
In 1901, Revels collapsed and died during a church meeting in Mississippi. That same year, the last black member of the House of Representatives finished his final term. Congress resumed being an all-white institution. Blacks had been driven out of office by beatings and assassinations.
Revels' death barely got a mention in the Southern press. His fellow black congressmen received the same treatment. Revisionist historians were already depicting Reconstruction as a fatal example of government overreach and Northern "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" coming South to profit off of the regions' misery, said Dray, author of "Capitol Men."
"When some of them passed away years later, the Southern press barely mentioned it," Dray said. "It was a part of American history that people did not want to remember. No one wanted to talk about it or think about it."
One group of Americans, however, never forgot what Revels represented.
During the Great Depression, Dray said, the federal government dispatched interviewers from the Works Progress Administration to the South to collect oral histories from former slaves.
The interviewers noticed a curious sight as they walked into the shacks of the former slaves. They saw faded copies of an 1872 lithograph depicting the first seven black members of Congress, including Revels.
The image is still haunting.
Revels and his fellow racial pioneers are posed together, dressed in vested suits and bow ties. They exude pride and determination, even though only several years earlier they weren't even considered fully human by many Americans.
Revels sits in the front row of the group portrait. He stares forward in the picture, a man who seems confident in what the future would bring.
What would he think of Obama if he could somehow see him today? Would he be delighted at what America has become in 2012?
Or would he think the future he embodied still seems far away?
Original article can be found here.
http://www.cnn.com/
Parallels to country's racist past haunt age of Obama
By John Blake, CNN
(CNN) - A tall, caramel-complexioned man marched across the steps of the U.S. Capitol to be sworn into office as a jubilant crowd watched history being made.
The man was an African-American of mixed-race heritage, an eloquent speaker whose election was hailed as a reminder of how far America had come.
But the man who placed his hand on the Bible that winter day in Washington wasn't Barack Obama. He was Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate.
His election and that of many other African-Americans to public office triggered a white backlash that helped destroy Reconstruction, America’s first attempt to build an interracial democracy in the wake of the Civil War.
To some historians, Revels' story offers sobering lessons for our time: that this year's presidential election is about the past as well as the future. These historians say Obama isn't a post-racial president but a "post-Reconstructionist" leader. They say his presidency has sparked a white backlash with parallels to a brutal period in U.S. history that began with dramatic racial progress.
Some of the biggest controversies of the 2012 contest could have been ripped from the headlines of that late 19th-century era, they say: Debates erupt over voting rights restrictions and racial preferences, a new federal health care act divides the country, an economic crisis sparks a small government movement. And then there's a vocal minority accusing a national black political leader of not being a "legitimate" U.S. citizen.
All were major issues during Reconstruction, an attempt to bring the former Confederate states back into the national fold and create a new era of racial justice. And many of the same forces that destroyed Reconstruction may be converging again, some scholars and historians say.
Hiram Rhodes Revels became the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate in 1870.
Ruha Benjamin points to this as proof that change is fragile - and reversible. The backlash that swept aside Revels lasted nearly a century.
"When white Americans helped put this African-American in the Senate, it seemed that they were really welcoming African-Americans and they wanted them to have full equality," said Benjamin, an African-American studies professor at Boston University. "We know in hindsight that it was about to get worse."
The notion that the country is poised to enter a new post-Reconstruction era may seem outlandish, even offensive. That period, known as the Jim Crow era, saw the establishment of American apartheid: segregated public facilities, race riots and white racists murdering blacks and their white allies with impunity.
Today, too many white Americans are "militantly anti-racist" for the country to return to the post-Reconstruction era, said Mark D. Naison, a history professor at Fordham University in New York City.
"You hold a racist demonstration in this country and the anti-racist protesters will have as many whites and blacks in their group, maybe more," Naison said. "We are definitely not post-racial, but we aren't going back to the days of legal segregation."
Yet there is another slice of white America that seems stuck in a time warp, as if it never left the post-Reconstruction era, other historians argue. While not calling for the return of Jim Crow segregation, some white Americans are recycling the same political rhetoric and legal strategies that snuffed out Reconstruction, these historians say.
They are also resurrecting some of the most racist images from the post-Reconstruction era, some black commentators say.
While it is no longer acceptable to call a black person the N-word publicly, people do it all the time in social media, video games and in the comment sections of online news stories, said Nsenga Burton, a writer for The Root, an online news site with an African-American perspective.
Much of this racism is aimed at Obama, she says. Among examples, he’s been called "tar baby" and "the ultimate Affirmative Action N******" and depicted as a chimp. People are not shocked anymore by overt displays of racism, she says.
Burton said in a Root essay entitled, "It's a Great Time to be a Racist," that Obama's presidency didn't inaugurate a post-racial era. "Try post-Reconstruction," she said, "because the harmful slurs and images being tossed around the public space hark back more to a racist past than to a racially ambiguous future."
A recent Associated Press online poll concluded that racial prejudice in America has slightly increased since Obama's election. The survey said that a majority of Americans, 51%, express explicit racial prejudice toward blacks, compared to 48% in 2008.
While the poll on its own doesn’t prove the country has become more racist in the last four years, it does offer evidence that the “post-racial” world some thought Obama’s inauguration would bring has yet to materialize.
"We're in a racist renaissance," Burton said. "It's a rebirth of the oldest forms of racism. It's not new, not different. It's like the 1800s, the most archaic abusive terms are applied to black people every single day."
Some conservatives have a different take, on history as well as current events. Everyone who criticizes the president is labeled a racist, they say. And describing Obama as a post-Reconstruction president is absurd.
"It's race-baiting of the highest order; it's bunk," said Niger Innis, a black conservative and son of civil rights activist Roy Innis who has defended the Tea Party movement against accusations of racism.
"The America of today is not the America of the 1870s," Innis said. "When the American people voted for their first black president, the Union Army didn't occupy the country."
Some conservative commentators also say Obama isn't a victim of racism, but to the contrary has inflamed racial divisions to advance his political agenda.
"Obama was falsely portrayed in his campaign as a post-racial president who would bring healing to the nation's racial divisions," said Larry Schweikart, co-author of "A Patriot's History of the United States."
"Obama has done everything he can to ensure that there were stark racial differences. … Obama has focused his entire administration around racism, a sort of reverse racism on his end," Schweikart claimed.
It is a view that has been reflected by conservative talk-show hosts such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh’s brother David, author of "The Great Destroyer." David Limbaugh would not talk to CNN for this story.
Hope and change in another time
Reconstruction, which lasted from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1877, was filled with dueling perceptions of race as well. The political changes unleashed by the Civil War unnerved many white Southerners: As blacks achieved positions of power that previously had been reserved for whites, historians say, many whites felt like their country didn't belong to them anymore.
After the Civil War, the U.S. Congress passed the 13th, 14th and 15th "Reconstruction Amendments" that abolished slavery, granted citizenship rights to blacks and prohibited denying the right to vote to newly freed slaves.
The term "civil rights" was coined during Reconstruction, said Eric Foner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution." A century before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a segregated bus, Congress passed the 1866 and 1875 Civil Rights Acts, which banned the discrimination of blacks in "public accommodations" such as streetcars and theaters.
The reforms provoked what some historians say was white Southerners' greatest fear: "Negro Rule."
During Reconstruction, at least 2,000 blacks were eventually elected to political offices throughout the South. They included congressmen, judges, tax collectors, sheriffs, even a governor, said Philip Dray, author of "Capitol Men," which examines Reconstruction through the lives of the first black congressmen.
"Expectations were high," said Dray, who has also written books about the rise of labor unions and lynchings in America. "People felt like there was change, and they were going to be part of it."
Revels rode that wave of optimism into high office. In 1870, he became the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate when the Mississippi legislature appointed him to fill a vacancy left when the state seceded from the Union.
Opponents initially insisted he wasn't a legitimate U.S. citizen because the Constitution required a senator be a citizen for at least nine years. He also had an unusual background, having been born to a free black family in North Carolina when slavery was legal.
"He wasn't radical or over the top," Dray said of Revels. "He was a minister, a conciliatory figure. The idea was that it would be easier for him to weather the scrutiny."
Revels himself would anticipate the white backlash that would follow when he told the Senate early in 1871: “I find that the prejudice in this country to color is very great, and I sometimes fear that it is on the increase.”
Obamacare, 19th century style
Beyond Revels, there are other parallels between today and the post-Reconstruction era, according to some historians.
The most commonly cited link revolves around the debate over voter ID laws. Since Obama's election, 34 states have considered adopting legislation requiring photo ID for voters, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Seven have passed such laws, which typically require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls.
During the post-Reconstruction era, many white Southerners viewed the onset of black voting power in apocalyptic terms. They created a thicket of voting barriers - "poll taxes," "literacy tests" and "understanding clauses" - to prevent blacks from voting, said Dray.
"The idea was to invalidate the black vote without directly challenging the 15th Amendment," Dray said.
This political cartoon highlighting voter intimidation appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1876.
Many contemporary voter ID laws are following the same script, he said.
"It just goes on and on. They've never completely gone away. And now they're back with a vengeance."
Some opponents of the voter ID laws note that these measures disproportionately affect the elderly and the poor, regardless of race.
Supporters of voter ID laws say they're not about race at all, but about common sense and preventing voter fraud.
"That is not a racial issue and it certainly isn't a hardship issue," said Deneen Borelli, author of "Blacklash," which argues Obama is turning America into a welfare nation.
"When you try to purchase over-the-counter medication or buy liquor or travel, you present photo ID. This is a basic part of everyday transactions."
Historians say there are other ways the post-Reconstruction script is being dusted off and that some of them appear to have nothing to do with race on the surface.
Consider the debate over "Obamacare," the nation's new health care law. The controversy would be familiar to many 19th-century Americans, said Jim Downs, author of "Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction."
The notion that the federal government should help those who cannot help themselves wasn't widely accepted before the Civil War. There were a few charities and municipal hospitals that took care of the sick, but most institutions ignored ordinary people who needed health care, said Downs, a Connecticut College history professor who studies the history of race and medicine in 19th-century America.
Reconstruction changed that. Post-Civil War America was marked by epidemics: yellow fever, smallpox and typhus. Freed slaves, who were often malnourished and had few clothes and little shelter, died by the "tens of thousands," he said.
The federal government responded by creating the nation's first-ever national health care system, directed at newly freed slaves. It was called the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau. The division built 40 hospitals and hired hundreds of doctors to treat more than a million former slaves from 1865 until it was shut down in 1870 after losing congressional funding, Downs said.
"It absolutely radicalized health care," he said. "You can't argue that government intervention in health is something new or a recent innovation. It originated in the mid-19th century in response to the suffering of freed slaves."
Critics at the time said the new health care system was too radical. They said it would make blacks too reliant on government. The system was expanded to include other vulnerable Americans, such as the elderly, children and the disabled. Yet some still saw it as a black handout, Downs said.
"The whole notion of the modern day "welfare queen" can be traced to the post-Civil War period when people became very suspicious of the federal government providing relief to ex-slaves," Downs said. "They feared this would create a dependent class of people."
A campaign to 'save' America
Economic fears in the post-Reconstruction era also fueled the white backlash, a pattern that some historians say is repeating itself today.
A national economic collapse took place just as freed slaves were gaining political influence. The Panic of 1873 started with a banking collapse and a stock market dive. The result: Tens of thousands of workers, many Civil War veterans, became homeless. People lined up for food and shelter in cities across America.
"It made it more economically competitive for everybody," Dray said. "You saw whites become even less generous to African-Americans [than] they might have been."
Some white Southerners channeled their economic anxiety into a systemic attack on the federal government, historians said.
Before the collapse, Southern states controlled by Northern politicians and their allies had built hospitals and public schools and created social services to help freed slaves as well as poor whites, said Jerald Podair, a historian at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
But the notion of an activist federal government helping blacks amid tough times created an opening for Reconstruction opponents. One group that took advantage of that opening was the Redeemers, a popular movement led by conservative, pro-business politicians who vowed to "save" the South, said Podair, who is writing a book on Bayard Rustin, a close aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Redeemers gained control of most Southern statehouses and pledged to reduce the size of government. They defunded public schools, closed public hospitals and halted road construction, Podair said, all while cutting taxes for the wealthy plantation owners, the 1 percenters of their day.
The Redeemers cloaked their rhetoric in the need for more government efficiency, but their goals were also racial, Podair said.
"The Redeemers were interested first and foremost in power," Podair said. "If freed slaves received education and medical care, they were that much closer to economic and, eventually, political power. And if the federal government had a major role in the South, that also meant less economic and political power for the Redeemer class."
Some historians say the backlash against Obama mimics late 19th-century resistance to black political progress.
Podair said some contemporary governors are recycling the same talking points used by the Redeemers. They are invoking the need for austerity while cutting government jobs that employ a high number of blacks and reducing public services that help the poor, a disproportionate number of whom are black.
"There may well be a new post-Reconstruction era of slashed federal budgets and policies that transfer power and resources to state and local governments," Podair said. "Once again, initiatives that sound race-neutral on their face will have a devastating racial impact."
Innis has a different take.
He said state and local governments can't afford to keep the same number of jobs because of generous benefits negotiated by unions. Race has nothing to do with it.
"If you have a government job and the pay and benefits is more than a private sector job, something is wrong," he said.
Government cutbacks are designed to help the economy, not inflict pain on any particular group.
"Until we get our economy on track, black and brown people are going to suffer," he said.
'White Girl Bleed a Lot'
The primary weapon white Southerners used to halt Reconstruction was violence. Mobs attacked and killed blacks gathering to vote. They assassinated black officeholders and their white allies. Newspapers sparked race riots and warned of race wars by printing false accounts of black-on-white attacks.
We are not seeing anywhere near the level of violence toward black people that followed Reconstruction. But some people fear that the inflammatory rhetoric that helped trigger racial violence in that era is returning.
A Google search of the phrase "black mobs attack white people" yields tens of thousands of hits. Conservative bloggers and columnists say a "wave" of black mobs attacking whites at random has spread across the nation in places such as shopping malls, downtown tourist spots and even "Beat Whitey Nights" at Midwestern fairs.
Syndicated conservative columnist Thomas Sowell - himself African-American - wrote in a May 15 column for National Review Online that "race war" has returned to America because black gangs are "launching coordinated attacks on whites in public" across America. A Republican state legislator in Maryland, Patrick L. McDonough, warned earlier this year in a letter to the governor that "roving mobs of black youths" had been attacking white tourists in Baltimore.
One author, Colin Flaherty, wrote a book about this alleged wave of racial violence called, "White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Race Riots to America." The various accounts follow the same pattern: Black "flash mobs" suddenly attack whites in public, followed by a media cover-up.
Flaherty, also a talk radio show host, said he first noticed the attacks in 2010. Since then, he claims he has seen "thousands" of videos of black mobs attacking whites.
People have called him racist, but Flaherty said he's just a "guy standing on a corner" reporting what he sees.
"White liberals go nuts on this," he said of his book. "When people use names like 'racist,' they're using it to shut down conversation, not engage in it."
The return of race war rhetoric has disturbing historical echoes, said David Godshalk, author of "Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations."
Godshalk said neither Sowell nor Flaherty have offered any statistical evidence that reports about "black mobs" are anything more than isolated cases. Sowell did not respond to interview requests.
Scores of blacks died during the post-Reconstruction era because newspapers spread false or grossly exaggerated reports of blacks as predators, particularly accounts of black men raping white women, Godshalk said.
Some whites used those reports to justify violence and political oppression against blacks, he said.
"Longstanding notions that African-Americans were criminals were used to argue that they shouldn't be leaders in society because they didn't have the same capabilities as whites, and they weren't trustworthy enough to hold positions of authority," said Godshalk, a history professor at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania who has also written about Reconstruction and lynchings.
Those notions of black inferiority eventually infected the legal system during the post-Reconstruction era, historians say.
The post-Reconstruction Supreme Court played a major role in destroying what Congress had created through its racial reforms. The court delivered a series of decisions that nullified the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 as well as additional laws designed to protect blacks from mob violence at the voting booth, said Peter Irons, a civil rights attorney and author of "A People's History of the Supreme Court."
In 1883, the court imposed a judicial death sentence on Reconstruction in the "Civil Rights Cases" decision, which allowed private individuals and businesses to discriminate against blacks. Associate Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in the decision that freed slaves should stop being "a special favorite of the laws."
The most notorious post-Reconstruction decision involving race took place in 1895 when the Supreme Court legally sanctioned Jim Crow laws by enshrining the "separate-but-equal" doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson. The court upheld a Louisiana law requiring that federal rail cars provide different facilities for white and black passengers.
By the late 19th century, the Supreme Court had "turned its back on the claims of blacks and opened its arms to those of corporations," Irons said. It was the onset of the Gilded Age, an era of widening income inequality that saw the court first introduce "corporate personhood," the concept that a corporation has the legal rights of a person.
"People were getting tired of concerns about racial minorities," said Irons, an activist whose book on the Supreme Court was partly inspired by the late liberal historian Howard Zinn and his book, “A People’s History of the United States.”
"The court is generally a mirror of the broader society, and that was the way most people felt at the time."
Irons and other liberal observers fear the current Supreme Court is drifting in a similar direction and anticipate that it will overturn or weaken a key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as affirmative action in college admissions.
The court is expected to hear a challenge from Shelby County, Alabama, to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires nine Southern states and parts of others to "pre-clear" with federal officials any voting measures that could potentially restrict black voters.
The court is also due to rule on a case on affirmative action in college admission policies in Fisher v. University of Texas.
Irons said the conservative majority on the contemporary court would be doing what their counterparts did during Reconstruction, avoiding a frontal assault on civil rights laws and other measures that protect women and workers, while eviscerating the laws.
"It's unlikely that the court would render any decisions that would be totally reactionary on issues of race," said Irons, "but what they're doing in the current court is whittling away and cutting back very gradually on things like racial, gender and wage discrimination."
From post-racial to most racial
Some conservatives, though, have a different perspective on Reconstruction and any modern parallels.
Most historians say Reconstruction ended with the disputed presidential contest of 1876. An election too close to call was resolved when candidate Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to pull Northern troops out of the South in exchange for the presidency.
Schweikart, co-author of "A Patriot's History of the United States," said the United States abandoned Reconstruction because the nation could not call itself a democracy while keeping half its population under military occupation.
"Reconstruction ended, pure and simple, because the North could not afford economically, politically or socially to maintain a standing army in a part of the U.S. for an indefinite time and still call America a democratic republic," said Schweikart, a history professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio.
Borelli, author of "Blacklash," does see one contemporary link with 19th-century America. She argues that Obama is actually encouraging a new form of servitude to what she calls the "Big Government Plantation."
Since Obama became president, a record number of Americans, at least 46 million, now receive food stamps. And one in six Americans receives some form of government aid as the nation struggles to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
"There are a lot of people who are relying on government for their basic everyday needs: food, clothing and shelter," said Borelli, who is outreach director for FreedomWorks, a Washington-based group that advocates for smaller government and lower taxes. "When you rely on government, your liberties are reduced."
Another conservative said Obama has tacitly endorsed reverse racism.
"You can't have a legitimate disagreement with the president if you're white without being called a racist," said Stephen Marks, creator of FightBigotry.com, a Super PAC that produced a television ad accusing Obama of not standing up to racism.
Marks said Obama said nothing when Vice President Joe Biden recently told an audience of black and white voters that Republicans were "going to put y'all back in chains."
"They're the ones who play the race card, 100% of the time," Marks said of Obama and Democrats. "The Republicans don't have the gonads to respond because they're so afraid of being called a racist."
What happened to Revels?
There's little disagreement among contemporary historians about what happened to the South when the nation abandoned Reconstruction. The region became a divided society where race filtered into everything, said Dray, author of "Capitol Men."
"It had a paralyzing effect. Business interests didn't want to invest there. Immigrants didn't want to go there," Dray said. "The South became this tainted place. Instead of moving into the 20th century, it stayed put in the 19th century."
The Jim Crow laws that marked the end of Reconstruction stayed put for at least 60 years. It would take a century before the contemporary civil rights movement restored the political and civil rights of blacks. Some historians argue that the United States did not actually become a democracy until 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Black pioneers like Revels disappeared from the history books. After serving his Senate term, he didn't seek reappointment and returned to Mississippi, where he eventually became president of Alcorn State College and pastor of a church.
He lost much of his black support for not speaking out against the abuses that ended Reconstruction, said Benjamin, the Boston University professor.
"He was an accommodationist," Benjamin said. "He was in the Senate standing up for white folks and telling people not to be so hard on Southern plantation owners. He didn't use his platform to represent African-Americans."
In 1901, Revels collapsed and died during a church meeting in Mississippi. That same year, the last black member of the House of Representatives finished his final term. Congress resumed being an all-white institution. Blacks had been driven out of office by beatings and assassinations.
Revels' death barely got a mention in the Southern press. His fellow black congressmen received the same treatment. Revisionist historians were already depicting Reconstruction as a fatal example of government overreach and Northern "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" coming South to profit off of the regions' misery, said Dray, author of "Capitol Men."
"When some of them passed away years later, the Southern press barely mentioned it," Dray said. "It was a part of American history that people did not want to remember. No one wanted to talk about it or think about it."
One group of Americans, however, never forgot what Revels represented.
During the Great Depression, Dray said, the federal government dispatched interviewers from the Works Progress Administration to the South to collect oral histories from former slaves.
The interviewers noticed a curious sight as they walked into the shacks of the former slaves. They saw faded copies of an 1872 lithograph depicting the first seven black members of Congress, including Revels.
The image is still haunting.
Revels and his fellow racial pioneers are posed together, dressed in vested suits and bow ties. They exude pride and determination, even though only several years earlier they weren't even considered fully human by many Americans.
Revels sits in the front row of the group portrait. He stares forward in the picture, a man who seems confident in what the future would bring.
What would he think of Obama if he could somehow see him today? Would he be delighted at what America has become in 2012?
Or would he think the future he embodied still seems far away?
Original article can be found here.
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