Image by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen.
Senator Bernie Sanders has been holding public meetings about what he calls “Fighting Oligarchy.” There is much good about this. At the same time, Sanders has advertised his tour and criticized President Trump by saying, like in a recent Guardian column he wrote, that the United States has centuries of “commitment to democracy” and has long stood as “an example of freedom and self-governance to which the rest of the world could aspire.” Of course it’s obvious that Trump and his fellow Republicans are not very interested in democracy. For example, Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil has recently been illegally taken into custody by immigration officials and threatened with deportation despite his having legal status in the United States. The Trump administration has been clear that he is being targeted for his political views – he has been active in protesting violence against Palestinians.
At the same time, the Democrats aren’t particularly committed to democracy either. What has happened to Khalil is part of over a year of serious repression on college campuses, repression applauded and arguably called for by Democratic politicians. Those Democrats who have spoken out against Khalil’s treatment have been few, and many of their statements have been mealy-mouthed, expressing minimal concern over the legality of deporting him, while taking great pains to also denounce him. This is victim-blaming pretending to be support. In slightly longer term perspective, in the 2009 coup in Honduras, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton minimized the severity of the situation and the Obama administration went on to give a great deal of aid to the post-coup government.
In an even longer term perspective, the United States government has often opposed democracy at home and abroad when it suits what the government decides is the country’s foreign policy interest. We can point to the history of slavery, the annexation of large parts of Mexico, and the taking of native people’s lands, all of which were tremendously violent. These and similar atrocious actions – chronicled in excellent works by historians like Howard Zinn and Greg Grandin – in no way express any commitment to democracy.
In claiming that the US is a symbol of democracy, Sanders presents us with a white-washed account of US history that is simply false. Furthermore, all of the violently undemocratic actions of the US government have been challenged in meaningful ways. Those challenges have involved heroic bravery and self-sacrifice as well as a great deal of creativity and intelligence. To white-wash away the violent undemocratic part of US history is to erase the bravery and intelligence of people fighting for justice. Very simply, if you believe Sanders’s white-washed history, then you can’t understand Martin Luther King, Junior, or Rosa Parks, or Harriet Tubman, or Mother Jones, or Eugene Debs, or any of a long list activists from US history.
Instead of a simplistic account of the US as always pro-democracy, with Trump and the Trumpist Republicans as an exception, the truth of the matter is that the US has always involved a fight between anti- and pro-democracy forces, and most of the time both US political parties have been mostly in the anti-democracy camp. I understand that it’s rhetorically useful to treat Trump and company as exceptional, but it’s more accurate to see them as a particularly ugly example of the longstanding pattern of actions by anti-democracy forces. One reason it’s rhetorically useful to treat the present as exceptional is to create an air of moral urgency, but we don’t have to do that. We can instead say that all of our fellow human being are precious, so any attack on any of them is morally urgent. As an old labor movement slogan goes, “an injury to one is an injury to all.”
How we think of the past has a lot to do with what we criticize. Any positive aspects of Sanders’s Fighting Oligarchy events are lessened by Sanders encouraging a false image of the American past and erasing a proud history of some – and only some – Americans fighting for justice. They’re further lessened by a selective outrage about oligarchy.
To be clear, Trump and his cronies like Elon Musk are definitely oligarchs. At the same time, Joe Manchin, the recently retired millionaire Democrat Congressman, is obviously an oligarch too, as are all the billionaires who donated to him, and to both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as well. It’s one thing to say ‘I disagree with the actions of the oligarchs in power right now’, it’s another thing – and a more principled thing – to also say ‘I disagree with oligarchy as such, I’m opposed to even those oligarchs I sometimes agree with.’ Oligarchs have ruled the United States for a very long time, and as I said, their rule has been opposed by many heroic activists. Sanders’s whitewashed version of history makes his Fighting Oligarchy end up siding with some oligarchs against others, instead of opposing all forms of oligarchy.
How we remember the past is also important because it influences how we think of the future we want. If Trump and his ilk are an exception, that implies we want to return to the supposed good old days pre-Trump, to the rule of the oligarchs who pre-dated him. Instead, we should bear in mind the more accurate assessment. Trump and company are part of a longstanding pattern of undemocratic attacks on ordinary people. Those attacks have been opposed by lots of activists fighting for a new world of justice. That implies we want something better than we’ve ever had before, a world with no oligarchs of any kind, where everyone is free and treated with dignity.
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