Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now? - What David Brooks got wrong!

 

In his November 6, 2024 post election opinion entitled “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” David Brooks blames America’s elite and the Democratic Party for the Trump election. While millions can agree the Democrats have failed miserably in their number one job to “combat inequality,” Brooks ignores that corporate America has controlled the government and the economy and he ignores our pathetically out-of-date Constitution that allows small numbers to block anything progressive.

As Brooks was wrapping up he wrote “Well, Donald Trump hijacked a corporate party, which hardly seemed like a vehicle for proletarian revolt, and did exactly that.” Really! The Republican Party is certainly a corporate party, but Donald Trump has yet to hijack corporate America or take over running the economy. Recall Trump had a first term and during his 2016 campaign he made some very populist proposals to benefit the working class, all opposed by corporate America.

Start with 2016 candidate Trump who asserted the NAFTA trade agreement needed significant improvements, calling it a “disaster” and the “worst agreement ever negotiated.” He threatened to have the United States withdraw without the changes he demanded. From the beginning in 1994 NAFTA succeeded increasing trade, foreign domestic investment and Gross Domestic Product in the United States, Canada and Mexico to the great satisfaction of corporate America. When negotiations for a new Trump NAFTA began May 18, 2017 corporate America was there watching to make sure changes would be acceptable to them. From the beginning in 1994 critics like Ross Perot insisted NAFTA benefits flow to corporate America at the expense of U.S. jobs and the working class, and so contribute to inequality in income distribution. Trump had a point: unregulated free trade equals cheap labor at the expense of the working class, but corporate America ran the show to make sure nothing much happened. NAFTA remained while corporate America gave public relations deference to their brush off to Trump’s populist appeal.

Next came Trump’s populist demand to build a border wall and cut immigration that corporate America opposes and the Republican establishment blocked during the Obama years. Corporate America wants foreign immigration to provide cheap labor, but the Trump campaign promised to the working class that voted for him required that he fight corporate America and the Republican Party establishment and be aggressive in his efforts to restrict the flow of immigrants. Further he wanted to cut the number of legal immigrants coming in through the foreign labor certification program that permits U.S. employers to hire foreign workers on a temporary or permanent basis instead of American workers. These were the H1-B jobs as professionals, the H-1C jobs, as nurses in disadvantaged areas, H-2A, for seasonal jobs in agriculture, and H-2B, temporary certification for non-agricultural employment. Trump appealed to voters tired of having immigrants taking their jobs.

Trump made building a border wall be evidence of his commitment to cut immigration. After Trump’s inauguration corporate America remained silent and let him demonize and debase Mexicans and Mexican families to suit his political purposes. He separated families and put young children in detention while corporate America looked the other way knowing his threats were tall talk while they continued with foreign labor certification and continued to hire and employ documented and undocumented immigrants as their cheap labor.

These first term proposals would have benefited the working class had they been phased in over the four years of 2017-2021. It would have been the beginning of a limit on the flood of labor, but corporate America blocked them all; they want cheap labor. Trump agreeably signed corporate America’s new round of corporate and upper-class tax cuts and then they had him appoint a good and competent Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, to manage the macro economy while the micro economy lurched forward generating more inequality of income and wealth.

There is nothing populist or beneficial for the working class in Trump’s 2024 proposals, but Brooks ignores these policy reversals and the danger January 6 attacks implies for a second term. Consider Trump’s new mass deportation demand. It offers stark contrast to slowing immigration from the first term. The reported eleven million undocumented immigrants came here for jobs and we might suppose many have two of them. Deporting them will require confronting people at their work place and disrupting and depressing production, employment and the economy, not to mention the potential for violence. His tariff proposals reverse decades of lower tariff policy and trade agreements like NAFTA preferred and controlled by corporate America.

In 2024 Trump controls a majority of voters and controls the sycophants of the Republican Party, and he had little trouble getting corporate media to do their daily best for four long years to make him a legitimate candidate and get him elected. They have succeeded, but they did so figuring to control him in his second term as easily as they did in the first. Trump’s second term policy is to challenge corporate America’s long held prerogatives and allow him to displace their decades of control over politics and the economy.  His proposals make clear how badly he wants to divide and defeat America’s corporate Oligarchs in his second term. That Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the Washington Post would sit down with Trump just before the 2024 election and make an utterly corrupt deal illustrates how that might work. After getting outwitted by corporate America in his first term Trump views them as his last frontier.

Brooks writes that “Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism. Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America” but he fails to mention the chaos will result from a pitched battle between Trump and our corporate Oligarchy. Recent Presidents like Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden either served corporate America or got brushed aside by them; no president has ever tried to take them on until now.  The odds are corporate America will prevail, but Trump shows no sign he cares what, or who, he will destroy and ruin in the process. Recall the white supremacist vigilantes from January 6, their destruction at the U.S. Capital, and their Confederate flag on the floor of U. S. Congress, it’s the perfect image of what is coming.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s, A Thousand Days, - A Comment

Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s, A Thousand Days, - A Comment

In Arthur Schlesinger’s memoir of his years as an advisor to President John F. Kennedy, A Thousand Days, he wrote about the right wing as he saw them in 1965, the year of publication. You might get a sense of Déjà vu.

From page 750:

“The burst of right-wing activity in the early sixties was a predictable historical phenomenon. In conservative periods, like the fifties, the radical right was characteristically disorganized and dormant. Its members were soothed by the eternal hope that a conservative administration might do something they would like.” . . .
“But the election of a progressive administration generally has a galvanizing effect on the radical right. It grows desperate, convinced that the nation is in mortal danger, that it is five minutes before midnight, that it must rally and resist before it is too late.” . . .

He went on with “I first heard of the John Birch Society in an early warning letter of December 1960 from that fine old progressive Republican Alfred M. Landon. One heard a great deal more of it in the months following. The radical right appealed equally to the incoherent resentment of the frightened rich and the anxious middle class. It flourished particularly in states like California and Texas, overflowing over raw new money; in states like Arizona and Florida, where older people had retired on their pensions; in small towns in the mountain states, where shop keepers felt harassed by big business, big labor, and big government. The mood is one of longing for a dreamworld of no communism, no overseas entanglements, no United Nations, no federal government, no labor unions, no Negroes or foreigners – a world in which Chief Justice Earl Warren would be impeached, Cuba invaded, the graduated income tax repealed, the fluoridation of water stopped and the import of Polish hams forbidden.”

Remember this was written in 1965

Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

 Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, (NY: Harper-Collins, 2022), 383 pages

Imani Perry teaches a variety of courses in gender, law, public affairs and jazz studies as a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her book South to America has elements of a memoir, black history, black culture and a travelogue. Travelogue applies given section and chapter titles have the names of regions, states and cities she visited and writes about: Section I. just below the Mason-Dixon line, Section II. the mid-south, Section III. the south along the water including Cuba and the Bahamas.

In Appalachia, Perry visits Harper’s Ferry where she narrates the history of John Brown’s raid. The raid, its failure, and Brown’s execution are familiar to many, but Perry fills in some lessor known details like the participation of two black men, Shields Green and John Copeland, executed for their part in the raid.  Readers learn freedman built a one room school house at Harper’s Ferry in 1866. The school became Storer college, a historic black college. In 1906, the Niagara Movement for racial justice met there with W.E.B. Dubois and William Monroe Trotter in attendance. Perry writes the story of this conference. To them John Brown was a hero that made it possible for blacks to envision freedom.

Perry shifts to narrating a walk about Harpers Ferry and along the Shenandoah River. During her walk she encounters a Civil War re-enactor on the Confederate side taking the day off from his job in Washington, D.C. She dubs him Bob and describes their hour or so of cautious conversation before reflecting on the search for identity for Appalachia and the black people that live there.  Commentary ranges widely such as a midnight walk through an Appalachian Walmart, comments on Appalachia by Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe, a discussion of Appalachian coal mining, strikes and violence that brought momentary black and white class solidarity and a lengthy discussion of the Highlander School.

This Appalachian chapter has the characteristics of all the chapters. It has stories related to the chapter’s region and the black community there. She writes varied commentary of her visits with family, friends or the strangers she meets, which she reflects on as a black woman born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1972 and raised in the south. The chapters are sprinkled with a variety of seldom mentioned black accomplishments. I learned that a black jockey, Issac Burns Murphy, won the Kentucky Derby three times and that two black bartenders invented the recipe for the mint julep. She reflects on the music of Chuck Berry and James Brown and their seldom recognized influence on the music of Elvis Presley.

Stories and reflections come with reminders that race and class figure prominently in American history and contradict our ideals such as the Virginia chapter where Perry quotes a seldom quoted part of Thomas Jefferson’s biography: his racist views of black people. Many know of the Dred Scott case, but not his life on an Alabama plantation or what happened to his children after they were separated. That 380 acre plantation became Oakwood University and might be the site of their remains, but Perry reflects it does not matter “there are gallons of sorrow in the soil.”

 

Some of Perry’s stories reveal someone wrestling with class and its relation with race as it plays out today. Remember southern white boys fought and died by the thousands to save slavery for wealthy plantation owners, but those well-to-do plantation owners offered only one reward: whites could be above black people in the social class hierarchy. Trump reminds us that insistence remains in the United States of 2024, as Professor Perry so well knows.

As an educated member of the professional class Perry tells a story of attending a writing retreat in Louisville, Kentucky with a group of black women professors. “By the external measure, we were a group of Black women who had scaled the heights.  . . . Some of us could trace our ancestries back to the plantations here, others to plantations in the Caribbean.  . . . Some came from elite families, most from struggling ones, all from people who eked out from under the race and gender rules. The past for us was something sorrowful and beautiful at once.”

At the end of their retreat, they took a tour of distilleries; Perry called it a bourbon tour. “I loved it. The science, the aging process, the history. The scent was intoxicating.” . . . But then, she relates “In retrospect, knowing what I know now, and reflecting on the sensory and social pleasure of that visit, I feel uncomfortable.” On the tour she learned these Kentucky distilleries emerged during slavery and depended on slave labor. “Don’t we always need to look round the back to see what made all this happen? Should I have reveled so easily in the bourgeois luxury?  . . . “This is a bit of navel-gazing, but if you gaze anywhere with a critical eye, you do have to look at your own belly, too.”

The narrative has lots of navel-gazing, or as I would call it, reflecting on race relations in a personal way, as an insider. In more navel-gazing Perry reflects on a trip to the Bahamas and the gulf between her and the black women that worked at her hotel. “It is an uncomfortable feeling.  Being an African-American, even an upper-middle class African American, often insulates you from the guilt of empire. After all, ‘we,’ in any collective sense, have never been the ruling class.  . . . But the truth is that relaxing in a multinational hotel makes me a part of the problem that people like [the maid for my room] have to manage, and for too small a compensation. I became her monster and she is mine, though she is blameless.  Because just a generation ago, my people were her. I’ve laid claim to a heritage that includes women situated just as she is, yet here I am one of her exploiters.”

The book coheres as a memoir because so much of the narrative covers Perry’s personal feelings and includes commentary of her experience and of her family’s experience as part of the black community, and on writers, composers, and activists connected to black history and culture. She quotes from, and comments on, people both black and white like W.E.B. Dubois, Ida B. Wells, H. L. Mencken, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, June Jordan, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison and many more. There are no footnotes, no bibliography, as would be required of academic writing, and no “academize” to burden the reader.

The book’s narrative stays below the Mason-Dixon line as the subtitle, A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, suggests it will. Readers will find dozens of stories of white, mostly male, discrimination against blacks. Some are mid length; some are short. Some come from long ago; some are more current. Among recent cases include discussion and comments on the murderer of Trayvon Martin, the Duke Lacrosse rape case, and the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor: “Our hearts broke for Breonna.” While the book has no obvious thesis if what Perry narrates of the south applies to the soul of the nation, then America continues to be racist.

Even so there are quite a few millions of white people who have, or had, black classmates as students, have black colleagues at work, and more and more have black neighbors. These whites can feel accepting, respectful and friendly toward the black people they know, even as they avoid thinking about white racist misconduct. Let me suggest the moderate tone in her writing and naval-gazing brings an optimistic note to the end of the book, and an invitation for whites to rethink what should be the soul of the nation.