(LA Progressive) -- On the eve of the big vote, Susan Glasser’s “dark certainty” piece in the New Yorker said it well, as did (in a different way) David Blight’s Times op-ed on the continuing relevance of Frederick Douglass. The deep and still-unacknowledged stain of white supremacy persists; the very long and strong grip of the Slave Power persists. The midterm result portends only more hand-to-hand struggle ahead in a civil war that never really ended.
A modestly empowered Democratic opposition in just one chamber of Congress counts for something only if the leadership there can be respected as the loyal opposition, which they won’t be by Trump-enthralled Republicans. The thuggery and blatant racism of GOP voter suppression tactics in this round show pretty clearly that they take their blood-and-soil ideology seriously. Don’t expect Charles Schumer to be beaten and bloodied unconscious on the Senate floor, as was Charles Sumner, but virulent white tribalism is still on the march.
The white nationalism of the Tea Party and now of Trump Time represents an enormous and “authentic” expression of the main spiritual current in American history, which (pace the wonderful rhetoric of a couple of brilliant moderate Illini named Lincoln and Obama) is about subjugation and supremacy and greed—and not, in fact, about hope and change. White domination has always been, and still is, America’s middle name.
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