The Two Faces of Southern Populism

By Dan T. Carter

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 1-3

With the strong showing of David Duke, the racism of the Jesse Helms and Guy Hunt campaigns and the nation’s general mood of political dyspepsia, George Wallace’s “populist” crusade of the 1960s and 1970s is back in the news. The resurgence of cruder forms of race-baiting, not to mention the more generic cry of “throw the bums out”–we are reminded–is not without precedent in our recent past.

Racism there is. Guy Hunt’s campaign in Alabama was a relatively soft-core version of the politics of race; David Duke and Jesse Helms practiced the old-time religion: “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!”

Helms has been crawling out of these sewers since 1950 when he joined Willis Smith’s race-baiting/red-baiting campaign against North Carolina’s Frank Porter Graham. With his appeals to hatred against homosexuals and blacks, his last campaign is a depressing reminder of his powerful mastery of the witchcraft of scapegoating.

In the long run, however, demagogues like David Duke may be even more dangerous than Helms. For Duke has understood that he is operating in an increasingly subliterate world of television in which each new day begins afresh, without past, without future. Thus he can nonchalantly dismiss his past history as a neo-Nazi/Klansman, concentrating instead on having his face made over by a first-rate plastic surgeon. As the nation’s political culture descends past Oprah Winfrey

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and Phil Donahue through Newt Gingrich’s lexicon of campaign slogans and downward toward the level of plants and minerals, appeals to glandular reflexes (“quotas,” “parasitic underclass,” “tax and speed”) are infinitely more accessible then complex discussions of budget deficits, income maldistribution or economic exploitation.

And all three men are the beneficiary of a Republican Party’s quarter-century flirtation with soft-core racism. George Bush may try to hang a leper’s bell on Duke, but it is difficult to take him seriously when he trucks off to North Carolina to embrace Helms, whose campaign has been as squalid as anything David Duke could have imagined. Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy; Ronald Reagan’s amiable harangues against [black] welfare queens; George Bush’s Willie Horton commercials and his politically inspired veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990; and now the campaigns of Hunt, Duke and Helms; it’s not a pretty sight.

But I am not at all certain that Duke or Helms or Hunt can be explained as reincarnations of George Wallace; nor do I believe they are the authentic voices of a resurgent wave of working class racism.

After Wallace became the high priest of racial segregation in the early 1960s he brought to his state a level of rhetorical vindictiveness that left wounds still unhealed. And in his presidential campaigns through the 1960s and 1970s Wallace gave voice to some of the darkest fears and hatreds in American society.

What is easy to forget, however, is that George Wallace began his career in 1946 as a down home social democrat with little enthusiasm for the race-baiting that often marked Southern political campaigns. And when the number of black voters in his state passed the 300,000 mark in the early 1970s, the Alabama governor reversed directions and welcomed black voters and politicians into the Wallace tent. Political opportunism is not an edifying spectacle; when compared with the unwavering racism of David Duke it has its charms.

George Wallace’s convoluted career should remind us that there are other, more humane populist traditions which come out of the Southern experience. Wallace himself learned his lessons from an altogether different kind of Populist, James E. (“Big Jim”) Folsom.

Through two terms as governor and forty years of campaigning, Folsom resumed again and again to four texts: the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and–most of all–Jesus’s

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Sermon the Mount. And from these familiar texts he evolved his political catechism:

That governmental laissez-faire inevitably allowed the powerful to prey upon the weak; that adequate welfare programs were the “fundamental obligation of a democracy to its people in order that the unfortunate may feast on more than crumbs and clothe themselves with more than rags;” that women were not chattel, but citizens who should be given the same rights as men; that the black citizens of Alabama were entitled to equal justice, equal opportunity and a “full share of democracy;” that there were no problems which could not be cured by a “good strong purgative of pure and unadulterated democracy.”

In the end Folsom’s personal failings (too much whiskey, too many women, too few honest friends) were as conspicuous as his six foot, eight inch frame and his size sixteen shoes. His challenge to Wallace collapsed in the 1962 governor’s race when Folsom appeared on statewide television, too drunk to recognize his own children. When he ran for governor against Wallace in 1974, he got less than five percent of the vote.

The racists he had fought, the “Big Mule” industrialists and the old reactionary planter class of the Black Belt seemed to have the final word.

And now as the economy falters and the bills for the Reagan fantasies come due, those voices are returning to join the David Dukes. The “liberal politics of victimization are over,” we are told. Now black Americans can once more take their historical place as the scapegoats of a troubled society.

Folsom had seen it all before. The Ku-Kluxers, the race-baiters, and “some of the selfish interest groups” would always be present, he warned in 1949, “spreading their filth, their lies, their old and ancient hatreds … trying to boil up hatred by the poor white people against the Negroes … trying to keep the poor white from progressing by keeping the Negro tied in shackles.”

Still I take heart from the only conversation I ever had with James Folsom. He was nearly blind and occasionally confused as we sat and talked in a truckstop diner outside Cullman, Ala. But he retained an almost child-like faith in the decency and ultimate judgment of the same voters who had rejected him. The working people of this country- “the farmer, the factory worker, the mill hand, the school teacher”-would eventually see through this “blasphemous smoke screen” of racial hatred, he had predicted. And they would understand that the promise of this nation lay in the challenge of guaranteeing equal justice, equal opportunity and equal freedom for every man, woman and child.”

That’s a far cry from the “populism” of Jesse Helms or David Duke.

Dan T. Carter is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of History at Emory University. He is writing a biography of George Wallace.

Both Race and Class: A Time for Anger

By Dan T. Carter

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 19-22

As we look at the economic changes in the United States over the last quarter century, we can see that a revolution has taken place. Since the late 1970s, there has been a 40 percent increase in real income in the U.S., but over half of this increase has gone to the top one-half percent of America’s taxpayers. At the same time, people who make up the bottom 20 percent of income earners have seen a substantial decline in their standard of living. As a result, we have a gap between rich and poor which is greater than at any time since the 1920s.

That gap is growing every year; we are well on our way to the creation of a nation in which a small elite accumulates unimaginable wealth while an increasingly insecure majority struggles to maintain middle-class status, only a step away from a growing underclass of the desperately poor.

What role can a democratic government play in reversing these forces? It seems to me that this is a question of central importance as we think of our future, but it’s essentially a non-issue in terms of political debate. Clearly we have lost any sense of the possibility of collective action to reverse these trends.

Why?

I believe it is because we have lost faith in the power of a democratic government to promote equity and justice.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Alabama Governor George Wallace set up half the equation: the federal government–the “central government,” as he described it–was always evil. The “government” consists of bureaucratic elitists who live off the hard-earned wages of working people and delight in social engineering. Now we know that the mainspring of Wallace’s anger toward the federal government lay in its efforts, however timid, to end racial discrimination. But Wallace clearly touched a resonant chord across the nation which went beyond race.

The federal government had fought the depression, won the second world war, and laid the foundations for a stable middle class with policies which essentially benefitted that emerging middle class: subsidized housing loans, the GI Bill, Social Security, and a host of other programs. By the 1960s, however, that middle class was restive under the “burden” of taxes and uneasy over the social upheavals of the decade: civil rights, feminism, court protected free speech, a rising crime rate, the inconclusive war in Vietnam etc. Thus, when Wallace harped on the evils of busing or the rise of a parasitic welfare class–both issues with racial resonance–Americans across the nation proved receptive to his argument that government was part of the problem, not the solution.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan carried through where Wallace left off. He continued Wallace’s argument that government is inherently “bad,” but he made the circle complete by offering a solution: unleashing the beneficent forces of the marketplace. Everything is the best of all possible worlds as long as the government doesn’t interfere. The marketplace alone can adjudicate every economic conflict equitably and render rewards and punishments on the basis of individual achievement.

I’m normally not one for believing that intellectuals have much of an impact upon our society. But Godfrey Hodgson’s recent book on the triumph of conservatism documents the skillful way in which wealthy right-wing individuals and corporate interests have created a broad network of subsidized think-tanks, grants, fellowships, and research sinecures which skillfully promoted their ideological agenda. Nothing is more ludicrous today than conservatives’ complaints of a “liberal media.” The fact is, the assumptions underlying laissez-faire economics and a “free-market” economy dominate public political discussion. And that is true whether we are talking about the print media, Sunday television news programs, the major networks, or public television and radio.

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It will not be easy to break out of this ideological cul-de-sac. While the economic expansion of the last twenty years has primarily benefitted the wealthy, enough crumbs have trickled clown to the middle class to make possible the diversionary focus upon the poor, immigrants, and racial minorities. At the same time, conservatives’ success in subverting the role of positive government for working Americans and minorities has led to their increasing cynicism and withdrawal from the political process. In part, they’re correct, of course. Government is not working in their interest. The end result of that withdrawal, however, has been the creation of an electorate which is disproportionately white and affluent.

But we have to continue to struggle for racial and economic justice and to change the terms of the debate and to focus on the issues which will arouse the electorate.

It won’t be easy to confront racial issues. Despite the progress of the last forty years, this nation remains deeply divided along the color line. The climate of opinion is particularly hostile to affirmative action. In part this is because of the success of conservatives in misrepresenting its purposes and scope and convincing whites–it didn’t take much convincing–that discrimination is a thing of the past and that we truly have an open society. We also have to face up to the reality that opposition to compensatory action is deeply rooted in American’s notions of “fairness” and equal justice.

Still, I think we can take heart from the fact that there has been a deep shift in the thinking of most white Americans. A quarter-century ago, there would not have been the assumption that there ought to be minority group representation at every level of political and economic life. We have to build upon that shift by challenging the glib arguments used to misrepresent affirmative action.

We should challenge the worship of a handful of standardized tests as though they alone could judge what makes a person qualified for a job or for admission to college or professional school. We have to talk about the ways in which people actually succeed in college, in the workplace, and in life in general.

I’m most familiar with college admission procedures, and I know that my university constantly makes decisions on the basis of a variety of factors other than Standard Achievement Test (SAT) scores. We seek geographical representation. We look for different life experiences from our applicants. We seek students with a range of talents. And, yes, we seek to create a racially and ethnically diverse student body in the belief that there is strength in diversity.

We have to defend the freedom to make those choices in our public life as well.

That, I confess, is still a hard sell.

I think we can be more successful in refuting conservatives’ argument that the legacy of centuries of discrimination has miraculously disappeared over the last few years, and the reason minorities continue to lag is simply because they have been paralyzed by the “culture of dependency” fostered by welfare programs. We have to ask those who would throw the poor overboard to sink or swim: “Do you really believe that someone who has grown up in a culture of poverty, who has very limited education, lacks the kind of skills that the marketplace wants, with no financial reserves, no health care, and few resources–do you believe the solution to their situation is simply to throw them to the forces of the market?”

But I want to return to the original point that I made at the outset of our conversation. Discrimination in our society is rooted in both race and class; neither problem can be addressed separately and if we’re going to build any kind of effective political coalition, we have to make that linkage clear. Of course right-wing conservatives will cry “class warfare,” but that seems a hollow charge corning from a group that has waged relentless war against the weakest and most helpless members of our society.

Just as we must counter the shibboleths of the new racism, we have to challenge the ideological foundations of the new conservatism, driving home the argument that an unrestrained free-market economy does NOT protect the interests of working and middle-class Americans. At the same time, we have to stop passively accepting the big lie that all social investment is wasteful and makes no difference in the lives of the disadvantaged.

I recently spoke to an Atlanta service club about the enormous problems that primary and secondary educators face in impoverished communities. The disadvantages these children face are so great, I argued, that they cannot be overcome by teachers in the classroom, however dedicated. What is needed, I said, was a broad program of support including income assistance, child care, health care, and comprehensive job training for parents trapped in the cycle of poverty. It won’t be cheap, I argued, but it is the right thing to do and, in the long run, it will benefit all Americans.

As you can imagine, that didn’t go over very well. Afterwards, I was greeted with a chorus of dismay which faithfully echoed what has become the conservative mantra: there is no connection between spending money and improving education or solving social problems.

I like to think that I am a tactful person, but I’m afraid my answer was not very conciliatory. “If that were really true,” I replied, “why do we have parents clamoring to get their students into my university at a cost of $25,000 a

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year when they could send them to community college at $600 a semester?” What you’re really saying, I told them, is that money doesn’t count when it involves poor kids, but it certainly does when it involves your own.

At the same time, we cannot create the kind of political climate in which needed social investments are made in our society unless we face head-on the “no new taxes” chant that has become dogma to both political parties. And the best way we can do that is by creating a simple, straightforward, progressive tax system stripped of the kinds of convoluted provisions which seem to have rewarded the most rapacious and parasitic individuals and groups within American capitalism.

Having to make this argument does make me realize I’m getting older. No one in the 1960s would have questioned the ethical basis of a progressive tax system, but one of the horrendous accomplishments of the conservative revolution has been to justify various schemes whereby the rich contribute less and less to society, but justify their greed on the basis of some kind of moral superiority, defined of course, by their success in manipulating capital and corrupting the political process.

It is true that middle class Americans have not seen their taxes go down over the last twenty years. But, what Americans need to be reminded is that–despite all the talk of “tax cuts” in the Reagan years–the changes in the tax code in the 1980s brought benefits to a very small portion of the population. The bottom 50 per cent of the population actually saw its taxes increase as rising social security, medicare and excise levies more than offset marginal declines in their income tax rates. There was relatively little change in the tax rate of the population between the fiftieth and ninetieth percentile. In contrast, the closer to the top of the pyramid, the greater the reductions in the effective federal tax rates. For the top 10 percent there was a 5 percent reduction in taxes; for the top 1 percent a 15 percent cut. Cumulatively the effect has been to save the wealthiest tax payers billions of dollars over the last fifteen years and to play a significant role in transferring wealth from the working and middle classes to the very wealthy.

Never satisfied, the new rich in this country remind me of the grasping landowner who claimed that he wasn’t greedy: he just wanted all the land abutting his farm. And so this summer we are greeted by the sordid spectacle of a Republican congressional majority intent on reducing capital gains taxes to a maximum of 20 percent, even though studies by the Internal Revenue Service show that

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three quarters of capital gains go to the top one per cent of American taxpayers. (In 1989, ninety-three per cent of all families received NO capital gains.)

Now is when we really need a little class warfare.

What happened to the notion of the dignity of labor? Where is the morality in a system which decrees that Bill Gates–among the richest men in the world–should pay 20 per cent capital gains tax on the hundreds of millions of dollars he has made from his stocks while the nurse who cares for the sick and the elderly pays 28 per cent income tax on every dollar she makes over $23,000.?

I’m certainly not suggesting that we emulate the conservatives by substituting capitalist scapegoats for immigrants, gays, blacks and other minorities. I am saying that people have a right to be angry about a political and economic system which is rigged in favor of the privileged few.

For the last thirty years, conservative demagogues have successfully deflected the anger of middle and working class on the victims of the system rather than the real perpetrators of economic and racial injustice. But there is an opportunity to shift the ideological ground and to begin to build coalitions at the intersection of race and class.

Let me suggest two of the many battlefields where I think advocates of social justice can begin their counter-attack.

The first revolves around the issue of childhood poverty. For thirty years, conservative ideologues have revived the nineteenth century notion of the “undeserving poor” by blaming the victims of poverty for their own plight. But it is difficult to speak about “lazy, shiftless children,” or “undeserving toddlers.” It seems to me that this is one of the issues around which political coalitions can be built. Certainly in advocating universal children’s health care we can bring up the interrelationship between race and economics because we know that Hispanic and African-American children are disproportionately excluded from adequate health care.

Secondly, we can support a revived labor movement. Given the kinds of pressures that working people in the white collar job-force are facing, I believe there is also a potential for that revival. For all the past failures of America’s unions, they are the greatest hope we have for building a political base to protect the economic self-interest of working people.

Although blacks, whites, and Hispanics remain segregated in housing, schools, and (to a slightly lesser extent) in higher education, the workforce at the working-class level is going to be integrated simply because of the growing percentage of the Hispanic and African-American population. There is obviously an opportunity here to create an inter-racial coalition. I don’t mean to underestimate the difficulties of revitalizing the labor movement in this country; certainly it will be unlike the the industrial, blue-collar movement of the 1930s. And, while racial suspicions still divide workers, I don’t think there is any question that flagrant racial prejudice is less in the 1990s than it was in the 1930s and 1940s. So there is at least the potential in the twenty-first century for an interracial political coalition based upon common class interests.

I’ve talked a great deal about the role of the federal government on issues of taxation and social investment on a national basis. But the last point I would like to make is that a revival of the politics of social justice has to begin at the grassroots level.

As a black candidate in a newly configured majority-white congressional district in Georgia, Cynthia McKinney would, I feared, lose her bid for re-election in 1996. But she won by a substantial majority and I think she did so by focusing on political issues which cut across racial lines. In local communities as in the McKinney campaign, there are opportunities to build coalitions around issues of child welfare, health care, housing, the inequities of the criminal justice system, and the degradation of our environment.

Above all, we have to remember that authentic political movements always begin at the grass roots level and have their greater impact when we least expect it. It is always hard to predict where, when, or how the next movement for social justice will coalesce and emerge, but we have to learn from our mistakes, build upon our defeats, and move forward with the kind of arguments and proposals that–right now–don’t seem to have much prospect of success. Perhaps we can take heart from the words of St. Paul who urged the early Roman Christians to take heart from their troubled past, knowing that “tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope….”

Dan T. Carter is Kenan Professor of History at Emory University. He is author of The Politics of Rage: George Wallace. The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Simon Schuster, 1995). His most recent book is From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (LSU Press, 1996). This essay was developed from an interview with Southern Changes editor Allen Tullos.

Race, Class, and Reconciliaton

By Dan T. Carter

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 10-13

People of color have had to deal directly with issues of race for all of this nation’s history; they couldn’t avoid it. For those defined as “white,” and particularly those outside the South, it’s been a sometime thing: notably during the struggles over slavery, war, and reconstruction in the mid-l9th century, and during the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and the struggles that followed.

There has always come a time, however, when whites tired of this subject.

For one of the inescapable themes of the history of the nation and particularly the American South is the effort of whites to maintain racial supremacy over their darker-skinned brothers and sisters. First there was slavery, then the struggle of white Southerners to maintain a separate nation built upon that institution, then the use of terrorism by the Klan and other vigilante groups to overthrow the legally constituted biracial governments of the post-war South, followed by the disfranchisement of black Southerners, the escalation of white on black terrorism through daily acts of violence–the most heinous of which involved the lynching of thousands of black men (and women)–the creation of segregation, a hellish institution designed to systematically degrade black Southerners through the first sixty years of the 20th century and exclude them from educational and economic opportunities within the South. . . .

No wonder we want to smooth over the rough and crooked places of our past–to dismiss the deep historical events of hundreds of years with an impatient: “Get over it: that was a long time ago.”

Some of it was a long time ago. Today, I think the majority of white Americans would agree with the proposition that a society that accepts any form of hierarchy based upon so-called “racial” considerations is inconsistent with our democratic aspirations and incapable of achieving a meaningful reconciliation of its citizens. Now this is a commonplace conviction; only a handful of extremists would openly accept the notion that genetic differences based upon race justify forms of discrimination. But I offer an important corollary: if we truly believe that skin color is not a determinant of intelligence, creativity or ability, we have an obligation–a moral obligation–to do more than murmur pieties about equal rights or equal opportunities. We must do everything in our power to change a society in which it is obvious that deep racial inequalities remain despite the progress of the last half century. That is not easy and it requires more than conventional rhetoric about equal opportunity; it requires uncomfortable choices and no little sacrifice.

And this at a time, when I suspect most of us would agree that “sacrifice” is not exactly the prevailing theme of our contemporary political culture. When lawmakers beholden to corporate America face the choice between building classrooms to replace trailers for our children or helping the super rich buy another chalet in Switzerland, it’s no contest. It is easier to fill our political platforms with a rainbow of complexions, to join enthusiastically once a year on Martin Luther King’s birthday to utter platitudes about equality. We insist that we’re serious about the problems of racial discrimination, but our actions–in contrast to our words–treat the conundrums of race as though they were minor annoyances; a vexatious hangover from an older era.

Yet the reality is inescapable: as we begin the 21st century, far more people of color than whites continue to live in the shadows of American life while the racial dimensions of disparate treatment in income, education, health services, and in our judiciary and penal system are ignored. And the question which John Kennedy asked a quarter century ago remains no less relevant today: As long as “Negro Americans remain in the shadow of a full and free life,” he asked six months before his death, “who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

It’s much easier to relegate the uncomfortable shards of our past to a safe and comfortable category we call “history.” Even the more recent past becomes the victim of our desire to forget uncomfortable truths. The hustlers of our popular culture have reshaped the complex history of the civil rights era into a slick pre-packaged series of rhetorical slogans that allow present injustices to live comfortably with historical memory and the great voice of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King survives as a soothing icon to black and white, conservative and liberal alike. California businessman Ward Connerly launched his successful anti-affirmative action referendum on King’s birthday with the announcement that Martin Luther King would have approved since he “personifies the quest for a color-blind society.”

Forgotten is the Martin Luther King who dismissed such arguments in his Stride Toward Freedom. It was “obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a

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race three-hundred years after another man, the first man would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner.” Forgotten is King’s denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam, or his call for a “restructuring of the architecture of American society,” a restructuring in which there had to be a “radical redistribution of economic and political power and wealth.”

As Julian Bond put it, we don’t like to remember “the critic of capitalism, or the pacifist who declared all wars evil, or the man of God who argued” that a nation that chose “guns over butter” would end up starving its people and destroying its soul. The historical radicalism of King’s call to struggle has been stripped away, leaving only a soothing pablum of feel-good sentiments.

There is actually a justification for promoting this kind of cultural amnesia. Historian Ernest Renan argued that every nation is a community both of shared memory and of shared forgetting. Forgetting, wrote Renan, “is an essential factor in the history of a nation.” To the extent that we may become caught up in an endless cycle of fruitless recrimination, Renan may be right.

But I prefer the ancient wisdom of the Jewish tradition: only remembrance can bring redemption.

This does not mean that times have not changed, or that we should let our remembrance of a bitter past blind us to the journey we have made and the opportunities that lie ahead. Much has happened in the past half century for the better as the harshest contours of American racism have been worn away by the persistent struggles of the civil rights movement. In Columbia, South Carolina, today, my next door neighbors are an African-American couple who personify the American dream. He is the personnel director for a major international corporation based in Columbia; she a former assistant to the Governor of South Carolina. My neighbor across the street is a successful young Chinese-American attorney. My next door neighbor is a Lebanese-American cardiologist; a woman working in a specialty almost exclusively male just two decades ago. Three houses away is an African-American neighbor who has just become the number two budget officer for the state. These professionals are not simply tokens; they reflect the growing opportunities that do exist for those individuals given the chance to develop their abilities.

At the same time, the conflict between good and evil enacted on the television screens of the 1950s and 1960s seem far away. There are contemporary racial issues that reflect newer versions of that age-old struggle, but often we deal not with unambiguous moral decisions, but day-in, day-out struggles to determine what is the best of a series of uncomfortable choices. How should we judge “ability” and promise in a way that is fair? What discriminatory results are the consequence of purposeful racism and what reflect happenstance or simply the results of unquestioned institutional patterns? Was I denied this job because of the color of my skin? Or was the other candidate truly better qualified? Is it possible to achieve a redress of past injustices by fathers and mothers without penalizing sons and daughters? Each action, each word must be weighed; it is surely one of the most bitter and exhausting legacies of our past and our ongoing association of darker skin color with notions of inferiority.

One way to help understand the changing nature of our dilemmas is to recognize that racial ideas and attitudes increasingly reflect assumptions about class. In my Southern childhood the “single drop” theory of race was almost unchallenged. Black was black. We all know the once fashionable historical cliché about Brazilian race relations: that race was important, but “money whitened.” Well, that wasn’t really true about racial attitudes in Brazil, but there clearly was a difference between American and Latin societies.

That too is changing. I don’t in any way mean to suggest that race has disappeared as a constant (if often unconscious) measure of judgment by most white Americans. Still, as the overt racism of an earlier generation declines, and a broader African-American and Hispanic middle class emerges, the way is paved for whites (and some African Americans) to see class, as opposed to race, as a legitimate means of separating our society into winners and losers.

The problem for me is that this amounts to a shift from a hierarchical society built upon the foundation of racism, to one resting on the notion that there are vast differences in human beings that justify massive social and economic inequality. Increasingly that is seen as progress. Not for me.

Quite apart from the fact that I find it morally repugnant, I don’t believe that true social reconciliation in our democratic society is possible unless we arrest the growing economic inequality between our citizens. Since 1979, overall income in the United States has increased over 55 percent. But the greatest increase, by far, has been for the wealthiest Americans. Over half the growth in after-tax income has gone to the top one-half percent of America’s taxpayers and the results are what one would expect.

In 1977, the bottom 20 percent of the American people received a little less than 6 percent of the nation’s annual income, while the wealthiest 1 percent received some 7 percent. Today that bottom 20 percent receives 4 percent of the nation’s annual income; the wealthiest 1 percent has seen its share almost double, to 13 percent. And today, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans control

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more than 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, a maldistribution of wealth greater than at any time since the 1920s.

Now the argument, of course, is that a rising tide lifts all boats. With everyone growing richer, why should we be concerned if some groups are a little wealthier than others?

Only that is not the case. In inflation corrected dollars, the top 1 percent has seen its after-tax income increase 120 percent in the last quarter century, the bottom 20 percent has actually suffered a decline of 12 percent in after-tax income. Thirty million Americans–more than half of them children–still live below the poverty line; forty-two million Americans still have no health insurance. And despite the last ten years of steady economic expansion–once you exclude increased family income due to the growing number of dual wage earners–it is only during the last two and a half years that childhood poverty has begun to decline and the mid-50 percent of households in America has seen a slight increase in income. So much for a rising tide lifting all boats.

Now this shift in the distribution of income and wealth stems from many sources: The internationalization of trade, the opening of a global labor economy, the decline of trade unions and the displacement of semi-skilled and skilled workers through new technologies. But the evidence is inescapable that the growing gap between rich and poor has been exacerbated by deliberate government policies of the past two decades, particularly tax policy.

Despite all the talk of “tax cuts” in the 1980s, the bottom half of the population actually saw its taxes increase as escalating social security, medicare and excise levies and increasingly regressive state and local taxes offset the marginal declines in the federal income tax rates. While the 50-to-90th percentile received a very modest reduction in taxes, the nation’s richest 1 percent of Americans saw an annual decrease of 15 percent in federal income tax liabilities in the decade of the 1980s.

These were policy decisions, deliberately made, not the inevitable consequences of free market forces beyond our control. The underlying philosophy seems to be: If you make the lives of the poor, the working class and the marginal middle class more precarious and give them less money, they will be more productive and resourceful workers, returning benefits to society as a whole. And then if you give the rich and the well to do more money and make their already secure and prosperous lives even more secure and more prosperous, they will be more productive and resourceful in returning benefits to society as a whole. You think I engage in polemical exaggeration? How else can one describe the policies of the dominant national party whose main economic goals are to freeze the miserably low minimum wage for the poor, give a massive tax cut for the rich and allow them to pass on their vast wealth to their sons and daughters.

I realize that I am on far shakier ground here. For the last thirty years, conservative think tanks have been pouring out an endless intellectual justification for this proposition: that there is a natural hierarchy of class and intelligence which functions equitably on the basis of social and economic competition and any attempt to interfere with the unfettered forces of the marketplace can only lead us backward on that archaic and discredited path of socialism and social democracy. As Dinesh D’Souza concludes in his recent book on The Virtue of Prosperity, the “prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality [in America] seems to be merit.”

Really? In 1974, the nation’s corporate chief executive officers made, on average, 34 times as much as their workers. By 1996, it was 180 times that of their workers. By the beginning of this century, it was nearly 200 times that of their employees. Are we to believe that the merit of corporate leaders has increased sevenfold over that of the men and women in their employ?

I have a word for that kind of smug justification for the status quo; it’s not one that I prefer to use in polite society.

To be fair, most of us–conservative, centrist and liberal alike–are uncomfortable with the fictional character Gordon Gecko’s unvarnished assertion that “greed is good.” And so we conceal the unpleasant realities of our current economic system with slogans about promoting individual opportunity, or using education as a means of redressing powerful imbalances of economic and educational opportunities. At times I feel as though I’m watching the captain of the Titanic solemnly hand out teaspoons to the passengers left on the sinking decks, with the cheery instructions: “Start bailing, you’ll be fine.” The truth is, those of us who are safe in our life rafts daily check our retirement portfolios as our hearts increasingly vibrate in harmony with the raucous Muzak of our contemporary culture: that clanging bell that daily opens and closes the New York Stock Exchange.

So where can we begin.

First, I would suggest, by expanding our vision of reconciliation beyond the issue of race, gender, ethnicity and sexual discrimination to include a demand for broader economic and social justice.

Looking back on the last generation, we can see now that there has been a constant struggle for personal freedom and autonomy. Remember in the 1960s and 1970s–all politics is personal? While the battles still rage, I would argue that victory was won by social libertarians–Jerry Falwell and John Ashcroft notwithstanding. In the 1980s, there was a different kind of struggle: a battle for unre-

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strained economic freedom. To a considerable degree, that struggle was won by conservatives. But somehow in our headlong race for cultural and economic freedom, we have lost touch with an earlier dream most recently embodied in the call for what John Lewis describes as “the beloved community.” Instead we have come to accept as normal a society divided into the fabulously wealthy few, a comfortable upper middle class and half a nation one short step away from economic disaster, struggling to survive.

I do not believe real social reconciliation is possible based under these conditions. But recreating a sense of what might be–what should be–will not be easy.

A couple of brief suggestions:

Today we live in “America, Incorporated,” in which rampant individualism operating within the framework of the marketplace reigns with only a murmer of protest. Well, let me enter my dissent. We are not autonomous. If we look honestly at our own lives we see the truth of the old Irish expression: that “we all drink from wells we never dug; we warm ourselves by fires we never built.” As a means of allocating resources and creating wealth, corporate capitalism has a positive place in our culture, but if we allow it to make our decisions, as a society we end up in the same position of the cynic described by Oscar Wilde. We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I don’t underestimate how hard that may be, for words have been corrupted in true Orwellian fashion. Some people, said the Puritan martyr Richard Rumbold as he stood upon the scaffold, believe that “Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden. I do not.” But today those who are booted and spurred no longer swagger and proclaim their God given right to exploit those beneath them; now they speak with the voice of humility and concern–everyone feels everyone’s pain–and there is much talk of offering a helping hand to those in need.

Well, I propose that we all become cantankerous naysayers whose main duty is simply to remind all who will listen that those of us who are comfortably settled atop the pyramid of our unequal society, are always ready to talk about “compassion.”

But there is another language that has come from authentic social movements bent on changing our society by breaking down the barriers that divide us: the struggle for economic justice in the 1930s; the fight for racial justice in the anti-slavery and civil rights movement. These authentic political movements have emerged when least expected. As one of my favorite writers said, a keen sense of irony has seldom led anyone to mount the barricades. Our task in the future is to not to lead, but to be a part of that struggle.

What I do know is that, when that moment arrives, the voices that bubble up from the grassroots will not use the paternalistic language of “compassion”: they will speak of something far more fundamental–justice.

Dan T. Carter is Educational Foundation Professor of History at the University of South Carolina.This article is adapted from a speech Carter presented at the Reconciliation Symposium held at Emory University on January 26, 2001.

Embracing Thanatos: The War Machine and the Bush Administration

By Dan T. Carter

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 4-5

This year, Congress is on track to approve a Bush administration defense budget of $400 billion, a figure meaning that the United States now consumes more than 45 percent of the earth’s military expenditures. And that total does not include this year’s supplemental appropriations of as much as $87 billion for ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq or the $30 to $35 billion absorbed by the secret “black budget” of the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence operations.

But this is only the beginning. While state and local governments scramble to maintain essential services and federal programs for the poor and working class face new restraints, Pentagon planners have outlined future increases that will lead to military expenditures of $500 billion annually by 2008-a 33 percent increase over today’s spending levels and twice the amount of the mid-1990s.

In the wake of September 11, we are told that these staggering increases are essential in order to protect American security. But even a cursory examination of the Pentagon’s budget shows that most of these escalating expenditures are for elaborate weapons systems that are useless in confronting the asymmetrical national security challenges we are likely to face in the years ahead.

If our armada of supersonic aircraft, ponderous motorized artillery and high-tech weaponry is irrelevant in the struggle to control international terrorism, it is easy to see why this war machine is so politically popular. In the 1970s and 1980s, defense contractors astutely recognized the importance of spreading the pork and they strategically located their subcontracting production facilities across the congressional districts of key Republican and Democratic legislators.

But the new war machine is particularly beloved by the Bush administration. First, it is essential in supporting the imperial aspirations of the conservative neo-imperialists who now shape American foreign policy.

Second, the lucrative and essentially non-competitive contracts offer an irresistible cash cow for the defense contractors and other corporate patrons of the Bush administration. The millions in campaign contributions they in turn pass on to the current White House occupant (and other Republican and Democratic politicians) is a minor add-on to the cost of doing business.

The aftermath of the war in Iraq offers a classic example of this inherently corrupt relationship. Five major companies–Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons, and the Washington Group–received billions of dollars of non-competitive contracts for post-war Reconstruction and placed themselves in a commanding position to receive the lion’s share of the $100 billion that will be spent rebuilding that war-torn country. And what do these companies have in common? They are politically well connected and they have given lavish political contributions to the Republican party.

Third, these staggering increases in military expenditures–when coupled with the Bush administration’s trillion dollar tax cuts for the wealthy-conveniently reinforce conservative demands that non-military expenditures be “restrained.” Behind a façade of “compassionate conservatism,” the Bush administration moves by stealth toward the goal bluntly outlined by conservative ideologue Grover Norquist: gradually reducing the federal government’s social programs until they can be “drowned in a bathtub.”

The events of the last two years have once again reminded us that war is always the enemy of social justice in a democratic society. But this administration already has earned a special place in historical infamy for its

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willingness to engage in what Nobel laureate George Akerlof has called “a form of looting” as it mortgages our future with its short-sighted economic policies and militaristic adventurism. The impact of this neo-imperial militarism is felt around the world provoking resentment from former allies and unalloyed hatred from those who once responded to us with a mixture of admiration and hostility.

For those of us in this country who support the broad goals of a humane social democracy, it is particularly painful to see the way in which Bush administration policies skillfully unravel a safety net slowly constructed over much of the last century.

As we transfer trillions of dollars in tax revenues to the rich and billions of dollars to weapons of mass destruction, public schools cut short their academic year, colleges, universities, and trade schools raise their tuition as much as 30 percent and the number of uninsured Americans rises past 41 million even as cash-strapped states enact new measures to eliminate the desperate poor from Medicaid rolls.

No one said it better than President Dwight Eisenhower a half century ago: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.” A world in arms was “spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

If we can quantify the waste in economic resources, it is difficult to measure how this endless “war against terrorism” corrupts our political process by creating fear, dependency, and passivity on the part of the American people. Grappling with the difficult tasks of fighting poverty, protecting the environment, or ending racism and sexism requires complex thought, sustained civic engagement and difficult–and sometimes painful–choices.

By contrast, the war in Iraq, a short, relatively bloodless assault by our overwhelming forces on a hapless and depleted army, allowed television networks to transform bloodshed into a spectator sport, a video arcade in which death was seldom allowed onscreen. At the same time, the media–acting in concert with this administration–offered us the emotional comfort of a jingoistic patriotism driven by Madison Avenue slogans (‘The Axis of Evil,” “America Fights Back,” “Operation Iraqi Freedom”) and Manichean rhetoric (“evil-doers,” “mass murderers,” “barbarians,” and “you are with us or against us”).

Like the German soldiers who marched off to the First World War with “Gott mit uns” (God with us) stamped on their belt buckles, we convinced ourselves that we were the embodiment of all that was decent, honorable, and noble. According to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, Bush assured him that “God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did ….” But John Adams reminded us more than two hundred years ago that power “always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.”

Certainly it would be hard to argue that the conflict in Iraq and the accompanying war on terrorism has led to decency, honor, and nobility. Growing numbers of Americans have finally begun to realize that our President and his advisers have knowingly and deliberately lied to us in their rush to war. What is less recognized is the way in which the entire nature of political debate has been debased. Within a week of the blast, Bush was calling for the apprehension of Osama Bin Laden “Dead or Alive,” with a clear preference for the former. More recently, the State Department’s coordinator for counter-terrorism gave a reporter his recipe for killing Osama Bin Laden and then confirming his death to the world. “Take a machete and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA….It beats lugging the whole body back!” This is the language of swaggering schoolyard bullies, and it reflects the coarsening of our foreign policy and our values as a nation.

Twenty years of covering global conflicts convinced New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges that this circle of violence was a corrupting death spiral from which neither victim nor perpetrator escaped. But in his book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Hedges recognized the seductive power of “that process of dehumanizing the other, that ecstatic euphoria in wartime, that use of patriotism as a form of self-glorification, that worshiping of the capacity to inflict violence–especially in a society that possesses a military as advanced as ours.”

No one should underestimate the difficulties of reversing these reckless and destructive policies at home and abroad for they are sustained by an army of well-funded and ideologically committed activists who have pushed their agenda with guile and passion for more than half a century. Perhaps their greatest success has come from nurturing a sense of fatalism and passivity on the part of the American electorate, a belief that nothing can be done.

Our first task is to reject in our own thinking that very fatalism by offering an alternative vision of what we might still become as a nation. And then we must act.

Dan T Carter is Educational Foundation Professor of History at the University of South Carolina.