Democracy Matters (7 page)

Child, a radical abolitionist, admonished the country about the evils of slavery in 1833 with her
An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans:

The greatest novel ever written by an American,
Moby-Dick
(1851), is the thirty-two-year-old Herman Melville’s scathing exploration of the evils of nihilistic imperialist power, a power he recognized and abhorred at the heart of the American character. Melville was a staunch antiracist, anti-imperialist, and lover of democracy—ironically, his father-in-law was the judge who sustained the vicious Fugitive Slave Act that was a catalyst for the Civil War—and
Moby-Dick
can be read, in part, as a commentary on the ills of American democracy. The nihilist Ahab, drunk with power and the crazed embodiment of an absolute will to dominate and
conquer—fueled largely by wounded ego and worldly pride—leads his multiracial crew into the abyss of history, with the fetish of whiteness dangling before him.

The greatness of Abraham Lincoln was his courage to confront publicly the nightside of American democracy through deep Socratic questioning, unfailing prophetic love of justice, and excruciating tragicomic hope for a “more perfect union,” even in the midst of the white supremacist hurricane that nearly wiped the American democratic experiment off the map. Despite his distance from fervid abolitionists, his authoritarian lifting of habeas corpus during the Civil War, and his reluctance to embrace multiracial democracy, Lincoln exemplifies the integrity of democratic energy. He knew that democratic experiments require not only courageous truth telling but also practical wisdom. Lincoln was morally opposed to slavery, yet the decision to free the slaves (though those in the Confederate South only) was nonetheless a herculean battle for him. That battle in itself is emblematic of the horrible intertwining of democracy, race, and empire at the core of the nation. He knew all too well the fragility of the support for the Union cause among key border states and that freeing the slaves would likely throw them over to the Confederacy, and so his love of the American democratic experiment caught him in a horrible irony that required him to condone the most antidemocratic of American practices.

Only when he realized that the influx of over 150,000 black soldiers would be pivotal in saving the Union did he issue his Emancipation Proclamation, which then led him to support the New Orleans plan of multiracial voting—a decision directly responsible
for his assassination by the white supremacist John Wilkes Booth. His three-minute Second Inaugural Address is the most profound expression of Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope ever uttered by an American president, revealing what serious wrestling with the implications of racism and empire can bring out of those who have a passion for democracy matters:

Ironically, immediately following the war, the U.S. government would deploy troops in the imperialist cause of further westward expansion, engaging in a genocidal war against the indigenous peoples. And after the brief twelve-year experiment in multiracial democracy called Reconstruction, the forces of racism would rise up to subordinate black Americans in the brutal and long regime of Jim Crow. In short, the Union won the most barbaric of nineteenth-century wars, but white supremacy and imperial expansionism won the American peace. By the end of the nineteenth century, conquest and reservations loomed large for indigenous
peoples, Mexican lands had been fully annexed, Asian workers had been deported, and the U.S. terrorism of Jim Crow reigned over most black Americans. With the end of continental expansion—Manifest Destiny fulfilling its national mission—transcontinental expansionism flourished.

The Civil War was the first modern war—a use of modern technology and the resources of a modern state for mass mobilization. In this way, the fight over race and empire literally pushed the American democratic experiment into modernity. But that modernity brought temptations and challenges of its own for our democracy. In the wake of the war, triumphant industrialism ran amok, and the dogma of free-market fundamentalism reigned supreme. The country gave birth to a new breed of plutocrats, the “robber barons,” who ran unregulated monopolies and accumulated obscene financial fortunes. Ironically, the rights of these corporations were defended in the name of the Fourteenth Amendment enacted to defend the rights of black Americans. The link between transcontinental expansion and plutocratic wealth should not go unnoticed. Empire and corporate elite power, alongside race dividing the citizenry at home, are the age-old formula of nihilistic rule in America.

The American democratic experiment entered the twentieth century as a full-fledged empire with overseas possessions (Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Samoa—or over six million peoples of color) and with domestic racist systems of terror over black, brown, Asian, and red peoples. It also had attained hemispheric hegemony over South and Central America by giving new force and enforcement to the Monroe Doctrine, which in 1823
first stipulated U.S. imperial “sovereignty” over the South American and Central American nations. Most peoples of color were confined to poor rural communities, and wave after wave of immigration from Europe filled U.S. cities with a new population to be exploited as cheap laborers. The formula of corporate elite power alongside racist division of the citizenry would seem to have prevailed; yet, fortunately, this formula often overreaches, resulting in corruption, graft, greed, internal bickering, and a democratic backlash.

The complex intertwining of democratic commitment and nihilistic imperialism is at the heart of our democracy, and democratic commitment has made great strides. There have always been countervailing democratic forces pushing for the realization of the democratic vision expressed in the Declaration. The three most indigenous forms of democratic radicalism initiated by white males in the American democratic experiment—populism, progressivism, and trade unionism—made major contributions to taming the corruption, graft, and greed of plutocratic elites and corrupt politicians. The farmers-led populist movement was a backlash against the free-market fundamentalism of “the money kings” and “the business princes” of the Gilded Age. It called for more democratic participation of rural producers in the shaping of government and business policy. The progressive movement was an urban middle-class backlash against the corrupt ties of politicians to corporate elites and the unfettered greed of financial bosses. It called for more democratic input and bureaucratic efficiency over public policy. The trade-union movement was the worker-led backlash (often by new immigrants) against the free-market fundamentalism
of corporate owners and financial bosses. It called for more democratic control over the workplace, especially more say in wages paid to laborers.

These three crucial movements all expressed, in different ways, the democratic aspirations of predominantly white male citizens within the limits of the American empire of that day. Rarely did either movement target white supremacy or imperial expansion. In fact, all three movements tended to be xenophobic and imperialist even as they were deeply democratic. They stand as vital achievements in deepening our democracy, and yet we must acknowledge the limits of each in coming to terms with the legacy of race and empire, as well as the need for continued vigilance on all three of these crucial fronts. The Georgia congressman Thomas Watson, nominated in 1904 and 1908 for president by the Populist Party, was one of the most courageous Populists—often willing to fight alongside black farmers in the Jim Crow South—yet he ended his populist career as a major proponent of the Ku Klux Klan. Woodrow Wilson was an exemplary progressive politician who struggled sincerely against the corporate abuse of power. Yet one of his first acts as president was to reinstate white supremacist segregation throughout the U.S. capital, and his famous freedom charter in foreign policy did not extend to Africa, Asia, or Latin America. Eugene Debs was one of the greatest trade unionists as well as the leader of the U.S. Socialist Party. His crusade against vast wealth inequality was legendary, yet despite his own antiracist views, he could not convince his organization to integrate with peoples of color.

The energetic armies of American democrats won terrific battles
against the dogma of free-market fundamentalism, but they fell far short of completing the task of fulfilling the dream of democracy for all peoples. As the American empire reluctantly joined the great world struggles in the twentieth century against the nihilistic forces of imperialism and fascism, it did so with great battles yet to be waged within as well.

The age of Europe—begun in 1492 with the European discovery of the Americas and the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain—ended in 1945 with the Nazi effort to annihilate all Jews and with the American empire at the center of the world-historical stage. With the advent of the guns of August in 1914, sounding the opening shots of World War I, race and empire were the invisible perimeters of American democracy—hardly seen by most whites yet harshly lived by most peoples of color. The war not only shattered European myths of progress and illusions of security, but also disclosed the brutal realities and bestial desires of imperial Europe. As major European empires collapsed—such as the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Czarist Russian empires—seismic shifts took place across the globe. The British empire, first shaken by the South Afrikaner anti-imperialist victory at the turn of the century and hobbled by World War I, pulled back financially and militarily in Latin America and Asia. The French, Dutch, and Belgian empires adjusted accordingly. And the humiliated German empire turned inward for later dreams of world domination under the imperial xenophobe Hitler. American imperial banks and corporations quickly filled in for British ones as the world braced for round two in imperial Europe’s thirty-year war. As the British pound faltered and the gold standard collapsed, worldwide depression set in.

The aspirations for social and economic advancement among the poor and nonwhite peoples of America were dealt a devastating blow with the onset of the Great Depression. If the business of America is business, as President Calvin Coolidge said, then the America of dreams was no more. In the language of the greatest American play,
The Iceman Cometh
, written in 1939 by the greatest American playwright, the disillusioned democrat Eugene O’Neill, America was a barren landscape of pipe dreams—a landscape littered with the debris of hubris, greed, and bigotry. O’Neill saw no way out—even Socratic questioning and prophetic witness were hopeless. Some looked to the new Soviet empire for inspiration, but its brief alliance with Hitler and Stalinist atrocities dampened their hopes. Needless to say, imperial Europe entered a long, deep tunnel with only the courageous sheer will of imperial Winston Churchill standing between Nazi domination and any democratic possibility in Europe. Fascism—especially the vicious democratic despotism of Hitler (elected by the German people)—cast its ugly shadows over much of imperial Europe, including his fascist allies in Italy (Mussolini) and Spain (Franco). With aggressive militaristic autocrats in Japan seizing Asian lands and with all of Africa under European empires (including the Italian fascists’ subjugation of Ethiopia for a short time), only the American and Soviet empires seemed capable of combating the Nazi conquest of the world. And that is precisely what the historical alliance of the American and Soviet empires did together—they defeated the fascist forces on the globe at a cost of fifty million dead, including six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps along with Gypsies, Communists, gays, and lesbians. The
indescribable courage of the U.S. Jim Crow armed forces (365,000 dead) and the incredible gallantry of the Soviet army (twenty million Russian dead) gave the world another chance for democracy matters.

A small former British outpost had become the greatest imperial power in the world—with only a devastated Soviet empire as competition. Yet race still haunted the American empire, which was especially ironic given its heroic victory over a racist German regime in Europe. With the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to symbolize the defeat of imperial Japanese aims of domination, imperial America was the last behemoth standing after the nihilistic frenzy of a world drunk with power and greed subsided.

Yet, as is often the case in our sad human comedy, the peace did not last long, and in the cold war between the American and Soviet empires that immediately heated up in Turkey, Greece, Germany, and Korea, the major ideological weapon the Soviet empire could use against the democratic claims of the American empire was its racist treatment of black Americans and the refusal of the United States to support freedom movements in colonized Africa, Asia, and poverty-ridden Latin America. Then, as now, race and empire loomed large in America’s credibility in arguing about democracy matters on the global stage. No one in his right mind could deny the vicious forms of repression and regimentation in the Soviet empire—as well as Mao’s China—yet innocence and denial of race and empire in America vastly weakened a case that could have been stronger if candor had prevailed.