After Orlando: Will We Endure?

One knew an event such as the Orlando massacre would happen. That foreknowledge doesn't make it any less sad for the victims, their loved ones, and indeed, all the rest of us who have to suffer the threat of sudden, senseless violence. We all live in a diminished world after Sunday's bloody horror.

We also know that these sorts of attacks will happen again--here, in Europe, in Africa and the mideast, wherever. It is instructive to think that the Orlando massacre was the work of a disaffected Muslim, who felt some sting of prejudice and some pull of jihadism, but also (apparently) a deranged and contorted homosexual, who hated his own attraction to the LGBT culture he attacked.

From this I draw two conclusions: first, there are many complex patterns of causality behind this, and probably every other mass terrorist attack, and we go wrong when we try to assimilate them into a simplistic, linear narrative. And secondly, in such a maelstrom of psychotic crosscurrents, the deranged party will find the means of violent destruction if he chooses: a military-grade automatic weapon if he is American, a homemade bomb if he has internet, a knife if he is Palestinian and thus deprived of every other weapon. These discouraging conclusions are by way of preparation for those recurrences which are now an ineluctable fact of our contemporary, mediated, globalized, highly-powered civilization.

These sober realities do not make it inevitable that our nominally democratic political systems will collapse into fascism--but they give a strong push in that direction. That is a shocking remark--I am shocked to see it on my screen--so let me try to justify it with some very recent particular facts.

• Lies and falsifications are remarkably easy to let loose in our mass media. Thus Donald Trump calls the Orlando shooter an "Afghan" when he is really an American. Restrictions on Muslim immigration would have prevented this tragedy, Trump tells us, but the perpetrator was not an immigrant. "Hundreds of thousands" of such immigrants are admitted "without screening" he tells us, but no, intensive screening can take up to two years. And so on. 
• Such amplified Big Lies threaten to delegitimize our civil order. Trump himself has delegitimized the Obama administration for years by denying Obama's claim to citizenship. Tens of millions of Americans have been persuaded--on the basis of no evidence whatsoever--that he is right. Their visceral hatred of the President, their absolute refusal to acknowledge his presidency, has made the country ungovernable in some key respects.
• And now, for me the most shocking instance of the delegitimizing Big Lie: Trump, speaking as nominal head of the Republican Party, accuses Obama, through a screen of veiled but perfectly legible innuendo, of colluding with global terrorists to bring about attacks such as the Orlando massacre. 

This despicable gutter rhetoric would make the author of Mein Kampf proud. It will only get worse. We are after all still early in Trump's 'campaign'--really less an electoral campaign than a media-platformed March on Rome. Can this juggernaut of poisonous rhetoric, fueled by the hate-filled nightmares of psychotic terrorists world-wide, be averted? Is there room for 'good speech' to overwhelm and neutralize this tainted sort? That will be the challenge of the Clinton campaign, the respectable news media, and all of us as we try to survive this bitter electoral season in a world coarsened by unspeakable violence.

Bern It Forward

That's it. With yesterday's results in California and elsewhere, the Democratic nomination phase of Bernie Sanders's campaign--whatever he and his diehard supporters may say--is over. I voted for him, I like him a lot, but I have to say it: after the primary voters have decisively chosen Clinton, there is no justification for claiming 'foul,' for demanding that unelected super-delegates should switch their support to Sanders, or for bringing any of this adversarial rhetoric to the convention. That part is over.

But the Sanders campaign itself isn't over and musn't end. The issues he has brought to the surface--and some others he hasn't--will not be fully addressed by candidate or president Clinton, and the energy and enthusiasm Sanders has generated needs to move forward in pursuit of those issues. The best way to do this is NOT to argue about procedures in Philadelphia, smear Clinton, and undermine her general election campaign.

What then? On June 17th, 10 days from now, a People's Summit will convene for three days at the McCormick Center in Chicago. (I wish I could be there but I can't.) The goal? To bring together all the activist groups on the Left, including Sanders campaigners, to organize an integrated campaign going forward. There are so many fronts in this campaign: the $15 minimum wage, the incarceration epidemic and brutal law enforcement, the need for free college, health, and secure retirement, immigrant rights, women's pay equity, financial regulation and taxes on speculative profits. And overarching them all, the need to build a new, sustainable, job-rich green economy--fast! All these movements are actively in the field, but separately. The Sanders campaign has brought many of their adherents together around a visible, immediate goal. Now they have to stay together to lobby candidate Clinton, and then put pressure on President Clinton. This fight is just beginning. Integration of these many issues around a singular, holistic vision for a new society is key.

[Parenthetically, one can see that vision, more articulately expressed, in the campaign of Green Party candidate Jill Stein. I only wish it would make tactical sense to vote for her, as she is by far the most articulate and impassioned candidate in the field. Perhaps it will.]

Last night in California Bernie Sanders was not the most gracious loser--but who would be at that moment, after all he's done? I give him maximum credit for his combative determination--but I also hope that after a short respite he will see the futility of pursuing the nomination fight. But what I really hope is that he will lend his enormous charisma and prestige, not just to Clinton's general election campaign, but more especially to the ongoing work of the People's Summit, and the many interlocking struggles to which he has given voice this past year.

The battle is over, Bernie & comrades. The war continues without a pause. If you can make it to Chicago, be there!

Some Missing Scenes from "Hamilton: the Musical"

Scene 1: It's 1782. Hamilton, after recovering at home from his madcap bayonet charge at Yorktown, has left his family in Albany and joined the confederation congress, the new nation's governing body, in New York. Big problems: the confederation owes a lot of money to a lot of people, but can only raise it by begging from the states, which have their own debts to worry about. Member of congress Robert Morris has two problems of his own: first, as committee chair the national debts are his responsibility. Second, most of the war debt is owed to him personally. After reading up on Hume and others on the public finance question, quick-study Hamilton attaches himself to Morris, and they make a plan.

The continental army is encamped up the river at Newburgh, 10,000 men and 500 officers. The war is over but they don't want to go home without being paid. A certified military hero, Hamilton contacts some former comrades and suggests that a threat of mutiny--and a march on the congress--might focus congress's attention. Hamilton through intermediaries suggests to General Gates--who always thought he himself should have been commander in chief in place of Washington--that he might want to direct the mutiny. He then writes to his old friend General Washington, warning him of the army's restiveness. Washington gets it--he hastens to Newburgh, unhorses Gates, and lets the congress know how urgently things stand. Morris then proposes a generous settlement: the officers can be decommissioned with large, fully funded federal notes, along with the national creditors (like himself)--all included in the same blue-ribbon tranche. The private soldiers will be given much smaller sums of non-negotiable paper, which they sell off at large discounts before going home, broke and dispirited, after winning independence ... so that men like Morris and Hamilton can move forward with their plutocracy. Crisis averted, debt refinanced and consolidated to guarantee stronger taxing powers when the new constitution is written.

"We won the war. What was it all for?"

Scene 2: 1794. Hamilton, still secretary of the treasury, has coaxed his program through Congress: federal assumption of national debt, creation of a national bank, and--most delicate--imposition of a domestic tax, the first such, on whiskey distillers. With his passion for detail Hamilton has studied the distilling industry, domestic and foreign, and realizes that consolidation of small independent producers into large industrial ones is in the air. He carefully structures his tax to benefit these large producers, and thus imperil the only cash commodity produced by many western farmers, who lack the means to sell their grain to the eastern market in any form except whiskey.  These westerners, already dubious about the strengths of the new national government, refuse to pay the new tax, organize militias to repel the federal agents, and threaten secession. Hamilton persuades Washington, in his second term as president, to mount up and lead a large army--10,000 strong--over the Alleghenies to put down the rebellion. Hamilton becomes field commander as Washington returns to his executive duties, and leads a brutal campaign, arresting and detaining hundreds of the resistors without any legal or constitutional authority. Many are marched back to Philadelphia, where the courts release them. The battle has been won though: federal authority over local democratic bodies, industrial production over small decentralized homesteads, big finance over the land banks and easy credit that historian William Hogeland calls populist or egalitarian economics.

"Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?"

Taken together, these scenes represent two of Alexander Hamilton's greatest triumphs, moments when his vision of the new nation was built into the foundations of the national economy. Are the repercussions of these scenes with us today? You bet, from the self-dealing legislators and bond-holders to the misguided and ineffectual but fundamentally democratic resistance, both left and right, to our governing system of finance. Just listen to the current presidential campaigns. Hamilton is with us, not the awkward but well-intentioned young striver of the musical, but the steely man on a white horse, the friend of big capital and enemy of popular sovereignty. It's a different drama, and one worth staging.