AN INCLUSIVE TABLE

 

History matters: The other side of the story

By: Eartha Hopkins

https://www.mahoningmatters.com/community-columns/an-inclusive-table-history-matters-the-other-side-of-the-story-4466530

The majority of what I know about history was not found in the books I read in a formal classroom.

Instead, I learned about the wide spectrum of culture, traditions, wars and victories of the world from the tender, yet brutally honest approach of my mother who earned a bachelor’s degree in African-American studies from Youngstown State University. It instilled confidence and cultural identity that I still carry with me today.

I learned early the pros and cons of accessing a comprehensive worldview which was in sharp contrast to the lessons I’d be taught in the public school system. I faced reprimands consistently from teachers who did not necessarily agree with the cultural lens that I presented. 

An example that stands out the most is in the fourth grade when my teacher initiated a lesson about Columbus discovering America. When I questioned my teacher about how a man could discover a land that was already inhabited by people, she dismissed my inquiries and described to me and my 20 classmates that they were savages. 

Webster defines "savage" as "not being domesticated or under human control, and/or a beast." This is the framework created in the minds of a group of children expected to accept and trust their teacher. Luckily for me, my mother offered a safe space to discuss a 360-degree-view of history. I can only imagine how my classmates interpreted and internalized this message, particularly my peers of color. 

Throughout my academic journey, I would never be formally introduced to the existence and contributions of Africans before the transatlantic slave trade. Worse, the story of the civil rights movement was rendered incomprehensible because it was filled with the tropes of biased myths portrayed in media.

Omissions of accurate records of my past would create a disconnect that I would fight against to keep my identity intact. If I based my worth and value solely on what was presented to me in public institutions, I would exist in a myriad of confusion, unclear of my role within society.

Education from my perspective seemed one-sided; full of only non-Black protagonists and their viewpoint minus the various multicultural groups I knew to be true. The stories I read reflected perspectives, accomplishments and discoveries of people who rarely shared my culture, or looked like me or my community for that matter.

Even as an adult, I can still see the misguided teachings of what my fourth-grade teacher displayed in the world today.

I am just as perplexed now as I was then at how certain groups of people are dehumanized, displaced and completely omitted from American reverence. This lack of appreciation and dismissal of the full spectrum of humanity can never unite, but only further disconnects communities.

To embrace the full experiences of everyone is to begin a true process of healing and reconciliation; to create a world where we all are seen, heard and validated authentically. 

Chapter review: Introduction to the 2016 edition

According to many commentators, “the root cause” of the problems Americans face as the twentieth century draws to a close  is an “epidemic of family breakdown.” [One education expert] blames the decline of American education on a “parenting deficit.” “It’s not better teachers, texts or curricula that our children need most . . . . we will never see lasting school reform until we see parent reform.” Divorce and unwed motherhood are said to be the major causes of poverty and inequality in contemporary America. In his state of the Union Address for 1992, President Bush claimed that the crisis of the cities results from “the dissolution of the family.” Kate O'Brien of the Heritage Foundation asserts that people of all political persuasions are coming to understand that America's troubles stem from the collapse of “family stability and the work ethic.” -- Stephanie Koontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, chapter 11, The Crisis Reconsidered, original 1992 edition

Introduction & some context

As one might guess, Introduction to the 2016 edition is the introduction to the 2016 edition of a book. The book in this case is The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz. She is a college professor and an expert on the history of families and family structures and the actual, not spun, reality and forces they operate in.

In revealing and attacking myths, lies and crackpottery, this book is a lot like James Lowen’s 2018 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (chapter review here). Koontz focuses on and debunks an endless stream of lies and myths about families. She describes how political partisans and special interests use the myths to glorify and/or justify both their political beliefs and ideology, and their political, economic and social agendas. The political mythology around American families is staggering. Crackpot thinking and a combination of lies and ignorance is routine in the faux world of families and their effects on parents, children and society.

One point that jumps right out from Introduction is how well the myths from America’s radical right dovetail perfectly with the non-existent world that fundamentalist Christian nationalist dogma and mythology has created. Millions of American conservatives fully buy into the radical family mythology that Christian zealots have created at least since the 1960s. The idealized time was the 1950s, when prosperity was widespread and wealth inequality was relatively low. Myths about how families were and should be popped up and proliferated.

It is also apparent that radical right family mythology fits nicely with radical right mythology about the dominant, authoritarian role of men in government, society and the economy. That is core Christian nationalist dogma. Thus, on this point the fit between radical right religion and politics is as close to perfect as complicated human things like this can get. 

Review: Introduction to the 2016 edition

Koontz wrote the 34 page Introduction to describe what she revised or updated in her original 1992 book. She asserts that most of the 1992 edition has been left unchanged and that the facts and/or mythology she saw then has not changed much. The Introduction is thus a nice summary of the rest of the book, with some or most of the core myths mentioned and the debunking data summarized.

Regarding nostalgia as a trap, Koontz correctly points out that nostalgia is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it leads children to forget bad or unpleasant things in their past while having better recall of good things. But in the minds adults it can be a different thing:

“As time passes, the actual complexity of our history--even of our own personal experience--gets buried under the weight of the ideal image.

Selective memory is not a bad thing when it leads children to forget [parents’] arguments in the back seat of a car and to look forward to the next vacation. But it’s a serious problem when it leads grown-ups to try to re-create a past that either never existed at all or whose seemingly attractive features were inextricably linked to injustices and restrictions on liberty that few Americans would tolerate today.”

Koontz exemplifies the mythology of family using the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision that made same-sex marriage a nationwide right. Judges on both sides of that 5-4 decision got the structure or role of family wrong:

“In his dissent from the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, ‘For all . . . . millennia, across all . . . . civilizations ‘marriage’ referred to only one relationship: the union of a man and a woman.’ Its primordial purpose, Roberts asserted, was to make sure that all children would be raised ‘in the stable conditions of a lifelong relationship.’

These assertions are simply not true. The most culturally preferred form of marriage in the historical record--indeed, the type of marriage referred to most often in the five books of the Old Testament--was actually of one man to several women. Some societies also practiced polyandry, where one woman married several men, and some even sanctioned ghost marriages, where parents married off a son or daughter the the deceased child of another family with whom they wished to establish closer connections.

The most common purpose of marriage in history was not to ensure children had access to both their mother and father but to acquire advantageous in-laws and expand the family labor force. The wishes of the young people being matched up and the well-being of their offspring were frequently subordinated to those goals. That subordination was enforce through the institution of illegitimacy, which functioned to deny parental support to children born of a relationship not approved by the kin of one or both parents or by society’s rulers. In Anglo-American common law, a child born out of wedlock was a filius nullius, a child of nobody, entitled to nothing.”

So much for how the American radical right sees marriage. It is a mirage. How did the majority five justices in Obergefell see  marriage?

“Justice Anthony Kennedy, meanwhile, wrote an eloquent majority opinion in support of marriage equality. Labeling marriage a ‘union unlike any other in its importance’ to two committed persons, Kennedy argued that gays and lesbians deserved to marry because lifelong unions have ‘always promised nobility and dignity to all persons’ and ‘marriage is essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations.’

These claims are also at odds with historical reality. For thousands of years, marriage conferred nobility and dignity almost exclusively on the husband, who had a legal right to appropriate the property and earnings of his wife and children and forcibly impose his will upon them. As late as the 1970s, most states had ‘head and master’ laws, giving special decision-making rights to husbands, while the law explicitly defined rape as a man’s forcible intercourse with a woman other than his wife.”

More mirage. 

Koontz points out that such mythologizing about the historical benefits marriage has the downside of its tendency to to blame social ills on divorce and unwed motherhood. She points out that in the marriage-centric illusory good old days of the 1950s, poverty and material hardship were more common than now. Women and children bore the brunt of poverty in both traditional marriages and in households headed by women. Current worldwide research indicates that men in marriages are often economically advantaged at the expense of wives and/or children. Koontz writes:

 “In chapter 11 I discuss what’s wrong with the claim that unwed childbearing is the primary cause of poverty, economic insecurity, and inequality. Recent research bears out my argument. A 2015 study concluded that overall, between 1979 and 2013, income inequality was four times more important as family structure in explaining the growth of poverty. Another recent study concludes that since 1995, the role of single parenthood in contributing to economic instability has diminished even more.

Yet, politicians and pundits continue to recycle the myth that poverty and inequality are the result of marital arrangements rather than larger socioeconomic forces. A 2012 report for the Heritage Foundation by Robert Rector, ‘Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty,’ insists, even after the Great Recession plunged so many married families into poverty, that ‘the principal cause [of child poverty] is the absence of married fathers in the home.’ .... And a 2014 publication of the U.S. House Budget Committee, ‘The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later,’ totally misrepresents the accomplishments of the war on poverty ...., before joining the chorus with the claim that ‘the single most important determinant of poverty is family structure.’”

In 2014, Republicans controlled the House and this narrative fits with Christian nationalist and authoritarian radical right propaganda. One can only wonder if House Democrats agreed with this nonsense. Maybe they did.

Other family myths and lies that Koontz skewers in Introduction with actual empirical data include (i) criticism of parents for not spending as much time on child rearing as in cherry picked earlier times, (ii) complaints that marriage is a dying institution (it is not), and (iii) belief in family self-reliance without help from outside the family, including from government domestic spending programs, e.g., the home mortgage interest deduction is worth tens of billions annually to the top 20% of income earners. There is a cornucopia of lies, myths and BS to be revealed and skewered with data. Maybe that is why the book is 409 pages long, 443 pages if one includes Introduction.

Questions: 

1. Is it too much of a stretch to see a close connection between American family mythology and current (i) radical right Christian nationalist fundamentalism, and/or (ii) the rise of fascism as the dominant ideology or mindset in the Republican Party? 

2. Is Koontz a propagandist or is it believable that she is right in arguing there is a great deal of mythology and lies surrounding the American family and the institution of marriage, e.g., was Supreme Court reasoning based mostly on falsehoods in the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage?

Enter the Crazy

 I'm just going to lay it out.

Our society is not cohesive lately. It's going off the rails, and where the rubber meets the road that means a lot of people are essentially quite mad.

This includes your neighbor, and filters upward due to money and democracy, so it also includes the movers and shakers, and that's where things get super dangerous because it creates a feedback loop, as crazy appeals to crazy and then amplifies itself across the social strata.

It's a black hole, and there is a certain draw to it even as it disgusts us. There's a Hebrew word, to'evah, that to this gentile's ear nevertheless captures the dynamic of perverse yet magnetic - because we try to understand it. Because of this, you actually have to watch yourself so that you don't fall into it.

One way we find ourselves falling into the crazy is by analyzing the crazy, and trying to anticipate their individual behaviors, or worse, we try to appease them to do damage control (which almost never works).

If you moderate your behavior in response to crazy behavior your behavior will become similarly unhinged - this even as you try to counteract the crazy.

The best thing to do is to walk a line between understanding they are part of the landscape, but not letting yourself be controlled by their behavior, or letting it rule your thoughts.

That means we have to look at our policy goals for example, on their own - regardless of the right wing noise machine. Is the filibuster a necessary tool or an impediment? That is a question that can be answered regardless of Mitch McConnell. Do people need paid family leave? etc. Do we prosecute seditionists and other criminals? Is this a nation of laws?

It doesn't matter if they call it socialism. It doesn't matter if you think prosecuting them will lead to reprisal. You don't negotiate with crazy. You don't appease crazy.

Sadly, I believe we've reached critical mass. Crazy has infected so much of this nation that there's not enough stable society left - it's all downhill from here as the threads unravel, faster and faster until some catastrophic social reset.

Still, do what you can to keep yourself at arms length from the day to day of it. Be well.

What constitutes the mainstream Republican belief and political agenda?

Trump is now calling on Republicans not to vote — declaring “Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24” if his election fraud hoax is not “solved” first. He helped Republicans lose two Georgia Senate seats in January. Now he seems ready to try it again in the midterms. pic.twitter.com/ARBnsfwmzJ

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) October 13, 2021

Someone is still interested in correcting the 

massive 2020 vote fraud problem

The mainstream liberal-conservative divide in reality, reason and commitment to democracy and elections are vast and apparently not resolvable by anything other than major mindset change. Major mindset change is impossible.

Here at Dissident Politics

One set of recent comments exemplify the gulf.

Commenter: The democrats are the fascists. Wake up.

Responder 1: Prove your claim.

Commenter: Attempted gene therapy mandate, CRT brainwashing, attempting to tightly control ecomonic output, scapegoating groups of citizens (white suprematists), pushing POC supremacy, wanting to literally starve people who don't take their ineffective and possibly damaging "vaccine", gun control, causing inflation with spending and money printing, then blaming it on others, unfettered illegal immigration. Not hard to do.

Responder 2: Nah, the Repubs are way more fascist than the Dems. Attacks on the 2020 election and voting rights, attacks on abortion, liars about the vaccine, with consequences of killing people and damaging the economy, spending money and increasing the federal debt, fostering slaughter of innocents by eliminating reasonable gun regulations, attacking the free press, attacking and undermining the rule of law, etc.

Commenter: The 2020 election was fraudulent. That was obvious. No one attacks anyone's voting rights. Showing an ID isn't blocking someones rights. Only Jim Crow democrats do that.

The vaccine isn't a vaccine, it is untested gene therapy that only works for some people and only for about 5-6 months per jab. Enjoy your myocarditis.

The GOP has helped run up the debt, but not nearly as much as B. Hussein Obama and now brain dead Joe wants 3.5 trillion more debt for leftist idiocy.

We have many unenforced gun regulations. We don't need more. We need democrat control. It is them shooting each other.

The press are little more than democrat party activists and deserve to be attacked for their dishonesty. 

No one undermines the rule of law more than Biden's handlers.

Responder 2: No response.

 Elsewhere - the FRP plan for subverting elections

In the last couple of weeks, reports of what the FRP (fascist Republican Party) has been doing have come out. For the most part the FRP is focused nationwide on laying the groundwork to attack the 2022 and 2024 elections if they do not turn out its way. Baseless FRP attacks on the 2020 election continue. The Washington Post writes:

The glaring errors became clear soon after a former Wisconsin judge issued subpoenas earlier this month in a Republican review of the state’s 2020 presidential election. Some of the requests referred to the wrong city. At least one was sent to an official who doesn’t oversee elections. A Latin phrase included in the demands for records and testimony was misspelled.

Michael Gableman, the former judge leading the review, admitted days later that he does not have “a comprehensive understanding or even any understanding of how elections work.” He then backed off some of his subpoena demands before reversing course again, telling a local radio host that officials would still be required to testify.

Attorney General Josh Kaul (D) this week called the subpoenas unlawful and “dramatically overbroad,” and he urged Republicans to “shut this fake investigation down.” Voting rights advocates, election policy experts and some state and local officials, meanwhile, accuse Gableman of incompetence and say his review — which could cost taxpayers $680,000 or more — will decrease public trust in Wisconsin elections.

“It’s terrible for democracy in the state,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway (D) said in an interview. “It’s corrosive. It undermines confidence in our elections, and it’s deeply insulting to our municipal clerks and poll workers. … The thing that should give everybody some confidence is the fact that our elections are not being run by people like attorney Gableman.”

The FRP's plan to subvert democracy: The FRP's goal is to replace competent elections workers with FRP partisans whose mission is to see that Democrats lose and Republicans win. A lawyer, Mark Elias, involved in court cases that defended against FRP attacks on 2020 election results sees an overarching FRP plan to subvert elections in 2020, 2022, 2024 and beyond. The plan includes passing laws that make voting harder and more complex for both voters and poll workers. The goal is to get people to make mistakes in elections. The FRP intends to point to voting mistakes by voters and poll workers as evidence of widespread vote fraud, giving the FRP the excuse its needs to subvert the voter's will.

This 8 minute video contains the attorney's argument about what the FRP is doing. In his opinion, if the FRP does subvert the 2022 or 2024 election, we will be in a constitutional crisis. I presume he would assert the same thing if the FRP manages to overturn the 2020 election. In my opinion, we have been in a constitutional crisis at least since the first impeachment of our treasonous ex-president.

 

Elias wrote an essay about the FRP plan to subvert elections at Democracy Docket, a liberal media platform focused on information, opinion and analysis about voting rights, elections and democracy. Elias wrote:

We are one, maybe two, elections away from a constitutional crisis. More than a year ago — before Election Day — Donald Trump made clear that he would not accept the results of free and fair elections if he did not win. Too few people paid attention, discounting it as the ravings of a soon-to-be failed candidate. In the days following the November 2020 election, Trump and his allies executed a plan to subvert the election results. While they failed, Republicans learned from the experience and are prepared to try again. The future of our democracy rests on whether those committed to free and fair elections will prepare as well.

Immediately following the insurrection on January 6, Republican state legislatures began laying the groundwork for 2022 and 2024. They enacted new voter suppression laws optimized to disenfranchise Black, brown and young voters. They created false narratives of election irregularities and rallied their supporters around the Big Lie. Most recently, they began using their power in the redistricting process to ensure Republicans control the U.S. House over the next decade. 

Facing this grim reality, some have begun to urge Congress to ignore voter suppression and focus exclusively on the potential for election subversion in 2024. Specifically, they obsess over the outdated and imprecise Electoral Count Act — the process by which states select and Congress certifies presidential electors.  

This misguided effort ignores the fact that voting rules that maximize participation result in fewer disputed outcomes, while complex and restrictive rules create a larger pool of disputed ballots that can be used to justify post-election challenges. Republicans learned from 2020 that the absence of virtually any fraud was a stumbling block to their efforts to overturn elections. Since they cannot force voters to commit fraud, they are redefining the term. Several states, including Georgia, Iowa, Kansas and Texas, have criminalized practices that were previously legal. Some of these laws target voters, whereas other provisions are aimed at election workers. The result is the same. The goal of these new provisions is to manufacture fraud where none exists.

By manufacturing fraud, Republicans create controversy that can be exploited after Election Day by Republican candidates who do not prevail. The faux outrage created by the right-wing echo chamber vilifies election workers and provides excuses for disregarding election results.

Questions:

1. Does the commenter represent most of the Republican rank and file or is that person just a fringe extremist or crackpot who is not very close to mainstream rhetoric and/or belief the Republican Party leadership and donors explicitly or implicitly rely on?

2. Is what Elias asserts about a nationwide FRP plan to subvert elections mostly accurate, just a plausible hypothesis, mostly crackpot conspiracy theory nonsense and/or something else? If something else, what is it?

3. Is propaganda-fueled Republican fear that Democrats are subverting democracy by rigging elections and committing voter fraud a bigger threat to democracy than what the FRP is doing, i.e., is fear of socialist-communist Democratic tyranny a bigger threat than fear of fascist Republican tyranny, or are neither significant threats, or both about the same?