When someone says of the Fascists, oligarchs, religious bigots, and racists of today’s Republican Party “that’s not us,” I shake my head.
That is us. I’m a history major. America has always been a battle between our ghosts and our better angels. There’s nothing Russia or China can teach us in that regard.
- Slavery? We perfected it, in the American South.
- Genocide? We perfected it, in the American West.
- Eugenics? We invented it, in American cities.
The Taliban have been here since the Puritans. Nearly all Christianity’s craziest cults were American-born. The Great Awakening of the 19th century was just an appetizer.
You want oligarchs? American oligarchs have been around since John Jacob Astor. Stolen elections? Tilden won but southern electors were bought for Jim Crow. Tammany Hall spawned dozens of urban machines.
None of this is new.
Freedom, democracy, liberty, equality, these have always been aspirations, goals, ambitions in the American mind. The Founders knew this. Benjamin Franklin’s last act on Earth was an essay answering a Georgia Congressman on slavery, where he took the role of a North African Muslim justifying his ownership of white Christians, using all the Georgian’s arguments.
My point is there is no such thing as “once and for all.” Those predicting the end of American democracy are wrong. American democracy has lost in the past, been failed in the past. Our courts have been run by racists and demagogues in the past. What matters is that other Americans have always fought back, struggling over years, decades, the whole lifetime of W.E.B. DuBois.
None of what’s happening today is new. None of it is unprecedented, except that it’s all the ghosts of our past rising together, trying to bring us back into the pit with them. We live in the Second Gilded Age. We’re on the cusp of a Second Progressive era.
Fortunately, we have every incentive to create one. That’s because our economy depends, more than ever before, on its supply of creativity. Free human minds, free to think and free to share, are where economic growth comes from in the Moore’s Law era. Money no longer comes up from the ground, it rains down from the clouds.
China tries to keep people from thinking. Russia keeps people from doing anything. Japan and Europe limit the rights of immigrants. It’s not just about finding minds, or about an open market, but being open to new ways of sharing, to open source. That’s where money is made today. That’s why America’s economy dominates the world.
Gay or straight, male or female, black, white, or Asian, we can use you all. Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jensen Huang are immigrants. Tim Cook is gay. There are more great women leaders in America than anywhere else.
But bigots are also free here to practice what they preach and grow great businesses. Chick Fil A is still closed on Sunday. Charles Koch and Rupert Murdoch live. They’re the price of freedom. The ghosts of our fathers and our better angels are both free to compete.
Our angels and our ghosts contend, but the money in this century will be made by those who liberate the angels. As I said, I am a history major. It’s why I won’t countenance those who predict doom.
