What’s Happening to America

Is America in the midst of a moral and political crisis–one that goes deeper than George W. Bush? The Advocate asks some of America’s brigtest minds what’s going on–and what we can do about it. In This Issue Mark Engler, Noah Mackert, Grace Lee Boggs & Scott Kurashige

Mark Engler

The End of the ‘End of America’

Over the past year, the writer Naomi Wolf scored a significant hit with her book The End of America. On October 31, just days before our recent presidential elections, The Independent of London published a commentary by Wolf reiterating the book’s argument that our country was descending into fascism. She wrote, “If you look at history, you can see that there are ten steps for turning an open society into a dictatorship.” She contended that the US government under Bush, with its warrantless wiretaps and extraordinary renditions, was well on its way toward completing each of these steps. Despite the strongly positive signs given by all available polling evidence at the time, Wolf doubted that an Obama victory could ever happen, saying that it would be “a miracle.”

The notion that America is in a state of decay, whether moral or political, was a popular trope long before Naomi Wolf ever took it up, yet it grew ever more prevalent during the Bush years. Especially in recent times the question, “What is happening to America?”—the topic of this symposium—has invited the knee-jerk response that our country is going to hell in a hand-basket. Last summer, my large extended family gathered in Wisconsin for a reunion. A younger cousin of mine, an eighth-grader with a precocious interest in politics, recruited me to help him survey the political beliefs of our relatives. When asked whether America was heading in the right direction, everyone in the family, whether right or left, answered “No.” It was the one question in the poll that everyone could agree on.

Wolf’s argument, however, always seemed profoundly flawed to me. No doubt, the Bush administration perpetuated some frightening violations of civil liberties and undertook a troubling centralization of state power. But the idea that this represented a unique stroll down the path toward totalitarianism relied on an ahistorical nostalgia for a past United States, vigilantly lawful and democratic, that never existed. Stolen elections are nothing new in American history—and, as conservatives who ruefully remember Kennedy’s victory in Chicago in 1960 will remind us, they have not always gone to the Republicans. Although activists of past decades may not have been hindered by Bush’s “no-fly lists,” they all too often faced Pinkerton goons, Jim Crow lynchings, and COINTELPRO raids.

If the victory of Barack Obama does anything, I hope that it will bring an end to the idea of “The End of America”—at least in this most facile form—and force us to reckon both with our country’s troubled history and with the more subtle challenges that remain ahead.

Amid the current financial crisis and the disastrous war in Iraq, we are now hearing a fresher set of doubts about America’s future. These predict an end of empire. They suggest that our country’s superpower will falter, for better or for worse, and that we will be overtaken by rising rivals such as China and India.

These concerns are closer to the mark. But they, too, echo familiar choruses of the past. From the left we have heard persistent intimations that each new economic panic might be capitalism’s last. From the center and the right we heard in the 1980s the fear that Tokyo was buying up America, and that we would soon be made to bow down, at least in an economic sense, before our Japanese overlords.

I worry that today’s talk of the loss of imperial power might form another type of “end of America” rhetoric that does little to advance progressive efforts. It contributes neither to shaping a long-term vision of what our society might become nor to addressing the political demands of the moment. The decline of an empire is usually a decades-long process. Even if this is truly the fate of the United States, we cannot afford to remain spectators during that span.

In the short term, our challenge today is to prevent the Obama administration from following the same path as the last Democratic White House. Social movements must mobilize to ensure that the new president not only repudiates those brutish aspects of the Bush administration that led some liberals to cry fascism. We must also work to see that President Obama rejects the strategies of corporate globalization and domestic neoliberalism—the rule of the market over ever-greater swaths of public life—that flourished even during the Clinton years. We must make sure that putting Wall Street at ease is not the sole preoccupation of his public policy—especially considering that it was Wall Street at its easiest and most free-wheeling that created the economic crisis we are now experiencing.

In the longer term, we must question whether a New New Deal is the best future that we can hope for. Because, ultimately, we have good reason to believe that it is not enough.

In response to the editors’ question, “What is the biggest open secret in American life?” another writer in this series responded that the sprawling, high-consumption form of American life that we have known in past decades “is absolutely unsustainable.” I agree. A neo-Keynesian strategy that uses government spending to revive the American people’s appetite for spending and consumption might well succeed, pulling us from what could have been a much deeper economic downturn. We should hope that it does. But then we will have to reckon with the fact that this very hunger is exactly what has been driving us toward collective destruction by route of global warming.

The hope that a future of complete tragedy might be averted does not need to be based in a vision of a past America that was pure and good. On the contrary, our best hope is in recognizing the deep national flaws that previous generations have already confronted and overcome—in acknowledging the work of movements that successfully brought about an end to slavery and poll taxes, the widespread elimination of domestic sweatshops and the creation of the weekend.

At their best, these movements have shown the ability both to adapt to new troubles and to envision a country better than what ever existed before. That, rather than yearning for a mythical early America or satisfaction with a return to more recent economic comfort, is what our future will demand.

Mark Engler, a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, is author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com

NOAH MACKERT

Lessons from the Bronx

Last winter, I watched a young teacher pull down a projection screen, walk over to an LCD projector and remove the lens cap. We saw a black and white photograph of three black men at a diner. Instead of eating, they merely sat, looking at the camera. The teacher walked back to the front of the classroom and asked, “How did these men use non-violent resistance to achieve their rights?”

Terrence raised his hand. He was 15, too big for his desk, too old for the 8th grade and only interested in class when serious issues were being debated. “Why ain’t there any white kids in this school?”

It was a good question.

To give a full answer, you would have to go way back, to when New York was New Amsterdam, and the Bronx was forest. Dutch colonists, men like Lewis Morris, who built his estate with slaves from Barbados, and Jonas Bronck, after whom the borough is named, settled the land and drove out the Lenape American Indians, and their ancestors who farmed there for nearly three hundred years. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Bronx evolved into a home for immigrants of all kinds: first Germans and Jews, then Irish, Italians, Poles and Slavs, and blacks and Puerto Ricans. It was known, during the roaring twenties, through the depression and after the Second World War, as a place where people were stable, where you might be poor but you worked hard, tolerated your neighbor and saw that your kids went to college.

That was the golden age. What happened next, from the late fifties to the mid-nineties, has unfortunately come to define the borough worldwide. The fabric of society seemed to unravel. Heroin flooded the city, youth gangs took over the streets, and families disintegrated or moved out. The whites were gone by the mid-sixties, to Riverdale, in the West, or to Co-Op City in the North. City planners like Robert Moses built housing projects and superhighways atop poor but intact communities. Then, the money to maintain these experiments dried up. The Bronx began to burn; roughly 100,000 housing units were lost to fire and arson in the seventies alone. After a lull in drug-related violence, crack hit like a plague, and the murder rate skyrocketed. This nightmare, depicted in Paul Newman’s 1981 Fort Apache: the Bronx and Adrian Nicole Leblanc’s 2003 Random Family, the land of drugs, gangs, theft, rape and murder, is what most people picture when they think of the Bronx.

So it may be confusing to hear that when Bill Clinton stopped by the Madison Square Boys and Girls Club in 1997, he hailed the Bronx as a model of urban renewal. By that time, the population was growing again; construction was booming, ranch houses and 5-story apartment buildings with blue air conditioners in the windows stood in formerly vacant lots; and the murder rate had dropped to pre-1965 levels. “If you can do it,” said Clinton, “everybody else can do it.”

What happened? As with the current economic collapse, many factors contributed to the sudden fall and slow revitalization of the South Bronx. The descent into chaos resulted from some combination of bad welfare policies, bad housing policies, the de-facto segregation of the poorest citizens into high-density public housing, the development of suburbs and the creation of Co-Op City, the tendency of whites to leave browning neighborhoods, the destruction of communities by highway construction projects, the viral spread of cheap drugs, the epidemic of abandonment and arson, and the general economic collapse of the Northeast.

By the mid nineties, however, crack had receded, and $5 billion set aside in the eighties by Mayor Koch, a proud Bronxite, was helping to rebuild the borough. Community organizations worked to see the money spent wisely, on construction and basic services, but they were equally useful as watchdogs. In the early nineties, for example, the Northwest Bronx Community Clergy Coalition (NWBCCC) took Freddie Mac to task for providing improvement loans to landlords that were much larger than the value of the buildings. Today, the Bronx is still poor—one of the poorest urban districts in the country—but it is cleaner, safer, and more hopeful than it has been in a long time.

So what does the Bronx have to do with America? That depends on to what extent the lessons of the Bronx, particularly the South Bronx, America’s original inner-city, apply to the depressed areas in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Oakland, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Cincinnati and Detroit. Who deserves credit for saving the Bronx—community activists, lawyers, mayors, or the federal government? How will the Bronx continue its upward swing? Can schools eradicate poverty, or do we have to solve poverty to improve schools? Does anyone in the rest of America really care one way or another?

I have my own opinions about these issues, and so do a host of bloggers and columnists. But I wanted the opinion of real Bronxites, so I began calling my friends and former pupils to ask them: what is going on in the Bronx, and what does it have to do with America?

Ernest, a barrel-chested superintendant and single father, was guardedly optimistic. He believed a whole generation had been lost to the ravages of the 60s, 70s and 80s. “But the people have changed,” he said. “The younger people today are more active socially and politically. With the older ones, I just don’t see anybody out there.” He said he was hopeful that the Bronx was improving, but “if the next census comes around, and the Bronx is still on the bottom in terms of wages, then how can you really talk about change?”

Dolores was similarly guarded. She is a solid, white-haired woman who is the primary care provider for her grandchildren and who lives on the top floor of a housing project. I asked her who had been an advocate for the Bronx. She thought a while and said, “I remember when President Carter came through. That was significant for us. But you know, when it comes to politicians, I don’t trust none of them.” She excused herself to tend to the stove. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to teach these boys how to make fritters.”

On the night of the election, I talked to Enrry, a ninth grader, and a former student. He was excited about president-elect Obama, as are all my former students, who are black and Latino, and whose parents overwhelmingly vote Democratic. I asked him whether he thought the Bronx was getting better. “Well, there’s, like, a lot of new buildings, and the bus stops are new.” We chatted for awhile about how things used to be. Then, at the end of our conversation, he asked me, “Mr. Mackert, if the Bronx is getting, like, real nice, are the rich people going to move in soon?”

And today, on the third of December, I talked to Eric, another ninth grader. He expressed neither hope nor fear—he was too busy at school. But he tried to stay informed. “Every morning I take the newspaper down to the cafeteria, and I read it,” he said. His classes were going well. There was only one that was giving him trouble: criminal law. “And I’ve got a test coming up.” I asked him what he was studying.

“Torts.”

As soon as I can receive that kind of news without tearing up, I’ll know we’re making some progress.

Noah Mackert is a writer and educational consultant in New York City. He is currently working on a memoir about teaching special education in the Bronx. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine.

GRACE LEE BOGGS AND SCOTT KURASHIGE

Where Do We Go From Here?

It was block by block, from the ground up, community organizing that won the White House for Barack Obama. Inspired by his eloquence and audacity, his commitment to change we can believe in, and his faith in himself and human possibility, tens of thousands of Americans, of all ages, ethnic backgrounds and faiths, members of unions, churches, synagogues, peace, women’s and other community groups, discovered in them/ourselves the energy that comes from renewed hope and commitment to a just cause. So, especially after the Democratic convention, we/they went door to door, block by block, in neighborhoods all over the country, persuading strangers and folks who had never voted or who had lost faith in voting, to vote for Obama. It was a great feat—one worthy of celebration.

Where do we/they go from here? Some people will use the experience to advance their own careers. Others will be content with Obama’s closing down Guantanamo and undoing similar Bush-Cheney abuses. Still others, outraged at Obama’s appointments of unyielding Zionists, rightwing Democrats, and economic heavyweights whose only concern is growing the economy will organize protest demonstrations, trying to push Obama to the Left. Or they will regret that they did not vote for Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney.

We will not be among them. As Grace remarked in her first post-election column for the Michigan Citizen, “I think that Obama has already done our country a great service by encouraging tens and hundreds of millions all over the world to believe that America can change and that together we can change it. I do not delude myself that despite Obama’s formidable multi-tasking skills, he will be able, in the Oval Office, as commander in chief of the US Armed Forces, struggling to extricate this country from two unwinnable wars which have become occupations, saddled with a trillion dollar deficit, and needing to court both Republicans and Democrats even for modest health care legislation that will not make us more healthy but only make health insurance more available, to initiate the profound changes in our values, in how we live, how we make our livings and how we educate our children, that are urgently needed at this milestone in our evolution when we are in the midst of a cultural transition as far-reaching as that from hunting and gathering to agriculture eleven thousand years ago and from agriculture to industry three hundred years ago.”

Changes of this magnitude cannot come from the top down, only from the ground up. Thus, we need to look in the mirror, recognizing that putting demands on the state is not enough. We must also put demands on ourselves. At the end of 1966, four months before his anti-Vietnam war speech at Riverside Church, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote “Where Do We Go from Here?: Community or Chaos” in which he called for “a radical revolution of values” against “the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism.” It would be fitting if on January 20 as we celebrate Barack Obama’s inauguration we also commemorate MLK’s 80th birthday by holding teach-ins on this little pamphlet.

Why is revisiting the writings from the last years of MLK’s life such an urgent task? We know, for starters, that King was so deeply concerned about poverty in America that he was mobilizing a Poor People’s Movement to bring about sweeping structural reform. Given the widening scope of the financial/housing/credit/unemployment crisis, the idea of ending poverty seems an even more elusive dream today than in the 1960s.

At the same time, however, we must listen to the voice of MLK the philosopher—not the Social Democrat but the dialectician who thinking historically, had recognized that Karl Marx, the young Hegelian, had been seduced by the materialism of the 19th century. King recognized that the unbridled pursuit of economic growth, which this country had embarked on at its inception, had brought miracles in technology, comforts and conveniences but was also the root cause of our racism, materialism and militarism, destroying community and participation and ending in our spiritual poverty, spiritual death and the need to grow our souls.

In a recent interview with Bill Moyers, self-described conservative Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University Professor and retired U. S. Army Colonel who lost his son in the Iraq war, raised the specter of this MLK warning when he pointed out that “Our major problems are at home, not out there somewhere.”

“We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be, to drive wherever we want without having to think about whether or not the books balance at the end of the month. What neither Obama nor McCain can do is persuade us to look ourselves in the mirror, so we rely increasingly on the projection of American military power around the world to try to maintain this dysfunctional system.”

Since the Vietnam War period, Bacevich warned, the United States has become an “empire of consumption.” We refuse to live within our means. So we rely on our military power. We can’t expect Congress to change this situation because “the imperial presidency” is its creation. It has thrust all power on the executive branch and now exists primarily to assure the re-election of its members.

So beyond the welcome surprises of 2008 (and the three decades of living in denial under Reagan/Clinton/Bush) lies a stark reality we must confront. American militarism has spun out of control, creating chaos around the globe while undermining our economic security at home. The world’s finite supply of fossil fuels, the wellspring of consumer capitalism, is running out. There is no confident helmsman steering the ship of the global capitalist system, which may even be in a terminal crisis. And climate change is a runaway train that may soon reach the point of no return, if it has not already. No matter what your analysis of Obama’s’s politics is, there is no doubt that we are in store for big changes that will—for better or for worse—work themselves out over 5, 10, 25 and 50 year horizons.

Embracing MLK’s call for a “revolution of values,” which links self-transformation and structural-transformation, will require many of us—especially those who come out of the materialist tradition of American leftism—to develop a whole new vision of social transformation beyond New Deal liberalism, social democracy, national liberation, Bolshevism, or any other vestige of the industrial age.

What a movement to create a revolution of values strives for is something far more profound than a redistribution of the wealth created by an unsustainable and dehumanizing system. We are talking about a new model of community and of building more respectful and fulfilling ways of living, of relating to others, and of relating to the earth, so that we may transcend our profligate ways that have led America into an endless series of wars and led the world to the brink of ecological catastrophe. Of not just ending our dependence on foreign oil and giving tax cuts to the middle class, but of creating a real bottom-up economy that is more local, more participatory, more sustainable, and more rooted in self-reliance rather than dependence on transnational corporations.

Now we must also realize that the massive housing foreclosures destroying whole neighborhoods are the result of the sad reality that on much of Main Street as well as Wall Street we have created a casino economy by assuming that we can live endlessly on credit. By recognizing our own culpability instead of putting all the blame on others, we can discover the power within each of us to change the world by changing ourselves. One way to begin a new conversation, not only with Obama supporters but also with those who voted for McCain, is by providing examples of how we would be safer and happier if we lived more simply so others could simply live.

What we need are not stopgap measures like the bailouts concocted by George W. Bush and his Wall Street Secretary of the Treasury. What we need instead is a paradigm shift toward a solidarity economy whose foundation is the production and exchange of goods and services that we and our communities really need. Like the activists who sparked the first American Revolution in December 1773 by throwing overboard crates of tea on British-owned ships in order to declare their independence from English colonialism, we need to burn our credit cards to demonstrate our independence from the casino economy. At these rallies we need to declare our commitment to creating local economies based upon new principles and ethics of real work.

Building a movement to create a new economy based on new ethical principles and an appreciation of one another and of the needs of the earth will require us to think dialectically, to comprehend how reality is constantly changing due to the working out of new contradictions. There is no better place to start than to transcend the narrow parameters of debate surrounding “the future of Detroit,” which the media and politicians wrongly equate with the future of the big 3 automakers. If we can think dialectically about the dilemma that Detroit thrusts in our face, we will better equipped to consider the challenges and possibilities confronting us in the age of Obama.

Detroit, on the one hand, is exactly as Thomas Sugrue portrays it in his brilliant historical work, The Origins of the Urban Crisis—blighted and barren, economically depressed and starkly segregated after decades of sprawl, discrimination, and capital flight. A city built for two million people is now home to just over eight hundred thousand. If you tour the many ruins of the city, you will come away with a strong sense that this is what the heart of a dying empire looks like.

On the other hand, the most radical activists in Detroit—those who understand that it is neither practical for working-class people to wish for auto industry jobs to return, nor desirable to bring back the dehumanizing culture of the industrial era—are creating a whole new way of living. Forced to endure an exodus of jobs, plummeting housing values, and financial crises for several decades running, a growing number of local residents are beginning to view deindustrialization and devastation as an opportunity to rebuild, redefine, and respirit Detroit from the ground up as a “City of Hope.”

By choice and compulsion, the bearers of this new movement insist that we see the collapse of industrial capitalism as a moment of liberation, an opportunity to reclaim our humanity.

There is a wide range of activism in Detroit to address issues of work, education, arts, youth, spirituality, sexuality, policing, urban design, and much more. But the best symbol of a paradigm shift in thinking about radical social change is the urban agricultural movement. Next to a hulking abandoned factory, you can find urban farmers who have dug up entire city blocks to grow organic produce, connecting elders from the rural South with alienated youth whose schools have been turned into medium-security prisons. We are growing our own food in hundreds of community gardens, planting fruit trees, and creating a new kind of public high school where pregnant teens learn biology not mainly from books but by gardening and caring for farm animals.

On the west side we are establishing centers like Hush House where young people and returning prisoners rediscover and rebuild their human identity. On the east side, a district like Hope District where local residents grow not only food but their souls by weaving new dreams and doing work that serves the needs of the community.

The continuing meltdown of the global economic order won’t be a pretty site for anyone, but because of these ongoing efforts Detroiters will be far more prepared than most Americans. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in a wonderful piece for Harper’s Magazine (“Detroit Arcadia,” July 2007) “Detroit is where change is most urgent and therefore most viable. The rest of us will get there later, when necessity drives us too, and by that time Detroit may be the shining example we can look to, the post-industrial green city that was once the steel-grey capital of Fordist manufacturing.”

The questions we are grappling with in Detroit have begun to envelop people all over the map. Across the United States, the local foods movement is helping Americans cope with spiraling food prices, at the same time slowing down global warming and making us healthier because we are not importing adulterated foods grown on factory farms and transported thousands of miles in gas-guzzling trucks.

Indeed, urban agriculture may be the fastest growing movement in the United States. In Milwaukee, it is spearheaded by Growing Power, the tiny two acre urban farm started by Will Allen, the former pro basketball player, which not only supplies food for hundreds of Milwaukee families but helps them create their own gardens as a base for rebuilding their neighborhoods and also conducts workshops for urban agriculture pioneers from all across the country.

“We have to go back to when people shared things and start taking care of each other. That’s the only way we will survive. What better way to do it than with food?” said Will as he was honored with a 2008 MacArthur Genius Award.

In neighborhoods all over the country the economic meltdown is forcing people to rethink the waste of suburban living and SUVs and the cost of shopping at malls rather than neighborhood stores. So this Thanksgiving people will be swapping stories of an older generation whose hands were more calloused but who cared not only for themselves but each other. By these diverse means we are embracing the power within us to create the world anew, thereby freeing ourselves from our elected officials in Washington who disempower us by promising solutions that encourage us to think like victims dependent upon them for crumbs.

Movement elder Vincent Harding, reflecting on the meaning of Obama’s election, offers the metaphor of midwifery to put it into context. “So as I sat one August night in Denver among the tens of thousands of on-site witnesses to Barack Obama’s acceptance speech,” he recently wrote, “it seemed obvious to me that my young brother seems to offer the place where all the ‘we’ people can stop our waiting and carry on our work to create the pathway, the birthing channel toward ‘The land that never has been yet, and yet must be.’ Not only is something trying to be born in America, but some of us are called to be the midwives in this magnificent and painfully creative process.”

Harding reminds us that the new possibilities that are animating millions of Americans and people around the world did not spring out of thin air and they were not handed to us from above. They were potentialities that millions of us have nurtured for years. Now we must continue to care for them and help them blossom. We are the leaders we’ve been looking for. 

Grace Lee Boggs is a 93-year-old philosopher/activist based in Detroit and the author of Living for Change: An Autobiography and Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century (with James Boggs). She writes a weekly column for the Michigan Citizen newspaper and has been the subject of feature interviews on Bill Moyers Journal and Democracy Now.

Scott Kurashige is associate professor of History, American Culture, and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan and author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles, recipient of the 2008 Albert J. Beveridge Book Prize from the American Historical Association.

Both are board members of the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership (www.boggscenter.org).

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