Kelly's Heroes

Donald Trump and John Kelly

We’re all Civil War re-enactors.  As the most dramatic and consequential chapter in our tortured racial history it compels our concern and provokes our passions. But we seem unable to deal with it maturely. Instead of facing it and learning from it, we succumb to its distortions and lies. Instead of settling it, it unsettles us. We fight it every single day, and it always wins. And on October 30, White House Chief of Staff, General John Kelly recklessly threw himself into that fight, responding to a question about Civil War monuments by saying:

I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now where it’s different today. But the lack of the ability to compromise led to the Civil War and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand with where their consciences had them make their stand.

But this is monumentally foolish. The entire history of the American republic before the Civil War is one of endless compromises aimed at reassuring the South that slavery would not be disturbed. The precipitating cause of the war was the election of a profoundly conciliatory and compromising president who merely wished to prevent the expansion of slavery into new territories, and promised to leave it alone in the states where it already existed.  We compromised our ideals for decades, but that ultimately proved incapable of preventing war with people prepared to fight to the death to maintain such a monstrous evil. And apparently we need to be reminded that General Lee (who was a gallant soldier, but a brutal slave-master) led an army intent on destroying the United State in the service of that evil.

But why do we need to be reminded? How does an intelligent person like Kelly manage to overlook such glaring truths? The easy answer from liberals is: deliberate racism. In this view Kelly finds Confederate generals admirable because they’re the heroes of white power over black bodies. Maybe he even likes slavery!  But this is cheap and irresponsible; there is no evidence that beneath Kelly’s bland exterior there beats a cold racist heart. Indeed, there’s a better, a more subtle explanation, and it’s the reverse of the liberal accusation. It’s not that Kelly admires men like Lee because of their white supremacy; it’s that he goes easy on their white supremacy because he admires them.  And he admires them because it’s too painful not to. That is, to admit Lee’s evil is to admit American evil and that’s something a conservative can never do. Slavery and racism are central to the American story, and the inability to accept that is central to American conservatism.

And what’s true for Kelly is true for the millions more – in the South and elsewhere – who perceive the Civil War in the same way. Some of them are indeed motivated by outright racism, but most are simply unable to concede that America committed such grievous crimes. It’s probably true that most people in most countries are similarly unable to face up to their own national sins. But Americans find it particularly painful, since we invest such emotion in the view of ourselves as noble and enlightened crusaders fighting for democracy and truth. How can the shining city on the hill have a rotten foundation?  Downplaying American racial sin to preserve American idealistic self-image is older than the republic itself.

Rutherford B. Hayes, who ascended to the presidency
in 1877 by agreeing to a backroom deal that ended the
federal guarantee of the rights of African Americans

It’s because the Civil War presents a direct threat to that self-image that we continue to fight over it so bitterly. And in the period after the war, known as Reconstruction, we dug ourselves deeper. When the South lost it faced a profound moral choice: either concede the horrible wrongness of its war aims, or preserve its self-image by pretending it fought for other more respectable reasons, and by suppressing the ex-slaves as lesser creatures whose rights need not be respected.  We all know what it chose. And, crucially, it asked the rest of the country to share its mythology. Or rather, it demanded widespread acceptance of that mythology as the price for white reconciliation. In effect, southern whites presented northern whites with a choice of their own, “Side with us or with our ex-slaves; you can’t have both.” And we all know what they chose. The mythology became the consensus, and black Americans paid the price.

Kelly, and the millions who agree with him, are still making that same choice. They callously disregard and minimize the death and destruction visited upon black people under slavery, Jim Crow, and even now, all to preserve white unity and white pride. But unsurprisingly, callousness is not a constructive strategy. It’s what impels conservative denial about the continuing harsh reality of black life in America today. It pushes whites toward white identity politics, even white nationalism, even outright racism. Its suppressed guilt makes conservatives bitter, defensive, resentful, angry.  It allows them to be manipulated by malevolent hucksters like Donald Trump. Conservative denial is the very poison that is killing us.

But liberals are immune because they’ve opted out of the old consensus. That’s what makes them liberals! Starting in the 1950’s and 60’s they determined to expand the New Deal economic and social success story – which had until then been limited to whites – to include all Americans.  In effect they rejected the white southern Reconstruction-era choice as a false one and determined to side with everyone.  But southern and conservative whites refused – even at this late a stage – to honestly face their historical and current crimes, and liberals, in frustration and desperation, gave up the project of shared prosperity.  After the Civil War, northern whites reconciled with southern whites and blacks suffered.  But now white liberals side with blacks and reconciliation suffers. We’re all Reconstruction re-enactors.

But that’s partly because liberal reluctance to surrender American unity has turned into wild-eyed enthusiasm.  Liberals are happy to see themselves as the good guys, the protectors and allies of black people, and even happier to see conservatives – particularly southern white conservatives – as the embodiment of all American evil. Increasingly, liberals see America itself as so essentially compromised by racial evil that anyone would be foolish and naive to bestow upon her any hope or loyalty. But liberal racial sanctimony, like conservative racial denial, is really about unresolved guilt, about attempting to remove oneself from American sin. Conservatives childishly pretend it doesn’t exist; liberals face it but project it entirely onto the political Other. Conservatives hold onto American idealism by denying it’s less than ideal, liberals hold onto it by psychologically and politically removing themselves from America. The liberal response is more forgivable, of course, since they do face the truth, and they do hold onto their idealism. But they do so at the cost of alienation from their own country, that is, from themselves. And that detachment makes it too easy to indulge the darker aspects of that idealism and go crusading against conservatives like Puritan ministers railing against Satan. But unsurprisingly, shaming is not a constructive strategy. But it is an inevitable one when you’ve concluded that the only way to hold onto your idealism is by rebuking your own country.

And that’s how we’ve hardened into our two sad, familiar camps, defined by our respective dysfunctional reactions to the horrible contradiction between our national ideals and our national crimes. But callous denial and aloof sanctimony are not our only options.  The only hope, and it’s a slim one, is for liberals to see the damage they do when they so fundamentally deplore their fellow countrymen. Liberals, as the conscience of America, must be the more mature party here. If they can face up to American sin, can’t they face up to their own? It’s true that many conservatives are still outright racist, but most are not, and calling them all racists and labeling them as essentially evil does enormous harm to our national life. It degrades the discourse and increases mistrust and resentment, it hardens people in their resistance.  It confuses the symptom, racial resentment, with the disease, national pride, and it angers people who simply want to believe in themselves and their country. It plays into the hands of white nationalists and unscrupulous politicians. Conservatives have foolishly conflated believing in America with believing America has never really done anything wrong, and they badly need to educate themselves on the distinction. Many, out of stubbornness or animus or ignorance, never will.  But many could, and liberals need to give them the space to do so.

And as liberals, the only effective way we can educate is by example. We can do all three things at once: hold onto our ideals, squarely face our country’s sins, and honestly accept that they’re our sins, that we’re inextricably American too. Honest judgment of American history will never get a fair hearing if it’s not joined to a deep commitment to America itself, since no one will hear criticism from someone they don’t trust. And we can be a little more forgiving of those who find it so difficult to hear.  If liberals cannot transcend their own misunderstandings, if they cannot graduate to a more mature and constructive engagement with our terrible history, if they can’t accept that redeeming America means redeeming actual Americans, and if they can’t meet them as equals and as fellow Americans – if they can’t do all this they won’t be honestly addressing our deepest problems; they’ll only be perpetuating them. 

American Crusader

Bradley Cooper as American sniper Chris Kyle

The sniper clearly sees his target.  That’s what makes him such a compelling figure.  He directly sees the impact of his actions; he knows who he kills and he knows what killing means.  The chaos of war may prevent the grunt soldier from knowing if he ever hits anyone; but the sniper knows.  He rains down death like a wrathful god and he sees who he smites.

So he must confront the question: Who is an enemy and who is not?  That’s the dilemma crouching at the center of American Sniper, the movie by director Clint Eastwood, which presents the life and career of legendary Iraq War sniper Chris Kyle.  The movie sees Kyle as an admirable, old-fashioned military hero: courageous, smart, tough, willing to sacrifice for his comrades.  He protects the good guys by killing the bad guys, and it’s quite clear to him which is which and who is who.

But from where did such old-fashioned moral clarity spring?  According to Eastwood, from the simple teachings of Kyle’s father, a Texas Sunday-school teacher and church deacon.   In an early scene the stern father illuminates for Chris the moral facts of life:

There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs.  Some people prefer to believe that evil doesn’t exist in the world.  And if hatred ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. These are the sheep. Then you got the predators. These people use violence to prey on the weak. They are the wolves.  Then there are those who are blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock.  These men are the rare breed that live to confront the wolf.  They’re the sheepdog.  Now we’re not raising any sheep in this family and I will whoop your fucking ass if you turn into a wolf.

Strength without goodness is evil, but goodness without strength invites evil.

The rest of movie shows Chris living out his father’s creed, committed to being a strong and protective sheep dog.  He finds purpose after terrorist attacks against American embassies in Africa and, of course, after 9/11.  The determination to do good sustains him through the rigors of Navy Seal training, through his four terrifying tours in Iraq, through bitter struggles with a wife and family who resent his unending service, through the confusions of returning to civilian life.  He only wavers when he doesn’t know who he’s fighting for, when he’s home and has no sheep to protect.  Finally home for good, he tells a military doctor:

It’s the guys I couldn’t save. Those are the faces I see. That’s my regret – that I couldn’t hold on longer. That I couldn’t do more.

The doctor introduces him to his last fight: helping physically and emotionally wounded soldiers come to terms with the horrors they’ve experienced.  And like every other fight, he faces it bravely and squarely, never doubting his intentions or his ability to help his fellows.  But this is the fight that defeats him; one particularly damaged veteran, Eddie Ray Routh, slips into psychosis and murders Kyle.

The Chris Kyle portrayed in the movie is a genuine hero (though the real-life Kyle was a more ambiguous figure).  There is much to admire in someone so eager to fight the good fight, to sacrifice and risk so much to help his comrades and his country.  But it is a sad, limited heroism, a heroism with blinders on.  As a sniper he saw his victims clearly and as an American soldier he saw good and evil clearly.  But are good and evil really so clear?  To Kyle anyone who fights America must be evil, since America can’t possibly be in the wrong.  It never occurs to him that he was part of a military occupation of a foreign country that did not want him there!  Neither Kyle nor the movie ever considers the complexity of the Iraqi situation, with its wide array of insurgencies, peopled by Baathist ex-functionaries, Iraqi ex-soldiers, and Islamic militants; with Sunni groups, only a fraction of which were connected to al Qaeda; and Shiite militias aligned with Iran fighting against Sunni groups like al Qaeda.  The Iraqi hell was ignited by an American invasion against a regime that had no weapons of mass destruction and had no connection to attacks on the U.S.  Can we honor Kyle’s heroism when we face these facts?

Some of the movie’s most compelling moments come when Kyle is uncertain about a particular kill.  In the opening scene he must decide whether to shoot a mother and son who may be preparing to attack a vulnerable American column.  He hesitates, but when he’s sure of their evil intent, he shoots them down, professionally and decidedly.  In another scene a small Iraqi boy picks up a grenade launcher with great difficulty and tries to aim it at approaching American soldiers.  Kyle’s heart races as he hopes to God he won’t have to kill the boy.  But the child suddenly drops the weapon and runs away, and Kyle breaks down and cries in relief.  He’s a killer, but he’s not heartless; he’s the good guy!  But tactical doubts are as far as Kyle allows himself to go.  He may worry about killing a child, but he never worries that there’s something wrong with a situation which compels him to kill children.  He just stubbornly refuses to consider the reckless, brutal, irresponsibility of preemptively invading a country that posed no threat.  He simply will not let himself see the bigger picture.

But Eastwood’s point seems to be that Kyle could only be a hero by not seeing it.  When Kyle’s friend and fellow Navy Seal Marc Lee is killed in action, Kyle and his family attend the funeral stateside; Lee’s mother reads aloud a letter her son had written shortly before his death, a letter in which he expresses his doubts about the war.  On the drive home Kyle tells his wife what he thinks about his friend’s death and that letter:

We were operating off emotion and we walked into an ambush.  But that’s not what killed him. That letter did. That letter killed Marc Lee.  He let go and he paid the price for it.

Doubt is deadly; only rock solid faith can sustain us.  Eastwood seems to be saying that a soldier fighting a war must believe in it for his own sake.  Kyle was certain that he and his fellow soldiers were the sheep dogs, the insurgents and terrorists were the wolves and Americans back home were the sheep, and that’s all there was to that.  It may be simple-minded and foolish, but seeing his situation that way is what gave Kyle his strength.  To Eastwood, he is strong because he is good and he is good because he is simple.

And what applies to Kyle applies to America as well.  Eastwood is suggesting that this is the only way for a country to fight a war: it must believe in itself.  Since war is sometimes necessary, and therefore sometimes justified, we must believe in that justice if we are to triumph.  Could we have defeated Hitler if we had doubted ourselves? And is the determination to be a sheepdog foolish in itself?  There’s nothing wrong with committing oneself to fighting the good fight, to protecting the weak, to combating oppression.  Indeed, isn’t that the highest calling?

But Kyle’s sin, and America’s, is believing that good intentions are enough.  It was easy to justify fighting Hitler, but it’s not so easy to justify invading Iraq.  A thoughtful sheepdog – a sheepdog who wants to make sure he’s not a wolf – accepts the responsibility of understanding the meaning and consequences of his actions.  But also, more fundamentally, where both Kyle and his country – our country – go wrong is in believing that our intentions are always good.  Americans really love this movie, and we do so because it indulges our fervent wish to reclaim the conviction that we’re inherently, inescapably good.  And in that way, this movie – and every American war movie made in the last 40 years – is really about Vietnam.  Vietnam made us doubt, and we still have not come to terms with that.  Kyle’s simple faith and heroism urge us to join him in rejecting the doubt.  The farther right one goes on the political spectrum, the more one reveres that American goodness and applauds its forceful application.  But to some degree all Americans feel this Puritan instinct to save the world.

This is the tragedy of American idealism.  We ache to do good in the world, to be a force for good, to be an example of good.  But to blindly believe in our own crusading righteousness, and to deny the moral complexity of the world in order to cling to that righteousness, is to invite victimization by foolish and cynical politicians.  American idealism exploited Kyle and destroyed Routh, and through Routh, it destroyed Kyle as well.  It’s right to celebrate and admire Kyle’s courage and sacrifice, but we must overcome his limitations.  The best way to honor Kyle’s heroism is to prevent any further exploitation of the generous, eager idealism still out there. But that idealism must itself become more sophisticated and responsible.  We must absorb the lessons of Vietnam and Iraq and become less self-righteousness and more genuinely righteous.  We must become more humble about our intentions and our capabilities.  We can be both good and wise, but only if we concede that both we and the world are so much less simple than can be seen down the scope of a high-powered rifle.

Partisan Blindness: A Case Study

Tammy Duckworth at the World War II Memorial

Tammy Duckworth was born to be an American soldier.  Her ancestors fought in the Revolution, World War II and in Vietnam.  She entered the ROTC program in graduate school in 1990 at the age of 22.   In the Illinois National Guard, she chose to become a helicopter pilot because it was one of the few combat positions open to women.  In 2004 she flew over 120 combat hours in Iraq.  But on November 12^th of that year, while flying over the Tigris River valley, a rocket-propelled grenade fired by insurgents hit her helicopter directly below her seat.  Her legs were blown off and her right arm was terribly damaged.  During her lengthy and painful recovery, she never lost her spirit and her optimism; she learned to walk on prosthetic legs, and she even hoped to return to her pilot duties.  She didn’t fly again, but she did become a champion of veterans, helping to create a rehabilitation center for wounded veterans and serving as Director of the Illinois Department of Veteran Affairs and the Assistant Secretary of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.  She is presently a member of the United States House of Representatives from the 8^th district of Illinois.  Her determination, professionalism, patriotism, courage, and dedication to duty should make every American proud.  She is a genuine hero.

She recently received attention for her amazing verbally beat-down of a veteran’s benefit cheat.  On June 26, Duckworth sat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as it questioned businessman Braulio Castillo as part of its ongoing investigation into whether Castillo had obtained a $500 million IRS contract because of his personal friendship with an IRS deputy director.  But what caught Duckworth’s attention was that the IRS had assigned Castillo’s company that lucrative contract as part of a program of contracts set aside for firms owned by disabled veterans.  Castillo’s claim to disabled veteran status was that he twisted his ankle playing football for a military prep school in 1984.  That’s it; there’s no more to it.  Castillo dropped out of that prep school after less than a year and subsequently went on to quarterback his college football team.  He never served in the military in any capacity and he waited 27 years to make an official claim of any lasting physical injury.  An obscure regulation allows him to be treated as a veteran, since he received his “disability” at a military school.  But he is the Holy Roman Empire of bureaucratic classification: a disabled veteran who is neither disabled nor a veteran (nor much of a human being).  So Duckworth, as seen in this amazing video, just tears him apart.  She reads from a letter Castillo wrote to the Veterans Administration explaining his condition: “These are crosses that I bear due to my service to our great country and I would do it again to protect this great country.”  Duckworth’s follow-up is a masterpiece of outrage and sarcasm:  “I’m so glad that you would be willing to play football in prep school again to protect this great country,” she mocks. “Shame on you, Mr. Castillo. Shame on you. You may not have broken any laws but you certainly broke the trust of this great nation. You broke the trust of veterans.”  Watch the video and you will be gratified to see a genuine hero smack down a callous fraud.

Duckworth is a genuine hero, even a righteous hero, but did I mention that she’s also a liberal Democrat?  That shouldn’t matter in this case, and the vast majority of conservative commentators have either supported Duckworth in this instance or ignored the matter entirely.  But there is a small minority of conservatives who actually have defended Castillo and condemned Duckworth.  Consider a writer from the hard conservative website RedState with the pen-name streiff, whose post on Castillo’s shaming calls Duckworth a “Political Hack, Professional Victim, Schoolyard Bully”.  He spins like a top to avoid applauding Duckworth and condemning Castillo.  First he blames the system:

These special carve-outs in contracting laws are wrong on every conceivable level, other than creating a feel good moment for the Congress, and one can no more be shocked, surprised, and upset when they are manipulated than one should be shocked, surprised, and upset when you are hit by a car when walking across the freeway.

So Castillo has no personal responsibility here, he’s merely the victim of overpowering liberal government temptations.  But, somehow, that same evil liberal government must not be questioned: “Regardless of what ‘Doctor’ Duckworth might think of Mr. Castillo’s injuries, the facts are that he applied for the disability rating and the VA granted him that rating. She doesn’t get a vote on it and no one should lionize her for her asshattery.”  So even a democratically-elected, badly-disabled, war-hero congresswoman shouldn’t express her anger when someone tries to steal benefits meant for genuine veterans?  The VA rules were handed down from on high, those rules have spoken and we can only submit.  We can be sure that the fair-minded Mr. streiff would just as categorically defend welfare cheats and frauds.  According to his genuinely wearing-your-ass-as-hat logic, if a government program follows its own rules then its results can never be questioned.  Anyone who does so is merely being a “hack” and a “bully”; they can’t possibly be a responsible public servant rightly condemning dishonesty and policing a public program.  It’s fascinating that such a self-proclaimed and such a self-congratulatory “firm believer that the government is our servant not our master” makes such an absolutist and appalling argument for submitting without question to those same government masters.

And he shamelessly misrepresents the cause of Duckworth’s anger:  “Duckworth took umbrage at the fact that Mr. Castillo has a VA awarded service connected disability rating of 30%.”  Actually, no.  She “took umbrage” because Castillo lied about his condition, wasted the VA’s time and resources and received gobs of IRS money that was supposed to go to actual disabled veterans.  Watch the video and that is utterly clear.  She just used Castillo’s 30% rating to make her larger point: Castillo gamed the system without regard for actual veterans.

But streiff must know all that – it’s all there in the video included in his piece!  So why does he twist himself up into such ridiculous logical pretzels to avoid the truth?  Conservatives constantly speak of “personal responsibility”, but Castillo should not be held responsible.  Government is our servant, but we must obey it without question.  It doesn’t matter if Castillo “gamed” or “defrauded” the system.  Really?  It’s not relevant?  Why does streiff recoil in such horror from that most conservative verbal instrument: the moral harangue?  He abandons all his conservative principles in his desperate need to avoid what even most conservatives find obvious: Duckworth’s condemnation of Castillo is exactly the sort of moral clarity that our political discourse is crying out for and she’s just the person to do it.  It would easy to dismiss streiff’s piece as pure partisan misrepresentation, just a shamelessly dishonest attack – particularly from a website and a writer that have in the past attacked Duckworth and defended her Republican opponent.  Clearly, that is part of what’s going on, but I believe there is something more: blinkered inability to accept a liberal Democrat as a moral authority.

In streiff’s world only conservatives are allowed the moral harangue, because only conservatives are moral in essence.  Obviously, there are liberals who believe that liberals are moral in ways that conservatives are not.  And – as the Duckworth episode shows – most conservatives are easily capable of seeing moral authority in non-conservatives.  But the essence of modern American conservatism consists of these notions: that all issues are moral issues, that all social and political problems can only be addressed by the sufficiently forceful application of simple moral principles, that only morally correct individuals have both the moral clarity and the moral strength to impose those principles, and that moral correctness is itself an essential part of an individual.  Put simply, only a good man knows what’s good.  To the kind of moral simpleton such as streiff whose ideology is unqualified by any pragmatism or generosity – that is, to a constricted and thoughtless conservative – moral correctness and conservatism are the same thing.  To be a liberal is to have a blemished and polluted soul and no such degenerate can possibly be a moral authority.  Nothing can redeem a liberal, not love of country, not love of her fellow soldiers, not courage in face of unimaginable pain and suffering.  All of these are superficialities, distractions from the underlying evil essence that every liberal soul bears like the mark of Cain.

This is the ugly, distorted face of partisan hatred.  It fascinates because it’s such a pure specimen.  And it’s in such a widely read venue.  Liberals, of course, are just as capable as conservatives of being shrill rhetorical bullies and hacks – sadly, both sides amply demonstrate that every day.  But conservatives and liberals tend to bully in different ways, each befitting their natural ideological inclinations. When a liberal slips into the deep end he becomes an egalitarian crusader slaying the dragons of privilege and authority, or a captive of anarchic fantasies.  An extremist conservative sees all politics in terms of authority that must be respected; an extremist liberal denies that any authority deserves respect.  And liberalism, with its pragmatism and meliorism, can just as easily slide into anti-ideological extremism; it can become too ready to sacrifice means to ends, too dismissive of principle; it can become relativist and cynical. Excessive avoidance of idols can itself become idolatry.  But all extremism results from the same fault: the overpowering need to purify and simplify.  The fanatic discards mitigating and conflicting principles and facts and reduces the complexity of life to a single conviction; examples abound: “all politics is class warfare”, “the state must enforce God’s commands”, “nothing should constrain great individuals”.  The logic of fanaticism leads inevitably to seeing all dissidents as enemies of the one shining truth.  And when a fanatical American conservative reviles his opponent this is how his ideology demands he do so: he denies them any moral respect, no matter how well earned.

Standing by the Sides of the Tracks

  

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” – Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson wrote those words in 1783 contemplating the enormity of the injustice of slavery.  Seventy-eight years later Abraham Lincoln assumed the presidency and reaching out to seceding southern compatriots, he struggled mightily against becoming the instrument of God’s justice:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Struggling over race is what Americans do.  The Civil War, the failures of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, the fight over multiculturalism.  We struggle mightily, but, ultimately, race defeats us.  There has been tremendous progress, of course, but race remains the most important political divide in American politics.  Conflict over race defines, distorts and confounds almost every political issue in contemporary American politics.  Consider something as mundane as this year’s election for United States Senator from Massachusetts.  A credible and qualified liberal Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, is finding it improbably difficult to remove Republican Scott Brown from the seat held by liberal lion Teddy Kennedy for 47 years.  The reason Warren is running only neck and neck with Brown is that she’s a Harvard professor who has described herself as a racial minority.  Yes, it’s about race.  The struggle over race lies deep and implacable within the American psyche; it poisons our politics; it elicits not our better angels, but our most bitter demons, even in Massachusetts, even in 2012.  We all still tremble in the shadow of Jefferson’s dark reflection.

Teddy Kennedy never lost an election.  He was first elected United States Senator from Massachusetts in 1962, while his brothers were the President and the Attorney General of the United States, and he was re-elected an amazing eight times.  He was a proud liberal and he fought ferociously for minorities and the disabled, for education and immigration.  But his real passion, the cause for which he worked his entire political life, was universal healthcare.  For Kennedy the American welfare state and the social contract it represented would never be complete until every American could depend on decent and affordable medical care.  But in the summer of 2009, just as President Obama seemed poised to push universal healthcare through Congress, death finally removed Teddy Kennedy from the Senate.  And Kennedy’s dream almost died with him.  It was the subsequent special election in January 2010 that sent Scott Brown to the Senate, ending the Democratic, filibuster-proof, 60-seat majority and forcing Democrats to pass Obamacare through contentious legislative contortion.  The people of Massachusetts – one of the most liberal states but also the home of the original Tea Party – had sent Brown explicitly to kill Obamacare and also because they were frustrated with Washington’s broader dysfunction.  They also wanted the Democratic Party to know that no party or family owned that Senate seat.  All those messages were properly sent and received, and now, almost three years later, any respectable Democratic candidate should have no trouble reclaiming Teddy’s seat.  And Warren, Harvard law professor, champion of community, inspiring convention speaker, and “scourge of Wall Street”, clearly qualifies.  What almost disqualifies her in the eyes of many of her fellow Bay Staters, though, is that she claims to be 1/32 Cherokee.

Obviously, every election has its own issues and complications.  Warren is an academic, not a career politician.  She’s not a gregarious Massachusetts native like Brown.  And she’s a woman.  But some local politicians are convinced that the biggest drag on her campaign is the inability to put the Cherokee issue her behind her.  Here’s the background: Warren was born in Oklahoma in 1949; as a child she heard family stories that her paternal grandparents had not wanted their son to marry Elizabeth’s mother because she was part Cherokee and Delaware.  At age 24 Elizabeth enrolled in the law program at Rutgers University, which she completed in 1976; she taught law at many schools, including Rutgers, the University of Houston, the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania; she became an expert on bankruptcy and the finances of middle class families.  In 1984, she described herself as a Cherokee when she contributed to a Native American cookbook.  In 1986 she listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty.  Warren worked temporarily for Harvard in 1992, during which time that university, in complying with federal affirmative action regulations, listed a Native American woman as part of its faculty.  While Warren was back at the University of Pennsylvania from 1993 till 1995, Harvard did not report a Native American woman on its faculty.  In ’95 Warren went back to Harvard to stay.

It’s not clear if Warren’s family lore – which is similarly reported by siblings – is actually true; there is no documentary evidence. And even if it is true that she’s one thirty-second Native American, it seems that those distant native ancestors never properly registered as natives and therefore she can’t officially claim Cherokee membership.  It’s pretty clear that Warren genuinely believes both that she really is part Cherokee and that being part Cherokee has not helped her career.  She claims she never drew attention to being mixed race when applying for her various positions, including the one at Harvard.  She says Harvard recruited her and that her ethnicity never came up during the hiring process and, further, that she never knew that Harvard had used her to defend its commitment to racial diversity.  But even if all that’s true – which would seem to be the case – it doesn’t mean that Harvard didn’t use her supposed racial heritage for its own advantage.  Let’s put that another way: even if Warren didn’t deliberately use race to advance her career it still probably advanced her career.  That doesn’t mean Warren isn’t qualified to teach at Harvard, she clearly is.  And it doesn’t necessarily mean that Harvard felt the need to fulfill a numerical quota.  But it does mean that Harvard benefitted by hiring a woman they could list as a Native American woman.  Therefore – and the logic is inescapable – simply being a Native American woman can help one’s career.

The Brown campaign has acted as if all this is a character issue, as if Warren had known that she wasn’t really a Native American but was pretending to be so to get ahead.  As Brown put it in his first televised debate with Warren, “She claimed that she was a Native American, a person of color, and as you can see, she’s not.”  That’s foolish, of course, since many people of native descent appear utterly white.  The point is that Brown is accusing Warren of cheating, of pretending to be something she is not for unfair advantage.  He’s accusing her of passing.  In the old days one was considered black if one had any black ancestors; just one drop of black blood was thought to pollute an otherwise pure white genetic makeup.  Therefore, there were many who were, by the definitions of the day, genetically black but who looked as white as Rush Limbaugh, some of whom “passed” as white.  It’s hard to blame them for living as white, since life as a white person in those days was so much easier than life as a black person.  But times have changed, haven’t they?  According to Brown, now one passes for non-white.  Brown isn’t really criticizing Warren’s character, he’s criticizing a system that encourages such lapses in character.  She “passed” because Harvard and the entire multicultural and affirmative action regime made it advantageous for her to do so.

Brown tries to cover up by claiming, in effect, that he’s defending the affirmative action system, that he’s upset that a genuine Native American candidate was denied Warren’s spot because Warren gamed the system; he charges that she “took advantage of a status that was only entitled to people of true need.”  But his tender sympathies regarding the plight of minorities do not bear close examination.  His silly debate claim that Warren’s appearance means she couldn’t possibly have native blood does not exactly reveal any depth or sophistication in his understanding of racial issues.  He laughed along on a radio show when right-wing comedian Dennis Miller made a crack about sending a donation to Warren in beads rather than dollars.  And there was the quite shocking racial episode in which members of Brown’s staff heckled a Warren rally with loud Hollywood-style war whooping while miming tomahawk chops.  Yes, they really did.  

Brown’s campaign traffics in crude racial stereotypes but claims to be defending minorities.   What’s going on here?  When asked about the heckling episode, Brown gave this telling response: “It is certainly something that I don't condone.  The real offense is that Warren said she was white and then checked the box saying she is Native American, and then she changed her profile in the law directory once she made her tenure.”  How reassuring that he doesn’t condone the yahoo mockery of racial minorities by his own staffers!  (He did reprimand his staff later.)  But consider that to Brown the real offense is falsely claiming to be a minority.  Who exactly does Brown think Warren’s victims are?  Is he really worried that Warren is passing down, i.e. that she’s pretending to be a member of an oppressed group that in this limited circumstance has a small advantage?  Or is he worried that Warren is passing up, sneaking into the privileged life, as some blacks used to do?  If he really objects to passing down, he would speak up more about the troubles of non-whites, not mock them.  And there doesn’t seem to be any reasonable objection to passing up, since why shouldn’t Warren cheat a system that has cheated her merely because of her race?  He’s trying to have it both ways: It was terrible of her to cheat an immoral system.  Officially he condemns her for stealing the crumbs reserved to poor put-upon minorities, while he signals to his white constituency that the whole system is corrupt and they are its real victims.  What Brown really seems to object to is that Warren plays these convoluted race games at all, that she isn’t satisfied with being white.  For Brown, this is the real character issue.  She offends his white pride. 

There are perfectly reasonable objections to affirmative action.  For one thing, it demands legal definitions for its racial categories, definitions as silly and arbitrary as the one-drop-of-black-blood rule, a rule which to our enlightened sensibilities seems both so evil and so quaint.  If Warren’s great, great, great grandparent was a full-blooded Native American does that mean Warren is really a Native American?  What if it was four greats instead of three?  And do we make any distinction between biology and culture?  Was Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi Italian because his ancestors were Italian?  Would he still have been Italian if he had been spirited away at birth to Ireland and raised as Irish?  No, he was Italian because he spoke Italian, adhered to Italian folkways and identified with Italy, because he was culturally Italian.  Is Warren at all a Cherokee in a cultural sense?  If not, then she really is just as white as Brown says she is, regardless of her genetic makeup.  Her identification as Cherokee becomes little more than sentimental affectation. And has multiculturalism made race less of an issue in American life?  The question answers itself.  Affirmative action was created to undo centuries of injustice and violent suppression.  But it created a new – though comparatively minor – injustice, the denial in some circumstances of equal access to whites.  If being a Native American female makes it a little easier to get a job at Harvard then being neither Native American nor female makes it a little harder.  Affirmative action is not a policy well designed to effect racial reconciliation. 

The quite serious problems of affirmative action, however, don’t remotely counter the fact that simply being a white male in America, even today, has immeasurable benefits.  There may be some deluded souls who don’t find that bleeding obvious, but they’re in such deep denial that nothing could possibly convince them.  Warren was passing down, not up, whatever Brown or his constituents perceive.  But this shows why most conservatives, such as Scott Brown, have no credibility when objecting to multiculturalism: they’re blind to white privilege.  (Liberal blindness, of course, works in reverse.  They find white privilege glaringly obvious while denying the downsides of affirmative action.)  If Brown and many of his supporters really believe Warren is passing up then they must really believe that the class she’s passing into is a more powerful class.  They don’t just deny white privilege, they fear minority privilege.

But Brown’s rather visceral disgust with Warren (and, by implication, all of modern liberalism) consists of more than just white fear.  The other component is populism, the fear that there is a powerful class that discounts and injures the values and interests of the majority.  There is an elite who exploits us regular people.  Populism is the source of all effective and enduring American politics.  And the combination of populism and racial fear is as potent an elixir as American politics can conceive.  Though Warren comes from a genuine working class background and fights for the economic interests of working people, conservatives have branded her a snooty, intellectual, academic elitist.  The Brown campaign makes sure to always call her “Professor Warren” and Brown frequently called her “Professor” during their first debate.  Holly Robichaud of the Boston Herald mocks Warren’s middle-class credentials: “As a Harvard professor married to another Harvard professor, she may find connecting with middle-class voters a tough sell.”  Liberal analyst Simon van Zuylen-Wood writes that Warren’s occupation inspires resentment among both conservatives and “the historically Democratic blue-collar voters whom Scott Brown won over with a barn coat and a pick-up truck in the 2010 special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.”  Brown’s coat and truck mark him as one of us, as “the king of townie Massachusetts,” as one local commentator put it.  Warren may be fighting for middle class bankruptcy relief against conservative politicians wholly owned by credit card companies, but she lacks a coat and a truck.  She must be against us.  She can’t even name any of the Red Sox!

The white working class has always been populist.  The central theme of American history consists of the white working class fighting back against exploitation by elites, from the Revolution to Presidents Jefferson and Jackson to William Jennings Bryan and the People’s Party to Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to FDR.  White working men have always been the heroes of American politics, the good guys.  They were the champions of freedom and equality, if only for white men.  There were two episodes in which white populism failed, and in both case it failed because of racial exclusion.  Those episodes were the Civil War/Reconstruction era and the Civil Rights era.  In both cases, the white working class was asked to expand their notion of freedom and equality to include blacks, and in both cases they refused.  The Confederacy was founded upon the notion of white supremacy, which the Confederates placed above patriotism. During the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877), the post-war period when the southern states were brought back into the Union, the federal government led by the Radical Republicans (today we would call them liberals) tried to integrate blacks as full equals into American society.  But when the North wearied of policing southern racial violence and withdrew its armies, the ex-confederates imposed second-class status – sanctioned by law and custom, enforced by brutal violence, justified by the most egregious bigotry – upon the recently freed slaves, returning them almost to the status of slaves.  The slaves had been freed but Reconstruction had failed.  And the myth arose that the fight for Confederate independence was a “noble Lost Cause”, that the war was a “tragedy”, a terrible misunderstanding among brothers, not a war to emancipate human beings from chattel slavery and white supremacy, not a climax in the war against Africans in America that had been waged for 250 years, not the failure of whites to open up their democracy to its most maligned and mistreated outcasts.  The notion that the Civil War was a tragedy allowed white populists, North and South, to return to their status as the heroes, the good guys of American history.  And blacks and other minorities paid the price for that return.  And so things remained for nearly 100 years. 

During that 100 years, however, populism made great advances – for whites.  There was the establishment of the welfare and regulatory state, first under Woodrow Wilson, then under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Working people now had federal legal guarantees for working conditions, wages, retirement, etc.  And decades of labor agitation culminated in the passage of the Wagner Act of 1935, which protected the rights of workers to join unions.  Between populism in the form of a welfare state and populism in the form of labor unions, capitalism was tamed, was made to work for everyone.  However, these laws were generally written to keep minorities out; for example, when Social Security was enacted in 1935, it excluded domestic servants and agricultural workers, most of whom were overwhelmingly black.  And many unions explicitly excluded minorities.

But in the 1950’s black Americans fresh from fighting for democracy in Europe and Asia began to fight for it at home.  They demanded political and civil equality, refusing in various peaceful ways to comply with the racist and segregated regime of Jim Crow.  And allied with liberal politicians like Hubert Humphrey they pushed the federal government to enforce equal access to public services and accommodations, like lunch counters, hotels, buses and trains.  Populism had bestowed the good life upon the white working class, and liberals felt that it was time for that good life to be opened up to all Americans.  It was time for another Reconstruction.  But that Second Reconstruction failed as well.  No, that’s not quite fair, it half succeeded.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually ended the Jim Crow legal regime and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 actually enabled blacks to vote.  And blacks and other minorities began the long, hard slog into the mainstream of American economic and social life (a slog that continues).  But race riots in several cities across the country in the same period led to a white backlash.  Whites became increasingly disenchanted with civil rights and with liberal policy in general.  Conservatives courted the votes of white working people with increasing success.  In 1964 Barry Goldwater became the first national candidate to run against the Civil Rights laws with the hope of appealing to white voters.  Goldwater won only his own state of Arizona and five Deep South states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina), but this “Southern Strategy” was employed by successive conservatives and finally came to fruition with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

The point is that liberals and the white working class became estranged.  Before the 1960’s American liberalism was about the interests of working people.  Pre-Civil-Rights liberalism was white populism.  But when minorities and liberals pushed for racial integration it split the ranks of white working people.  Many were ready to open up the blessings of American society to everyone, but many – most southerners, for example – were not.  This led to the liberals and the white working class to reject each other.  Liberals began to see working people, particularly southern working people, as backward and ignorant; they rejected their folkways and attitudes.  The violent hatred of racial equality shown by white southerners marked them and revealed them as unenlightened and contemptible.  This is the beginning of liberal elitism.  Liberals, in effect, told southern whites that they weren’t the heroes of American democracy anymore; this is what white conservatives really mean when they speak of liberal elitism.  Working class whites had always seen themselves as the heroes; indeed, liberals had been telling them so since the time of Jefferson and Jackson.  They were not about to abandon their populist notions of themselves as the regular people fighting against an arrogant elite.  But the more liberals looked down on southern whites as rednecks and rubes, the more southern whites looked upon liberals as intellectual, sneering snobs.  For 150 years liberals nurtured the populist myth of commoners against the aristocrats and then, circa 1964, they jumped right into the role of the aristocrats.  And conservatives were only too happy to make that case; that, not capitalists, but liberals – with their subversive education, their refined cultural tastes, and their racial sanctimony – were the real elite.  Liberal condescension made it too easy to turn liberal populism into conservative populism.  And this new brand of conservatism found favorable reception among whites in the north as well.  Southern conservatives, in effect, said to white northerners, “You are southerners, too. You are being oppressed by the same snooty liberal elite as us.”  The extent to which white northerners became aligned with conservatism is the extent to which they believed that they had become southerners too.

And it’s true even now.  Now we know what a grass-roots American conservative actually is: one who’s convinced that liberals dismiss his values and think they’re better than him.  A conservative is someone who bitterly resents that he’s no longer treated like the hero of the American story.  This explains conservative passion and it explains conservative rancor.  They’re angry because they know that they are the “real America” – they’ve always known that, even when they voted for liberals. But the rest of America doesn’t seem to recognize it anymore.  White working people and conservatives are actually not racist for the most part, at least not in the old-fashioned let’s-beat-‘em-down sense.  But contemporary white conservatism is based upon the continuing myth of white populism, a myth which now claims that small-town, religious, white folk are still the good guys; that condescending liberals are their elitist enemies who are too eager to disdain them and tax them for the sake of free riders, welfare queens and abortion-lovers.  They don’t vote conservative because they hate blacks, they vote conservative out of resentment, out of a desire to strike back and re-assert their heroism.  White working people hear Professor Elizabeth Warren describe herself as a Native American and all they hear is, “You’re not the good guys.”  Scott Brown wears the right coat and drives the right truck and they hear, “You’re still the good guys.”  That’s all they need to hear.

But, as white working people continue to support conservative populism they perpetuate the failure of the Second Reconstruction.  Their inability to see the horrible wrong and destructiveness of their past racism (and to some extent, continuing racism) hobbles and distorts their populism, and with it hopes for both economic fairness and racial reconciliation.  But liberal condescension is a big stumbling block as well.  The inability to appreciate the healthy side of faith and family marginalizes liberalism.  Liberals cannot consider themselves the party of inclusion while they disdain working class sensibilities.  It is this lack of inclusiveness which lends credibility to conservative charges of liberal intolerance.  And truth be told, liberals and working class conservatives miss each other and need each other.  Liberals have become alienated from American folk devotion and conservatives have become alienated from any higher communal aspirations.  Both groups have become pinched and narrow, clinging to their respective shreds of a once-great populism.  And the triumph over the last few decades of content-free individualism, with its blunt relativism, consumerism and materialism, mocks any sense of the community and solidarity that was once part of American populism.  Such individualism makes no room for heroes.  A liberalism with these barren cultural commitments is a liberalism unable to complete its mission: the inclusion of minorities into a broadly prosperous and harmonious society.  Liberalism must reclaim its heroism.  Conservative malign neglect of racial issues – cynically masked with the rhetoric of color-blindness – just perpetuates material and social inequality.  And the liberal response, affirmative action, is merely a band-aid on those wounds, and an ugly band-aid at that.  But only liberals can be the bridge between minorities and disaffected whites.  Only inclusive liberalism can redeem populism. 

In November 1963, when Teddy Kennedy had only been a Senator for one year, his brother, the president, was shot and killed.  A year after that Teddy’s other brother, Bobby, resigned his post as Attorney General and was elected United States Senator from New York.  Less than four years after that, in June of 1968, Bobby was running for president himself when he was shot and killed.  Bobby’s death marks the death of liberal inclusion.  Robert Kennedy was the last national figure who broadly appealed to both minorities and white working people.  He was the last symbol of that old liberalism, the one that wanted everyone to be the good guys.  Two months before Bobby was killed, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was shot and killed.  Bobby was scheduled to speak in a black neighborhood in Indianapolis that night, but when the news of King’s death reached him he was urged to cancel.  But he didn’t cancel; he spoke to the crowd that had come to greet him and he broke the terrible news to them.  Then, as someone who himself had suffered violent loss he appealed to their better angels:

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization – black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love . . . What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

After his death, Bobby’s body lay in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, from where, on June 8, 1968 it was delivered by special train to Washington.  Thousands of Americans lined the tracks, saluting, holding American flags, weeping, praying, mourning.  They mourned Bobby and they mourned themselves, and they mourned their lost hopes for reconciliation.  Bobby’s death cleared the way for the triumph of Nixon and the politics of resentment, it ensured the failure of the Second Reconstruction.  We all still suffer the pain of that failure.  We all still stand by the sides of those tracks, mourning our lost hope.  The most terrible wounds are those that divide us, that make us enemies instead of brothers.  Unlike the First Reconstruction, we cannot heal some of those divisions at the cost of aggravating others.  All those divisions must be healed, for God’s justice still awaits.