Before you can address the tactical issues of the upcoming election, you must have a strategic idea of what it is about.
Political pundits would have you believe this presidential election is essentially a contest between competing political philosophies that will be decided by a rational American public making logical decisions.
Also, that the election will be decided on whether Kamala Harris has a convincing argument for most rational Americans in about seven states. I’m going to suggest that idea is not just wrong, it’s absurd.
What we’re looking at today, and have been since 2016 really, is the existential angst caused by a paradigm shift of historical proportions.
In America, democracy was not only compatible with white supremacy and oppression, it actually facilitated it. White supremacy was the democratic will of the American people. For me the campaign theme of saving America’s democracy rings a little hollow.
For the last 50 years, America has undergone a paradigm shift. A paradigm is a way of looking at or understanding something. It’s basically how we understand or make sense of our reality.
A paradigm shift is a significant change in that understanding, it replaces the usual way we think or do something with a new way.
For roughly 350 years America had a binary paradigm, from say 1619 to roughly 1960. Everything could be understood in terms of Black and white. Us and them.
Now there’s an army of white commentators that disagrees, but my column is not theirs. As late as 1960, when there were 179 million people in America, the population was 85% white,11% Black and less than 4% were Hispanic.
In that scenario it’s possible to reconcile the genocide of the Indigenous People, the enslavement and Jim Crow apartheid oppression of Black “Americans” with democracy. In fact, the violent malevolence visited upon Indigenous and Black people since 1789 was sanctioned by, and more often as not, executed by the democratically elected Federal and state governments of the United States of America.
In America, democracy was not only compatible with white supremacy and oppression, it actually facilitated it. White supremacy was the democratic will of the American people. For me the campaign theme of saving America’s democracy rings a little hollow.
But this too shall pass. In 2020 there are 330 million people in America, twice the 1960 population, but the demographic makeup is a lot different. Of those 330 million, 19% are Hispanic,12% are Black and 6% are Asian, in addition 10% of the population identifies as multiracial. In 2020 roughly 47% of the American population identifies themselves as something other than white.
This explains the fascist desperation of MAGA America. There’s no way you can continue to maintain a racist, patriarchal white male social, political, economic hierarchy and a functioning democracy simultaneously.
This paradigm shift, and the existential angst it creates, is exacerbated by an economy that has rapidly gone from a place based industrial economy to a constantly changing high tech interconnected global economy.
The American dream that white Americans had come to believe was their inherent right has disappeared in a generation. Now think about MAGA America and America’s changing demographic, cultural and economic landscape. This is the strategic context that explains the circumstances surrounding this election.
These MAGA Americans, like their Confederate forbearers, are fighting a lost cause to “protect their way of life” at your expense. I say lost cause because I believe there is an immutable law of the universe, that the old order must yield to the new order. It can go quietly and peacefully, or it can go resisting, but it will go.
The paradox of the United States is that everything has changed since 1860 and nothing has changed since 1860. The effort to form a more perfect union has always encountered and had to overcome the opposition and indifference of most white Americans.
No matter what happens on November 5th this issue will not be resolved. If Kamala Harris wins MAGA America will not go quietly into that good night, if Trump wins neither should we.
But what about the election?
To be continued.
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