Let me strongly recommend The Fiery Brilliance of Obama’s Lost Book Manuscript in the Sunday Times of Oct. 9. Some of us understood that there was no way Obama could do what we wanted him to. The white world wasn’t going to allow him to repair the damage that had been done to the Black community. When the civil rights community turned to the language of white privilege and racism, some of us understood it couldn’t fly in America. Whites believe they earned and deserve everything they have and any other position would damage them deeply and unfairly.
Obama understood that anything he could do for the Black community would have to be universal and it shows. McConnell blocked almost everything Obama tried to do but he couldn’t make Obama a one-term president, and neither he nor Trump could stop or repeal Obamacare. The American people showed their approval of Obama and attachment to Obamacare. Obamacare is universal though it repairs a major hole in Black lives. It illuminated and passed through the narrow hole for social justice programs in this country.
The insight is not new. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t propose or pass welfare for old people – he passed social security for everyone, not as welfare but as insurance. He sold us on our right to it and it became “the third rail of American politics” – the charged electric line that kills any who touch it.
I believe social justice is morally right. And I’ve no trouble paying taxes to help others – indeed I’d rather pay taxes for a program that works than to make contributions which help only a few but let’s us donors feel morally good. What I really don’t want to pay taxes for is to enrich the rich even more.
There are huge pitfalls in Obama’s approach. Farm programs sound universal but didn’t help minority farmers and haven’t done much for family farmers either. But those they helped want to lock their benefits in and lock out everyone else. Damages for harm done, and for benefits illegally denied, is a standard legal concept. But politics resists any for Blacks.
Roosevelt insisted Social Security should go through the Post Office – to make it as simple and resistant to official machinations as possible. Actually Social Security did cut Blacks out by excluding domestic and farm work that were more common among them. That’s finally been changed although the Court did its best to block benefits to both kinds of workers. It’s obviously hard to fashion equality so that denial seems unequal to the general public.
Applications processes almost automatically favor America’s largest corporations – and some foreign ones too. So the opening Obama highlighted for beneficial programs is narrow.
There’s only so much even a brilliant and much beloved president can do against determined opposition. To me, McConnell was a villain. He harnessed the great cancer of American politics – the racism that blocks valuable programs. A century ago, Populists advocated improvements for all American workers, but their coalition was broken over the back of racism, and everybody lost, as C. Vann Woodward explained in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which Martin Luther King called the “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The moral of the story: The most effective way to make progress for all America is to plan to vote, see that your friends do too, and reach out to friends in swing districts and states.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.