"What's Past is Prologue..."
November 15, 2016
All,
For some very odd, stubbornly evasive, and clearly self deluding reason far too many people in the United States today (the overwhelming majority of whom are white American citizens both in terms of their aggregate numbers and baseline percentage of the national population) continue to cling to the glaringly false, utterly bizarre and even willfully perverse notion that the rancid outcome of the presidential election last tuesday night was somehow a historical anomaly, and was not merely a determined continuation and extension of a very longstanding tradition in American politics generally over the past 150 years and especially in the modern post 1945 era.
That tradition of course is the pervasive all encompassing role of racial ideology in voting generally in this country and especially in national federal elections for the Presidency and Congress. That racial ideology of course is the structural, institutional, and systemic doctrine and practice of White Supremacy. For the past four years on this facebook site and for the past eight years in the online pages of the Panopticon Review website I have been constantly pointing this out in a very broad array of articles, commentary, editorials, and historical essays by not only myself but many other professional journalists, historians, political theorists, cultural critics, and social activists.
One of those essays is an excerpted piece of a much longer essay in progress on modern American politics since 1945 by myself that I have run on two previous occasions on this facebook page since its first appearance online on the Panopticon Review site on March 2, 2016. I am reprinting this excerpt here a third time because it continues to be a source of great frustration and even angry annoyance that so many people even in the wake of Trump's horrific victory on November 8, 2016 still insist on clinging to and even actively promoting an intellectually bankrupt notion about the actual theoretical, strategic, and tactical reasons for the abject failure of far too many liberal and even more significantly neoliberal pundits, operatives, activists, and theorists from the Democratic Party (and even among some left leaning ideological "independents") to properly organize, educate, mobilize, and advance the genuine interests and needs of the U.S. citizenry in both philosophically rooted and radically activist terms that would not only uphold the banner of political, economic, and cultural democracy in general terms, but would actively combat and oppose the social and ideological forces of racial, class, gender, and sexual oppression, exploitation, and discrimination in the public sphere. The protofascist rightwing forces led by Trump won the presidential and congressional elections for clearly defined reasons that we all have to be intellectually, morally, and ethically honest about. For without this honesty and clarity we cannot proceed to seriously address what is really wrong, dysfunctional, and destructive in our national politics and why...Stay tuned and pass the word...
Kofi
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/…/the-central-role-of-…
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on March 2, 2016):
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
The Central Role of Mythology, White Supremacy, Capitalist Hegemony and Ideological Hubris in Modern American Politics Since 1945
NOTE: The following piece is an excerpt from a much longer forthcoming essay-in-progress on the cumulative societal effects of Modern American Political History since 1945:
THE NEW CONFEDERACY IS EXACTLY LIKE THE OLD ONE (PLUS IT TOO HAS ACCESS TO SOCIAL MEDIA...)
by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review
"...There are many debilitating myths about American history in general and American politics in particular. In fact it could be said that the widespread intellectual and social reliance, even obsessive dependency, on this enormous cobweb of lies, distortions, half truths, misrepresentations, and fallacies have contributed to an atmosphere of social discourse that is often drowning in a cesspool of rhetorical evasions and blatantly false assertions. One of the most dangerous and paralyzing of these myths has to do with the alleged progressive attitudes and values of the national white American electorate—especially in the so-called modern era since the end of World War II. One of the persistent articles of faith of this mythology has it that since the popular notion of the ‘American Century’ (which we now often rather arrogantly refer to as the recent history of ‘Amercian exceptionalism’) emerged as a slogan following the collective defeat by the Allies of the United States, Europe, (and ironically by the then Soviet Union) of the global forces of fascism led of course by the German Nazi Party, there has been an endless promotion in the media, popular culture, and in academia of the idea that the United States is fundamentally a progressive, forward looking nation that deeply loves and supports democracy and is a firm believer in the systemic eradication of all forms and vestiges of such virulently anti-democratic, repressive, and reactionary ideas and practices as institutional and structural racism, sexism, class oppression and exploitation, homophobia, and imperial militarism. However even a cursory examination of the actual history of the U.S. since 1945 indicates that this reading of a substantial majority of the white American electorate is not merely inaccurate and off the mark but delusional.
For a stark and very significant example consider what the national voting record of white Americans in presidential elections has been since 1948. It was in that year that former Vice President Harry Truman first ran for the office as the Democratic Party candidate following the untimely death of his predecessor President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April of 1945 (who in November 1944 had won the presidency for an unprecedented fourth term—a future possibility that was eliminated by the passage of the twenty second amendment to the constitution in 1947 which stated that no presidential incumbent could henceforth serve more than two terms). However despite this new ruling and the fact that both the far left and far rightwing segments of the national Democratic Party bolted from Truman candidacy and ran their own independent campaigns (i.e. former Vice President in Roosevelt’s last administration in 1944 Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party and then Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of the openly racist and segregationist “Dixiecrat” Party) Truman was still able to garner 53% of the white vote nationally, that along with the heavily truncated 71% of the black (male) vote was barely enough to provide Truman with a surprising but very narrow victory over his Republican opponent New York Governor Thomas Dewey, whom the media and most political pundits had erroneously predicted would easily beat Truman.
What’s also significant about the national presidential election of 1948 is that except for only ONE other occasion in the past 64 years(!) the Democratic candidate for President (whether he was an incumbent or not) has failed to receive anywhere near a majority of the national white vote. Please allow me to repeat this harrowing statistic: In the last 16 presidential elections following Truman’s victory in 1948 and going back 64 years to the next presidential election in 1952, a substantial majority of white American voters have voted for the Republican candidate--again whether he was the incumbent or not--15 times. The ONLY exception in the past six decades is 1964 when former Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, ran on his own for the office a year later vs. arch conservative and rightwing political reactionary Barry Goldwater. Clearly, in what was essentially a national sympathy vote for the successor of the slain President Kennedy, Johnson received a whopping 60% of the national white vote, a figure that hasn’t been reached by any presidential candidate in the Democratic Party in the fifty years since; one would have to go back 70 years to 1944 in Franklin’s Roosevelt’s last presidential victory to find any Democratic Party candidate who won as large of a percentage of the white vote. In fact in the last 16 presidential elections Democratic Party candidates have only won a cumulative national average of 38% of the white vote.
So the obvious question looms: What do these dramatic statistics tell us about the modern white American electorate since 1945? Well for starters it clearly tells us that the average white voter in general since 1945 has not supported and does not currently support a progressive social and economic agenda by the government. Of course this may change at some point in the near future (say in a decade from now) but I highly doubt it will change anytime soon in the foreseeable future (i.e. the next two national presidential election cycles leading up to and probably including 2020)…"
Posted by Kofi Natambu at 8:19 AM
Labels: American political history, Capitalist hegemony, Hubris, Ideology and Politics, Mass media, Mythology, the Confederacy, Voting
