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This is an important argument by @briebriejoy on identity and power. It's something I encountered in researching corporate power. There are two basic big questions about justice in American history. (1) Can citizens self-govern? (2) Who is a citizen? currentaffairs.org/2017/09/how-id…
@briebriejoy America was founded out of aristocracy. Colonial American children learned about their betters before learning the difference between right and left. You would bow your head to a gentleman on street, not look him in the eye. A self-governing free citizenry was a fringe idea.
@briebriejoy Men like Alexander Hamilton simply did not believe in popular self-government, opposing democracy, straight out, as a bad system. He lost that battle. But many who sought liberty and self-government for citizens defined citizenship in a deeply exclusionary and racist way.
@briebriejoy This debate continued over the 'slave power' into Reconstruction and then the creation of corporate America. The corporate and financial oligarchs of the Frick, Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller eras used racial constructs to erode democracy.
@briebriejoy From the other side, populists attempted to create a multi-racial movement against corporate power. They were crushed, and the Jim Crow deal was the result. Even the 1896 Plessy case was over... railroads! And Plessy's lawyer was anti-monopolist ex-Union soldier Albion Tourge.
@briebriejoy In 1912, Woodrow Wilson sought to fight corporate oligarchs and bring forth industrial democracy, or a "New Freedom." He even got the endorsement of WEB Dubois in 1912! Dubois of course quickly regretted the decision.
@briebriejoy While Wilson's answer to the first question was 'yes we want citizens in a democracy governing,' his answer to the second question of 'who is a citizen' was deeply exclusionary and racist. That didn't make his answer to the first question wrong though.
@briebriejoy New Dealers, many of whom had experience under Wilson, finally smashed the plutocrats and established a democracy, largely still of white citizens. But let's be very clear. The 1920s was an exceptionally racist decade, the heyday of the KKK (which was a for-profit corporation).
@briebriejoy The New Dealers, many of whom believed in racial equality, did not actualize it with the institutions they constructed. They started with economic democracy. But they built a foundation for the multi-racial democratic movements which emerged with the Civil Rights movement.
@briebriejoy During World War II, a war of New Dealers, black Americans pursued the “Double V Campaign,” defeat of the Nazis abroad and segregation at home. They sought to answer *both* key questions. Yes we want a democracy of self-governing citizens, and *everyone* is a citizen.
@briebriejoy The problem under neoliberalism is the one @briebriejoy points out. If you answer the second question with 'everyone is a citizen,' but answer the first question with 'we don't want an economic democracy,' you get bad faith weaponization of identity. currentaffairs.org/2017/09/how-id…
@briebriejoy The law and economics scholar Robert Bork presaged the modern attack on racial justice with his attack on Title II of the Civil Rights Act in 1963. He said segregation was distasteful, but requiring restaurants to serve black people was an infringement on *property rights.*
@briebriejoy Bork rejected hundreds of years of nondiscrimination provisions in common carriage law that defined property rights as being social in nature. Bork sought freedom for capital, not freedom from capital. He answered question one, do we want an economic democracy, with 'no.'
@briebriejoy Today, we live in a world where we have aristocrats telling us we cannot touch our economic institutions, that some humans are better than others. But not always on race, often on... meritocracy. But you can't coherently argue that bullying is fine, except when it comes to race.
@briebriejoy And so @briebriejoy, @ninaturner and @BernieSanders are all arguing we must have a multi-racial democracy. That means both defining citizenship carefully and broadly, but also it means ensuring that citizens have power over their government and corporations. No aristocrats. /Fin
