I write about this in THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT but once black men could no longer vote it drastically changed the character of the party and if this disenfranchisement project succeeds the Dems will change substantially as well.
The point of this project is not simply to insulate their power from the public, it is to engineer the electorate to be narrow enough that even when they lose the rival party is restrained by the character of the populations who retain meaningful political influence.
*drastically changed the character of the republican party. You get the idea.
Anyway I do not think that elected Democrats understand they are in a battle to preserve the character of their party, not just the rights of their vulnerable constituents. But maybe they do and don’t care.
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Today, the statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee was removed from Charlottesville, Virginia, after years of protest. It was the inspiration for 2017's white supremacist rally, where activist Heather Heyer was killed. This is long overdue. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/r…
The true Lee has long been hidden behind a fog of nostalgia. Months prior to the rally, I wrote about Lee's canonization as a reluctant, anti-slavery Confederate—part of the postwar propaganda push to whitewash secession and justify the Jim Crow system. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
I revisit this essay in THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT, because the Lee mythology was the reason the white supremacists believed they could use him to mainstream their cause—and they were delighted with Trump's defense of the rally. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
Starting to think that maybe these guys aren’t as big on free speech and rigorous factual inquiry as they said
Anyway the *founders* knew the founding was flawed and we know that because they left us their conflicted thoughts on slavery for posterity. An ostensibly patriotic person would know this, a nationalist in the Orwellian sense would deny it or refuse to even learn.
A few years ago I wrote an essay titled "The Cruelty Is The Point" on Trump's approach to politics and policy. On Tuesday, my book sharing that title is being published. Today in the @nytimes, I explain why Trumpist politics didn't end with his defeat. nytimes.com/2021/06/26/opi…
Cruelty is a part of human nature; we're all capable of it. But in American history, its elevation to a virtue in politics is strongly associated with attempts to deny people their fundamental rights, from the Founding, to Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights Movement to now.
The greatest threat to American democracy has always been the drive by some of its leaders to deny human beings the basic rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence, because people want to be free.
I am very excited to share the cover for my forthcoming book: The Cruelty Is The Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump's America, which is coming out on June 29. You can preorder here: bit.ly/3psRSrr
I hope you'll buy a copy and encourage others to the same!
TCITP contains some of my Atlantic essays, but is mostly new material, including new pieces on the politics of police unions and the myth that European immigrants at the turn of the century came to America "the right way," among others.
A strange kind of denial greeted Trump's ascension, and a similar one is setting in after his defeat, both about what he did and represented, as though he were just an aberration, rather than a manifestation of beliefs that have plagued American democracy since the founding.
Baldwin’s remark that “Urban renewal is negro removal” is 60 years old, but when mocking actual history as “wokism” gone mad, it helps for both the mocker and their audience to be completely ignorant of that history. Relies on it.
Yes I get it, it really sounds crazy that white planners would destroy entire black neighborhoods to build a road. It still happened. theatlantic.com/business/archi…
OMFG WHO IS THIS YOUNG WOKE SAYING BUILDING ROADS IS RACIST?!!?!?! (It's Clarence Thomas).