The Battle for “The Soul of America”

I just got around to reading Jon Meacham’s best-selling book ‘The Soul of America.’  Like most non-fiction books, the title is intended to get your attention and the subtitle tells you what it’s about: ‘The Battle for Our Better Angels.’

Meacham is a left-leaning editor and presidential historian.  So, I expected to get some moralizing about the current resident of the White House.  But I didn’t get it.  There were a few swipes at him in the introduction and the first chapter.  That was just to set the tone for what followed.

Meacham lays out a history of the United States as we have made progress on racial justice by consistently overcoming a tribal fear of “the other.”  The story he tells - mostly through presidential history - reveals the complexity of presidents who had the political courage and the moral leadership to enact laws, enforce court orders and espouse a moral philosophy consistent with that of our founders.  

He does so while pointing out the moral failures of those same presidents.  Harry Truman used racial slurs in private but wrote to Congress in 1948 about our belief that “all men are created equal and that they have the right to equal just under the law.”  He faced down the inevitable backlash from Southern Democrats saying, “I’m everybody’s president.”

Teddy Roosevelt (TR) was the first president to invite a person of color – Booker T. Washington – to dinner at the White House. He later recalled, “the very fact that I felt a moment’s qualm on inviting him because of his color made me ashamed of myself…”  And, yet, he worried that low birth rates among the “best people” (the English-speaking, white population) might lead to “race suicide.” 

The two-steps-forward-one-step-back struggle for racial equality and acceptance of immigrants has always been a study in contrasts.  Initial reforms under TR and Woodrow Wilson were “plagued by theories of racial superiority and fears of the ‘other.’”  FDR rescued capitalism and “redefined the role of the state to lift up the weakest among us” but interned “innocent Americans of Japanese descent.” 

Meacham spends more time discussing the courage and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson than other chapter of our history.  Paying scant attention to the failure of the Vietnam War and the five decade long failure of his Great Society, he paints LBJ as a hero of the same stature as Lincoln. And, indeed he was.  Despite my distaste for LBJ who lied us into a war we should never have fought, I gained a new appreciation for his moral and political courage.  Like Truman, LBJ was a Southern Democrat whose moral sense overcame his background.  He relentlessly advocated that we as a nation rise above racism, saying, “whatever your views are, we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for [The Civil Rights Bill of 1964] and three-fourths of the Republicans… I signed it, and I am going to enforce it…”

Meacham closes his book thusly:

“For all of our darker impulses, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and deferred, the [American] experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight. There is, in fact, no struggle more important, and none nobler, than the one we wage in the service of those better angels who, however besieged, are always ready for battle.”

WHO WILL LEAD?

Competing for immigrants... My original sin... An MLK slip of the tongue

Competing for immigrants

I recently wrote to the senior senator from New York, minority leader Chuck Schumer. My message was simple: “Fight for what matters; let go of what doesn’t.  Fight for DACA; give him his damn wall.”  But, that ain’t gonna happen.  

Before I go on, here’s a two-sentence economics lesson.  (Two sentences, I promise.)

Growth in GDP is the sum of changes in productivity plus the change in population.  That’s not a theory; it’s a definition.  Two sentences! 

To keep the economy growing, we need economic policies that promote innovation (free market capitalism) and immigration policies that admit more immigrants.  There are other ways to grow the population than immigration of course. But, birth rates in the industrialized world are declining.  

Politicians, especially the president, stir up our worst fears about immigration – they take your jobs, kill your neighbors, and sell drugs. But those fears are unfounded. I lived in South Florida for 18 years among legal immigrants from Cuba.  I can assure you that Cuban-Americans are just like every other group of those descended from immigrants: aspirational.  Florida’s economy thrives not only because of low taxes and good weather but also because it provides a welcome environment for anyone who moves there whether they’re from Chicago or Bogotá. 

We have nothing to fear from legal immigration and everything to gain.  Our Canadian neighbors understand this and plan to welcome 1 million immigrants over the next few years.  We should emulate them. 

In short, if we expect our economy to continue to grow, we need to start competing for immigrants. 

My original sin

I’m a classic swing voter. I haven’t voted for a winning candidate in a presidential election since 1996.  Most everyone I know says they are conservative on fiscal matters and liberal on social issues.  It’s a suburban mantra.  So, why does neither party ever give us a candidate who fits the profile?  A friend who worked on political campaigns in New York, says, “there aren’t enough of you” to gain the attention of the major political parties.

Philosophically, I am more aligned with libertarians than with Republicans and find myself most in agreement with Republicans on economics and defense.  On social issues, not so much. Yet, I can’t vote Democrat because of economic policies designed to undermine the free enterprise system. What’s worse is the religious right and the politically correct left both wish to impose their values on the half of the population that disagrees with them.   

As both the Democrat and Republican parties drift (some would say gallop) to the extremes, I have become politically homeless.  I am not alone on this.  An academic study done by More in Common suggests I am part of the “exhausted majority.”

I refuse to be part of a political party that embraces hypocritical economic policies (tariffs, deficits), isolationist foreign policies and abhorrent social policies (anti-women, anti-gay).  Alternatively, I refuse to embrace politically correct culture.  Use the wrong phrase or express the wrong view and you’ll be hounded off college campuses or reviled in mainstream media.  For a white male to be accepted in this subculture, one must be “woke.” Why would I want to be a member of a political party that treats being a white male as an original sin?

The MLK slip of the tongue

A local controversy has gone viral.  Weatherman Jeremy Kappell has been fired for describing a local park as “Martin Luther Coon King, Jr. Park” during a live broadcast.  It was a slip of the tongue that went by so fast you may not have noticed it had it not been caught by Rochester’s African-American mayor, Lovely Warren. The mayor called for his dismissal and got her way. 

You have to wonder how a professional on-air broadcaster could make such an error.  I don’t!  I suspect (I have no evidence) that he hung out with bro’s sometime in his youth – high school, college or young adulthood – who used the phrase consistently without the self-correcting addition of “King” following the gaffe.  

It’s interesting that Bernice King (MLK’s daughter) has advocated he shouldn’t have been fired.  Suggesting that “we’re just moving people around the board” when we “just fire them,” she advocates rehabilitation. I confess I don’t know what that means in this case.

In making this assertion, Ms. King is channeling her father’s best instincts.  MLK gained national attention and empathy for his cause, in no small part, because he showed us how our behavior was misaligned with our stated values.  Today, media, both mainstream and social, would rather divide us than remind us to find the better angels of our nature. 

WHO WILL LEAD?