William J. Mathis, Ph.D., has served as a school superintendent and vice-president of the Vermont state school board. He also served as Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center and is the president-elect of the Horace Mann League of America.
In the beginning, Kansas irregulars attacked Missouri. Missouri replied in kind. It was an unneighborly kind of war. Little mercy was asked and little was given. The Osceola raid, it was said,counted but one survivor. But with the rush of hot-blood, truth is often the victim. The partisans vowed righteous vengeance on each other, heated their rhetoric and twisted their courage for the oncoming civil war. It left 215,000 laying on the ground.
We fumble through our historical rolodex for comprehensible parallels to the insurrection ofJanuary 6; looking for something that explains, something that restores, something that fills the emptiness.
Such conflicts are not innocent unexpected surprises by play-pretend soldiers. Aggressive words lead to aggressive actions. People die.
Then, as now, crises were foreshadowed. Jayhawkers and Harper’s Ferry were not accidents. Our Constitution neglected the humanity of 4 million enslaved African Americans. Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, concluded that Blacks could not be citizens because they were not. Ranked the worst Supreme Court decision in history, this judicial miscarriage was influenced by President Buchanan who, until our times, was widely criticized as the nation’s worst president.Alienating both North and South, he could have prevented the Civil War – but he didn’t.
We have great accomplishments but we also have great fiascos. Benedict Arnold sold out when his ego was not stroked. Vice President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and launched a “filibuster” or invasion of Mexico. Acerbic Andrew Johnson got impeached and U. S. Grant’s administration is known for corruption. But Grant’sreal sin was the wink and nod he gave to the oppression of native Americans. After teaming up with red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy, PresidentRichard Nixon resigned in disgrace.
These shames pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s behavior. What the former president has in common with this rogue’s gallery is a selfish disregard of people and an enormous regard for himself. His minions flatter their Emperor and compliment his new clothes while ignoring his buck nakedness. It took a 26 year-old woman’scourage to say the Emperor was dressed a little light for the weather.
Meanwhile, black-robed justices summoned older spirits, “’tis time! ‘tis time! Double, double toil and trouble.” In one infamous week of opinions they overturned laws on women’s health, religion in the schools, scuttled environmental protections and approved carrying a gun in a society suffering thesickness of repeated mass murders.
Compounding these benighted events, the worst inflation in forty years placed the greatest burdenon people of limited means. The more affluent saw their investment portfolios crash faster than their travel plans. Hit with covid, a cautious population isolated itself while Russia weaponizedoil. The blockade of Ukrainian food threatens the world food supply.
Will the Center hold? – We have survived many crises and in turn, been strengthened by them. But the past is not always the predictor of the future. Rather, the turn of the tale lies in our ability to cohere as a nation and as a society.
We speak of the “United States.” Is it? The East and West coasts are solidly blue while the South and the mid-West are red. The economic and migration patterns increase and sharpen the inflection points. Will we see “Bloody Kansas” again? What is this beast that slaughters people claiming protection of a Constitutional right?
The “greatest generation,” those who came of age in World War II, and gave us the baby boom are coming to the end of their lives. We see the fading of the institutions that for one small flash made the American Dream a reality for some. We promised equality and access to opportunities.Instead, the wealth and educational gaps are increasing while politicians gerrymander voting districts to freeze political power to their advantage. School privatization claims “freedom of choice’ but the least reflection shows the reality is segregation and inequalities. At the same time, the exploding costs of elite higher educationinstitutions, make them inaccessible to children on the wrong side of the wealth gap. People advantaged by this system want to keep it that way.
We have survived the litany of our devils and prospered by the actions of our saints. Yet, the purpose of a democratic society is to build and sustain a fair and just society. It is endangered. We face an election that will likely tell the tale. Our obligation is to select leaders based not on the thin chaff of election season but on the principles and wisdom by which the candidates havegoverned, their commitment to the strengtheningof the commonwealth, and their manifest compassion to embrace all citizens.
Will the center hold?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money,” and Kurt Anderson’s “Evil Geniuses,” are two of many books that trace the political economic history that brought us to this moment in American history. Starting with U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Eugene B Sydnor’s request that then-A.G.-cum-Supreme-Court-Justice Lewis Powell draft a memo that was a blueprint for the ruling elite and Big Business to “save American free enterprise” by pooling their money together to tightly organize political infrastructure promoting laissez-faire policy (with all its ancillary social, cultural, and personal ideologies) while simultaneously transforming economic policy from Keynesianism back to laissez-faire, (spun to sound positive with ‘libertarian’ or ‘neoliberal’) capitalism. Trumpism is the result of fifty years of all this. They won. The ruling elites won. What Sydnor called for and what Powell mapped out for the American ruling class of their day? They won. This is it. Sydnor and Powell called for this because, in their eyes, the 60s and the early 70s demonstrated an “excess of democracy” on behalf of the masses. The EPA was created along with the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. This frightened the hell out of the ruling capitalists of the day. The Nixon Shock, the Volcker Shock, Reagan’s Economic Tax & Recovery Act of 1981, Thatcher’s “there is no society” and union busting and privatization to Clinton’s selling out of the Democratic Party to win votes by acting Republican, the ridiculousness of Bush II’s deficit spending (Cheney: “It’s our due”), housing bubble burst, crash and recession with massive bailouts for the wealthy. ….and this is where I left off because I had had enough–that it’s pointless to “pick a side.”
The Powell memo seems tame now. He could not have dreamed, in his wildest dreams, of the extent to which the Conservative movement in the United States would deliver in the form of powerful, breathtakingly well-funded and influential foundations and think tanks and political action committees, that Citizens United would clear the way for the flat-out buying of politics and politicians, that the US would effectively become an oligarchy. He also could not have imagined how extremist the Conservative movement would become, more extreme that he could have imagined or would countenance (be careful what you wish for). He could not have imagined, for example, that vast numbers of conservatives in the US would now be calling for secession and supporting the end of Posse Comitatus or that the standard bearer of the party would be the lapdog of the fascist Russian dictator, Putin and that we would be sliding right past laissez-faire into full-on fascism.
Yossarian: “because, in their eyes, the 60s and the early 70s demonstrated an “excess of democracy” on behalf of the masses.” Was that really it? Or was this a milestone on the path for elites that had already been working to turn back the New Deal for decades? “An excess of democracy on behalf of the masses” had already been happening since 1946: for the first time in our history, all subgroups advanced in sharing national wealth, for a period that lasted until sometime in the 1970s…
Just saw a report yesterday about how Russian state media is gloating about the prospect of another ruinous presidency for Donald Trump, come 2025.
Meanwhile, here people are in the US talking about Civil War. Tzar Vladimir’s investment in Don the Con has paid off big time. There must be a lot of laughter right now in the Kremlin–then, that is, they aren’t thinking about the utter debacle of the aggression against Ukraine and the dire poverty of Russia’s rural populace.
cx: when, that is, they aren’t. . . .
Could you provide a link to said Russian state media article? Thanks.
Will the Center Hold?
When Center holds
With a strangle
The country folds
In a tangle
yup
What my right wing friends think of as far to the left is actually the middle. There are no voices I have heard calling for government ownership of the means of production. There are no voices calling for confiscated property to be redistributed to the masses. The freedoms advocated by modern Democrats sound like Republicans in 1960.
Thank you, Roy. That was my thought. The “left” these days is like the Democratic party under FDR or Truman or LBJ (except for some folks who would have demanded that FDR stay out of WWII because Hitler was just defending himself).
NYC PSP,
I think you refer to the isolationists in the late 1930s and early 1940s who understood Hitler’s desire for lebensraum and to take back the land that Germany lost in WWI.
The Center has got us where we are today. Nowhere.
People have this very weird idea that the middle is always the best place to be.
Even if it’s the middle of a frying pan.
Bizarrely , people even extend the “Center is best” idea to scientific issues.
So, on something like climate change,even if climate scientists say we need to cut emissions by X amount by a certain date and clkmate change deniers say we don’t need to cut emissions at all, some folks will say, let’s split the difference and cut emissions by X/2.
It’s just stupid.
Exactly, someDAM!
Roy,
You are exactly right. Republicans throw slanders around and label the Democrats as the “radical left” who want open borders and no police. I just kicked a Trumper off the blog who made these absurd claims. Where’s the evidence? Well, one person said…
I have always been a middle of the road guy. But when one guy wants to kill and the other wants tolerance of, middle of the road is defined by what it is. I want to kill the philosophy of White Supremacy. That makes me middle of the road.
Roy, re: your right wing friends: those are the same folks who call Euro socialist democracies “socialist,” apparently due to an appropriate distribution of wealth which resembles what we had in our post-WWII boom years. All of those countries are actually capitalist. They have “trammeled” capitalism [which we approximated for a few decades, but abandoned starting late ‘70s]. Perhaps it takes a history of hard knocks, from feudalism to democracy, overtaken by empire, then declining empiricism, then all-out war with fascists that take your country hostage &/ or bomb the hell out of it to arrive at that middle ground.
The center did not hold, past tense. It had its chance. Bipartisanship defined two decades of history and then, the center failed and the fascists came out out the woodwork. The reason it failed was that the center was not a true center, one party gleefully accepting as the other party abandoned its values. Both parties wound up enhancing socialism for investors and rugged individualism for workers, and neither party lifted a finger for the working class. A center is a place of actual compromise, not of winks and nods.
The only way to revive the center is to revive the left. And for that to happen, the left needs to take a page from the capitalist right: The left needs a rebranding as the true patriots liberal Americans are. We’re never going to have anything for voters if all the right needs to do to squash a candidate is say the words “radical socialist”. Too easy. The left need to be able to respond by just saying, for example, the word “wimp”.
The fact is that progressivism is the patriotic duty of every red blooded American; it is to stand by his or her neighbor. Supporting public schools and parks is hearty Americanism. Caring for seniors and the sick, injured, and wounded with programs like social security and universal medicare is responsible, patriotic, good old fashioned American living. We pay for these things because we’re not spineless worms. The left consists of rugged individualists. The right consists of wimps and babies.
The center is a meaningless concept because it all depends on how one defines the extremes.
And there is absolutely nothing that says an extreme is not the most reasonable position.
For example, ecologists who tell us that the only kind of sustainable economy over the long run is one that patterns itself after nature (based on cyclical resource use, conservation, and renewable energy) would be considered extreme by most but that does not mean they are not correct.
The “center” on economic thinking supports the totally unphysical idea of eternal exponential growth. That’s just insane. Certainly not sustainable. But people treat it as the most reasonable position and therefore the one to support.
The center held
The center held
With a strangle grip
The high strength weld
Will never slip
The center held
To current day
And we’re compelled
To just obey