Excerpted with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from What's The Matter with White People by Joan Walsh. Copyright © 2012
A few days after the Occupy Wall Street movement began to stir in September 2011, I walked the narrow streets of the world's financial hub in a light rain, looking for a protest still too small to find. During the next few weeks, OWS would change the national conversation. The slogan "We are the 99 percent" did what years of complaint by economists and liberals could not: it focused attention on staggering income inequality and "the top 1 percent" who'd enriched themselves phenomenally during the past thirty years. "I am so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death," Frank Luntz, the GOP's master of spin, told a private meeting of Republican governors at the end of 2011. "They're having an impact on the way Americans think about capitalism."
Suddenly, cable news shows that had been obsessing over the deficit "crisis" and President Obama's latest poll numbers were explaining how decades of tax cuts and deregulation unraveled the social contract established in the New Deal. It had been accepted by every American president for thirty years afterward, until Richard Nixon brilliantly divided the New Deal coalition, largely around race. In the early days, polls showed that the Occupy movement's grievances were broadly shared, even by the white working class, which Nixon and then Ronald Reagan had lured to the GOP. Yet how long before the 99 percent would cleave back into the 51 and the 48 percent? I couldn't know. For the moment, though, it was amazing to see such broadly shared political discontent surfacing at all.
As I headed down the dark canyon of Wall Street itself, I decided to climb the steps of Federal Hall to get a better view of blue-helmeted cops behind barricades, waiting for trouble that never came that day. With the famous statue of George Washington to keep me company--our first president gave his first inaugural address on the site--I found myself thinking, and not in a good way, about another historic gathering on those same steps, one that offered important lessons for any American political movement: the Hard Hat Riot of 1970. The violent but little known skirmish marked the ultimate fracture of the Democratic
Party of the twentieth century, a fracture still unhealed in the twenty-first. Would today's protesters be mindful of the sad lessons of protests past? Probably not, because nobody younger than sixty remembers the Hard Hat Riot today.
But I do, even though I was just a kid at the time. My father talked about it for years afterward. An unlikely corporate peacenik, my dad wandered from his office near Wall Street at lunchtime on May 8, 1970, to join a protest denouncing the killing of four antiwar Kent State University students by the Ohio National Guard a few days earlier. Just as he got there, the peaceful gathering was interrupted by flag-wielding construction workers, marching over from the grounds of the World Trade Center they were building a few blocks away. Chanting "All the way, U.S.A." and "Love it or leave it," they broke up the Kent State protest, charging up the steps of Federal Hall to plant American flags on George Washington. Everyone else was rebelling; now the hard hats were, too, paradoxically trying to use disorder to restore social order to a country that had been torn apart by forces nobody entirely understood. Horrified, my father headed back to work, but as he left, he thought he saw one of his brothers, a steamfitter employed on the World Trade Center site, among the angry workers. A few used their iconic hard hats to beat up antiwar students, smashing the remnants of the New Deal coalition at the same time.
Later that month, the head of the rioters' union coalition, Building Trades Council chief Peter Brennan, presented President Richard Nixon with his own hard hat; in 1972, Brennan bolted the Democratic Party to endorse Nixon's reelection. He became Nixon's ineffectual labor secretary in 1973, the same year the
World Trade Center opened for business. Labor began a sharp decline that year, as did liberalism. You couldn't blame it all on the Hard Hat Riot--the Democratic Party had begun to unravel years before that event--but the clash further divided the party and the country, and my family, too. Mine wasn't the only working-class Irish Catholic family split that way. A year earlier, New York magazine writer Pete Hamill had written a long, anguished feature, "The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class," about "the growing alienation and paranoia" of a group he claimed as "my people," even as he grappled with their misplaced rage and racism. Yet the violence of the Hard Hat Riot horrified Hamill, and he attacked it in the New York Post, writing with a kind of anger that is often borne of shame. I recognized it.
How strange, then, that American dissent began stirring again forty-one years later, at the exact same site, only blocks away from the World Trade Center. Or maybe not strange: terror brought the towers down ten years earlier; the banking crisis that cratered the economy in 2008 was centered there, too. Maybe George
Washington created a mysterious vortex of democracy when he addressed his young country at the site more than two centuries earlier. (Alexander Hamilton, the father of American banking, is buried in the Trinity Church yard down the street.) It seems as if we are continually having our attention drawn back to the same spot, trying to get democracy right, as we struggle over America's place in the world. Certainly, democracy seemed to come alive again there, as the movement to wrest control of the country from Wall Street and the wealthiest 1 percent spread to hundreds of American cities and into other Western countries. "We are the 99 percent" became an updated version of e pluribus unum, "out of many, one."
I think about the Hard Hat Riot all these years later because it symbolized the culmination of a Republican political strategy that has worked nearly flawlessly for almost my entire life. No matter what's going on in the world, the right can find a cultural issue that will get the left to fight itself, to atomize into little groups, and to give voice to factions that frighten Americans on the sidelines--often, the left-out white middle and working class--and the country winds up the worse for it. Thanks to my roots in that much maligned, misunderstood, and sometimes destructive demographic group, I'm haunted by the mistakes of political movements I barely remember.
In 2011, we began to honestly reckon with the political and social forces that had allowed the rich to sack the country while people in the once-great New Deal coalition fought among themselves.
Could we avoid those old battles and meanwhile reach out to attract the anxious folks on the sidelines, rather than repelling them this time? And could those anxious folks, many of them white people--my people--stop longing for a golden age that never was, and help invent a just, multiracial America?
I felt optimistic, yet I had grown up seeing all of the ways my team defeated itself, to the delight and the triumph of conservatives.
We can't afford to do that again.
"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America 's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America 's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that, "the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better."
~ Senator Barack H. Obama, March 2006
If OBAMA gets re-elected, just think of the mess he will inherit!"
And those in power, aside of putting on tired, old, make-believe haggard faces, were just under the surface quite jubilant. If this was all the mob was capable of, they probably thought, well let 'em have this silliness and when it dries up, it's back to business as usual.
And so, today, it is back to business as usual, and those in charge of making real noise are quietly doing just that.
For example:
Romney has to explain his new Math. Most independent voters have given up on "Trickle Down" economics as just Spin. Here is the Republican (Romney-Ryan) New Math for 2012
20% Tax Cuts (on top of Bush's tax cuts) + Increased Military Spending = Balanced Budget.
Oops! $ 716 Billion saved from Medicare; using savings from ACA which Romney promises to abolish on his first day in office.
On top of the above math, add the costs of new war(s) starting with Iran; and the govt largess owed to big-money campaign contributors.
Example 2:
Making Medicare a voucher program guarantees the survival of insurance carriers (ends the concept of single payer) and also guarantees that 20% (at least) of the healthcare dollar will go to pay for insurance overheads and profits and not for medical care - simple arithmetic.
Paul Ryan is called the wonder whiz-kid of the Republican Party because of his interest to privatize it all. So, the SPIN of the Republican Talking Points a.k.a. Faux Nooze lies sunk the Romney Campaign among SENIORS.
I have no problem with your advice, but if you really meant the words "liberals" and "progressives," then you are making a distinction between ideology and party. If so, then "keeping the discussion on the HARD issues" means keeping the Democratic Party one that's worth supporting.
Both races are falling off the cliff in misplaced priorities; including divorce (50%), babies born to unwed mothers (60%), school drop-out (50%), failure to care for elderly relatives forcing them to die in hospitals and nursing homes (making healthcare so much more expensive for all).
You wanted a diverse party. Unfortunately ethnically diverse means a much more conservative party than the old white liberal one. What liberals need to confront is the drastic social conservatism of Black Protestantism and Latino Catholicism that is ascendant in the Democratic Party.
Progressive - thinking out of the box to get "a bigger bang for the buck" or to "do more with less."
Liberal - throw more money, and that will solve the problems.