How Respectable Conservatives Produced Donald Trump.

I came to this conclusion after reading an op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune(3/16) titled “A letter to my liberal friends.”  While the author, Rosemary Warshawski, is clearly an intelligent person, her essay is founded upon several egregiously specious arguments that I’m here to correct.

 

At the core of Ms. Warschawski’s argument, as in the core of all conservative’s arguments, lies the so-called victimization of minorities.  She writes:  “I don’t want to make victims of minorities by telling them,’ That’s OK, you can have my help because you can’t make it on your own.”  That is soft bigotry.  … help minorities to achieve the prerequisites for their goals, but don’t lower the standards for them.”

 

Mrs. Warschaski writes of how hard she and her husband have worked and  complains of “leveling the playing field to the point of absurdity – where those who work and sacrifice according to the rules are asked to give more of the money and the fruit of their labor to strangers who haven’t worked as hard  …”   Therein lies the rub.

 

Conservatives like Mrs. Warshawski ignore the most salient of facts: that this is a thoroughly racist society in which the rules are constantly being changed to keep minorities down.  When the perception was that African Americans were the primary consumers of heroin, the response was to lock them up.  Now that the consumers are Caucasians, the response is treatment.  The same NRA that opposes any form of regulation as to who can buy what guns and where, is the same NRA that helped draft legislation to take the guns out of the hands of the Black Panther Party!    Where are the conservatives when these rules are changed?  Their voices cannot be heard protesting such double standards because they are the ones implementing them.   The familiar cry from the right resonates here: If only those people would get up and work hard and apply themselves, we wouldn’t have these problems.  Does she not know that black folks have done just that?  Does she not know that white folks destroyed eight black neighborhoods or towns, including what was known as the Black Wall Street, specifically because they were so successful?   Does she not know that when the Nation of Islam tried to establish cattle ranches so we could pull ourselves up by our bootstraps the white folks poisoned their cattle?   Apparently it does not matter that blacks gave their lives in every war this country has been engaged in – beginning with being the very first casualty of the Revolutionary war, Crispus Attucks, only to return to second class citizenship.

 

The plight of African Americans is the direct result of slavery.  Conservatives will argue that slavery was a long time ago and should not matter now.  And IF the country had made some sort clean break with slavery… IF black folks had received their forty acres and a mule (a proposal defeated by the conservatives of yesteryear) that argument might not be so thoroughly laughable.  But slavery was followed by mass incarceration, Jim Crow, lynchings, the worst domestic terrorism, and a plethora of policies and procedures implemented by every institution in the land, from the judicial to the educational, to ensure the supremacy of white folks and the continued subjugation of blacks.

 

Mrs. Warshawski, like all reasonable conservatives, decries the extremism of the left and advocates the “sensible middle.”  On the surface this makes sense.  But this country has moved so far the right since Barry Goldwater authored the current wave of conservatism, that the middle is on the right.

 

Whether it be the sophisticated essays of  conservative elites such as Charles Krauthammer or the guttural ramblings of the rabid Rush Limbaugh; from that great Republican god, RONALD REAGAN, who rode white America’s irrational fear of welfare cheating black folks all the way from the golden screen of Hollywood to the Olympus and Valhalla  of white America’s imagination where he combines the powers of Zeus, Odin and Thor; who blamed all of America’s economic woes on those lazy welfare cheating (he forgot to mention also mythological) negroes to current Republican frontrunner, Donald  (I’ll build a wall and make Mexico pay for it) Trump,   the philosophical underpinnings of the conservative element remain the same.  The echoes of racism and/or cognitive dissonance, whether a shout or a whisper, permeate everything.  Someone is always trying to take away their liberty, and the fruits of their labor.

 

To these people I reply, not from a philosophical intellectual argument, but from a very personal perspective.  There have been times when I have had popcorn for dinner, when I was in college, because white folks would not hire me, due to my race.  I had two jobs because of Affirmative Action.  Neither was very good and I was more than qualified for both.  But the employers would not have hired any blacks, regardless of credentials, had it not been for Affirmative Action.  I have stared down the barrels of police guns on more than one occasion simply for walking or riding in a car, while black.  I have been humiliated and degraded by police after having committed  no crime other than crossing the street.  I was cheated out of a pony by grown white men when I was only six years old because of my color.  I could go on, but just thinking of all the injustices I’ve encountered is tiring.  And there are those who have endured far more than I have.

 

White folks aren’t the only Americans who work hard.  I shined white folks’ shoes for thirty seven hours a week, after school when I was fourteen.  I had mopped bloody floors in a hospital, dug ditches, washed dishes and hauled 70lb. mail sacks all before graduating high school.   Americans of color who have legitimate grievances are sick and tired of hearing about white anger from the most free and most privileged people on the planet.  We are tired of hearing about how health insurance will take your freedom from you.  You are not victims.  Your leaders tell you that you are so that you will vote against your own best interests and vote to add even more wealth to the obscenely wealthy like the Koch brothers at your own expense.   Grow up.