What A Hypocritical Shithole

EAT THE RICH! SOCIALISM NOW!!

“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

A historian explains:

Writing during the carnage of the First World War, the iconoclast intellectual Randolph Bourne described the American revolutionary inheritance as a squalid marriage between the town capitalist and plantation patriarch. Glittering generalities of freedom and democracy, Bourne observed, were indelibly marked by their long captivity to the money counters and owners of human chattel.

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Recent years have seen growing numbers of mainstream detractors from this consensus history – among the most prominent, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which offered an account of a “new founding” adjacent to the one championed by civil rights liberals, but wildly traducing the original. The Revolutionary War, its lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones argued, was primarily motivated by the tawdry desire to give a free hand to Bourne’s plantation patriarchs “in order to ensure that slavery would continue”.

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King observed something else that has since been mostly forgotten. American universalism was weak because it had been purchased “at bargain rates” – and often at someone else’s expense. The Black freedom struggle, in this sense, was about “more than the rights of Negroes”, as it revealed “systemic rather than superficial flaws” in US society. “Today, Black Americans have not life, liberty nor the privilege of pursuing happiness, and millions of poor white Americans are in economic bondage that is scarcely less oppressive,” King said.

In Trump’s second term, the expansionist pole of the American dialectic has instead returned with a vengeance, untethered from its worn-out emancipatory partner. “If you don’t believe in the Indian wars, you don’t believe in America,” could just as easily be a social media post from the Department of Homeland Security, or a slogan supporting Israel, a kind of US settler colony in miniature – as it seeks to further its own expansionist project in the Middle East.

The violence and corruption of the current era, however, lack any legitimating or moralizing framework, and are unlikely to be laundered as easily as it was in 2008 if and when the Democrats return to power. In the eyes of the world, the US is no longer “the cause of all mankind”, but its scourge. Reanimating stalled pretensions to racial progress, or other such bargain basement promises, will not absolve the empire this time. The town capitalists and plantation patriarchs are in the saddle – while our revolutionary inheritance, Paine’s “universal struggle for liberty”, awaits its next reinvention.

Don't hold your breath. Be ready for a boot stomping on a human face across this awful world.