Trickle Down
I was thinking about trickle down. No, not Reaganomics (giving tax advantages to the wealthy and doling out corporate welfare and waiting for it to trickle down to the less fortunate) — we know that doesn’t work: The yachts get bigger, the houses get more numerous, and the middle class gets comparatively poorer.
I was wondering about a different downward motion. There has been a paradigmatic shift in political speech-making: Folks calling one another stuff I can’t repeat here. At times, the pejoratives are so extreme they would be funny if that style of talking did not interfere with the necessity of governing. It would seem just dumb if it were not accompanied by actual acts of violence to people on the street, to the tenants of democracy, and in the halls of justice. I was wondering: How much of the lunacy and incivility that invaded our country in the top reaches of government trickled down? I wondered, what does it actually signify?
Sherrilyn Ifill, lawyer and the Vernon E. Jordan Jr. Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University, has an interesting theory. She calls it a rebellion against decency — freeing themselves from the requirements of decency.
Some have speculated for years that Republicans follow Trump because they are afraid of being primaried — afraid of Trump-style retribution. Ifill speculates that they follow Trump for the simplest of reasons: They agree with him. He permitted them to speak and act as they feel. They may not like the man, but they are grateful that Trump gave them permission to say it out loud. To make American Great Again, they are undoing the outrageous and unacceptable changes wrought beginning in the 1960s.
For more than 50 years
There are marches today; there were marches as early as just post-Revolutionary War. However, the marches of the 1960s were different. Marchers were predictably aggrieved and disenfranchised people demanding better treatment. In the 1960s, it was the children of the elite — white and privileged, college students. It was incomprehensible that they took to the streets. In poetry, in song, and in rallying cries shouted on the streets, they chorused, “You can’t do that.”
You cannot jail someone because of whom they sleep with. You cannot stop Americans from voting because of the color of their skin. You cannot deny education or a job — knowledge or income — because you don’t like or agree with them. You cannot keep folks out of community swimming pools, public bathrooms, or restaurants because they are different. We will not say, and you cannot say certain historically denigrating words. Words matter; words expose or produce feelings. We won because we were in a position to argue at the family dinner table and the Ivy League classrooms. We were very successful: We changed the American ethos.
Mary Flynn said America would pay for political correctness. As always, Mary was right. We didn’t win the hearts and minds, we won the public square and, like smoking, banished it from public and swept it into private places. Until Trump. If you doubt it, consider the rights that the Supreme Court has snatched back. Each time the Supremes do, someone says, we had that right for more than 50 years and now it is gone.
Ego dystonic
One way to define the term is to be forced by social convention to act and speak differently from how one feels: We bump into someone we do not particularly like; still, we are polite and pleasant and inquire after their family and their health. It is a mild example of acting contrary to how we feel. It may be momentarily uncomfortable but soon forgotten. In American history, there is a much more dramatic example, and a segment of the population has been smarting for 60 years.
OK, the kids pushed the cultural behavior and they pushed back. We pushed the dialogue in movies, plays, and song, and they pushed back with gerrymandering, poll watching, legislation, and packing the courts. Who is winning now?
We are watching a more than 50-year-old edifice tumble. We were moving closer to a “more perfect union,” one with ever-expanding rights. We are watching it snap back to a more exclusionary, less democratic country.
Trump said why not? Why not act and speak as they felt? So now they do. They may have been silent, but they were not inactive. The court is packed, the legislation is passed, the gerrymandering is in place, and the poll watchers are armed. It was too tough being decent. The relief they feel to act and speak in harmony with their true feeling must be palpable — however destructive to the rest of us.
