Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1114 Editor's Choice: 106
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Excellent interview
[Read the article: "We're all fascists now"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Salon has published an exceptional interview, and once again it's the combination of intimate familiarity with an underlying adversarial dynamic between the interviewer and the subject that focuses the discussion. (The last one I read that was this good was last year's interview of Katie Roiphe by Rebecca Traister.)
Alex Koppelman neatly demonstrates his better (or perhaps simply more honest) grasp of the history and politics of fascism, and Jonah Goldberg is left twisting around trying to defend the shoddy scholarship of his ludicrous premise.
That his scholarship is shoddy and quite possibly dishonest is evident practically off the bat, when he complains about how Mussolini was unfairly (or at least arbitrarily) called a fascist. Mussolini invented the term fascisti to describe himself and his followers! He is the canonical fascist. To assert that the term is somehow incorrectly applied to him is a klaxon that indicates that we're going to descend to depths indeed in the rest of the interview.
While totalitarian impulses are certainly as widespread in the American left as anywhere else, the idea that these are fascist impulses is an appalling torment of the term. Fascism is not that hard of a term to define, as Koppelman slyly demonstrates — it's the likes of Goldberg (and all of his intellectual cousins that seek to weaken and dilute the term for their own ends) who are kicking up all the uncertainty and doubt.
And with good reason in this day and age — in classic Rovian "attack them where you're weakest" style, stalwarts of the most statist, corporatist, militarist, nationalist, theocratic political movement in American history are desperate to call anyone else they can think of a fascist.
And I hope that Salon will have the likes of Koppelman around whenever they do.
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beuchel on black disenfranchisement
[Read the article: Quote of the day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]weren't poll taxes instituted in only southern states (and not all of them?) definitely they were applied across the races, black and white, and i daresay as many or more poor whites as blacks were disinfranchised as a result.
You may dare say it, but that doesn't make it so. Poll taxes, along with literacy tests and various other gimmicks, were explicitly used as tools of racial control. If you were a poor, illiterate white racist, the Jim Crow regime was happy to count your vote — multiple times if need be.
how many blacks were lynched for voting, and where?
Many thousands, all over America, though mostly in the South. Naturally this discouraged many times that number from ever going to the polls. In places where blacks could vote with relative impunity, their votes were stolen, changed, or destroyed outright, with literally no consequences whatsoever for the perpetrators. On top of that black communities everywhere were gerrymandered into political insignificance.
women could not vote in most of the u.s. when my mother was born (1917)-- black men could.
The de facto disenfranchisement of black Americans had already been going on for a generation by then, and would continue strongly for another generation. One reason for the massive migration of blacks to the Northern cities during that time, and the enormous explosion of African-American cultural energy that resulted, was because of the relative empowerment that they found there. You lived in ghettos in the North, too, but at least you could elect your own representatives and hold a measure of political power, and that was a form of advancement.
In fact the apparatus of disenfranchisement remained largely intact until the 1960s, and while there has been tremendous progress since then many of the practices are still employed in different forms. "Suppression" (as it's now called) of the black vote is an important and widespread campaign tactic employed by Republicans to this very day.
(These days it's all about underfunding, ID requirements, police intimidation, and counting fraud — much more genteel.)
All of that may help explain why black Americans generally take voting very seriously — far more so than they do Gloria Steinem.
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Additional Irony
[Read the article: Quote of the day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Throughout the entire period of social transformation and the advancement of liberal ideals during the 20th century, the various movements for social justice studied, informed, and fundamentally depended on one another.
It's a great irony of Steinem's article, and the mindset it represents — early suffragettes drew crucially on the ideas and tactics of the Abolitionists (who in turn were just appropriating them from the revolutionary patriots, who themselves fought against injustice and the disenfranchisement of white American men).
In turn, mid-20th-century civil rights leaders and second-wave feminists alike learned from their antecedents, as well as contemporary third world liberation movements.
And black power drew explicitly on second-wave feminist theory and the idea that the personal is political in its conception of Afrocentrism, black pride, and a roots-based movement.
... which went on to inspire other militant movements of liberation, including third-wave feminism — as well as political correctness, which for all its faults forever raised our consciousness (we hope) of the relationship between language and identity.
And so on, and so forth. This is what the kids mean when they say "there is no hierarchy of oppression." Attack the advancement of liberalism anywhere and you attack it everywhere. Defend it for one group and you defend it for everyone.
But by the same token, if you cut your own movement off from everything else as Steinem does, you're doing harm to everything you believe in.