I find myself remembering an early summer day in 2019. I was on my way to our local Fiesta Mart. Fiesta has the best Mexican food ingredients and an excellent seafood counter. From March until the end of May, Fiesta carries crawfish too. That day, I was on a bug hunt – looking for mud bugs for an evening crawfish boil for friends that I had invited to dinner. I had the radio on, and I was listening to NPR, I think. The program was an interview with Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt – authors of the book “How Democracies Die.”
Several things about that interview stuck with me. One was that Democracies are sustained by statesmen and patriots who are willing to treat their opponents with respect, but they are ended by politicians whose only interest is “winning.” Those who sustain democracy are willing to accept defeat, but those focused on winning are willing to sacrifice democracy. Winning, in this context, means acquiring and husbanding power. The “winners” do not typically resort to violent overthrow of a democracy, but instead use the very features of the democracy to subvert it – using the features of the constitution to destroy the democracy itself. The authors called it playing “Constitutional Hardball.”
It’s Mitch McConnel abusing the filibuster during the Obama presidency to undermine as many governing priorities as the first African American president proposed. It is the use of Senate procedural rules to “steal” Supreme Court seats. None of these acts was illegal, they sought simply to strangle Democracy with its own umbilical cord.
Towards the end of the interview, one of the authors said that America had had three opportunities to right the injustice of slavery. The first was the Civil War, but justice was betrayed as the newly restored Union looked away while the slave states enacted Jim Crow laws that kept former slaves from having a voice at the polls. The second was during the Civil Rights movement with its Voting Rights Act, but justice was again thwarted by gerrymandering and various voter suppression tactics.
So, here we are now at the third opportunity to right the wrongs of social injustice by passing the voting rights legislation passed by the House of Representatives. Fifty Republicans and two Democrats appear determined to ensure that America once again fails to right its Original Sin – slavery.
I am not Black. I am not White. I am just an ordinary American who is the descendant of immigrants. Too many “white” Americans do not recognize that they are themselves “the other” because they are not natives of this continent. They, like me, are just immigrants. It is solely by accident of birth that I and they are not the descendants of slaves.