Michelle Taja Miller’s book, “The Invisible Self”, is powerful, moving, and very insightful – both about the traumatic experiences that she endured from birth, and how she was able to eventually heal herself with the help of Primal Therapy.
The majority of “The Invisible Self” is about Miller’s life and how the pain that was inflicted on her unconsciously shaped her thoughts, feelings, and actions throughout her life. In itself, it is a very compelling read and it sets the stage for her discussion of how her therapy gave her vital and often surprising insights about the events – and the resulting pain – that damaged her.
It was only when she began her therapy at Arthur Janov’s center in California that she began to understand how trauma had impacted her life so profoundly.
One of the unique elements of this book is its understanding – and explanation – of what Primal Therapy is.
For starters, it has nothing specifically to do with screaming. “The Primal Scream” was simply the title of Janov’s first book. (This best-seller was what led to John Lennon starting his own therapy and then to such “Primal” songs as, “Mother”, “Working Class Hero”, and “Imagine”).
Miller explains that when pain – physical and/or emotional – is unbearable, it causes a person to dissociate – that it, to bury their most painful feelings so that they rendered are unconscious. For instance, she explains that her, “panic attacks were memories re-experienced out of their original context. The fear belonged somewhere in the past, out of reach, unconscious.”
“This repression”, she explains, “creates a protective amnesia, disrupting normal brain function.”
Such pain does not go away when the incident is over – rather, it can become “neurologically embedded” in the nervous system. Primal therapy seeks to reconnect these neural pathways, allowing for the resolution of repressed traumas.”
(At a conference a few years ago at UCLA, I asked Dr. Daniel Siegel about what actually happens when a patient remembers a past trauma, and he explained that the neurons in the lower brain – where the pain is stored – physically reconnect with the frontal cortex, so that the unconscious memories can now be accessed by our conscious minds).
Ideally, Primal Therapy allows a person to slowly and carefully make those emotional and intellectual connections – and that is what constitutes the process of healing. A key result of effective therapy is the insights that one gets – the ability to understand, e.g. “So that’s why I always felt that I was never good enough!”
After several years of therapy, Miller was able to access the painful memories of her birth, which she then understood that her, “entire life was a replay of the sequences” of her birth – reshaped by the numerous other traumas in her life. For instance, her, “panic attacks were memories re-experienced out of their original context. The fear belonged somewhere in the past, out of reach, unconscious.”
(Note: Janov showed a video of a patient reliving his painful birth to the renowned neurobiologist, Jaak Panksepp, who stated afterward that such an experience “could not be faked.”)
One of the most important sections of, “My Invisible Self” is at the end, where Miller explains the elements of effective therapy. She writes that:
“When the therapy is done right, the process of opening up happens naturally in sessions, when the patient is ready.” A therapist should not dogmatically insist that a patient MUST focus on what the therapist thinks is the right way to proceed. Ultimately, only the patient can, with proper encouragement and support, discover, piece by piece, their own true path in the healing process.
As Janov explained to me, a good therapist encourages a patient to follow their feelings. “Don’t be smart, and don’t offer insights”, he said. After all, even if the therapist is correct as to how the patient is damaged, everybody has to make the connection for themselves for it to enable genuine healing.
Further, Miller stresses the very important understanding that there is a dialectical relationship between good therapy and our day-to-day lives.
“Primal is not a process that takes care of itself. To succeed, we have to feel, connect, realize, and use our insights to ‘terminate’ behaviors that are detrimental to our well-being and change our lives; it is an unending dance between feeling and doing…These last conscious steps of choosing to change our behavior are essential for the Primal process to be complete and for our lives to really change.”
Miller was trained as a therapist at The Primal Center, and “The Invisible Self” is both a compelling read and a very insightful guide to the healing process.
“Causes of the Contemporary Crisis in U.S. Politics”
Peter G. Prontzos
The frustration, polarization, and anger that now engulfs the U.S. political system – exemplified by the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021 in a brazen attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election – is the most serious domestic crisis since the Civil War. The roots of this turmoil are complex, but the most important factors are the economic changes in the last 50 years that underlie this development.
This paper will first describe some of the major economic, political, and cultural developments that occurred as a result of the neoliberal wave that began in the 1980s, and the resulting increase in the power of large corporations. It will then consider how such changes have contributed to the growth of this extremism, as well as the psychological factors that underlie it. The final section will offer suggestions on how to create a more equitable, fair, and democratic society, which is essential if the U.S. is to significantly reduce the threats to the American people and democracy itself.
Perhaps the most important changes began in the 1950s, as the power of corporations began to increase relative to the people as a whole and to workers in particular. The first major mention of this shift was President Eisenhower’s “Farewell Speech” in 1961, when he warned that Americans: “…must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” 1
Another milestone was the creation of the Trilateral Commission by David Rockefeller in 1973, which claimed that there was a “crisis of democracy”. As Noam Chomsky observed, the Commission claimed that this “crisis”:
…resulted from the efforts of previously marginalized sectors of the population to organize and press their demands, thereby creating an overload that prevents the democratic process from functioning properly. In earlier times, “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” so the American rapporteur, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, reflected. In that period there was no crisis of democracy, but in the 1960s, the crisis developed and reached serious proportions. The study therefore urged more “moderation in democracy” to mitigate the excess of democracy[!] and overcome the crisis.
Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive. 2
This effort was manifested primarily by increasing corporate power in a number of areas: in the workplace (e.g. destroying unions), in the economy, (e.g. “free trade” and globalization), and in the political sphere (such as putting more corporate allies into governments at all levels in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches; and gerrymandering electoral districts to favour Republican candidates).
One telling (and predictable) result which directly benefitted the economic elites: “Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015 it was 40 percent.” 3
Not surprisingly, inequality has continued to increase from the 1970s on. As Senator Bernie Sanders has written regarding the effects of these changes:
“…60 percent of our people live paycheck to paycheck – and real inflation-adjusted wages have not gone up for fifty years. Some 85 million of us are uninsured or underinsured, and sixty thousand die each year because they don’t get the medical care they need. We have the highest child poverty rate of almost any major country on earth…and our childcare system is a disaster. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable…Millions of seniors lack the resources to heat their homes in the winter or buy the prescription drugs they need.”
“Meanwhile, the richest three billionaires own, “more wealth than the bottom half of our society – 165 million people. Today, the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 92 percent and the CEOs of major corporations earn four hundred times what their employees make.”
…
“An estimated 112 million (44 percent) American adults are struggling to pay for health care…Over the past year, the percentage of Americans who report skipping needed care due to cost has increased to 30 percent.” One result is that, “The average American now lives six years less than the average Norwegian and South Korean…”
…
“Between 1979 and 2020, worker productivity increased by 61.8 percent, while worker pay increased by just 17 percent.
…
“…over the past forty-seven years $50 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent…” 4
Ironically, a major factor which led to the increase in power of the corporate class was the 14th Amendment to the Constitution – which was passed in 1868 and which was designed to provide civil rights to former slaves. It said that states were forbidden from depriving, “…any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
However, some Supreme Court rulings have given corporations “rights” that were intended for people, such as in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, which upheld the “right” of corporations to make unlimited political expenditures under the First Amendment’s clause to protect a person’s freedom of speech.
At a more personal level, Bruce Alexander (SFU) has pointed out how such an increasingly corporate-driven economy:
“…breaks down every traditional form of social cohesion…creating a kind of dislocation or poverty of the spirit that draws people into addiction and other psychological problems.”
Alexander also explains that:
To the degree that civilizations approximate, “a free-market society, dislocation is not the pathological state of a few but the general condition. Because the expanding reach of free-market economics engulfs ever more aspects of life, dislocation is increasing.” Addiction, he adds, “is neither a disease nor a moral failure, but a narrowly focused lifestyle that functions as a meagre substitute for people who desperately lack psychosocial integration.” 5
Such a system both creates pain and deflects the blame. There are many examples of how this dysfunctional and unfair this increasingly unequal society is:
Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorces, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. 6
Perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon is what have been termed, “deaths of despair”, a term devised by Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. The American Council on Science and Health defines deaths of despair as those due to suicide, overdoses, and alcoholic liver diseases, with contributions from the cardiovascular effects of rising obesity. Bruce Bower writes:
Since the 1990s, mortality had risen sharply among middle-aged, non-Hispanic white people, especially those without a college degree…
White, working-class people ages 45 to 54 were drinking themselves to death with alcohol, accidentally overdosing on opioids and other drugs, and killing themselves, often by shooting or hanging. Vanishing jobs, disintegrating families and other social stressors had unleashed a rising tide of fatal despair…
“The most meaningful dividing line [for being at risk of deaths of despair] is whether or not you have a four-year college degree,” Deaton says.7
Specifically, “Drug overdose deaths have risen fivefold over the past 2 decades. In 2021, 106,699 deaths occurred.” 8
(That toll is twice as many as the number of Americans who died during the U.S. war in Vietnam).
And according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by 2021, “More than one million people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose.”9
The CDC reported that, in 2021 alone, “there were an estimated 107,622 drug overdose deaths in the United States…” 10, more than 36 times the number of people killed on September 11.
Rates of deaths of despair among middle-aged U.S. adults
T. Tibbitts
An analysis of national data from 1992 to 2017 for adults ages 45 to 54 reveals an increasing risk of alcohol, drug and suicide mortality among those without college degrees, whether Black (orange line) or white (red line). For reasons that are not yet clear, Black college graduates (dark blue line) had the lowest rates of deaths of despair in this statistical comparison. 11
These deaths disproportionately impact Caucasian males without a college degree. Anger, despair, and toxic “masculinity” are other major problems. As the Washington Post reported:
“Males are overwhelmingly responsible for violence in the United States, according to the most recent crime data published by the FBI. They committed about 80 percent of all reported violent crimes in the country in 2020, including 87 percent of homicides.”
Caucasian men are six times as likely to die by suicide as other Americans. 12
The sources of such problems are examined in Gabor Maté’s, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. Dr. Maté is a physician who, among other endeavors, spent years in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada, working with people addicted to various drugs. His new book shows how so much of what is generally considered “normal” and even healthy in modern society is both unconscious and actually harmful. 13 As I wrote in the CCPA Monitor:
Maté defines our “culture” as: “the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.”
His book examines what exactly is “toxic” about our societies, and he stresses that the global health problems that we face, such as, “burgeoning stress, inequality, and climate catastrophe” have been created by a culture of “globalized capitalism” that condemns countless numbers of human beings, “to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation.”
“Of course, it’s not just about ourselves. Maté stresses that we must work to create a society which, among other needs, prioritizes the health of infants and children, e.g. one that outlaws spanking and makes sure that no child goes hungry or lacks medical care, that their feelings are treated with respect, and so on. As important as these practices are in themselves, Maté emphasizes that they have profound social and political consequences as well: “…the harsher the parenting people were exposed to as young children, the more prone they become to support authoritarian or aggressive policies, such as foreign wars, punitive laws, and the death penalty.” 14
Political socialization, for instance, usually begins in the home. George Lakoff (Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley) has shown that children whose parents are more nurturing tend to be more liberal, empathetic, and open-minded – and more likely to use empathy as their moral foundation. Children raised with a traditional “strict father” style of parenting tend to be more conservative, individualistic, authoritarian, and patriarchal – and see morality as being based on obedience.
The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing the United States can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative).
What do social issues and the politics have to do with the family? We are first governed in our families, and so we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing systems of families.
In the strict father family, father knows best. He knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and his spouse do what he says, which is taken to be what is right. Many conservative spouses accept this worldview, uphold the father’s authority, and are strict in those realms of family life that they are in charge of. When his children disobey, it is his moral duty to punish them painfully enough so that, to avoid punishment, they will obey him (do what is right) and not just do what feels good. Through physical discipline they are supposed to become disciplined, internally strong, and able to prosper in the external world. What if they don’t prosper? That means they are not disciplined, and therefore cannot be moral, and so deserve their poverty. This reasoning shows up in conservative politics in which the poor are seen as lazy and undeserving, and the rich as deserving their wealth. Responsibility is thus taken to be personal responsibility not social responsibility. What you become is only up to you; society has nothing to do with it. You are responsible for yourself, not for others — who are responsible for themselves. 15
Moreover, in his Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) Study, Dr. Vincent Felitti found that the more trauma that a child has experienced, the more troubled that child (and that adult) would be. 16
This finding is compatible with the work of Dr. Arthur Janov (e.g. Primal Healing), whose work shows how a child can be damaged, (even in the womb!) in a toxic environment, e.g. poverty, abuse, stress, pollution, etc.)
It appears, however, that both liberals and conservatives are equally adept at ignoring “inconvenient truths” when making political decisions. We all have limitations, biases, and distortions that shape our world-views. These tendencies are, for the most part, automatic and unconscious, such as “motivated reasoning” – when our thinking is biased to produce whatever conclusion we want to believe.
For his part, Albert Einstein was more than just the most famous physicist in the 20th century. He was also an astute observer of human nature, and he had a deep understanding of the importance of social and economic factors in shaping human consciousness. In 1949, he wrote that:
…the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept “society” means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual…depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought…” 17
Social problems, such as hopelessness, anger, and poor health, are much worse because of the high levels of poverty and inequality in American society. This phenomenon is explored in, The Inner Level, where Wilkinson and Pickett explain that, “…inequality – the large income gaps between rich and poor, damage us all. Almost daily we see new reports of rising levels of mental illness, school shootings, depression and self-harm.” 18
They also point out that greater inequality increases the mental health of the rich as well as the working class.
Gender is also a vital factor in understanding these phenomena. For instance, “The suicide rate among males in 2020 was 4 times higher than the rate among females. 19
More than half of people who commit suicide do not have mental health conditions. For many, negative environmental and societal conditions, e.g. lack of medical care, low wages, poverty, and the need for housing contribute to stress that may increase suicide attempts, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 20
The CDC reported that, “there were an estimated 107,622 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2021…” 21, more than 36 times the number of people killed on September 11.
Increasing inequality and economic distress for the majority of Americans is directly related to government policies which have made the rich even richer at the expense of the majority. A clear example is the extremely low federal minimum wage: $7.25 an hour – unchanged since 2009! On the other hand, corporate taxes in 2017 were reduced from 35 percent to 21 percent – a bonus of $1.5 trillion in the first year alone. As Newsweek observed: “Trump’s Tax Cuts Didn’t Benefit U.S. Workers, Made Rich Companies Richer”. 22
In 2019, tax cuts for top U.S. banks alone totalled $32 billion.
In 2020, while 22 million U.S. workers lost their jobs in March and April due to the pandemic, U.S. billionaires increased their cumulative wealth by $282 billion!
Not surprisingly, an NPR poll found that 46% of households report facing “serious financial pain”.23 Today, millennials are the first generation since the Great Depression who are worse off than their parents.
Authoritarian leaders use such emotions as anger and despair to their advantage. That explains why Tr$mp has said things like: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” 24
“Divide and conquer” is one of the oldest methods to seize and maintain political power. The former President and most Republicans in Congress have been trying to distract Americans from the real causes of their anger by the use of scapegoats: Mexican immigrants are, “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Our nation is victim of an “invasion” by “caravans” of “vermin” from “s**t-hole” countries and we must “build the wall” to keep them out. Some of the white supremacists and neo-nazis at Charlottesville were “fine people”. Democrats are Marxists who engage in “witch hunts”. And so on, ad nauseum.
In general, these authoritarians:
– see the world as dangerous
– are conservative (rate high on Fascism-scale)
– had difficult childhoods
– identify with powerful figures
– are tribal
– feel like victims
– feel threatened
80% of Tr$mp voters “view the world as a dangerous place” and “feel economic despair.”
The most authoritarian Republicans are mostly Tr$mp supporters.
And: “The space for thoughtful discussion is being hollowed out by social media forums that reward the loudest voice and the most extreme attitude.” 25
Possible Solutions
Tribal authoritarians are often racist and patriarchal, but, as Nancy Fraser points out, the bourgeois solution is not, “to abolish social hierarchy but to ‘diversify’ it, ‘empowering talented’ women, people of color, and sexual minorities to rise to the top. And that ideal was inherently class specific: geared to ensuring that ‘deserving” individuals from “underrepresented groups could attain positions and pay on a par with the straight white men…” 26
Both the corporate elite and the U.S. military would be even more effective if they used the most qualified people, regardless of their identity. For example, U.S. government lies to the United Nations about the non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq was probably more convincing because it was given by General Colin Powell, an African-American.
Then there is this example of shameless U.S. Air Force propaganda:
“Dr. King would be proud to see our Global Strike team—comprised of airmen, civilians and contractors from every race, creed, background and religion—standing side-by-side ensuring the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense…Our team must overlook our differences to ensure perfection as we maintain and operate our weapon systems.”
“From a U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command post to commemorate Martin Luther King Day, an American holiday in honour of one of its most committed proponents of nonviolence and anti-militarism. 27
Dr. King, of course, denounced the violence of the U.S. military, opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam, and said that the United States was, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” 28
The problems with the focus on “race” is extremely problematic.
First of all, “The Concept of “Race” Is a Lie”. That is the title of an essay that I wrote in, Scientific American. In brief, I noted that the American Society of Human Genetics, the largest professional organization of scientists in the field, explained that:
“The science of genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories”; and it “challenges the traditional concept of different races of humans as biologically separate and distinct. This is validated by many decades of research.” In other words, “race itself is a social construct,” with no biological basis. 29
(Note: using terms like “black” and “white” is problematic for several reasons. After all, we no longer call Asians “yellow people” or describe Native Americans as “redskins”. Worse, such words tend to reinforce the false belief that there is a clear line that divides people into different “races”. That term is a colonial construct and is rejected by the overwhelming majority of geneticists and anthropologists. It is more accurate to use the word “ethnicity” instead of “race”).
The answer to social problems, then, is NOT the tribalism of “identity politics” – the tendency of people to identify primarily with “their kind” – whichever group that is – rather than humanity as a whole.
But the idea of paying “reparations” to the descendants of slaves in the United States is extremely problematic for many other reasons.
First, there would be the difficult problem of deciding exactly how much African-Americans in general should receive.
Then there is the question of deciding how much each individual should get. For instance, if one person has 100% African DNA, do they get four times as much as somebody with only 25%? And if it’s only 12.5%? How about a person whose father arrived after slavery ended and whose genome contains 50% African DNA – Barack Obama, for example?
Third, if the descendants of slaves are entitled to reparations for past horrors, what about Native Americans, who experienced genocide for hundreds of years?
A fourth question: what would be the political ramifications of this narrow and convoluted approach? Tens of millions of working-class people will be angry about having to pay for an evil that hasn’t existed for over 150 years and for which they have no personal responsibility. Indeed, there are tens of millions of Americans whose ancestors arrived in the United States after slavery was abolished.
And the first group that would try to weaponize reparations? The KKK.
You don’t have to be a prophetess like Cassandra to foresee how such resentment would translate into even more virulent racism and “white nationalism” – which would lead to more domestic terrorism. As FBI director Chris Wray explained: “racially motivated violent extremists, such as white supremacists, have been responsible for the most lethal attacks in the U.S. in recent years.” 30
Racism and violence are rising for a number of reasons, and as we’ve seen, the most important ones are the growing stress and alienation resulting from growing social and economic inequality. Anger is then often redirected to various scapegoats, encouraged by many on the Right.
Fortunately, there is an approach which would be more humane, inclusive, and a smarter way to address systemic racism than the divisive approach of reparations. I also believe that it would win the support of the majority of Americans – and in doing so, it would also reduce the amount of anger amongst the population.
When the United States was founded, one of the key elements of the new republic was the motto, “E Pluribus Unum” – “from many, One.” It was more of an ideal than a reality, and slavery was the most blatant example.
The end of slavery did not, of course, end racism against African-Americans, so a century later it took a broad-based Civil Rights movement to eliminate some of the more obvious forms of discrimination, such as “whites only” drinking fountains and school segregation.
The uprisings following the torture and murder of George Floyd sought to eliminate systemic racism once and for all – and the unprecedented speed and depth of these reactions signify that most Americans are finally supportive of real progress.
In this context, it is important to remember that racism was also inflicted on immigrants, and not only from places like Latin America and China. Even Europeans – from countries such as Germany, Ireland, and Greece (like my grandparents) – were sometimes met with racist diatribes and even violence. President Woodrow Wilson was, by the dawn of the 1920s, arresting and deporting Eastern European and Italian immigrants. U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned in detention camps during the Second World War.
As evil as these actions were, there was another people who were treated even worse – Native Americans. The genocide inflicted on the First Peoples of the Americas resulted in a population decline from approximately 10 million when Columbus arrived, to only a quarter-million at the end of the “Indian Wars” – a rate of genocide over 97%. 31
This slaughter was “justified” as “manifest destiny” – the belief that “white” Americans were given a mandate from God to take over the continent.
Mexicans were also victims of this “divine” colonialism. Their territory was seized, from Texas to California, and many were slaughtered in the process. For instance, three hundred Mexicans were murdered in Texas in 1915 and 1916 alone, and tens of thousands of these “aliens” were sterilized in a mass eugenics program. 32
George Lakoff argues that the best way to approach this problem is to:
“Give up identity politics. No more women’s issues, black issues, Latino issues. Their issues are all real, and need public discussion. But they all fall under freedom issues, human issues. And address poor whites! Appalachian and rust belt whites deserve your attention as much as anyone else. Don’t surrender their fate to Trump, who will just increase their suffering.” 33
In other words, the most effective way for people of good will to combat this atmosphere of lies and hate is to focus on the real problems facing the majority of Americans – which are primarily about economic class – and on inclusive solutions. This approach has a deep history, especially among African-American intellectuals, who, for at least a hundred years, have argued for the intersection of ethnicity and class. Leaders from W.E.B. Du Bois to Jesse Jackson, “added an incisive critique of how race and class intersected in American society and insisted that the only way to defeat racism was through cross-racial working-class solidarity.” 34
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were democratic Socialists who moved away from a focus primarily on the scourge of racism to a broader critique that included an economic system which exploited the majority of Americans – the working class – regardless of ethnicity. King felt that it was necessary to address poverty and inequality in addition to racism in order to make progress on all these fronts, and that a broad program would appeal to a wider constituency than only focusing on civil rights.
“A reckoning with racism, he insisted, was impossible without radically redistributing wealth and, by extension, power in American society…For him, race, class, and economic empowerment were therefore all intertwined”. 35 This intersectional egalitarianism was at the core of King’s, “Poor People’s Campaign”.
King was assassinated while helping striking sanitation workers in Memphis.
His perspective is even more relevant today, especially in the debate about reparations. As we have seen, there are some very serious problems with any program that tries to remedy this evil in a narrow manner.
Professor Adolph Reed, an African-American scholar and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, sees the emphasis on race-based politics as a dead-end. In his view, the problems now bedeviling America — such as wealth inequality, police brutality, and mass incarceration — hurt people of color most, but they also hurt large numbers of working-class and poor Americans of all ethnicities. 36
What is the best way to begin to address all of these problems?
First, Congress would issue an apology for slavery and for the genocide of First Nations.
Second, Congress would enact policies based not on ancestry, but on real economic need in the present. This approach would benefit the great majority of Americans – and especially African Americans, Latino, and Native American people, who on average have less family wealth. Any program which is based on people’s needs rather than “identity” will especially benefit those who are disadvantaged as a result of past and present discrimination.
At the same time, all Americans who are affected by economic inequality, no matter what their ethnicity, will be better off. Fewer veterans will be homeless or commit suicide. Tens of millions of working people will benefit when the federal minimum wage is raised to a living wage, at least $20 an hour.
This approach will also be seen as fair by most people.
There is a precedent for such a bold vision: the New Deal. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in United States history, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted work programs, the Tennessee Valley Authority, social security, and other measures to improve the lives of average Americans.
Likewise, a “Green New Deal” would create millions of well- paying jobs in order to finally address the existential danger of the climate crisis.
Free college education is another progressive option.
Making health care available to everyone is not only the humane thing to do, it will actually lower overall costs, which are about 50% higher per capita than in countries like Canada and France. Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman notes that every dollar invested in children’s well-being results in huge savings of future costs (due to ill health, addiction, crime, and so on). He adds that: “The highest rate of return in early childhood development comes from investing as early as possible, from birth through age five, in disadvantaged families.” 37
One political advantage of all of these ideas is that they are race-neutral: They disproportionately help African-Americans and other ethnic minorities because the policies are economically targeted. And economic-based policies are much more politically feasible than race-based policies. Polls show, for example, that slavery reparations are deeply unpopular. 38 So, “while racial disparities in economic insecurity are apparent…income is an even greater predictor of financial pain, with households earning under $30,000 per year roughly three to four times as likely as those earning over $100,000 annually to have experienced material hardship during the pandemic.” 39
Such programs will be cost-effective in the long run, who will pay for these them in the short term? The answer: those who can best afford to – primarily wealthy corporations and individuals. Congress could start by eliminating the corporate tax cuts which, for example, resulted in at least $1.6 billion windfall for Walmart in just the first three quarters of 2018. 40
Programs such as these will not only improve the lives of the majority of Americans, but they will do so in a way that deals effectively with such challenges as racism, poverty, the climate crisis – while reducing the division, anger, and violence that are a growing threat to democracy. Such measures are critical, since, “…one-third of Republicans support violence as a means to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats…More specifically, Republicans who have favorable views of Donald Trump were found to be “nearly three times as likely as Republicans who have unfavorable views of Trump” to support political violence.” 41
For all these reasons and more, it is not an exaggeration to say that American democracy is facing its greatest challenge since the Civil War.
In 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein urged us, above all, to “Remember your humanity”. To the extent that the people of the United States do so, they will create a better America for everyone. 42
2. Noam Chomsky. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. South End Press. (Boston) 1989.
3. Arlie Russell Hochschild. Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New Press. (New York) 2016.
4. Bernie Sanders. It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. Crown. (New York) 2023.
5. Bruce K. Alexander. The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit. Oxford. (New York) 2008.
6. Hochschild, op. cit.
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15. George Lakoff. “Understanding Trump. 23 July 2016. [https://george-lakoff.com/2016/07/23/understanding-trump-2]
16. Prontzos, op. cit.
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18. Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The Inner Level. Penguin. (London) 2018.
19. CDC. “Suicide Data and Statistics”. [https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html].
20. Sabrina Tavernise. “U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High”. NY Times. [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-surges-to-a-30-year-high.html]
21. CDC. “U.S. Overdose Deaths In 2021 Increased Half as Much as in 2020 – But Are Still Up 15%.” [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/202205.htm]
22. “Trump’s Tax Cuts Didn’t Benefit U.S. Workers, Made Rich Companies Richer”. Newsweek. [https://www.newsweek.com/republican-tax-cuts-trump-wage-increases-879800]
23. ‘I Try So Hard Not To Cry’: Nearly Half Of U.S. Households Face A Financial Crisis. NPR. 10 Sept. 2020. [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/10/910724801/overview-of-poll-data-on-pandemics-damage]
24. Charles Homans. “Donald Trump Has Never Sounded Like This.” N.Y. Times. 27 April 2024. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/27/magazine/trump-rallies-rhetoric.html]
25. “Who’s drawn to fascism? Postwar study of authoritarianism makes a comeback.” CBC Ideas. 24 October 2022. [https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/who-s-drawn-to-fascism-postwar-study-of-authoritarianism-makes-a-comeback-1.6403074]
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28. Viet Thanh Nguyen. “The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most.” Time. 17 Jan. 2019. [https://time.com/55054
29. Peter G. Prontzos. “The Concept of Race is a Lie: Even the Ancient Greeks knew it”. 14 May 2019. Scientific American. [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-concept-of-race-is-a-lie]
30. Eric Tucker and Ben Fox. “FBI director says antifa is an ideology, not an organization.” Associated Press. 17 September 2020 [https://apnews.com/bdd3b6078e9efadcfcd0be4b65f2362e]
31. Michael Smith, David. “Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492–Present” (PDF). Southeast Oklahoma State University.
32. David Dorado Romo. “Massacre, Look to the Long Legacy of Anti-Mexican Violence at the Border”. Texas Observer. 9 Aug. 2019. [https://www.texasobserver.org/to-understand-the-el-paso-massacre-look-to-the-long-legacy-of-anti-mexican-violence-at-the-border]
33. George Lakoff. “Understanding Trump”. University of Chicago Press. August 2016. [https://press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2016/lakoff_trump.html]
34. Sylvie Laurent. “Martin Luther King and the Other America.” The Nation. [https://www.thenation.com/article/martin-luther-king-and-the-other-america-sylvie-laurent-book-review]
35. Ibid.
36. Michael Powell. “A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury.” N.Y. Times. 14 Aug. 2020. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html]
37. Heckman: Invest in Early Childhood Development: Reduce Deficits, Strengthen the Economy. [https://heckmanequation.org/resource/invest-in-early-childhood-development-reduce-deficits-strengthen-the-economy]
38. “How to Close the Racial Wealth Gap: A new online calculator has a winner: Baby bonds.” NY Times. 7 Aug. 2019. [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/opinion/baby-bonds-booker-race.html]
39. Kenny Stancil. “Survey Shows Nearly Half in US Suffering Serious Economic Hardship–and Situation ‘Going to Get Worse”. Common Dreams.11 Sept. 2020. [https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/09/11/survey-shows-nearly-half-us-suffering-serious-economic-hardship-and-situation-going]
40. Jim Tankersley. “Trump’s Tax Cut One Year Later: What Happened?” N.Y. Times. 27 Dec. 2018. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/us/politics/trump-tax-cuts-jobs-act.html]
41. Ashley Lopez. “More Americans say they support political violence ahead of the 2024 election”. NPR. 25 Oct. 2023. [https://www.npr.org/2023/10/25/1208373493/political-violence-democracy-2024-presidential-election-extremism]
42. “The Russell-Einstein Manifesto”. [https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/]
