Blog For Iowa

11 minutes.

Have you ever wondered why we in America can’t have a simple medical system where if you get sick or injured you go to a doctor’s office or hospital and get taken care of? 

Have you ever wondered why when children are starving in America we can’t just set up a system to get them fed? Lord knows we could use that in Iowa.

Have you ever wondered why some people are forced to live on the streets? Especially when it would be cheaper to give them food and shelter would be cheaper than putting them into the prison system?

Have you ever wondered why some folks work very long hours for very little pay and still end up without housing? 

Have you wondered why our public school systems always seem to be starved for funds when these are the institutions that are preparing future generations.

I wonder these things all the time. Much of my thinking on musings such as the questions above usually turns back to as President Obama put it “America’s Original Sin. “ Said more plainly much of our policies today are based on prejudices and policies from America’s racist past. 

Using the process of “othering” – that is dehumanizing humans and turning the perception of certain groups into less than human – leads to a separating the “others” from the normal participation in society. This is often followed by making the “others” into people who are abused and targeted for abuse. Often dehumanizing language is used to excuse such abuse.

Certainly most of us are very cognizant of using terms such as “them” and “those people” to lump “others” into groups that can be targeted for abuse. Who hasn’t heard someone say “Those people don’t deserve to have medical care.” Or “They don’t deserve good houses. They lower property values.”

Heather Cox Richardson uses the US’s history in this area to discuss why socialism has been so derided in this country. Her historical perspective explains why even today socialism is so misunderstood in this country, but will probably never be understood:   

What Republicans mean by “socialism” in America is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when African American men first got the right to vote. Eager to join the economic system from which they had previously been excluded, these men voted for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as prosthetics for veterans, a vital need in the post-war U.S.), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to rise to prosperity.

Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting almost as much as they hated the idea of equal rights. They insisted that the public programs poorer voters wanted were simply a redistribution of wealth from prosperous white men to undeserving Black Americans who wanted a handout, although white people would also benefit from such programs. Improvements could be paid for only with tax levies, and white men were the only ones with property in the Reconstruction South. Thus, public investments in roads and schools and hospitals would redistribute wealth from propertied men to poor people, from white men to Black people. It was, opponents said, “socialism.” Poor black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina” and should be kept from the polls.

This idea that it was dangerous for working people to participate in government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the developing factories. Like their counterparts in the South, they voted for roads and schools, and wealthy men insisted these programs meant a redistribution of wealth through tax dollars. They got more concerned still when a majority of Americans began to call for regulation to keep businessmen from gouging consumers, polluting the environment, and poisoning the food supply (the reason you needed to worry about strangers and candy in that era was that candy was often painted with lead paint).

Any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man’s liberty, wealthy men argued, and it would cost tax dollars to hire inspectors. Thus, they said, it was a redistribution of wealth. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers’ government to life, Americans argued that their economy was under siege by socialists. Their conviction did indeed lead to a redistribution of wealth, but as regular Americans were kept from voting, the wealth went dramatically upward, not down. 

This also explains how political parties and corporation have used this distortion to their advantage in this country. Thom Hartmann in his daily essay Monday discusses how the Republican Party has exploited this “othering” to their advantage in his Monday substack posting:  

“Identity politics” can be either helpful to society or destructive of social cohesion and democracy itself. When used to bring people of different races, religions, and gender identities into the larger structure of society — to empower and lift up those who’ve traditionally been oppressed — identity politics becomes a platform for ultimately ending itself; once everybody has equal opportunity, it’s no longer needed.

The dark side of identity politics occurs when the dominant race/religion/gender (in today’s America that’s white Christian men) identifies people who aren’t part of their group as an “other” and uses this otherness as a rallying cry to enlist members of the powerful in-group against the “outsiders.”

This is what the GOP has been doing ever since 1968, when Richard Nixon picked up the white racist vote that Democrats abandoned in 1964/1965 when LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through Congress.

Nixon talked about his white “silent majority.” Reagan emphasized “states’ rights” to suppress the civil and voting rights of minorities. GHW Bush used Willie Horton to scare white voters in 1988 the same way his son vilified Muslims to win re-election in 2004. And, of course, Trump has been “othering” nonwhite people and women ever since he started his notoriously racist and hateful birther movement in 2008.

So now you know why the inequality is baked in the cake. Understand that MAGA politicians will expand the “others.” Democrats will work for equality. But given the enormity of the problem, it will not be fixed overnight.