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A consensus now exists across the American political spectrum, left to right, that everything fundamentally changed in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. To be sure, there was an upsurgence of patriotism and national chauvinism, a desire to “avenge” the innocent victims of the Al Qaeda network’s terrorism.
I would suggest, however, that the events of recent weeks are not a radical departure into some new, uncharted political territory, but rather the culmination of deeper political and economic forces set into motion more than two decades ago.
The core ideology of Reaganism—free markets, unregulated corporations, the vast buildup of nuclear and conventional weapons, aggressive militarism abroad and the suppression of civil liberties and civil rights at home, and demagogical campaigns against both “terrorism” and Soviet Communism—is central to the Bush administration’s initiatives today. Former President Reagan sought to create a “national security state,” where the legitimate functions of government were narrowly restricted to matters of national defense, public safety, and providing tax subsidies to the wealthy. Reagan pursued a policy of what many economists term “military Keynesianism,” the deficit spending of hundreds of billions of dollars on military hardware and speculative weapons schemes such as “Star Wars.” This massive deficit federal spending was largely responsible for the U.S. economic expansion of the 1980s. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was pressured into an expensive arms race that it could not afford. The fall of Soviet Communism transformed the global political economy into a unipolar world, characterized by U.S. hegemony, both economically and militarily.
The result was a deeply authoritarian version of American state power, with increasing restrictions on democratic rights of all kinds, from the orchestrated dismantling of trade unions, to the mass incarceration of racialized minorities and the poor. By the end of the 1990s, two million Americans were behind bars, and over four million former prisoners had lost the right to vote for life. “Welfare as we know it,” in the words of former President Clinton, was radically restructured, with hundreds of thousands of women householders and their children pushed down into poverty.
Behind much of this vicious conservative offensive was the ugly politics of race. The political assault against affirmative action and minority economic set-asides was transformed by the Right into a moral crusade against “racial preferences” and “reverse discrimination.” Black and Latino young people across the country were routinely “racially profiled” by law enforcement officers. DWB, “Driving While Black,” became a familiar euphemism for such police practices. As the liberal welfare state of the 1960s mutated into the prison industrial complex state of the 1990s, the white public was given the unambiguous message that the goal of racial justice had to be sacrificed for the general security and public safety of all. It was, in short, a permanent war against the black, brown, and the poor.
The fall of Communism transformed a bipolar political conflict into a unipolar, hegemonic “New World Order,” as the first President Bush termed it. The chief institutions for regulating the flow of capital investment and labor across international boundaries were no longer governments. The International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and transnational treaties such as NAFTA exercised significantly greater influence over the lives of workers in most countries than their own governments. By the year 2000, fifty-one of the world’s one hundred wealthiest and largest economies were actually corporations, and only forty-nine were countries. The political philosophy of globalization was termed “neoliberalism,” the demand to privatize government services and programs, to eliminate unions, and to apply the aggressive rules of capitalist markets to the running of all public institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and even postal services. The social contract between U.S. citizens and the liberal democratic state was being redefined to exclude the concepts of social welfare and social responsibility to the truly disadvantaged.
A new, more openly authoritarian philosophy of governance was required, to explain to citizens why their longstanding democratic freedoms were being taken away from them. A leading apologist for neo-authoritarian politics was New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In 1994, soon after his election as mayor, Giuliani declared in a speech: “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of indiscretion about what you do and how you do it.” As we all know, the Giuliani administration won national praise for reducing New York City’s murder rates from two thousand a year down to 650 a year, and violent crime rates plummeted. But the social cost to New York’s black, brown and poor communities was far more destructive than anything they had known previously. The ACLU estimates that between 50,000 to 100,000 New Yorkers were subjected annually to “stop-and-frisk” harassment by the police under Giuliani. The city’s notorious Street Crimes Unit functioned not unlike El Salvador’s “Death Squads,” unleashing indiscriminate terror and armed intimidation against “racially profiled” victims.
Many white liberals in New York City passively capitulated to this new state authoritarianism. It is even more chilling that in the wake of the September 11 attacks, New York Times journalist Clyde Haberman immediately drew connections between “the emotional rubble of the World Trade Center nightmare” and Amadou Diallo, the unarmed West African immigrant gunned down in 1999, with forty-one shots fired by four Street Crimes Unit police officers. “It is quite possible that America will have to decide, and fairly soon, how much license it wants to give law enforcement agencies to stop ordinary people at airports and border crossings, to question them at length about where they have been, where they are heading, and what they intend to do once they get where they’re going,” Haberman predicted. “It would probably surprise no one if ethnic profiling enters the equation, to some degree.” Haberman reluctantly acknowledged that Giuliani may be “at heart an authoritarian.” But he added that “as a wounded New York mourns its unburied dead, and turns to its mayor for solace,” public concerns about civil rights and civil liberties violations would recede. Haberman seems to be implying that the rights of people like Amadou Diallo are less important than the personal safety of white Americans.
As the national media enthusiastically picked up the Bush administration’s mantra about the “War On Terrorism,” a series of repressive federal and state laws were swiftly passed. New York State’s legislature, in the span of one week, created a new crime—“terrorism”—with a maximum penalty of life in prison. Anyone convicted of giving more than one thousand dollars to any organization defined by state authorities as “terrorist” will face up to 15 years in a state prison. When one reflects that, not too many years ago, that the U.S. considered the African National Congress as a “terrorist organization,” and that the Palestinian Liberation Organization is still widely described as “terrorist,” the danger of suppressing any activities by U.S. citizens that support any Third World social justice movements now becomes very real.
At all levels of government, any expression of restraint or caution about the dangerous erosion of our civil liberties was equated with treason. The anti-terrorism bills in the New York State Assembly were passed with no debate, by a margin of 135 to five. The U.S. Senate on October 12, passed the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism legislation by 96 to one. In the House of Representatives, when the administration demanded authorization to use military force in Afghanistan, only California Democratic Representative Barbara Lee had the courage to vote no. She immediately was subjected to death threats, and in her own words, was “called a traitor, a coward, (and) a communist.” But as Congresswoman Lee alone had the integrity to declare, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” To resist the reactionary mobilization towards war, we must have the principled courage of Barbara Lee.
Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University. “Along the Color Line” is distributed free of charge to over 350 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Marable’s column is also available on the Internet at www.manningmarable.net.
I would suggest, however, that the events of recent weeks are not a radical departure into some new, uncharted political territory, but rather the culmination of deeper political and economic forces set into motion more than two decades ago.
The core ideology of Reaganism—free markets, unregulated corporations, the vast buildup of nuclear and conventional weapons, aggressive militarism abroad and the suppression of civil liberties and civil rights at home, and demagogical campaigns against both “terrorism” and Soviet Communism—is central to the Bush administration’s initiatives today. Former President Reagan sought to create a “national security state,” where the legitimate functions of government were narrowly restricted to matters of national defense, public safety, and providing tax subsidies to the wealthy. Reagan pursued a policy of what many economists term “military Keynesianism,” the deficit spending of hundreds of billions of dollars on military hardware and speculative weapons schemes such as “Star Wars.” This massive deficit federal spending was largely responsible for the U.S. economic expansion of the 1980s. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was pressured into an expensive arms race that it could not afford. The fall of Soviet Communism transformed the global political economy into a unipolar world, characterized by U.S. hegemony, both economically and militarily.
The result was a deeply authoritarian version of American state power, with increasing restrictions on democratic rights of all kinds, from the orchestrated dismantling of trade unions, to the mass incarceration of racialized minorities and the poor. By the end of the 1990s, two million Americans were behind bars, and over four million former prisoners had lost the right to vote for life. “Welfare as we know it,” in the words of former President Clinton, was radically restructured, with hundreds of thousands of women householders and their children pushed down into poverty.
Behind much of this vicious conservative offensive was the ugly politics of race. The political assault against affirmative action and minority economic set-asides was transformed by the Right into a moral crusade against “racial preferences” and “reverse discrimination.” Black and Latino young people across the country were routinely “racially profiled” by law enforcement officers. DWB, “Driving While Black,” became a familiar euphemism for such police practices. As the liberal welfare state of the 1960s mutated into the prison industrial complex state of the 1990s, the white public was given the unambiguous message that the goal of racial justice had to be sacrificed for the general security and public safety of all. It was, in short, a permanent war against the black, brown, and the poor.
The fall of Communism transformed a bipolar political conflict into a unipolar, hegemonic “New World Order,” as the first President Bush termed it. The chief institutions for regulating the flow of capital investment and labor across international boundaries were no longer governments. The International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and transnational treaties such as NAFTA exercised significantly greater influence over the lives of workers in most countries than their own governments. By the year 2000, fifty-one of the world’s one hundred wealthiest and largest economies were actually corporations, and only forty-nine were countries. The political philosophy of globalization was termed “neoliberalism,” the demand to privatize government services and programs, to eliminate unions, and to apply the aggressive rules of capitalist markets to the running of all public institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and even postal services. The social contract between U.S. citizens and the liberal democratic state was being redefined to exclude the concepts of social welfare and social responsibility to the truly disadvantaged.
A new, more openly authoritarian philosophy of governance was required, to explain to citizens why their longstanding democratic freedoms were being taken away from them. A leading apologist for neo-authoritarian politics was New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In 1994, soon after his election as mayor, Giuliani declared in a speech: “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of indiscretion about what you do and how you do it.” As we all know, the Giuliani administration won national praise for reducing New York City’s murder rates from two thousand a year down to 650 a year, and violent crime rates plummeted. But the social cost to New York’s black, brown and poor communities was far more destructive than anything they had known previously. The ACLU estimates that between 50,000 to 100,000 New Yorkers were subjected annually to “stop-and-frisk” harassment by the police under Giuliani. The city’s notorious Street Crimes Unit functioned not unlike El Salvador’s “Death Squads,” unleashing indiscriminate terror and armed intimidation against “racially profiled” victims.
Many white liberals in New York City passively capitulated to this new state authoritarianism. It is even more chilling that in the wake of the September 11 attacks, New York Times journalist Clyde Haberman immediately drew connections between “the emotional rubble of the World Trade Center nightmare” and Amadou Diallo, the unarmed West African immigrant gunned down in 1999, with forty-one shots fired by four Street Crimes Unit police officers. “It is quite possible that America will have to decide, and fairly soon, how much license it wants to give law enforcement agencies to stop ordinary people at airports and border crossings, to question them at length about where they have been, where they are heading, and what they intend to do once they get where they’re going,” Haberman predicted. “It would probably surprise no one if ethnic profiling enters the equation, to some degree.” Haberman reluctantly acknowledged that Giuliani may be “at heart an authoritarian.” But he added that “as a wounded New York mourns its unburied dead, and turns to its mayor for solace,” public concerns about civil rights and civil liberties violations would recede. Haberman seems to be implying that the rights of people like Amadou Diallo are less important than the personal safety of white Americans.
As the national media enthusiastically picked up the Bush administration’s mantra about the “War On Terrorism,” a series of repressive federal and state laws were swiftly passed. New York State’s legislature, in the span of one week, created a new crime—“terrorism”—with a maximum penalty of life in prison. Anyone convicted of giving more than one thousand dollars to any organization defined by state authorities as “terrorist” will face up to 15 years in a state prison. When one reflects that, not too many years ago, that the U.S. considered the African National Congress as a “terrorist organization,” and that the Palestinian Liberation Organization is still widely described as “terrorist,” the danger of suppressing any activities by U.S. citizens that support any Third World social justice movements now becomes very real.
At all levels of government, any expression of restraint or caution about the dangerous erosion of our civil liberties was equated with treason. The anti-terrorism bills in the New York State Assembly were passed with no debate, by a margin of 135 to five. The U.S. Senate on October 12, passed the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism legislation by 96 to one. In the House of Representatives, when the administration demanded authorization to use military force in Afghanistan, only California Democratic Representative Barbara Lee had the courage to vote no. She immediately was subjected to death threats, and in her own words, was “called a traitor, a coward, (and) a communist.” But as Congresswoman Lee alone had the integrity to declare, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” To resist the reactionary mobilization towards war, we must have the principled courage of Barbara Lee.
Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Political Science, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University. “Along the Color Line” is distributed free of charge to over 350 publications throughout the U.S. and internationally. Dr. Marable’s column is also available on the Internet at www.manningmarable.net.