Were it not for Abe Lincoln ("Four score and seven years ago . . . ") almost nobody would know that one meaning of "score" is a period of twenty years. Dating back to 1776, the USA has now been around for twelve score and five years. (Twenty score and one year ago if you prefer to start at 1619).
Not every score in that two hundred forty-five year period has lived up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, some twenty-year periods ought to be looked at as deeply shameful times when the iron triangle of fear, tribalism, and political cowardice gripped the land. We've just lived though such a period (2001-2021), though "lived" might be an overstatement.
The years 2001-2021 will go down in history as our third score of shame, rivaled only by 1837-1857 and 1877-1897 for sheer self-induced misery. Each score saw those who fought to expand rights up against vicious attempts to abridge them. Each score in part illustrates W.B. Yeats' famous line from "The Second Coming": "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
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In the most shameful periods of American history, public policy is dominated by the worst: bad-faith actors who exploit divisions for narrow, self-interested agendas.
Let's take a closer look at each shameful score.
Score of Shame #1. 1837-1857: Gag Rules, War of Conquest, Dred Scott
The founders' Constitution of 1787 left slavery intact where it existed and of course excluded the enslaved from enjoying any liberties. Yet, for purposes of determining representation in the House of Representatives, the founders counted slaves as "three-fifths" a person. Pretty slick, eh? By the 1830s the movement to abolish slavery had grown significantly, putting direct pressure on the Congress to end the "peculiar institution."
Cowards in Congress responded to emancipation agitation by passing "gag rules" that forbade the House of Representatives from considering anti-slavery petitions or having any meaningful debate at all about the issue. In the United States Senate, South Carolina's John C. Calhoun in 1837 called slavery a "positive good" and explicitly argued against debate: "The subject is beyond the jurisdiction of Congress--they have no right to touch it in any shape or form, or to make it the subject of deliberation or discussion . . ." In the House the gag rules remained in place from 1837-1844, and ended only because of impassioned opposition from Congressman John Quincy Adams (who served as President from 1825-1829).
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| It took many decades longer than it should have, but a statue of pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun was finally removed from Marion Square in Charleston, SC in April of 2021. |
No politician of any considerable distinction or eminence seems willing to hazard his popularity with his party … by an open and unqualified disapprobation of the war. None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks; and all seem willing that the war should be carried on, in some form or other.
After the United States took control of California post-war, the treatment of the native population was conducted with such gruesome brutality that a growing number of contemporary historians describe it as genocide. Though technically admitted to the Union as a "free" state, California in its Constitution explicitly denied rights to non-white people, and Africans were enslaved there even though technically illegal.
In a fitting end to this disgraceful twenty-year period, on March 6, 1857 the United States Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sanford declared that neither enslaved nor free Africans were citizens and thus could not sue in federal court, and that slaves were the legal property of their owners. The ruling outlawed the tepid "compromises" negotiated between north and south up to that point and essentially declared African people could never be free under the existing Constitution, a stunning victory for the slave masters and rebuke of freedom fighters.
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| Dred Scott's (left) quest for freedom was rejected by "originalist" Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney (right), who held that constitutionally Africans in America were nothing more than property. |
Score of Shame #2: 1877-1897. Jim Crow's Expansion and Enhancement
After the Civil War the incompetent President Andrew Johnson tried to reconstruct the nation on his own, empowering the worst elements of the south in the process. Southern "Black Codes" were designed to deny any civil liberties to former slaves while providing legal cover for racist actions against them. In 1867 the "Radical Republican" Congress reversed Johnson's course and instituted military reconstruction of the south. The south was divided up into five military districts, and states could not be readmitted into the union until they approved the 14th amendment (guaranteeing citizenship to freed slaves) and passed Constitutions granting protections the newly freed population. Though not a perfect plan by any means, Radical Reconstruction did result in African-Americans being elected to Congress, state legislatures, and local offices throughout the south.
Progress for Blacks was met by fierce resistance from former slave masters and their enablers, creating a situation in which removing federal troops would lead to a reign of terror against African-Americans. Indeed, that is what ultimately happened. In the contested presidential election of 1876, an appointed Commission gave Republican Rutherford B. Hayes (who lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel Tilden) enough electoral votes to become president in exchange for an agreement to remove all Federal troops from the south. For Hayes' supporters this was a "Great Compromise." For African-Americans it was a "Great Betrayal." Progress toward civil rights for African-Americans, already too slow, came to a screeching halt while virtually all gains to that point were ultimately reversed. The 20 years from 1877-1897 featured the expansion and enhancement of the vicious, racist Jim Crow laws. Though Black men continued to vote in relatively high numbers from 1877-1897 (thanks to the passage of the 15th Amendment), the right to vote was slowly but surely eroded by "reforms" that included things like poll taxes and literacy tests, so that by the start of the 20th century the dream of a truly representative democracy had died, replaced by White supremacist rule.
Just as the 1837-1857 score of shame was bookended by a disgraceful Supreme Court decision, so too in this second period. In 1896 the Plessy v. Ferguson decision established that segregation in the United States was constitutional. The Court's insistence on "separate but equal" as the principle that should animate race relations in this country remains as the most blatant symbol of the shame of the era. Only one Justice, John Marshall Harlan, had the decency and legal acuity to dissent:
"In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. . .The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds."
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| The 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson said the enforced segregation in the United States was constitutional. In South Africa the same practice was called Apartheid. |
We would like to think that Harlan's sentiment is now "common sense" among legal authorities, politicians, and even the population at-large. Sadly, any honest look at our recent history would have to conclude that is not the case. That's a good transition to our third score of shame . . .
Score of Shame #3: 2001-2021. Getting Closer to Failed State Status
Where to even start with this miserable score? We entered the new millennium with Republican appointees on the US Supreme Court handing the presidency to George W. Bush under the dubious theory that in a representative democracy we don't actually have to count all the votes (at least not if the judges' preferred candidate stands to lose.). Everything pretty much went downhill from there: worst terrorist attack on American soil in history, hysterical and criminal overreaction to the terror featuring the bipartisan creation of a bloated and unaccountable Homeland Security bureaucracy, bipartisan sacrificing of civil liberties through legislation that few members of congress actually read, bipartisan wars of choice costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, and bipartisan enabling of a drone-war program that's made our presidents into literal gods deciding who lives and dies. Somehow Uncle Sam could spend twenty years in Afghanistan and almost that long in Iraq, and at the end both are failed states. The warnings of peace activists in the 1970s--that creating an all-volunteer military would give us a presidential praetorian guard fighting wars endlessly--turned out to be depressingly accurate.
Meanwhile, financial hijinks and corruption crashed the economy in the late 2000s, yet not one major Wall St. crook went to jail; instead they received massive taxpayer bailouts. Oh yeah, the bailouts were bipartisan too.
But hey, at least we elected the first African-American president, right? That counts for something, but President Obama never quite delivered on the change promised during the 2008 campaign. He failed to end the wars, he expanded the drone program, he declared war on whistleblowers, and he did not appoint Justice Department officials who would hold Wall St. criminals accountable. While it is true that the Republicans refused to work with Obama on anything, ending War on Terror abuses and standing up more forcefully to Wall St. would not have required Republican cooperation. Meanwhile, Obama's signature domestic policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, was "better than nothing" but has proven to be woefully inadequate to meet the real health care needs of the populace.
If the United States is still around in a few hundred years, it will blow the minds of school kids when they learn that our first African-American president was followed by a reality tv star who spent most of his time gaslighting, insulting his critics on social media, and enabling far right creeps and culture warriors. As the climate crisis deepened, we had in power a man who continued to insist that climate change was a "hoax." By the end of his term the nuttiest of his disciples were ready to do whatever it might take, including hang the vice-president, to keep the Orange Man in the White House.
How appropriate that the last years of this shameful 2001-2021 score saw the United States become one of the nations hardest hit during the global pandemic. It turned out that billionaire Bill Gates' warning in the mid 2010s--that the real "terrorists" we should be dedicating resources to fighting were microscopic organisms--was spot-on. The pandemic demonstrated in ugly, tragic fashion that the trillions of dollars spent on overseas, doomed to fail adventures--while neglecting our health care infrastructure and other domestic needs--carried real consequences. The United States is not yet Afghanistan or Iraq, but the extreme tribalism we exploited in those nations has in a real sense come home.
What makes 2001-2021 more tragic than previous shameful scores is that in our time we have a relatively free media that should, at least in theory, be a check on the worst impulses of private power, politicians, and the people at-large. But mainstream media today is not really interested in being that kind of a check. Instead of exposing the forces that divide us and giving voice to those who see the big picture, mainstream media moved toward business models that make profit off division and disunity. That's why mainstream journalism enabled over-the-top obsession with Benghazi in the last two years of the Obama Administration, and then did the same with Russiagate for most of the Trump term.
In 2006 Noam Chomsky defined a failed state as one that fails "to provide security for the population, to guarantee rights at home or abroad, or to maintain functioning (not merely formal) democratic institutions." At the time I thought Chomsky might have been exaggerating the extent to which the USA deserved failed state status. Now at the end of a shameful score, I'm still not sure we are a fully failed state, but we are a hell of a lot closer to it than we have ever been.
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| In 2006 Noam Chomsky argued that the US was a failed state. Fifteen years later it's become more difficult to launch a compelling counter-argument against that claim. |
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