I think that, first of all, we need to rid ourselves of the illusion that the
kind of democracy that you and I envision, the kind that we were taught about
in school, ever existed. Next, we have to separate the idea of democracy from
the picture of a nation where people's basic needs are met, food, shelter, and
health care. China is accomplishing the task of meeting its people's basic
needs, but it isn't a Democracy. Libya also did so before the US murder of its
leader, but it wasn't a Democracy either. So did Iraq and Syria before the US
intervened, neither of which were Democdracies.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2021 10:44 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: delores selset <dselset@xxxxxxx>; jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@xxxxxxxxx>;
Jennifer Ford <dandjford88@xxxxxxxx>; brianandrenae@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Fwd: March 26, 2021: Georgia's governor attempts to
end democracy in his State.
My question, after looking back to 1861 and then at 2021, is this:
What is the definition of insanity? How many times will we do the same thing
over and over before we realize that it is impossible for democracy and
capitalism to coexist?
Carl Jarvis
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American
<heathercoxrichardson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2021 07:47:41 +0000
Subject
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed his state’s new voter suppression law last
night in a carefully staged photo op. As journalist Will Bunch of the
Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, Kemp sat at a polished table, with six white
men around him, under a painting of the Callaway Plantation on which more than
100 Black people had been enslaved. As the men bore witness to the signing,
Representative Park Cannon, a Black female lawmaker, was arrested and dragged
away from the governor’s office.
It was a scene that conjured up a lot of history.
Voting was on the table in March 1858, too. Then, the U.S. Senate fought over
how the new territory of Kansas would be admitted to the Union. The majority of
voters in the territory wanted it to be free, but a minority of proslavery
Democrats had taken control of the territory’s government and written a
constitution that would make human enslavement the fundamental law in the
state. The fight over whether this minority, or the majority that wanted the
territory free, would control Kansas burned back east, to Congress.
In the Senate, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond, who rejected “as
ridiculously absurd” the idea that “all men are born equal,” rose to speak on
the subject. He defended the rule of the proslavery minority in Kansas, and
told anti-slavery northerners how the world really worked. Hammond laid out a
new vision for the United States of America.
He explained to his Senate colleagues just how wealthy the South’s system of
human enslavement had made the region, then explained that the “harmonious… and
prosperous” system worked precisely because a few wealthy men ruled over a
larger class with “a low order of intellect and but little skill.” Hammond
explained that in the South, those workers were Black slaves, but the North had
such a class, too: they were “your whole hireling class of manual laborers.”
These distinctions had crucial political importance, he explained, “Our slaves
do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the
majority, they are the depositaries of all your political power. If they knew
the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with
banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be
reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet
process of the ballot-box.”
Hammond believed the South's system must spread to Kansas and the West
regardless of what settlers there wanted because it was the only acceptable way
to organize society. Two years later, Hammond would be one of those working to
establish the Confederate States of America, “founded,” in the words of their
vice president, Alexander Stephens, upon the “great physical, philosophical,
and moral truth… that the negro is not equal to the white man.”
Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln recognized that if Americans accepted the
principle that some men were better than others, and permitted southern
Democrats to spread that principle by dominating the government, they had lost
democracy. "I should like to know, if taking this old Declaration of
Independence, which declares ... are equal upon principle, and making
exceptions to it, where will it stop?” he asked.
Led by Abraham Lincoln, Republicans rejected the slaveholders’ unequal view of
the world as a radical reworking of the nation’s founding principles. They
stood firm on the Declaration of Independence.
When southerners fought to destroy the government rather than accept the idea
of human equality, Lincoln reminded Americans just how fragile our democracy
is. At Gettysburg in November 1863, he rededicated the nation to the principles
of the Declaration and called upon his audience “to be dedicated… to the great
task remaining before us… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth
of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.”
The United States defeated the Confederacy, outlawed human enslavement except
as punishment for crime, declared Black Americans citizens, and in 1867, with
the Military Reconstruction Act, began to establish impartial suffrage. The
Military Reconstruction Act, wrote Maine politician James G. Blaine in 1893,
“changed the political history of the United States.”
Today, as I looked at the photograph of Governor Kemp signing that bill, I
wondered just how much.
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