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yasbxxgie · 4 years ago

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This year’s clashes between protestors and the police from Portland to Atlanta to Kenosha are the latest flashpoints in the long history of policing in America. While the police today emerged from a hodge-podge of national and international iterations, one of the United States’ earliest and most storied forces, the New York City police, offers modern Americans a lesson in the intractability of problems between the black community and the officers sworn to uphold the law. That long history is both bleak and demoralizing. But this past also reminds us that real change will only happen by learning from the collective American experience, one in which those who supported systems of oppression were met by others who bravely battled against them.

As the nation’s most populous city for most of its history, New York has been uniquely affected by this dynamic. In the decades before the Civil War, when Gotham’s police force was becoming regularized and professionalized, Manhattan routinely erupted in riotous violence over the very meaning of equality.

No one individual embodied the brawling roughness of New York policing like Captain Isiah Rynders of the U.S. Marshals. Born in 1804 in the Hudson River town of Waterford, New York, Rynders was a gambler on Mississippi River steamboats. He reportedly killed a man after a card game and fled to his home state around 1837. Known for his thunderous voice, a powerful memory, and a penchant for histrionics, Rynders made an immediate impact on New York City. Black New Yorkers became his main target, and for decades, he patrolled the streets looking for runaways who had escaped enslavement in the South and who, against tremendous odds, had found freedom in Manhattan.

The Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause required northern free cities like New York to return the self-emancipated to their southern enslavers, and the NYPD and officers like Rynders were only too willing to comply, conveniently folding their hatred of black people into their reverence for the nation’s founding document. Armed with the founders’ compromise over slavery, Rynders and his fellow officers, men like Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash, terrorized New York’s black community from the 1830s up through the Civil War.

And, even worse, it often mattered little whether a black person was born free in New York or had in fact escaped bondage; the police, reinforced by judges like the notorious city recorder Richard Riker, sent the accused to southern plantations with little concern and often even less evidence.

Thanks to Rynders, Boudinot, and Nash, the New York police department had become an extension of the powerful reach of southern slavery, and each month—and often each week in the summer months—brought news of another kidnapping or capture of a supposed runaway. Black New Yorker John Thomas, for example, was claimed by an enslaver from Louisville, Kentucky. Thomas purportedly fled slavery along the Ohio River, then travelled through Canada, and ultimately found a job as a porter in a Manhattan hotel. In late 1860, Thomas was arrested as a fugitive by the Manhattan police. While in prison, Thomas hastily drafted a note, dropped it out his cell window, and asked a passing boy to give the note to his employer, who submitted a writ of habeas corpus.

Unfortunately, the marshal on duty was none other than Rynders, who produced a different black man in response to the writ, and the judge declared the writ satisfied. In the meantime, Thomas’ employer and friends learned, too late, that one of Rynders’ deputies had taken the real John Thomas to Richmond, where he would be transported to Kentucky, lost in the darkness of American slavery, like untold numbers of other kidnapping victims.

Fortunately, New York’s black community was not without heroic defenders like David Ruggles, the tireless activist and journalist. Ruggles led the city’s antislavery community while the likes of Rynders, Riker, Boudinot and Nash, a group so wicked that Ruggles had labeled them “the kidnapping club,” patrolled the streets and docks in search of their next prey. Joined by activists like Horace Dresser, Arthur Tappan, Charles B. Ray and other antislavery protestors, Ruggles fought relentlessly against those officers and marshals who threatened black liberty. Just as modern protestors decry the role of the police in the quest for order, black and white activists in pre-Civil War New York claimed that the force was little more than a vigilante expression of the worst tendencies of white residents. A more professionalized police force, however, did not mean one more suited to the protection of black civil rights. On the contrary, in the early 1800s, the police proved sadly and persistently indifferent to the black lives they were supposed to protect.

By modern standards, the early NYPD was a ragtag band of barely organized and only partially trained officers. The daytime police remained inadequate to deal with the robberies, violence, prostitution, gambling and other crimes of a city approaching 300,000 people in the 1830s. Only 16 constables, elected by citizens of each ward, along with about 60 marshals appointed by the mayor, patrolled the city. Only constables and marshals had the power to arrest under a magistrate’s orders. Armed with warrants issued by Riker, marshals like Rynders could terrorize Gotham’s black residents, who came to fear the police presence in their neighborhoods.

Part of the fear emanated from the fact that Rynders’ confederates Boudinot and Nash did not wear uniforms or carry any kind of badge signifying their authority. The familiar dark blue uniforms of the NYPD were not instituted until the 1850s, so African Americans harassed or arrested by the police could not even be sure that they were being accosted by legal authorities. Equally problematic was the fact that neither Nash nor Boudinot earned regular salaries on which they could depend; their ability to support themselves and their families came from fees set by state law, which virtually required officials to arrest as many people as possible. The situation almost guaranteed corruption, and tied the financial interests of the New York police force to the financial interests of southern slaveowners. Not that they needed any push to over-police the black community, but patrollers like Nash and Boudinot had every incentive to use their blanket writ to arrest as many accused fugitive slaves as they possibly could. In fact, their financial well-being depended on it.

Boudinot and Nash operated almost like independent agents in a police force that was itself in disarray, an institutional chaos that only rendered Black lives even more vulnerable. Fernando Wood, elected mayor in 1854, controlled the police department and relied heavily on Irish immigrants to man the force. But by the 1850s, anti-Irish politicians were trying to establish a new police force, soon to be called the Metropolitans, that would replace Wood’s Municipals. A clash erupted in 1857 when Wood refused to back down, and for months, the city actually had two competing police departments who battled each other as much as they combatted crime.

Both Wood’s Municipals and the state’s Metropolitans were guilty of malfeasance and dereliction of duty. In fact, the Municipals, led by police chief George Matsell, had been called “slave catchers” by the city’s black community and its allies in the Republican press. Matsell, a member of the NYPD since 1840, himself was suspected of corruption, and rumors spread that he extorted money from criminals, seized stolen property for his own use, and skimmed the profits of illegal activities. By the time the Municipals and Metropolitans vied for control of the New York police, Matsell had managed to build a sprawling summer mansion within a vast vineyard in Iowa, where local landmarks still bear his name. New York politician Mike Walsh labeled the heavy-set Matsell a “walking mass of moral and physical putrefaction.”

The crisis between the Municipals and the Metropolitans was only resolved when Wood and the Municipals finally backed down and the Metropolitans emerged as the city’s permanent and only official police force. Yet, the new police force proved no more respectful of black lives. Boudinot became a captain in one of the city’s main wards and Rynders became a Democratic elder statesman during and after the war. In fact, New York City, always ready to defend the cotton trade with the South, voted against Lincoln in 1860 and harbored racial conservatives like Wood during the war and after. Embodied by newspapers like The New York Weekly Caucasian, one of the nation’s most prominent promulgators of white supremacist ideology, the city remained an unfriendly place for African Americans.

One hundred and fifty years later, policing has changed a great deal, particularly in its militarization and organization, but the tensions between the nation’s black communities and the police are still very much evident. Black Americans have been fully aware of this history for generations because they have been the objects of so much of the violent quest for law and order. Although many people might assume that Riker’s Island was named after the city recorder, it appears that the name originates less from an individual and more from Manhattan’s general Dutch heritage. But though their origins may be different, both the prison and the city recorder share a similar past of neglecting the plight and suffering the New York’s most vulnerable residents.

Now, with some white Americans learning the fraught history of policing for the first time, have they come to realize that the last moments and utterances of Eric Garner, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and untold others are but modern expressions of a deep and deadly struggle that stretches back to America’s earliest beginnings.

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raleighliving · 4 years ago

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Pros and Cons of College Life in Raleigh

Last time I wrote about colleges in Raleigh generally and how it’s not like other college towns. This time, I’m gonna be speaking a bit more about the pros and cons so it should be a little more specific.

Before that, however, I wanna make this clear: Raleigh is not somewhere you should move to for college unless the school you’ve applied to is your dream school.

In terms of academics, there are better choices than NC State or WPU. If you wanna study biology or medicine, schools like UNC-W or Duke would probably be a better fit for instance. If you live in Raleigh, don’t pick a school just because it’s close; if you live in another part of the states and you want to attend an east coast school there are options all along the east coast that you should consider.

Raleigh is a great place to live and work, and there are plenty of friendly people here; but a degree from the right university can make or break your career (depending on the field and other aspects of course).

As a person suffering from anxiety, the question “Do you want the good news or bad news first” has always been a terrible one for me. Up until I hear the bad news, it could be literally anything regardless of what the person asking was doing or how much of the task they were on I’m familiar with.

Similarly, living in Raleigh (or really anywhere for that matter) is going to present a lot of subjective pros and cons. Please keep in mind this is gonna be super subjective, but I hope you enjoy reading this even if we disagree.

But you didn’t come here to read three paragraphs of disclaimer. So lets start by listing the good stuff.

Raleigh is a city full of vibrant color, culture, and cool shit. You can find cool things almost anywhere you look, regardless of where you are in Raleigh. I mean, all of the pictures (including those in this article) I use for this blog I’ve taken in Raleigh or nearby it. As a result, the first pro has got to be the beltline highway system.

The beltline is a highway system composed of I-440, I-40, and parts of I-540 that encapsulates all of Raleigh. It connects north and south Raleigh while having downtown in the center, letting travelers easily reach nearly any part of Raleigh.

I’ve lived on the border of Durham, Cary, and Rolesville at different points in my life. I’ve had to make trips to Garner and Apex for various reasons. At no point in my 20+ year stay have I ever had to make a city trip that lasted longer than a half-hour (one way). It makes working in Raleigh especially easy, since the abundance of highway access points and the convenience of the loop design means I’m never too far from that loop.

It even helps with adjusting to your new environment if you move here (for school or other reasons) since if you’re ever lost, the highways can act as a point to re-orient yourself by. I know I’ve had to do it plenty of times in the past, and it can really save you from looking like an idiot if you excuse your lost-ness by just saying “Oh yeah mate, I was just tryna get on the highway. Saves so much time.”

Does this mean Raleigh has the best transportation network of any city? Hell no. Does this mean that Raleigh has the best highway system? Not even close. But it’s still super nice, especially for students. You’ll run into the problems any urban place has like rush hour or crash delays, but this is mitigated by the fact you’ll be using it for our second pro: Everything happens in Raleigh.

Well, not EVERYTHING everything but as I’ve ranted about before; there’s plenty to do and see in the city of Raleigh (even if you’re a student).

For instance, according to raleighnc.gov, Raleigh is home to over 200 public parks. Not a fan of parks? Into more electronic entertainment? Then visit our very own “Arcade of Thrones” downtown and get your game on with your fellow nerds

Boring stuff like restaurants and night clubs aside, Raleigh is home to literally thousands of businesses and social clubs for you to partake in. Farmers markets, gun and knife shows, fishin’ holes and public church barbecues are available for that classic southern charm; but don’t forget to make use of our barcades, art festivals, concerts, comedy clubs and sport centers.

The only reason why I’m not going into more detail about examples like First Friday, the downtown cultural festivals, PNC arena or other more specific events is because I want to write about them in-depth in the future.

Of course, students having things to do and places to go is only part of the college experience. If you’re gonna come to Raleigh for college, the best pro I could possibly mention is the support network.

Not to say that we’re exactly all one big happy family here, but in Raleigh you get that nice blend of metropolitan city life with your rural state. Orgs like the LGBT Center, Goodwill, Raleigh Missions, and more support locals in need constantly and provide for the many different groups around here.

Libraries and civic centers share the same city as mosques and churches which neighbor women's shelters and LGBT+ advocacy groups. If you’re a republican or democrat, that’s fine but be prepared to meet the other members of the political spectrum since groups like the Democratic-Socialists of America (DSA) are active downtown as well.

If you need help or want to help others, there’s a 98% chance that you’ll find someone or something out there that meets your needs. Join a community through Facebook or Nextdoor and you’ll see every diaper drive, garage sale, and community recommendation pop up whenever one is needed.

Of course, this brings us to our first con. Raleigh may be home to some of the nicest people I’ve ever met but it doesn’t mean you won’t run into some problem people sooner or later.

There’s of course the typical collegiate douchebags, the upper-middle class young scions of no import who fumble through life with no regard for others because mommy and daddy will perpetually care for them, but being a red state you’ll also run into the more colorful republicans.

Every year there’s an anime convention called “Animazement” downtown and every year there’s a small herd of fundamentalist Christians warning all the otaku who’ll listen that they’re going to hell. Drive around town long enough and you’ll find a few different businesses that have made their opinions on things like masks and social distancing clear, not to mention there’s no shortage of QAnoners and alt-right sympathists.

Of course, you shouldn’t let others dictate the quality of your life or the area you live in but you should be aware that these people exist. Raleigh is more liberal than other parts of North Carolina for sure but it’s not the leftist paradise those other parts would say it is.

Other than the coinflip that is neighbors, Raleigh is kind of a pricy place to live. The cost of living is on average higher than other cities in the US, cheaper still than New York of Californian cities, but pricey nonetheless.

Rent in Raleigh for a one bedroom apartment is on average $975 according to bestplaces.net and can go as high as $1200 depending on the complex and location.

That, with a federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, means you’ll need

>Multiple jobs >Multiple roommates >A good paying job

or any combination of the two to be able to afford rent, utilities, and food beyond cup ramen. There’s housing programs like Section 8 and military housing initiatives to help, but for students you’re looking at some pretty steep housing costs for anywhere that’s not student dorms.

You can get a good job that pays decent, of course, nothing’s impossible. However, finding one that won’t require roommates would demand full time hours (which might be difficult to make on student scheduling) or a degree (which you’re probably at college to get). Most living spaces require you make at least 3x the advertised rent to even be considered as well, which may limit students to seedier student living complexes like University Village or The Proper (Formerly Vie, formerly wolf creek).

Finally, if you move to Raleigh for college be prepared to drive. A lot.

As I mentioned earlier, the beltline is a god send for students and people looking to explore; but it’s also practically mandatory for moving around Raleigh. Public transit in Raleigh isn’t non-existent but it’s pretty damn close.

Live between 10-15 minutes from your desired destination? Taking the bus is gonna be anywhere from half an hour to a full hour, and that’s if you even live near a bus route. If you’re like myself and habitually on the edge of Raleigh, be prepared to drive for a bit before you even see a GoRaleigh bus let alone a stop.

The buses do at least run pretty late (Closing normally around 11PM), but the lack of public transit lines and bike-able roads means that you’ll be adding to the urban congestion more likely than not.

Okay with driving? Hope you’re okay with paying another arm and a leg, because at most schools down here tuition doesn’t cover your parking pass.

NC State prices range from $105 to over $400 depending on your credit hours and where you’re staying at. Other schools like William Peace only charge a flat $130 for their parking decal, but most of the schools require you throw them an extra Apple Pencil or two for the privilege of being able to park your own vehicle close to the actual campus.

There are workarounds, like parking off-campus nearby, but those carry risks and penalties that can add up over time. The audacity these schools have to take thousands in tuition and then demand that you pay and additional fee to just use the parking lot.

Hopefully, though, regardless of my thoughts if you live in Raleigh or North Carolina in general and you’re considering attending one of the fine establishments here; I’ve provided you some food for thought.

College can be a scary experience for many, and the area around it can really make or break your experiences. We don’t have the biggest party schools or the most glamorous cityscape; but if I had to go through the collegiate system again I honestly couldn’t imagine doing it anywhere else.

Next time I’ll be talking about some alternatives to College though, so stay tuned for that.

Special shout out to the DSA of Raleigh as well. They didn’t help write any of this or communicate with me during the production of this article, but they’ve been doing some amazing work downtown with the homeless during the pandemic. They are some of the most amazingly hard working individuals who care immensely for the community and you can check them out on dsanc.org.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years ago

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Proud Boys jailed, obviously

Thom Dunn:

Two Proud Boys, members of the violent far-right street gang founded by Gavin McInnes, were jailed for four years Tuesday. Maxwell Hare, 27, and John Kinsman, 32, were convicted of gang assault and rioting for attacking protestors outside a speech given by McInnes to New York City's Metropolitan Republican Club.

Judge Mark Dwyer called them McInnes' “soldiers” and compared them to Nazi Brownshirts: “I know enough about history to know what happened in Europe in the '30s when political street brawls were allowed to go ahead without any type of check from the criminal justice system.”

The BBC:

The Proud Boys describe themselves as "proud Western chauvinists" and advocate political violence. The group has chapters across North America and beyond - including in the UK and Australia.

Hare and Kinsman were jailed in a case that centres of a fight that erupted after a speech by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes at Manhattan's Metropolitan Republican Club in October 2018.

CCTV footage showed the Proud Boys members beating up a group of four anti-fascist activists - known as "antifa" - who had come to protest against Mr McInnes' appearance.

This incident was obscured by serious failures of journalism. The NYPD initially implied that the Proud Boys were the victims and some media thumbed the scales for days afterward, casting the beatings as acts of self-defense against Antifa.

https://boingboing.net/2019/10/23/proud-boys-jailed-obviously.html

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wilwheaton · 6 years ago

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The commonalities here could not be more obvious. The most famous Democrats in the country, prominent cable news #Resistance pundits, and the famous Jewish liberal funder who has become an all-purpose boogeyman for the (increasingly anti-Semitic) extreme right. Of course, we don't know for sure who carried out the attempted bombings yet or why, though it's getting hard to imagine anything other than conservative politics as a motivation. But this would be far from the only example of recent right-wing terrorism — an increasing public emergency for the United States. Take the so-called "Proud Boys," a violent proto-fascist gang founded by the overt racist Gavin McInnes. McInnes was recently invited to the Metropolitan Republican Club — which is also the headquarters of the New York Republican Party. At the club, McInnes and his goons celebrated the 58th anniversary of the political assassination of Japan Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma, who was stabbed to death with a samurai sword at a public event by a young right-wing fanatic. Brandishing a sword himself to re-enact the murder, McInnes said, "Never let evil take root." Again, these guys were invited to come by top New York Republicans.

America has a right-wing terrorism problem

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jroemeth · 5 years ago

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#metropolitan republican club

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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JACOBIN MAGAZINE

If you go by most of what you see in the media, you would think politics is governed by some strange version of Newtonian physics. “Both sides” are perennially to blame, and if there’s ever dangerous excesses on one end of the political spectrum, then they must of course be evened out by the existence of equally dangerous excesses on the other end.

It’s why, after George Soros was mailed a bomb, Chuck Schumer felt the need to announce that “despicable acts of violence and harassment are being carried out by radicals across the political spectrum.” And why the New York Times, after more explosives were sent to individuals hated by the Trump-loving Right, decidedthe explosives were adding “to [a] climate of overheated partisan rancor.”

Yet we’re now at a moment when it’s indisputable that only one of these “sides” has actually become a vehicle for dangerous, violent extremism.

I’m speaking about the quickly fading line between the far Right and “mainstream” conservatism. This isn’t really a new phenomenon. The dividing line between US conservatism and fringe bigots of various kinds has always been pretty flimsy; the old, “respectable” conservatism represented by William F. Buckley and pined for by today’s centrist pundits was also a deeply racist one. It’s not a mystery why the Klan endorsed Ronald Reagan for president twice.

But just consider some of the events of the past few weeks. The “theory” that the bombs sent by Trump superfan Cesar Sayoc were a “false flag” orchestrated by the Left quickly moved from far right internet message boards to being broadcast by “mainstream” conservatives, including Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Lou Dobbs, Michael Savage, various Fox News guests, and even a Republican lawmaker, Matt Gaetz. Gaetz, along with “mainstream” conservatives like Newt Gingrich, also floated the idea that the thousands of Central American migrants traveling to Mexico and the US-Mexican border were being funded by some mysterious agent of chaos. One of these conservatives was pundit and prolific conspiracy theorist Erick Erickson, who for some reason was invited this past Sunday onto Meet the Press where he play-acted as a sober moderate and lectured conservatives to drop the crazy talk.

It called to mind the recent episode in which conservative legal thinker Ed Whelan invented an alternative“explanation” for Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged assault of Christine Blasey Ford that involved a Kavanaugh doppelgänger, defaming an innocent man in the process. It also calls to mind that, even now, a majority of Republicans believe Obama was born in Kenya.

This is far from the only recent instance of crossover between the far and “mainstream” Right. British far-right figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (a.k.a. “Tommy Robinson”) was invited by Republican congressman Paul Gosar to speak to the Conservative Opportunity Society, a group of right-wing House Republicans founded by Steve King. This is only a few months after Gosar traveled to London and spoke in support of Yaxley-Lennon at a protest peopled with other far-right figures, where he called Muslim men a “scourge.” The Arizona GOP said nothing.

Speaking of Steve King — the Republican congressman who, whoopsie daisy, just happens to somehow constantly retweet, meet with, and sound exactly like neo-Nazis — his “mainstream” colleagues seem to have a hard time condemning him. Here’s a parade of local GOP officials defending King and whitewashing his various racist comments (“he’s a godly, upright man”; “I think that he says what he means”;“maybe it’s crude, maybe a little mean, but it gets the point across”). One GOP county chair, when asked if King’s statement that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” was racist, responded: “I think it’s a reality.” (The head of the Republican Congressional fundraising arm did finally criticize King on Tuesday.)

King has helpfully made clear an obvious truth that would be considered too “partisan” if uttered by anyone in the media. Referring to the Freedom Party of Austria, a far-right party of actual Nazis, King said: “If they were in America pushing the platform that they push, they would be Republicans.” And he’s not wrong: this November features a gaggle of real-life, no-kidding neo-Nazis and white supremacists running as GOP nominees.

Meanwhile, the Proud Boys, a ridiculous but nonetheless violent fascist gang led by Vice founder Gavin McInnes, have been welcomed into the Republican Party fold, with McInnes invited by the Metropolitan Republican Club of New York City — traditionally a hub for the GOP’s establishment elite — to give a lecture. The talk involved McInnes re-enacting the 1960 assassination of Japanese Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma, complete with caricatured Asian eyes, and concluding, “Never let evil take root,” a line reportedly met with hooting and cheering by the Republican audience. The Proud Boys also acted as “security” for Joe Gibson, a far-right activist who was briefly a Republican Senate candidate from Washington, and a recent protest by the gang was organized by a local GOP official in Florida.

We can also see this shift in Fox News, the most popular and powerful media arm of the conservative movement. Fox has long been a bastion of racist dog-whistling, as Megyn Kelly’s tenure at the network can attest, but it’s recently opted to swap the dog whistle for a bullhorn. Tucker Carlson runs shows about the dangers of Roma immigration and supposed anti-white discrimination in South Africa, while Laura Ingraham told viewers that “massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people” through both illegal and legal immigration, and that “the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” in parts of the country. Earlier this week, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested that the migrants headed toward the US are carrying unnamed “diseases,” which Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale accurately called “a staple of racist and anti-semitic incitement for hundreds of years.”

But the fact that Fox has never been far from these more alarmingly explicit appeals to racism is key, because the same goes for “mainstream” conservatism. As the Left has been at pains to point out for the past three years, other than on trade and some aspects of foreign policy, there is very little real substantive difference between Trump and “mainstream” conservatives, which is why Republicans, including his fiercest“opponents”, vote almost exactly in line with Trump’s policy positions most of the time. It’s also why Trump’s approval ratings are sky-high among Republicans and why “mainstream” conservatives have walked back their previous disapproval of Trump and now declare they’re “thrilled” with him. As one pollster has said, the “Never-Trump” Republicans that tend to appear on TV and in op-ed pages don’t really exist in real life.

Take a look at the recent midterms, which have seen the entire GOP heavily stoking racism in advance of voting day. The Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, affiliated with House speaker Paul Ryan and the GOP leadership, has been running some breathtakingly racist ads. But the GOP’s “moderate” elements have been flirting with extremism for a while now.

Hatred of refugees, which motivated the latest far-right terrorist attack, was stoked by the “mainstream” Right in 2015, when 31 governors (all but one of them Republican) refused to resettle any Syrian refugees in their states. Hapless “moderate” Jeb Bush suggested letting in only the Christian ones. The following year, Ted Cruz, then another “moderate” alternative to Donald Trump, ran a campaign ad that was essentially Willie Horton for immigrant communities.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual confluence of “mainstream” conservatism’s brightest lights, has for many years been a cesspool of far-right talking points, ideas, and figures. Figures like Pamela Geller and Frank Gaffney were fixtures for years (Gaffney, a conspiratorial, anti-Muslim hate-monger, was also an adviser to Ted Cruz in 2016, and other GOP hopefuls that year lined up to be associated with him). Geert Wilders, the far-right Dutch politician, turned up once at CPAC to a forty-second standing ovation. This was the same year Wilders had been invited to the Capitol by Jon Kyl, the extremely conservative Republican former congressman who was considered a “pragmatic” choice to fill John McCain’s seat in Arizona.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #conservatism #republicans #bigotry #economic inequality

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Rachael Dottle

I grew up at the top of a hill on the east bank of a river that burned.1 That determined so much.

My maternal grandparents bought the house where I grew up in 1949. They were the rare Catholics in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and they lived at the edge of the city, a few blocks away from a Jesuit college and parish. They were entering their 40s, and that they could buy in tony Shaker carried a certain cachet. The city probably wasn’t quite as excited to have them. My paternal grandfather, who was a real estate agent and lived a town over, was sometimes told by sellers in Shaker that they didn’t want their homes shown to any Catholics (like him) or Jews. The city had few black residents then. After one black couple did move to Shaker in the mid-1950s, their newly built home was firebombed in the middle of the night. That determined so much, too.

Parma, a city on the other side of the Cuyahoga River — which bisects Cleveland both geographically and transcendentally — was on the precipice of a wild population sprout in ’49. The city’s neat rows of modest houses still speak to the enthusiasm of its post-war suburban sprawl. In the course of two decades, Parma’s population grew from 30,000 to more than 100,000. It was the butt of Cleveland jokes, though. In a blue-collar part of the country, Parma was almost too blue collar — its flamingos-on-the-lawn, pierogies-in-the-kitchen reputation was so infamously parodied by a local 1960s TV personality that the mayor of Parma called the comedy “a dangerous slur to the community.”

For Cleveland suburbs, Shaker and Parma have little in common other than that, until recently, Democratic presidential candidates could count on their votes. But in 2016, Parma voted for Donald Trump, and Shaker didn’t. To Clevelanders, this split followed a certain logic. Shaker and Parma have long been of different tribes, though the same political party.

The two cities, one racially mixed, the other homogenous, have become my reference point for a cultural fissure in the Democratic Party that gaped open with the election of Trump. White Americans have split politically along class lines, and their alienation from each other following 2016 seems utter and complete. But the split that’s happening isn’t just between residents of rural and urban places. It’s also apparent in some suburbs, among people whose lives aren’t, at least on the surface, all that different from one another’s.

Much of my life since 2016 has been subsumed by politics talk — on podcasts, at parties, in conversations I scribble down in my notebook. Those discussions are often about how Americans find their tribe. Whom you date or befriend might hinge on politics. What city you move to might also, as well as what news you read and what books you take as gospel — whether you take the gospels as gospel matters politically, it turns out.

So, I decided to go home to look at the tribalism of where I’m from. Perhaps familiar ground might lead me down some road of insight. By dumb luck, we’re all born some place, to some kind of people. The choices made for and by us along the way, and the histories we absorb, are what shape our politics. They did in 2016, and they will again in 2020.

On the left, the Ridgewood Inn in Parma’s Polish Village. On the right, Shaker Heights High School’s bleachers.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

We don’t spend much time thinking about the suburbs. That’s sort of the point — they’re purposely and pleasantly boring, a cul-de-sac monolith of culture. But the suburbs also form the worldviews of 175 million Americans. Whom you live next to, where your parents went to school, what store opens down the street — all these small things shape the politics of Americans before they even know what politics are.

In the past few years, the suburbs have also shown themselves to be the heart of the shifting politics of the nation. According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton lost the suburbs to Donald Trump in 2016, continuing a slump for Democrats — Obama lost the suburban vote in 2012 after nabbing it in 2008. But in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats took back the House on the strength of their showing in suburban districts.

Lots of theories for the changing political proclivities of suburban Americans have been floated, and white Americans are front and center. (White people are the majority in 90 percent of America’s suburban counties.) Class has something to do with it. Over the past few years, college-educated white people have been increasingly more apt to vote for Democrats, while those without a college education skew Republican.

But what do we mean when we talk about “class” and politics? While Trump’s campaign consistently served messages of blue-collar empowerment, the people who voted for him were often quite well-off. According to an analysis of American National Election Studies data, 1 in 5 Trump voters without a college degree had a household income over $100,000.

Our concept of class is far too vaguely defined, and our political discussions of it too two-dimensional. Class means more than how much money you make or whether you went to college. It encompasses your understanding of racial identity — your own and that of others — and your perceptions of history, whether you look favorably or unfavorably on the country’s evolution. When we say “working-class white,” what we actually mean is a set of people whose understandings of politics is rooted in a specific set of values: those of racially homogenous communities who came up in America through middle-class jobs, often unionized ones.

If Democrats lose these voters in 2020 — both white blue-collar workers and their blue-collar-identifying descendants — it might portend a dramatically different party over the next few decades, or even century. When I went back to Ohio, I gleaned that how white people vote has quite a bit to do with their pasts — the formation of political identity comes from experiences, oftentimes inherited ones.

Parma and Shaker Heights lie on opposite sides of Cleveland’s metropolitan area and on opposite sides of a cultural divide. That cultural divide became a political one in 2016.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Politics are an iteration of ongoing history. So to understand Shaker’s and Parma’s present moment, I went back to the beginning.

Shaker Heights — current population, 28,000 — is named for the Shakers, the celibate Christian sect that settled in what they called “The Valley of God’s Pleasure.” The Shakers rather predictably lost their mojo around the turn of the 20th century because young people kept leaving, rumspringa-style. By 1905, the 1,366 acres of land they had worked found its way into the hands of real estate developers, the Van Sweringen brothers, who bought it for a cool million.

Shaker was to have neighborhood schools, lakes, canoeing, and no undesirables that would bring down home values. Deed restrictions stipulated architectural style, and only four were acceptable: Tudor, Colonial, French provincial and English cottage. (Historian Virginia Dawson has researched the city’s exclusionary real estate tactics extensively, cataloging the stringent regulations of Shaker’s early years.)

It was a rarified, exclusive atmosphere. An early advert talked about “friendly neighbors of our own kind … the peace and beauty and hominess of Shaker Village can never be invaded.”

Early advertisements for housing developments in what would become Parma.

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

The crucial Van Sweringen innovation, though, was a railway line that took Shaker residents directly from their suburban homes to downtown Cleveland. “Open rolling country and deep woods lie beyond, yet the Public Square is but 30 minutes away by Shaker Electric Express,” an ad from 1926 read. Shaker was cosseted suburban life done to perfection yet still had access to the cosmopolitanism of Cleveland.

Perhaps that’s why early news and advertisements for the development that would become Parma conjured up visions of Shaker Heights. (Parma was incorporated as a city in 1931 and before that was known as Parma Township.) “In many ways, it will rival the Heights district,” a 1921 newspaper item said of Ridgewood, the brainchild of developer (and Shaker Heights Country Club member) H.A. Stahl. There were artificial lakes, and “many acres are set out in wonderful orchards,” an ad trumpeted. “Children … will grow strong and healthy out in Ridgewood. Three hundred and twenty-five feet above Lake Erie, where the air is pure and fragrant with the perfume of flowers.”

But the West Side development seemed ultimately more intent on attracting a humbler demographic. Stahl’s company promised that “the man of modest income can buy a homesite at the price of an ordinary lot in a manufacturing district and live amid beautiful surroundings.” And indeed, the real Parma boom came after World War II, driven by migration from the Eastern European Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland. As Andy Fedynsky, director emeritus of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland tells it, Tremont’s big Ukrainian Catholic church had purchased a cemetery plot out in the suburb. “People started gravitating to Parma because every time they buried a loved one, they went there,” Fedynsky said. The churches and people kept coming in droves thanks to the 10-minute drive on the highway from Cleveland to Parma.

Parma’s identity has remained remarkably cohesive — 88 percent of its residents are white, and it’s still a community centered around churches and the Eastern European experience. Most of the city’s immigrants are European — 71 percent, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Evidence of the city’s ethnic pride is still easy to see — on a recent visit, I spotted the Polish eagle on the side of one building and signs for “Old World Christmas” on street lights.

Shaker, meanwhile, has seen drastic change.

Homes in Shaker Heights.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Shaker was built for segregation, at the very least the socioeconomic kind. South Woodland, a lovely, tree-lined boulevard, cuts across the belly of the city, dividing it into north and south. The northern reaches are where the real wealth dwelled and still does — it’s where the Van Sweringens built themselves a Tudor fortress. There, larger lots for mansions were built, close to the Shaker Lakes. To the south of South Woodland, there are smaller lots, meant for modest dwellings, including two-family homes.

Neighborhoods on both sides of South Woodland evoked a certain suburban idyll, but the city was far from immune to the racial violence that typified 20th-century America.

The Baileys were a black family that bought a home in Shaker in 1925. Their garage was soon set on fire, and the windows broken. At the time, the Van Sweringens were adding provisions to deeds that stipulated homes couldn’t be sold to people they didn’t approve of. That was mostly code for black and Jewish buyers. The Baileys soon moved back to Cleveland.

Thirty-one years later, in Ludlow, a neighborhood that straddles Cleveland and Shaker, there was another act of racial violence, this one sparking a much different reaction. On Jan. 3, 1956, a bomb destroyed the garage and part of the dining room of John and Dorothy Pegg’s newly built home in Ludlow. The Peggs were black. In the wake of the bombing, a kind of proto-wokeness in the city was born. For decades to come, a part of Shaker’s identity would be its pride in diversity efforts.

Shaker’s Ludlow Community Association formed after the bombing of a black family’s home. The group tried to deter white flight by giving loans to white buyers while also trying to attract black residents to the Ludlow neighborhood that bordered Cleveland.

CLEVELAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY / SHAKER HEIGHTS LIBRARY

After the bombing, Ludlow residents formed the Ludlow Community Association, a group with aims to integrate the neighborhood purposefully. White real estate agents had stopped listing Ludlow homes by the time the community association formed because the neighborhood was integrating, and homeowners feared that a further increase in black residents would decrease property values. Its strategy was to prevent white flight by setting up a mortgage company, offering help to potential white buyers, while still welcoming black residents with open arms. It was a difficult proposition for the time.

Dawson, who lives in Shaker, lauded the careful strategy of the group. “The genius of the way Shaker Heights integrated was that they were trying to attract white liberals who would move in and become cheerleaders for integration,” she told me. To do that, the community association put white residents front and center, she said, even while black residents “were really the leaders.” Today, Ludlow remains an integrated neighborhood.

But elsewhere in Shaker, similar strategies worked with varying degrees of success on the integration front. The Moreland neighborhood had a less proactive neighborhood association, according to Dawson, and its white residents left. Today, it is nearly entirely black.

American suburban life seems to regress to a mean of segregation. A 2011 analysis using Census Bureau data found that a “typical white” American lives in a neighborhood that’s 75 percent white.

Shaker has spent 60 years trying to fight that. And in the process, the city cultivated what might be called, in the parlance of 2019, a woke white demographic. The identity of the city, which once rested on being wealthy and WASP-y, turned unmistakably liberal.

This sort of wokeness has become a trope in today’s Democratic Party, empowering to some, alienating to others. But there’s evidence that white Democrats’ views on race have shifted quite a bit over the past few years. In 2009, according to the Pew Research Center, 50 percent of white Democrats agreed with the idea that the country needs to make changes to give black Americans equal rights to white Americans. By 2017, 80 percent of white Democrats agreed with that position. This shift has come alongside gains for Democrats among white college-educated voters, which seems notable given the change in racial attitudes. Shaker has a lot of that well-educated demographic — 65 percent of the population has a college degree or higher.

Share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher, based on the 2013-17 American Community Survey five-year estimate

Bachelor’s Degree or higher Shaker Heights 64.7%

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Parma 20.7%

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Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Since I moved away, I haven’t spent much time in the parts of Shaker outside my family orbit — Van Sweringen geography still at work. But on a February afternoon, with time to kill, I took a drive around Moreland and found myself in front of Chelton Park, where I’d played summer-league softball as a kid. Moreland and Ludlow look a decent amount like Parma. Most of the homes around Chelton are doubles. In Ludlow, there’s a mix of the traditional Shaker colonials and Tudors, along with G.I.-era ranch-style homes. As I drove around the area, the street signs switched back and forth from the blue of Cleveland to the white-and-black lettering of Shaker.

Some called the traffic barricades separating Shaker Heights from Cleveland “the Berlin Wall for black people.” Portions of the barricades still stand.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Down the block from Chelton is Scottsdale Boulevard, the boundary between Shaker and Cleveland. During the 1970s, Shaker set up traffic barriers along Scottsdale in an effort, the city said, to control vehicle flow. To many, though, their purpose seemed clear: “the Berlin Wall for black people.” A couple of barriers are still there.

Most Shaker residents probably don’t like the “build the wall” chant that Trump has popularized, but they built one of their own here, years ago, a reminder that the city’s integration was done on its own particular set of terms; it wasn’t necessarily meant for everyone.

Parma was at the very least honest about its discriminatory practices.

“I do not want Negroes in the City of Parma,” City Council President Kenneth Kuczma said in 1971, garnering Parma all the wrong kinds of attention.

He made the statement at a public meeting on whether a proposed new development should have low-income housing. People were worried that Parmatown Woods would attract, as Mayor John Petruska put it at the meeting, the “entire east side of Cleveland,” a thinly veiled reference to black people. The comments were picked up on local and national TV, and the federal government soon got involved. In 1973, the Justice Department sued Parma, accusing it of engaging “in a pattern and practice of racial discrimination in housing in violation of the Fair Housing Act.”

Parma’s Polish Village.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

In 1970, Parma, a city of 100,000 people, had only 41 black residents, 0.04 percent of its population. The city was eventually found to have systematically discriminated and was mandated by the court to establish its own public housing committee and to advertise the community as welcoming to minority homeowners; unusually, city officials were required to take a course on housing discrimination. (Historian Dennis Keating, emeritus professor of urban studies and law at Cleveland State University, detailed the events surrounding the lawsuit and its fallout in his 1994 book, “The Suburban Racial Dilemma,” which focuses on Cleveland’s suburbs.)

Today, with a population of around 80,000, Parma is 3 percent black.

“There are places I won’t go here because I know I wouldn’t be welcome,” Karyn Dukes, who is black and lives in Parma, told me recently. “There’s a bar at the end of my corner” — I’d seen the Irish bar with cinder-block half-windows when I’d driven up her street — “I’ve never been there.”

Dukes told me that she thinks twice about going into stores with Polish flags or ethnic emblems on them. “You’re scared to because of the rejection of how people will act or treat you when you’re in there,” she said. “I feel like I have to put on this air. I feel like I can’t act like myself — ‘Hi, how are you!’” She put on an exaggerated perky voice.

Polish sweets at Rudy’s Strudel & Bakery in Parma.

CLARE MALONE

A couple of days earlier, I’d gone into one of those businesses to buy Polish jelly doughnuts. The place smelled like pure sugar, advertised polka dancing lessons and had a picture of Joe Biden on the wall. The woman behind the counter was lovely and insisted on giving me free doughnuts when she found out I was visiting from New York. It felt like a Cleveland hug of kindness, the kind of out-of-nowhere warmth I miss on the East Coast. Would Dukes have felt comfortable walking in, I wondered.

Dukes lives in the upstairs of a two-family home with her son, a sweet and gangly preteen. One of the reasons she moved to Parma nearly five years ago was for the schools, the better housing and the chance to be near her mother, who lives in a town not far away. “I think the area that I live in is a prime location,” she said. “There’s a Sam’s Club, a Walmart. There’s a park, bike trails, all that stuff.” Suburban-ideal kind of stuff.

The 2016 election made things hard for Dukes in Parma. She said that Trump yard signs made her feel like people were signaling that they didn’t believe in having people like her there. “I feel like people have had deep feelings about a lot of the issues that he raises, but they didn’t really say anything about it [before] because Cuyahoga County is predominantly a Democratic county.”

Parma has been shaped by the ebbs and flows of American manufacturing and by generations of close-knit communities of Eastern European descent.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

In their book on the 2016 election, “Identity Crisis,” political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck talk about something not far off from the phenomenon that Dukes describes: “Once Obama was in office, whites with less formal education became better able to connect racial issues to partisan politics.” The Democratic Party, it was becoming clear, was a party for liberal racial policies. That realization coincided with the party’s loss of white people without a college education. In 2008, roughly half of non-college-educated white people identified as Democrats and half as Republican. By 2015, the share that favored the GOP had grown to 57 percent, while the share that favored the Democrats had dropped to 33 percent.

Dukes told me that she is “an empathizer.” I asked what she thought it was that made some people in Parma hostile to people like her. (The politicians I talked to in the area — all white — said racism isn’t a problem anymore in Parma.) “I think because a lot of them were probably immigrants, from immigrant households themselves,” she said. “They probably feel they worked hard to build a community here so how come people of other races can just come in here and benefit from anything they’ve built.”

Dukes said she’s mostly worried about how the environment in Parma will affect her son. “I’m scared to let my son go down the street and play with other kids because I don’t know if their parents are OK with my son being black,” she said. “And that’s the most frightening part.”

“My son loves everyone,” she said. “I don’t want him to see color, but I also have to put the warning out to him.”

Parma Mayor Tim DeGeeter is a Democrat. So is most of the City Council, the city’s state representative and its Cuyahoga County Council member. “Right to Work Is A Lie” is emblazoned on a billboard above the highway near Parma. (Parma has a General Motors plant, and its United Auto Workers chapter is active.) Online, you can watch a 2008 video of a young Barack Obama working the rope line for an adoring crowd at one of Parma City School District’s high schools; a 2012 clip shows Bill Clinton and Bruce Springsteen rallying a Parma crowd in support of Obama.

Hillary Clinton footage?

“Their campaign didn’t focus on places like Parma,” DeGeeter told me, sitting next to Mickey Vittardi, the head of the city’s Democratic Party. The three of us were discussing which, if any, national Democrats could win the city back after 2016. Parma Democrats, DeGeeter said, were Reagan Democrats: “You know who plays best here — Joe Biden.”

Parma’s Democratic identity is a union identity. Its political history is a union town’s political history. That’s in part because the ebbs and flows of American manufacturing figure heavily into Parma’s well-being as a city. DeGeeter said that when GM announced the closure of a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, “we for sure got on the phone and talked to them.” What would happen if the GM plant in Parma closed, I asked. “I wouldn’t want to think about it,” the mayor said.

The Clinton campaign did send Biden to Parma in 2016, and he returned on a midterm swing through the area in 2018. The former vice president likes to commune with the blue-collar union demographic by talking about Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. Despite a national party that’s heavily flirting with left progressivism, Vittardi said that he was hopeful the Democratic presidential primary would winnow the field to a more moderate candidate. “My friends that I grew up with are strong Democrats, but they’re tired of our party sliding so far to the left,” he said.

In recent years, Parma has tried to court new residents with its affordable housing and cohesive sense of identity.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

While Parma’s Democratic identity comes from union politics, its cultural identity is probably best described as “white ethnic.” Because of that, it’s a place that’s well aware of Cleveland’s traditional ethnic geography. “So you’re Irish, what are you doing on the east side?” one person asked me a few minutes into a casual conversation, after he’d found out my last name and that I’d grown up across the river.

DeGeeter told me that the city’s Polish Village, paczki-laden Fat Tuesday celebrations and Ukrainian parades and festivals were real selling points for Parma. Young people, he told me, were eager to move to a community with cheap housing and a cohesive sense of identity.

“People work hard, play hard, want their kids to do better than they did, want their kids to go to college at the Kent States, the Bowling Greens, and be able to afford to go on vacation to Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head,” he said. And they want their politicians to confine themselves to kitchen table issues.

A couple of nights later, I was due in Parma for the city’s local Democratic Party meeting. My usual route west from Shaker takes me by Lake Erie, which I don’t just love for the blue haze it gets in summer or how the spray freezes into icicles in the winter. It’s a useful beauty — you could drink all 127 trillion gallons of fresh water if you needed to. But the route to Parma skirts inland, passing over the industrial heart of Cleveland, where belching towers of smoke sometimes take on the same pearlescent glow of clouds at sunset and shoot ribbons of flame into the night sky. It’s eerily, hellaciously captivating, a reminder, just like the lake, of what made the region. Someone recently said to me, “Who wants to read about Ohio? It’s not even beautiful.” This is just to say, of course it is. Some people just don’t know how to look. And if there is one thing I learned growing up in Ohio and then leaving it, it’s that people dismiss the place. They think it’s the past.

Bill Clinton visited Parma Pierogies Restaurant during his 1992 presidential campaign.

Joe Sohm / Visions of America / UIG via Getty Images

The party meeting was in a VFW hall tucked into a residential neighborhood. I arrived halfway through, and one official had already left for the Cavs game. The small crowd — all white — sipped beer and chatted. Jeff Crossman, who represents Parma in the Ohio House, nursed a beer and told me about a call that he’d gotten a couple of days after his November 2018 victory: “It was [Sen.] Sherrod Brown, and he had called to congratulate me. And we were talking about the [2020] general, and I told him how concerned I was that the national party narrative was hurting us in places like Ohio.” Candidates like Bernie Sanders, Crossman told me, ran the risk of “overpromising and underdelivering.” Ohioans probably weren’t going to go for “Medicare-for-all,” he said. “I don’t know that you can promise free tuition and free health care — it’s not free, first of all,” he said. “There’s a cost somewhere along the line. And I think people in Ohio are smart enough to know that. We’re very pragmatic.”

The break over, Ryan Puente, the soft-spoken, baby-faced executive director of the Cuyahoga County Democrats, got up to brief the crowd on November’s election. The performance of Ohio Democrats has been disappointing over the past couple of cycles, and Puente seemed well aware that his job was to boost morale by putting a spin on the numbers. “Is Ohio a red state?” he asked. “The short answer is ‘no.’”

A lot of that optimism about the competitiveness of the state centered on Brown’s performance. Puente was at particular pains to emphasize the importance of blue-collar suburbs like Parma that might be moving away from the Democratic Party. In Cuyahoga County, he noted, Brown outperformed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Richard Cordray, who lost his race to Republican Mike DeWine, by around 26,000 votes. Puente said that one way to keep Ohio competitive would be to bring all the people who had voted Democratic in the Senate election and Republican in the gubernatorial election back into the fold.

He wrapped up. Were there any questions?

A man wanted to know what to do about Republicans who kept tearing down yard signs by the UAW.

On the left, a flag supporting President Trump flies in Parma. On the right, a sticker in Shaker Heights protests the killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer in 2014.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Given FiveThirtyEight’s predilections, I suppose the most pressing question at hand is whether the Democrats can re-unite the political interests of Parma and Shaker in 2020. Can they knit two different tribes back into a single cloth? Will the primary produce the moderate of Parma’s dreams who also appeals to the sensibilities of Shaker’s liberals? That’s what people like to talk your ear off about.

In some ways, though, this near-term political dilemma is far from the only interesting one — what comes after 2020 matters just as much. The realignment of white America’s politics along class lines is likely to continue to define our partisanship.

How that will play out in the culture is an unknown. White Shakerites live in a racially mixed city, a relative rarity in American life. But there is an alliance forming in the Democratic Party between minorities — who are estimated to become the majority in the U.S. by 2045 — and another group of college-educated white people, those who say they share a race-conscious worldview but who don’t live in the same cities as minorities or send their children to the same schools. What that portends for our politics after the upheaval of the Trump era isn’t entirely clear.

Already, that alliance can be tense, particularly on issues where politics are personal. In Shaker, for instance, the schools are ostensibly integrated, but some people feel black students have limited academic opportunities compared with white students.

“There are three Shakers,” Kevin Lowery, the current co-president of the Ludlow Community Association, told me recently. Lowery is black and the father of two children in Shaker’s public schools. He thinks the city isn’t doing enough to grapple with its inherent disparities. “You have your upper-class, elitist Shaker, you have your middle-class Shaker — and those groups have taken ownership of the city,” he said. “Then you have the third group of students that are lower middle class.” Many of those students are black, and in Lowery’s view, they’re treated differently by the city schools. The white parents “have their students placed in upper-level classes whether they can do the work or not,” he said. “But the African American parents and students are steered away.”

Shaker Heights has a diverse school system, but some people have questioned whether white and black students have the same educational opportunities.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

When I was in Shaker’s public schools, we all had to attend programming done by the Student Group on Race Relations to talk openly about our inherent biases, although our cafeteria, like so many others, was racially segregated. I was one of two white girls on the middle-school basketball team, but when I got to high school, I switched to the swim team, which was mostly white. Well-intentioned institutional forces were everywhere, pushing us to integrate, but as humans tend to do, a lot of us settled into what seemed like the most familiar territory.

And Shaker seems less preoccupied these days with proactively implementing pro-integration housing policies. The last loan-giving housing integration group in the city, The Fund for the Future of Shaker Heights, dissolved in 2012, handing over its funds to the Shaker Heights Development Corp. It was the end of a grand social experiment in housing integration. Mayor David Weiss told me that the transition to a focus on business development by no means marks an end to Shaker’s efforts to maintain a racially balanced city. “Inclusion is part of our identity and what we bring, part of who we are and part of what makes us different than other communities,” he said. (Full disclosure: My brother is a member of the Shaker Heights City Council.)

I still wonder if Shaker is special, though, or whether one day it too will regress to the American mean of segregation.

And then what? What does it mean to be politically allied with people you don’t live with? Perhaps Parma gives a glimpse of what happens when that distance becomes too much for a political alliance to bear.

Democrats have started attracting more white, college-educated Americans. Will that always be the case? A few months ago, I was writing a story about California, a state that’s so robustly Democratic that its politics are beginning to divide along class lines, as manifested in debates over housing and gentrification. Justin Garosi, who works in the Legislative Analyst’s Office there, told me that a lot of political conflicts in the state “aren’t so much left versus right as pro-development versus anti-development.”

What else could divide Americans in a future class-based political paradigm?

I’m not entirely sure, but it makes me wonder what it will mean, 10 or 20 years down the line, to have grown up at the top of a hill on the east bank of a river that burned.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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dweemeister · 6 years ago

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The Great McGinty (1940)

Ask an American politician or political student with a certain knowledge of older movies and they will probably say that their favorite film on American politics is Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Starring Jimmy Stewart and Claude Rains, Mr. Smith tells of an individual’s stand against a corrupt political machine, a refusal to succumb to well-financed kingmakers that run much of the show. Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty probably will not register among many of those politicians and political students. This is not only because McGinty did not set the box office aflame upon release, but that the film is a cynical political satire. Sturges (1937′s Easy Living, 1940′s Remember the Night) became Paramount’s most-prized and highest-paid writer over the 1930s, but he had never directed a film and he wished to direct. The Great McGinty would be Sturges’ directorial debut – the reward for selling the film’s screenplay to Paramount for $10.

The film opens somewhere in a bar in Latin America. Dan McGinty (Brian Donlevy) is the bartender with a hell of a story to tell. An American customer (who, like McGinty, cannot return to the United States for legal reasons) and one of the club’s dancer girls are there to listen. During the Great Depression, McGinty was a city-dwelling vagabond who is offered $2 to vote for the incumbent mayor in a corrupt election. McGinty votes at thirty-seven different locations, and demands to be paid his rightful $74. His complaints are heard by the city’s political boss (Akim Tamiroff, who claims to be in control of both the dominant parties), who hires McGinty as an enforcer – shaking up the nerves of wayward political participants in order to assure their compliance to the political machine. McGinty climbs the machine’s hierarchy, even marrying his secretary Catherine (Muriel Angelus) so it can bolster his political image. But as McGinty assumes greater power, he is struck by his conscience – which ushers his self-imposed exile from the United States.

Political imagery – no matter how popular the politician or how much one agrees with said politician – is always calculated, appealing to populist preferences. But behind said populism are the policy preferences of McGinty’s boss – who wants to provide poorer voters more jobs, even if these job creation programs are unsustainable going forward. He may not live in the mayor’s residence or the governor’s mansion, but he is making all the important decisions and everyone else is being played as a sucker. Even after marrying Catherine for the purposes of political imagery (even now in the United States, an unmarried or single politician arouses suspicion), it takes McGinty ages to come around to his wife’s idealism.

For those who have seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, yes, this is yet another romantic interest who assists the male protagonist’s goals (Jean Arthur’s cracking wise, jaded attitude towards Jimmy Stewart gives her the edge over Angelus)! And even Catherine’s idealism is half-baked – addressing an extremely policy problem without having researched the root cause of that problem. In acknowledging the incongruence of his boss’ demands to what he belatedly believes is the right thing to do, McGinty realizes how difficult it is disentangle himself from the political machine. The machine is interwoven into city and state politics to the point that dissent from the machine’s leadership is to invite not only the wrath of the leadership, but of citizens who participate in politics actively and earnestly. Secondarily, McGinty’s budding relationship with Catherine never feels organic in its evolution, although his interaction with Catherine’s children (she is a divorcee) provides plenty of awkward humor.

This does not sound like a comedy, does it? Sturges has enough material for this film to make a straight drama: the protagonist’s political rise from anonymous penury, becoming bedfellows with deep-pocketed political figures, the moral stand against said figures, and the rapid descent from political office because of political bravery. Comedy is far more subjective and complicated to write – ideas can be lost in translation or to time. Sturges, somehow, crafts this material into humor – little of which will send anyone on the floor rolling in laughter (okay, apart from a recurring joke that happens in the back of a car). Yet in Sturges’ screenplay, The Great McGinty’s comedy is rooted in the story’s fundamental pessimism. For The Great McGinty, the comedy is largely situational, not appearing through witty dialogue or subversive entendres; instead, it toes the line between tragic cases of political expediency and the desire to do what is right. How Sturges manages to balance the pathos of McGinty’s situation (the politically averse politician is a popular trope in Hollywood, but it is nothing more than a compelling fantasy) with the absurdity of those surrounding him and the comical moments in between critical scenes is a near-miracle.

Yet, as a student of politics, I could not help but want for more historical specificity from The Great McGinty. In the United States’ Gilded Age, political machines were based out of the major eastern and Midwestern cities and often ran cities, states, and regions of the country without much opposition. Compared to the megadonors for today’s Democratic and Republican parties, the political bosses of the late nineteenth century were less hesitant to boast or flaunt their purchased political power – they, unlike those modern-day megadonors, usually possessed more complete control over a metropolitan or state political system. Akim Tamiroff cuts an intimidating figure, but where is clientelist network? His public, hubristic pronunciations of the political figures he has nurtured over the years? The Great McGinty has no qualms to depict Tamiroff’s character as unforgivably corrupt, but the film is starving for greater menace, clenched knuckles, deathly stares, and sharper teeth (this is not an acting issue as there are good performances across the film, but that of screenwriting).

The Great McGinty does not drown in its own cynicism. Those expecting a film that decries the essence of American representative republicanism (small “r”) as obsolete will not find what they seek. Advocating for authoritarianism or true democracy are both beside the point of Sturges’ film; this is a satirical polemic, not propaganda. What the political machine brings to the unnamed city and state’s respective politics is reprehensible, the movie says, and the actions of the machine will only corrode the strength of representative republicanism in the long term.

Donlevy, as Governor McGinty, and Tamiroff, as the political machine’s boss, would reprise both their roles in another Preston Sturges film – The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943). But The Great McGinty’s legacy extended behind the cameras. The critical and financial success of The Great McGinty opened the door for many of Hollywood’s best comedic writers to try their hands and directing and writing their own films, most notably with Billy Wilder (1942′s The Major and the Minor, 1959′s Some Like It Hot) as these comedic director-writers used Sturges’ inspiration to juggle their duties while keeping their producers content. Prior to Sturges, Hollywood luminaries like Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin were regarded as two examples of famous director-writers. But unlike the Capras and the Chaplins, Sturges is considered the first to find success and household popularity as a screenwriter before becoming a renowned director.

Preston Sturges wrote and directed a succession of comedic hits after The Great McGinty. At times flirting with drama, The Great McGinty is also a great example on how to effectively blend hysterical comedy with dramatic stakes. In this, the first film he wore both the director’s and writer’s hats for, he gifts the audience a biting political satire that – though lacking in historical specificity or the most convincing relationships between characters – is one of the best works of his most productive decade. It is arguably his most socially- and politically-minded film, moving away from the pure farcical dialogue of 1930s screwball comedies to find humor even in the main character’s ruin.

My rating: 8/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

#The Great McGinty #Preston Sturges #Brian Donlevy #Muriel Angelus #Akim Tamiroff #Allyn Joslyn #William Demarest #Louis Jean Heydt #Harry Rosenthal #Arthur Hoyt #31 Days of Oscar #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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