A Deeper Sickness by Margaret Peacock

Author:Margaret Peacock [Peterson, Margaret Peacock and Erik L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Consumer Purchasing Power, 2016-July 2020. (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and St. Louis Fed)

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2020

Twenty-three weeks since stay-at-home orders were first issued—162,000 deaths

Historians Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier argue the year 1968 represented, “a long historical moment . . . an idea.”19 The year brought to a head the war in Vietnam; the civil rights movement; the Chicano/a, American Indian, and Asian American liberation struggles; student and feminist movements; decolonial movements in Africa, Latin America, and Asia; and the antinuclear movement. George Wallace ran for the presidency, with plenty of support in rural America. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated only weeks apart. The electorate seemed irreparably divided.

On the one hand, that year marked a global outpouring of expression and freedom, what historian Gerd-Rainer Horn called “the dynamic towards personal and collective liberation.”20 On the other hand, it also rang the death knell for the old political liberalism and the Democratic Party as it had existed.21

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August, Mayor Richard Daley’s blue-helmeted police dragged from the floor those calling for an antiwar platform. Outside the convention center, National Guard troops tear-gassed protesters and beat them with nightsticks. For people like Daley, “liberals” had gone too far. “What are we coming to as a society,” he posed, “if policemen are treated the way they’ve been treated—not only in Chicago, but all over the country?” He blamed the protesters for their own beatings.22 A year later, a National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, formed one year after the better-known Kerner Commission, resolved that the police used excessive force: “There was enough wild club swinging, enough cries of hatred, enough gratuitous beating to make the conclusion inescapable that individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or arrest.”23

Much like the Kerner Commission in 1967, this National Commission in 1968 resulted in a large report and little actual reform. Instead, Richard Nixon, who painted himself as the defender of law and order, harnessed the memory of that night to enlist his “silent majority” of Americans who viewed protest and civil rights as democracy gone too far. The entrenched pro-business Republican Party shifted colors to become the new defender of law and order, property, family values, the Second Amendment, and white resentment toward racial and ethnic minority groups attempting to be included in the American Dream.24

Given the conflict of this year, one might be tempted to use 1968 as a model for anticipating this year’s Democratic National Convention. They are, however, nothing alike. This year’s affair happens virtually, with each speaker tuning in from home. Each reads from a script in front of a carefully manicured background. It feels like one long commercial targeting people who are already sold on the product. Vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris becomes the highlight, bringing a sense of closeness and realism, substance and gravitas. Former vice president Joe Biden speaks cogently about the issues of the day, and everyone sighs with relief.

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