A firm grasp on power

Young Bernie Sanders

Trump, Sanders, Bloomberg, Biden: Four old white men. 

One of them is on track to be elected president in 2020. (Maybe not Bloomberg. Super Tuesday was brutal.)

Generations do not give up power easily. It is seized out of failing hands by stronger hands. 

A personal history Guest Post by Thad Guyer. Guyer is my age, 70, a boomer, old enough to retire but still active in his work as a lawyer, representing whistleblower employees. Like me, he was in high school when Johnson overwhelmed Goldwater, promising to keep our boys out of Asian wars. Guyer was drafted to fight in it, a grunt in Search and Destroy missions.

Like me, he was 30, a young adult, when Reagan defeated Carter and the American mood changed from long hair to short, from hippy to yuppie. He was 50 in year 2000, when the Y2K virus didn't destroy the internet, but unbound optimism destroyed internet stock, and we were 51 when 9-11 taught us that America wasn't invulnerable. He was 66 when he moved to Vietnam and began carrying out his practice the modern way, through electronic filings, wherever he had his laptop computer.  He observes American politics from that view, an American abroad.

Guest Post, by Thad Guyer

“A Lifetime of Unchanged Social Justice Politics: A Brokered Convention?”

The horserace photo today is a triple frame of three old white men trading claims about who is the greater champion of racial justice, Sanders, Biden and Bloomberg.   How did American politics get so race obsessed yet so vapid and phony in electoral outcome, and can anything other than a brokered convention save us? I recall my grandmother’s furor in 1958 with my step-grandfather for having paid for their black gardener’s cataract surgery, and her ringing a table bell for the black maid to bring in Thanksgiving dinner. Lucile refused to respond to that bell in 1960 weeks after JFK won the election. During grandmother’s visits to our “white trash” neighborhood in downtown Miami she bit her lip at our friendship with the Syrian-Lebanese boy across the street, shook her head at the new synagogue going up two blocks away, and saw her social order collapsing under Eisenhower.  But she respected the great general too much to elaborate.  

Then came the Cuban “invasion” of our Miami neighborhood in 1960 and the displacement the blacks on 8^th street as it became “Calle Ocho”.  A devout Catholic, grandmother’s religious enthusiasm for Kennedy quickly evaporated atop his policies.  My father joined everyone else in fleeing to the north Miami suburbs in 1966, a move he said that proved even worse as black students were bussed in just a year later during Johnson’s administration requiring our sports field to be infringed by portable classrooms on wheels.  We self-segregated in the school cafeteria, and some classmates whispered glee at MLK’s assassination.  This prepared me for the self-segregated army when my draft notice issued in 1968.  Despite Johnson’s anti-racism policies, the n-word and honky slurs flowed freely except in the jungle, the only true American race-neutral zone in my life, united in survival by killing Vietnamese (but called by the g-word). 

On the GI bill after the Nixon administration got me out of Vietnam amidst racial dog whistles of “law and order”, I wanted the glory of the racial justice battles championed by Jimmy Carter, so to rural Tennessee and Arkansas we went being mentored by Phil Arnold. When he later recruited Debra Lee and I to the legal aid program in Medford after the shock of Reagan’s election our concern was Oregon would be too white, but Phil kept his promise keeping us busy with Hispanic discrimination in housing, farm worker, and criminal justice cases. The fight was in spite of Reagan.

For most readers of this blog, Barrack Obama was our political catharsis to a lifetime of racial strife during the administrations of Kennedy-Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan, and a more insidious kind during Clinton. Kinder-gentler Bush to Obama seemed a real trajectory to a new enlightened racial politics, until Trump suddenly ended it like a roadside bomb.  Hope for rescue came with the 2018 midterms and new faces like AOC and Ilhan, and young diverse candidates like Harris, Booker, Gillibrand, Yang and Castro. Yet this morning I am in disbelief that those candidates were wiped out in record speed by two snarling old men and a billionaire crackpot clamoring if not outright lying about their records on social and racial justice. 

If this is the price of removing Trump and restoring “democracy itself” then it is perverse. 2020 social and racial politics seem less promising than those of the mid 20^th century into which I was born.  Unless a brokered convention selects a woman or person of color, the cure to Trump may prove to have been worse than the disease.

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