In 1849 U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun gave a speech in the United States Senate where he said the following: “With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black, and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals, if honest and industrious, and hence have a position and pride of character of which neither poverty nor misfortune can deprive them.”Â
This statement captured the cultural and political context of America’s governing philosophy from then to the present day.
A historical review of American population demographics explains why this “we the white people” sociopolitical model worked for so long. In 1860 the population of the United States was 31 million human beings, 4 million of whom were enslaved black people (88 percent white, 12 percent black). One hundred years later in 1960, the population had gotten larger with 152 million people, but nothing had really changed. Jim Crow had replaced slavery, and the country was about 87 percent white and 10 percent black.
But the America of 2019 is a much different demographic story. “The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority—and its minority groups are asserting their co-equal rights and interests.“
This quote is from an article written by Yoni Appelbaum in the December issue of The Atlantic magazine entitled “How America Ends,” and if you’re only going to read one thing to understand the context of the 2020 presidential campaign, read this article.
Why does the America of 2019 bear so little cultural and political resemblance to the America of 1950? The answer is: the 1960s. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act didn’t fix racism, but they did unchain African-American cultural and political energy and that energy redefined the social landscape of America. Then there was the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization, which eliminated racial quotas in immigration. Today the country is 35 percent people of color, and the majority of the country will be people of color sometime between 2040 and 2050. History has spoken.
There are two other defining changes of the sixties that don’t get enough attention: Title IX and birth control. Title IX made competitive athletics available to girls on an equal basis with boys. Competition is how boys are socialized, and it’s a dominant factor in forming the character of the men they become. Title IX allowed girls to learn how to compete and to love the idea of competing. History has spoken on this issue as well.
The pill gave women control of their bodies for the first time in history. Effective birth control meant that women get to decide when and if they want children and who they want to have children with. For a patriarchal society, this was a paradigm shift of revolutionary proportions because it gave women control over one the most important and elemental decisions in human society.
The demographic and cultural changes produced by the sixties have been the driver of the political environment since November 2008, when Barak Obama became the 44th president of the United States. In a country founded on the principle of white male privilege, the idea of a president who looks like the descendants of the people they enslaved for 250 years and structurally oppressed for another 100 was incomprehensible to the emotional and physiological makeup of the majority of white men in America.
What’s this have to do with the November 2020 presidential election? This is not really an election for president but more like the Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the Civil War. No matter who prevails, the election is just the first battle in an extended struggle to define who is an American and what is America. Or, as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”
History hasn’t spoken on that yet.
