Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again
Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, look for Joe Biden and establishment Democrats to try to put that broken egg, the American myth, back together again, albeit with a nod toward more diversity and inclusion.
Think a movie with more Black people in the street scene (because it makes white people feel better) but not really as main characters, because the movie isn’t about us.
I thought of this well known nursery rhyme because it captures the longing and the futility in the spirit of white America in the second decade of the 21 century. Whether it’s MAGA (which Trump actually plagiarized from Reagan) or Biden’s “Build It Back Better”, the goal of white Americans is for restoration to a mythical past, a past in which they were center of the world as they knew it and they were the primary beneficiaries of how that world operated.
There was a time in the Middle Ages when people were absolutely convinced that the earth was flat and the center of the universe. Imagine the cognitive dissonance, when they came face to face with the reality that the world was not flat or the center of the universe, but was in fact round and revolved around the sun.The irrational delusional behavior of Trump and his cult is what happens when people are comforted with the reality of what they believe is not true, and never was.
These calls for healing and national unity — Lincoln’s second inaugural address is arguably the most famous — are a regular, recurrent phenomenon in American politics. As far back as 1800, Thomas Jefferson ran for president on a platform of reclaiming the Spirit of 1776.
However, whether it’s been the Declaration of Independence at the beginning in 1776 to the New Deal in the 1930s, with stops for the Constitution, the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1877 in between, every deal for the national unity of white Americans has required the compromising of the interest of Black Americans.
In fact, Lyndon Johnson is the only president of the United States who has ever politically aligned himself with and advanced the interests of Black Americans over the objection of substantial white opposition.
Given the delusional nature of Trump’s America and our history of being compromised by white America in these moments, it begs the question of how do you have the conversation, and if it’s possible, why do we want to have it?
Reconciliation presumes redemption, and redemption requires confession and contrition. And contrition, when it comes to racial justice, seems to be beyond the moral capacity of a substantial number of white Americans.
The notion that Black America should somehow be inclined to overlook the criminal mendacity of the last four years for the benefit of a national unity that always excluded them is both outrageous and insulting.
So how do we respond?
In my opinion the most emotionally satisfying response to this was given by Jemele Hill #StickToSports, but The St. Louis American is a general circulation newspaper, so I’m unable to quote the sister.
What I’ve come to understand and accept, in four decades of politics and seven decades of living, is you rarely get to give the answer you like. That’s especially true when accepting positions of leadership and are required to give up the right to your own personal positions.
That’s because your decisions, and their consequences, affect the well being of others — people you don’t know and will never meet. Your moral responsibility becomes making the best decision for the most people, tactically and strategically.
Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the Democracy for America political action committee, probably offered the only reasonably sanguine response:
“Unity is great, but freedom is better,” she said. “And there’s a part of this population that has sacrificed their freedom time and time again for unity, and they’re tired of it. … And so if you’re asking us to come together and that means my world doesn’t change, the people whose world needs to change doesn’t change, I don’t want that kind of unity.”
Simpson’s response correctly implies we’re going to find ourselves in political discussion about national unity, whether we like it or not. With that in mind, I’m going to recommend that this emerging generation of Black leaders take heed of the advice of two formidable politicians a generation ahead of me.
First, former Congressman William Clay Sr., who’s advice applies to this or any political negotiation: “Take what you can, give up what you must.”
And the late President John F. Kennedy: “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”