There are so many things wrong about President Donald Trump’s divisive speech at Mount Rushmore. As a child, like so many others, I thought about the July 4th holiday as a gathering of community, parades, rodeos, cook outs, fire works, and even great powwows. I even remember that big bicentennial push, including all of the Native organizations that participated and used that 200th marker to teach real history.
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This year’s “celebration” has turned July 4th into sour milk. (Not that it was ever perfect. But it was not like this either.)
Start with the 1950s McCarthyism twist. Of course communism is a failed mechanism for governing. The funny thing is no nation ever really tried to implement a people’s revolution. The Soviets and other experimenters simply exchanged one ruling class for another. Today’s China is more about global business than service to the people.
And today there is not even a good definition of what constitutes socialism, or one of its current variants, democratic socialism.
So President Trump and his supporters turn to the oldest political trick there is, framing the definition with the most extreme example, Soviet-style dictatorship.
“It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let this happen to us. Believe me, we’re not letting it happen, because communism is the enemy of free people.
“Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — it is death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil, he said. “You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
What about neither? What about finding a route that works to serve people with services that ought to be human rights, such as universal health care.
The thing is none of the “socialist” states are all or nothing. The Nordic states have some elements of socialism with a healthy addition of free market business enterprises. (Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the United States. Plus health care and other welfare state benefits.)
One interesting example of a democratic socialist state is Greenland. Last month the conservative publication in a published video, The American Prospect, asked if Greenland is “the most socialist state in the world? It has an immense sector of state-owned companies, and it seems to work pretty well.”
The reporter says one reason is that Inuit culture has a tradition of working for the benefit of community over the individual.
The government of Greenland sure has a big portfolio of state-owned companies. It owns the fishing company Royal Greenland, which is also the country’s largest single employer; the shipping company Royal Arctic Line; the housing company INI; the ferry company Arctic Umiaq Line; the logistics and retail company KNI; the national airline Air Greenland; the telecom company Tusass; the clothing company Great Greenland; the construction and renewable-energy company NunaGreen; the investment company Nalik Ventures; the real estate company Illuut; the utility company Nukissiorfiit; and the tourism company Visit Greenland.
One of the other characteristics of socialist Greenland is competence. That’s an element completely missing from Trump’s faux-capitalist crony state.
At Mount Rushmore, Trump tied “Marxist lies” to stories about stolen American lands.
Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, wrote a brilliant note about that on her Facebook page.
“Standing on a sacred mountain in the Black Hills, He Sapa, the President dared say that only the “communists” say that the “patriots” live on stolen lands and that “our heroes were oppressors.” The Black Hills were stolen and still are occupied, in violation of the 1868 Treaty at Fort Laramie among the United States and the Sioux, Cheyenne and
“Arapaho Nations. U.S. court rulings, congressional findings, highly historians and other authorities and esteemed figures have confirmed this and debunked wrongheaded claims to the contrary.
“And many Native Peoples (collectively and individually) fought, fell and won some of those same battles the President mentioned, including fighting communists, while he and no one in his family put themselves in harm’s way or served in the U.S. military in any war, conflict or action to protect U.S. citizens and non-citizens within the U.S., including the 575 Native Nations, Tribes, Pueblos, etc., with official relationships with the U.S.
“The great U.S. was built on Native lands, yes, some through honorable treaties, some it outright stole and coerced and some taken under the color of law. Free and inexpensive land gave honorable and dishonorable people the means to land ownership, just as enslaved people of color (African, Asian, Black, Hispanic) and many Women provided the labor that created leisure time for others, mainly White Men and their Wives and Relatives, to think, dream, plan, design, or just take it easy or try to have as many Children as they could from Women they treated as property.
“The world knows these things and it’s best for everyone to acknowledge what happened, work toward never going back to those sorry chapters of history and move toward making a better future for all of us.
“One way to assure that the tragedies of the past will shape the future is to deny they ever happened and that anyone today has responsibility for helping to set things right. Another way to assure throwback hostilities and conflicts is to keep on this project 2025 path of making a white nationalist country, during our people of color, favoring newcomers who are white and rich, creating more poor people and a broad labor class and making it harder for children of color and/or economically impoverished to escape poverty and gain education and work opportunities.
“Mr. President, please start your war against communism by stopping your attachment to Mr. Putin and other dictators and communist/nazi ideologues.”
It’s time to recognize that the United States has serious flaws. Yes it’s a powerful country and has done many great things. But we are on a path not toward democracy or purpose but greed and capitalism only for the favored. The corruption in government is a rot that would be so familiar to imploding empires of the past.
One of the missing elements from capitalism (no one argues for crony capitalism, they just steal), fascism, communist, socialism, democratic socialism, and other ideological debates is that labels become more important than the policies.
What are the policies that best serve people? When you ask the question that way, seems to me, I am on the other side of just about every policy plank coming from this White House.
We need policy choices, not labels. Here are three of my favorites.
- I want universal access to voting. We can do so much better to bring make sure everybody can participate in the future of the country. (Same day registration, far more polling locations and ballot boxes, and we should spend a hell of a lot more money on infrastructure and the hiring and training of local election workers.) That’s the minimum. But if we zoom out, there is a big sky look at what it takes to make the country more democratic: Proportional representation, a fairer judicial system, and a reimaging or or even the abandonment of the Senate and Electoral College.
- Universal health coverage. The United States should not be able to claim the being the “most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.” Universal health care is not a question of resources: The United States already spends more money on health care than any other country in the world. Why can’t a most accomplished nation be effective in how it spends?
- Climate leadership. There are only two choices here (OK, there is a third option, investing more in fossil fuels and pretending that there is no problem). First: We can try to reduce our carbon emissions (growing tougher by the day). Or we can build higher sea walls, move people away from harm, and adapt to a warmer climate. Both options are expensive.
