Los Angeles’ political system has been in turmoil the last few days, which in turn is unsettling the national Democratic Party.
I don’t think it should surprise anyone if political representatives who run and win on platforms of empowerment for underrepresented communities then proceed to play games of power with the same ugliness, speaking the same disfiguring racial ideologies, as the white elites that a previous generation began to push aside.
Ethnically-linked political machines in American cities in an earlier era tapped into bristling anger among Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, and other European immigrant communities, at real and imagined mistreatment by WASP elites, as well as the unmet needs and problems of their communities, and determined to break their way into the top echelons of political power to remedy those conditions. Before identity politics was commonly understood to be a defining attribute of the American left, it often enabled at least partially reactionary politics that aimed to seize the commons and hold it against old enemies and current rivals, and perhaps has, through “elite capture”, become so again.
Let me move off Los Angeles for a moment to a thought that may seem remote from the situation. The scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade has for decades wrestled with how to think about the role of Atlantic African societies in enslavement. I think a durable consensus argument has emerged through a lot of hard scholarly work and a lot of careful philosophical consideration. The first key point is to distinguish the “First Atlantic” from the “Second Atlantic”, that early Atlantic West and Central Africa before 1625 CE was relatively small-scale, that it was between trading partners who had relative parity in political and economic terms (and who were aware of that parity), and it wasn’t dominated by slave-trading. The Second Atlantic was massive in scale and scope, European merchants and ships had a dominant position, and it was all about slavery and violence. The second point, though, is that in both phases, it was not two unified sides, “African” and “European”, who were engaged in trade. There was no “Africa”, nor any “Europe” in places like St. Louis, Elmina or Ouidah. There were mercantile companies with financial ties first to monarchies and then later to financiers, there were sailors and ship captains, there were plantation owners and overseers.
By the height of the Second Atlantic, the threads of the slave trade reached deeply enough into Western and Northern Europe and into the American colonies (and then to the independent nations of the Americas) that it was hard to say that anyone there was wholly untouched by or unrelated to it. And on the other side, in West and Central Africa, to be outside of the Second Atlantic took formidable effort: either retreating inside of defensive fortifications or moving into remote and unfriendly environments that were hard for slavers to reach. But even at the height, it wasn’t “Africans selling their own people”. It was the powerful victimizing the vulnerable. It was elites, leaders, rulers against farmers, fishers, artisans. Centralized, militarized empires attacking towns and villages outside their hegemony. The trade was violent and capricious enough that sometimes even the powerful ended up as victims. But always the distinction between individuals and groups who had the power to enslave and those who were under the continuous threat of enslavement was and remains relevant—not the least because at least some of the deep structures of Atlantic inequality survived into and beyond formal colonial rule imposed at the end of the 19th Century. At least one legacy of the Second Atlantic are structured forms of political and economic hierarchy in Atlantic African nations today, hierarchies which layer those societies into a global system that puts Africa at the bottom—and enlists some African rulers and elites in the maintenance of that hierarchy. Merely being from and in Africa didn’t and doesn’t confer an exemption from complicity. But neither is guilt or responsibility evenly distributed: the complicit powerful in West and Central Africa were well down a long hierarchy of violent predation and murderous profit-seeking.
Empowerment and sovereignty are only the first steps in a long road to justice and transformation, and they are an easy place to fall off the staircase altogether. The reaction to the leaked audio of Los Angeles council members talking about redistricting is focusing on the wide array of grossly offensive racist sentiments shared casually across the table in the meeting because in some sense that is what the liberal-left political establishment is most equipped and mobilized to condemn. Even when the offense is coming from “inside the house”. What is harder to come to grips with is the sharp-elbowed talk about redistricting that is bluntly about increasing the representation of one group and dividing the resulting spoils accordingly. It’s harder to come to grips with it because that’s what happens in all sorts of rooms like this, whether accompanied by offensive racism or not. One reason our national politics are in such a miserable state is that Democrats for the first 15 years of the 21st Century paid too much attention to backroom maneuvering in the cities, counties and regions that Republicans were willing to concede to them and too little attention to how many districts Republicans were carving out for themselves at the same time.
The real question is “what comes of that kind of backroom maneuvering”? When it’s accompanied by the kind of casual racism that the LA council members displayed, it’s right to think that whatever districts the people involved have in mind, they are thinking of the spoils as zero-sum, thinking that the rise of their communities and their interests involves the fall of others. Which is the sort of Hunger Games mentality that feeds into interests and agenda far beyond the borders of Los Angeles, at the very least. More importantly, however, what that kind of talk tells you is that the people involved aren’t trying to carve out more spoils for their communities, aren’t engineering the rise of a people. They’re in it for themselves. They aren’t trying to change their world, just the position of their own specific patronage networks within it.
Hard deals and tough negotiations are required for justice and equality too. Somebody’s got to be in the room where it happens if for no other reason than to block bad deals and to threaten consequences for a failure to move forward. At the bottom of most reform, most positive change, is a threat that what happens when dreams are deferred, they won’t sag or fester, but explode, by intent. But being in that room with virtuous intent takes guarding as much against ostensible allies as it does known enemies. Dreams get stolen and diverted as well as starved.
The real alliances of real people in communities are gathering outside the walls of power in Los Angeles, full of justified rage at what they’ve heard happening among the people they’ve entrusted with power. That thronging outside the throne, in the streets outside City Hall, is another room where it happens, and it matters. But real movements for change need to always mistrust people with power and to always make clear that they are only being loaned that power for as long as they make the world better for everybody. We learned recently, not for the first time, that laws and constitutions are only as good as a righteous will to use them in the face of the unrighteousness they condemn and forbid. So too are identities. A person can be of a community and yet not in it, a prince who does the bidding of distant kings rather than be in service to a people. Everybody knows that, but too often we relax the vigilance we should always maintain, hoping it will be otherwise.
This is really good, Tim. It’s hard to bring together the long tissue at all, whether in long form or short term. You’ve done real well. Makes the Supreme Court’s notion of originalism seem so shrill, false, blind. Justice needs long views.