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I.  The Situation

America’s economic decline is taking a peculiar form: the economic foundations of a free and fair society are slowly being destroyed by “normal” economic change under the aegis of a criminally incompetent conservative government.  This decline is especially ominous for black America because it destroys the prospects for equal opportunity in American life.  Real equal opportunity requires substantial economic redistribution where those who have are taxed in order to improve the lives of poor and working people.  The decline of equal opportunity in the United States could be averted if the economy were managed through intelligent, far-sighted and progressive economic policies. 

Unfortunately, our current conservative rulers have so wrecked the nation’s economic prospects that economic justice may be off the public agenda for the next generation, if not forever.

The coming economic storms brought on by economic evolution and conservative folly will encourage the nation to dispense with justice on the false belief that social decency is inconsistent with economic renewal or even survival.  If too much of black America remains financially weak, badly schooled, unskilled, sick, unorganized and dependent on the charity of others – whether through private beneficence or public welfare – we will become the victims of immoral but inevitable social triage.  Yet, black America is in a position to build up enough intellectual, financial and organizational capital to meet our own needs and to become a real political force in the fight for social justice.

For better or worse, black America’s future is brightest if we become the nation’s best educated, most intellectually sophisticated, most highly developed social group that succeeds spectacularly in the academy and the marketplace while we push the nation toward justice in the interest of self-protection.  This will be a difficult task, not least because so many of us are poor, badly schooled, unemployed, sick and afraid.  But we have no choice: we must find a way to traverse the chasm between our current state and one where we compete successfully in schools, jobs and politics on our own terms, so much so that we gain real power to shape public, cultural and business affairs.

If we fail in this task, the global economy and the realities of American politics will sweep us onto history’s trash heap, leaving little more than stories about how blacks freed themselves from apartheid in America by the 1960’s only to falter when the nation’s economic decline ended equal opportunity across class and color lines.  This cannot be our story.

The following paragraphs outline the connection between national economic decline and the economic fortunes of black America.  This piece ends with a plea for us to understand why economic circumstances force the Republicans to continue their war on black America while the Democrats must abandon black people in the interest of electoral success.   A succeeding essay explores the contours of a successful long-term economic development program for black America in the face of liberal duplicity and conservative animus.

II.  Economic Decline, Social Triage and Black America

American economic decline is being driven by four forces.  First, the emergence of India and China in the global economy means that there are now three billion more buyers and sellers in the marketplace.  The good news is that there are three billion more potential buyers of American goods, though the vast majority of these folks are too poor to be much of a customer base for US business at the present time.  In addition, global trade means that American consumers benefit because low-wage workers from India and China produce low cost, high quality products.  The bad news is that global trade creates a global labor market where American workers must compete with a hundreds of millions of people who are as smart as they are and willing to work for less.  However, even the best-educated Americans face growing long-term competition from abroad as more and more people acquire the scientific and technical skills to compete in the most technologically advanced sectors of the global economy. 

Second, immigration is increasing the supply of skilled and especially unskilled labor in the US.  There is substantial evidence that the collapse in the wages of younger workers of all colors with only a high school education as well as increasing numbers of modestly educated older workers is due to the massive increase in the labor force due to immigration from Latin America.  This migration is leading to tension between Latino and non-Latino workers, fueling a destructive and counterproductive black-Latino racial conflict among low-income populations with common economic interests.

Third, ongoing developments in information technology, bio-technology, micro-electronics and material science increase the demand for highly educated service workers whose skills go into creating technologies that destroy the jobs of modestly schooled labor. Technological change in a market economy generates new technologies, machines, products and occupations that displace existing products and ways of working that are no longer cost effective or desirable; in other words people as well as technologies become obsolete.

The obsolescence of human beings in the American economy is an accelerating problem made worse by the fact that people with the wrong skills must rely on government to protect their livelihood as well as their children’s prospects.  The winners in modern economic life – highly educated, high-income workers as well as truly wealthy people – resent supporting the losers in the economic struggle, particularly when they too feel the economic pressure of emerging India and China on their own well-being.

Fourth, while our conservative rulers are not to blame for this state of affairs, they have responded to these challenges in the most incompetent way imaginable. Most American workers are either experiencing real economic decline or are threatened with decline because the rest of the world is catching up with the United States.  At the same time, our economy continues to grow, with the vast bulk of the benefits of progress going to the top one fifth of our most competitive workers – well-educated workers in the most innovative sectors of the economy.  We cannot stop the world from adopting the potent mixture of modern science and competitive markets as the antidote to poverty, but we can make sure that our people are better educated, our organizations better run, our society truly fair and our equipment the most efficient in the world. 

III.  The Economic Quagmire

A commitment to keep America both competitive and fair means taxing the well-off to make sure everyone has a real shot at doing well – good schools, decent health care, housing, and a reasonable minimum living standard.  But the social deal requires government to tax the well-off to support the poorly off so long as everyone works as hard as they can in school and on the job.  People who refuse to work or study are not to be supported because global competition is far too stringent to allow anyone to be lazy at the public’s expense.  Real equal opportunity for all combined with maximum effort from all is the best way for American society to respond to the challenges posed by contemporary technology, skill and trade driven capitalism.

Our conservative governors will have none of this.  Conservatives resist promoting real equal opportunity on the theory that it just takes good money from the productive classes while wasting it on lazy and stupid people – especially black people.  Conservatives cut taxes on the rich on the theory that this would lead to an explosion of job growth and technological improvements – even though this “trickle down” approach failed completely when Reagan tried it.  The tax cuts along with defense spending increases due to the war on terror as well as a number of truly stupid policies (like the Medicare prescription drug bill) have created budget deficits so large that the nation is on the brink of long term fiscal ruin.  In essence, the nation has borrowed so much money to make rich people richer while the poor get poorer – and the middle goes nowhere – that we must now reverse tax cuts and make enormous budget cuts in everything from health care to schooling in order to keep the nation from drowning in debt. 

The hard truth is that the United States government cannot rebuild our economy to face the challenges noted above without tremendous economic sacrifice for the foreseeable future.  But the winners in the current economic game – the well-educated and wealthy – are not about to raise their own taxes to support the losers, particularly when conservatives insist that this sort of thing is a bad idea.  Further, the racial warfare between black, Latino and white working people over the crumbs falling from the table of the well-off precludes the possibility of worthwhile progressive politics in an age where the Republicans have become uniquely skilled at hate politics.

IV.  The Clinton Abandonment, Part Two

No one really thinks that the Democrats, as currently constituted, matter much.  The working class majority in this country, split though it is into warring racial factions, can’t rely on a party that is financed by a coalition of highly educated workers and business liberals with a mild social conscience.  The people who pay for the Democratic Party are not, for the moment, threatened by economic change nearly as much as they are threatened by the near fascist cultural politics of the Republicans.  The Democrats have to win the votes of economically insecure white workers who are convinced that their enemies are blacks, Latinos, gay people and cultural liberalism rather than incompetent conservative policies in an age of economic change. 

In time, the Democrats will win this battle once the scale of conservative failure becomes clear, but they will also see the electoral wisdom of disassociating themselves from black people so as not to offend suspicious whites.  The Democrats will have to demote (and perhaps dismiss) black people, at least temporarily, in order to gain the votes of anti-black working people so as to protect the valuable achievements of cultural liberalism.  This abandonment will not mean the return of Jim Crow or the end of anti-discrimination laws, but rather a growing disinterest in issues of concern to black people unless these are shared by the most important members of the Democrats coalition: business liberals, conservative whites, and Latinos.  The easiest way for the Democrats to prove that they are the party of the common (non-black) man or woman is to repeat Clinton’s Sister Souljah move of 1992: tell black people to get in line, shut up, and accept the fact that the Democratic Party is about everyone’s problems, not the special (presumptively self-inflicted) problems of black people.  (Let us at least hope the Democrats do not instead choose to revisit Clinton’s brilliant and beastly killing of Rickey Lee Rector to prove their independence from black people.  Recall that Rector was a mentally impaired prisoner in Arkansas so out of touch with reality that he asked if he could save the desert from his last meal for after his execution.  Then again, we must also hope that Al Gore’s Willie Horton move, which George Bush the Elder only imitated, isn’t seen as efficacious by a Democratic presidential aspirant eager to appear tough on “crime” i.e. black people.  Still, we can be quite sure that some sort of subtle or not so subtle nigger-smacking symbolism is in the works.)

There is no way for black America to avoid being demoted or dismissed by the Democrats so long as we are such an economically, intellectually and organizationally weak social coalition.  We cannot become part of the Republican coalition given the firm place of white supremacists in the party.  Even if the Republicans were to eject white nationalists from the party – a foolish move given the greater size of this racist faction compared to black America – the economic agenda of conservatives offers nothing to low and moderate-income black majority. 

The first step in the economic development of black America under contemporary conditions is for us to realize that we are a profoundly undesirable people from the perspective of the major parties.  The Republicans consider us as vermin, while the Democrats see us as an ever heavier political albatross.  Yet, our circumstances are such that we can build a road to real economic prosperity in these tough times by using our limited resources wisely, building up our intellectual and social capital, investing in ourselves, forming realistic and limited coalitions across the hardening black/brown color line and playing a new form of American political chess that exploits contemporary divisions among white Americans to our advantage.  The next essay explores this development program, and post-left/right black politics, in some detail.