Bruce A. Dixon
August 29, 2012
Too much
agreement between Republicans and Democrats has always been bad news for those
at the bottom of America's class and racial totem poles.
Back in 1875,
Frederick Douglass observed that it took a war among the whites to free his people
from slavery. What then, he wondered, would an era of peace among the whites
bring us? He already knew the answer. Louisiana had its Colfax Massacre
two years earlier. A wave of thousands upon thousands of terroristic bombings, shootings, mutilations, murders and
threats had driven African Americans from courthouses, city halls,
legislatures, from their own farms,
businesses and private properties and from
the voting rolls across the South. They didn't get the vote back for 80 years, and
they never did get the land back. But
none of that mattered because on the
broad and important questions of those days there was
at last peace between white Republicans and white Democrats ---
squabbles around the edges about who'd get elected, but wide agreement
on the rules of the game.
Like Douglass,
the shallow talking heads who cover the 2012 presidential campaign on corporate
media have noticed out loud the remarkable absence of disagreement between
Republican and Democratic candidates on many matters. They usually mention what
the establishment likes to call “foreign policy.” But the list of things
Republicans and Democrat presidential candidates agree on, from coddling Wall
Street speculators, protecting mortgage fraudsters and corporate wrongdoers to
preventing Medicare For All to so-called “foreign policy,” “free trade,” “the
deficit” “clean coal and safe nuclear power” and “entitlement reform,” is
clearly longer and more important than the few points of mostly race and style,
upon which they disagree.
