If You Don’t Know, Ask A Black Woman.

Glory and celebration beckon in the wings of the play before hubris and nemesis bring it to an end. An old archetypal denouement of ancient Greek drama. Or as Mao is alleged to have said but didn’t, “Things are darkest just before they turn completely black.”

Over a decade ago I told a closest of friends that if Republicans were ever returned to power they’d turn the entire nation into a ghetto from coast to coast.
Like the New Jersey Turnpike as it fed its traffic into the Lincoln Tunnel back in 1968. Smokestacks, ash, pollution, and any other dystopian characteristics one cares to evoke. Well, that scenario is here. And
we’re not getting out of the drama anytime soon.

America began its decline when Reagan was first elected. It continued on a cascading course of failures thereafter, failure that were disguised in an Oz-like manner by escalating value markets that produced nothing but symbolic money.

Political Campaigns turned to code words. Two favorites, “the middle class” and “the working class.” When you hear them reach your hand imaginarily but gently to unclasp the holster of your revolver.
These words mean, “Not LBJ, no Great Society, no War On Poverty, no Voting
Rights Bill, no Civil Rights legislation, no Equal Rights and economic legislation of any kind irrespective of gender or preferences daring to promote civic and economic parity for all. No, we adhere overwhelmingly to the White Way. Don’t upset anyone by doing what’s right.”

Even the left practices this zen- like politics of terminal emptiness. And now? The zero velocity of the New Jersey Turnpike is here. America is in many ways a failed state, metastasis has set in, failure is everywhere. Except in what Baudrillard calls the “symbolic order”: the stock market where numbers refer not to products but to other numbers, Godel numbers of dividends and investor rallies.

In the 21st Century time and again the left, the Freudian left looked thru its one way mirror, and seeing only itself, ran third party campaigns that empowered Republicans. Now the courts, once upon a time, the final redoubt against the civic, political, and economic excesses of arbitrary abstract power have been turned utterly to the right. 20% of Bernie’s supporters would rather turn the nation over to Trump, once again, than vote for
Biden. Jeff Weaver, of Bernie fame, evidently, lamenting Biden’s apparent
nomination; in full nullity of Democratic voters will, evidently thinks presidential elections ought to be porn, “Biden just isn’t exciting.” What is the political equivalent of arousal and plateau?

Over the past fifty years the right and the left joined forces in an unwitting alliance to make America what it is today: a failing
state of failed unfulfillable fantasies about the middle class, and, say it, the white working class, who have never done anything for anyone else in its entire history but stand in the doorway like George Wallace, against any progress for others, whatsoever, like the Reagan Democrats they are. Then too, the so-called progressives even managed to turn a California congressional district over to the Republicans last week. In California
of all places!

Ineptness leads to failure leads to Republicans leads to failure. And
the New Jersey Turnpike.

This isn’t about holding up Democrats as charitable vessels of political virtue, either. But it is about holding onto the courts as a last redoubt against the excesses of abstract power, which will come no other way than the fealty of Democrats to Constitutional Intent rather than 18th
Century hermeneutics a la Scalia. Who can really demand that the living realm of Constitutional Meaning freeze itself in a stance of powdered perfumed wigs of gentry landowners?

The left needs to grow up and look at America as it is and not as some abstract working class – which is a code word for white working people who don’t want to be a part of a left coalition.

If you need to figure out where America is and what’s worth fighting for: ask a black working woman. She’ll tell you a truth that’s universal and good for everybody. If it’s good for black women, it’s good for everybody. That’s how you stop failed states.

James M. Flagg