Is that a genuine question? Are you aware of what was happening to disenfranchise people before these acts were passed, and can you think of anything remotely comparable today?
Do you think that shady redistricting or making people reregister to vote annoyingly often by purging voter rolls is on the same level as literacy tests or grandfather clauses? I genuinely can’t tell if that’s your position, or if you’re just that ignorant about what America was like before the passage of these acts. Probably because your only mode of communication is snarky one liner questions.
This is a newsletter from January published by the Economic Policy Institute, discussing how Trump undid much of the progress made in the years since MLK’s assassination:
I’m sure in a few months when the next MLK Day passes we’ll get updates from people talking about how it has gotten worse.
It doesn’t come anywhere close to completely erasing the progress made over the years, but any erosion of those goals is something to fight back against.
Sure, but I saw it not just for me, but for what my parents were willing to do for strangers in need and the things strangers did for us.
I suspect that kind of rural community vibe, for all its flaws, is one of the reasons they don’t tend to support social programs. Because they live in a reality where their community is their security, especially if they are churchgoers. I’m sure this has eroded somewhat since I was a kid but I don’t think they grasp that some people have literally no one to fall back on.
I think it’s more that they feel responsible for their community, which is why they are willing to go through hardship to support members of their own community, but they don’t feel responsible for people outside their community; if those people don’t have anyone to fall back on, that’s a failure of their community, and that community should take the steps to fix that problem, not them.
If they’re missing something, it’s the expanded definition of the community/in group that people who aren’t part of insular communities have.
Got it, so you concede that there’s nothing going on now that is remotely comparable to the pre-Civil Rights era. Or you’re self reporting your ignorance of American history. Either way, thanks lil bro.
My initial interpretation of your post suggested to me that you did not feel that shady redistricting or making people reregister to vote annoyingly often by purging voter roles, were remotely comparable to things that were happening in the Jim Crow era.
My response was intended to advance my opinion that, while they might not be on the same level, they are undoubtedly comparable.
I mean, a mountain and a molehill are comparable in the sense that it is possible to compare them, but they are also monumentally different in scale.
The posts I was pushing back against argued that in the Trump era the gains made by and since Martin Luther King Jr’s to me have been rolled back. That’s completely unfounded. It’s true that directionally the Trump era has been heading backwards, and that this REALLY FUCKING SUCKS and we should do everything in our power to push back against it. It’s also true that we are ahead of where we were when I was a kid 30 years ago, much less 60 years ago when MLK was killed.
To be clear, I didn’t say that we have a mountain and a molehill in this situation. I said that even a mountain and a molehill can indeed be compared, so if that’s the sense of “comparable” you want to use, then those two things (or two other things that are much closer together) would also be “comparable”. But that’s generally not how the phrase “there is no comparison” is used, which is what I was trying to demonstrate.
I think it’s a good idea not to be complacent just because we still have a lot of progress intact, because any sort of a backward slide is bad. And of course, even before the deliberate effort to undo progress by the Trump administration there was still a lot of work to be done (work that will never be finished; no matter how far we’ve gone we can always do better).
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that what Trump is doing is okay though, and we shouldn’t worry about it, because things are still better now than they were in MLK’s time. I don’t see anyone pushing that argument. Unless I missed it.
An interesting idea. First off the thought that rural communities are more likely to help a stranger in distress than an urban one. Not sure it is now or was ever true, not sure it wasn’t, but let’s assume it is - why?
My guess is two reasons:
small town means higher chance of seeing these people or their family again, game theory with potentially multiple turns. Similar to why classic communism of each gives to their abilities and takes to their needs does work at a Kibbutz size but fails on larger scales.
Diffusion of responsibility. Isolated area if I don’t help them there is no one else who can, busy place well let someone else do it, they got it.
The second part … maybe. @Babale the comparison would be to kibbutzniks. Very much the we depend on each other group. Were they less likely than the general population to support broader social services? Or is it not a great example since in group extending nationwide applies more in the Israel context than in rural America?
To the MLK discussion - the jump off was that MLK believed that the broad overall arc was progress and look what happened to him.
What happened to him, progress after him followed by increased reactionary success significantly reversing some gains, does not prove his beliefs false. No one is claiming the march of progress is linear, it definitely swings backwards too, but overall in the zoom out view progress is unmistakable. Maybe it stops on a dime, reverts back farther than the gains had been before swing back to more progress. Not impossible. But it is not the historical record so far so we have reason to be optimistic that we can successfully push back and further.
The problem comes in when folks demand / expect the pendulum to resume swinging their desired direction during their own lifetime. That’d be nice, but can’t be guaranteed. And especially not for older observers who’re now living through the early stages of a major reversal phase after maybe 30-40 years of progress.
You may have thought your life would see all progress all the time. Even if agonizingly slow at time Almost certainly not gonna happen. Sorry.