Without solidarity against the Republicans, we are sunk. There's nothing new under the sun, so they say, but, as Democrats and hopefully democrats, we should take divide and rule, most especially on our own side, personally. When we see it, read it, and hear it for months on end as a primary but unnamed campaign device, it should deeply offend and concern us.
I'm speaking up in this little piece because I don't want to let this primary season pass without standing up to something that is morally and, in the end, politically wrong about the Clinton campaign. I expect it of Republicans. And the fact that we don't normally expect it of Democrats these days creates a lot of confusion, by design.
I'm a southerner of mixed brown and white heritage. Somehow, before there was an I Love Lucy show, despite a head full of prejudice, my white (rumored to also include some Creek Indian from the nearby Kolomoki Mounds area) and dirt poor, Georgia farm girl mother realized that love can conquer what divides us. My dirt poor brown dad charmed her by being charmed. But before there ever was the couple that eventually had me, at the turn of the 20th century the Cuban American cigar-rolling ancestors on my father’s side were not segregated.
It was only because of Jim Crow that families and friends in Hillsborough County, Florida were forced to divide on racial lines. Before then, as in Cuba today, and now thankfully increasingly in the U.S., people of African, European, and Native American descent freely married and worked together. (Per wiki on Cubans, "An autosomal study from 2014 has found out the genetic ancestry in Cuba to be 72% European, 20% African and 8% Native American.[18]”)
Flash forward a few decades, by the time my mom and dad met, an unelected plutocrat, Ed Ball, was the divisive creep who ran Florida politics for a generation through the Pork Chop Gang.
He didn't hide, but gloried in, his divide and rule racism, red baiting, and anti-worker sentiments. Even in those times, however, he coupled divide and rule with a method to drive good people like Claude Pepper to distraction--creating confusion. He valued it so much so that he would have a nightly toast, "Confusion to the Enemy!"
We, on the other hand, on our side, the good side, should all value our inclusiveness and our democratic honesty and openness. We all on our side want liberty and justice for all, right?
We should celebrate a vigorous primary season with two enormously talented candidates showing us their substantive wares about how to pursue those paramount goals and their personal qualities and mettle as potential leaders of the party in the general election and of the country. But what we are experiencing is something more than that, something as confusing as it is divisive.
The Clinton campaign cannot expect Sanders supporters to be subjected to a primary season grounded in divide and rule and confusing “the enemy” and then expect that “enemy” to embrace it in a shared offensive against the Republicans in the event Clinton secures the nomination. The Democratic Party cannot take support of a motivated cross-racial mix of young people, the needy, and the broad working class for granted any more than it can take for granted minorities as minorities.
We are all in this together, or we are all in deep trouble. That in this country we have very real racial, gender, and sexual identity struggles does not undercut the notion that we also have a very real class struggle.
The Clinton campaign is playing with immoral and counterproductive fire. It is demeaning the Sanders campaign’s extremely valuable outreach to working class people of all races and ethnicities as a shameful tactic to be embarrassed about simply because it is bringing back to the party millions of working class whites who in fact might otherwise vote for Trump. Do we want them to vote for Trump? Are we that short-sighted?
We have needed for the country’s whole history an inclusive people’s party of solidarity. Spreading the false and defamatory notion that the Sanders campaign is racially and ethnically insensitive, right down to disparaging Sanders’ credentials even as a young man of being the opposite of that should have always been completely off bounds and unacceptable. Some would say this strategy is straight out of Karl Rove, but I think it's straight out of Ed Ball.
What worked just fine for Ed Ball should be poison for us. One problem, aside from the immorality of divide and rule—divided we the people are going to lose every time.