Op-Ed: The Rona and Politics Today

Alexander Burns’s article, “Could the 2020 Election Be Postponed? Only With Great Difficulty. Here’s Why,” published in The New York Times on March 14, 2020, exemplifies the sort of naivete that has characterized much of the intelligentsia in recent years. Indeed, just a few days ago, Peter Wehner published an article in The Atlantic titled “The Trump Presidency Is Over.” The reality is that most intellectuals have developed on university campuses, and theoretical frameworks therein have provided inadequate preparation for the likes of Donald J. Trump. Many contemporary thinkers have been bewildered by Trump’s political strategies, and relatively few have understood the full ramifications of his presidency—until now. In 2016, for instance, Marc Lamont Hill stated, “I would rather have Trump be president for four years and build a real left wing movement that can get us what we deserve as a people than to let Hillary be president and we stay locked in the same space …” Clearly, this was wishful thinking. Trump’s presidency didn’t spawn a left-wing movement; the opposite occurred—he emboldened right-wing bigotry.  

     Burns’s perspective is similarly misguided. Alluding to the Presidential Election Day Act that Congress passed in 1845, he states that the general election could only be postponed “with enormous difficulty,” because “[i]t would take a change in federal law to move that date.” But it’s important to distinguish between de jure and de facto because legality doesn’t appear to be Trump’s primary criterion. Thus the question isn’t whether postponing the election is illegal, or whether legal structures would complicate doing so. The question concerns enforcement of the law. Given the rise of autocracies in the twenty-first century in many regions across the globe, the lesson of Donald Trump’s presidency—if he’s taught us anything—is that the political paradigm has shifted dramatically. Two days ago he called himself a “wartime president”; and now that the coronavirus is creating more chaos and confusion, there’s no telling what Trump might do. As such, these are the fundamental questions: Will Trump honor the Presidential Election Day Act; and if he transgresses it, would Republicans and the Republican-controlled Supreme Court continue to protect him?

     This is the bottom line. And it’s important to emphasize here that I am not predicting events in November. It is my sincere hope that we’ll have a free and fair election. My only point is that this isn’t a given. Almost everything these days becomes a partisan issue. Even the Rona is a partisan issue. And while there are many reasons for this, the underlying reason is that ever since Barack Obama became President in 2008, the GOP has been engaged in a civil war by proxy. Blackness is a metaphor for liberalism, and everything associated with it is vilified as evil. This ideological strategy has been remarkably effective. White ontology is largely predicated on opposition—white people tend to formulate their sense of identity based on differences from other social groups. And when pushed to the extreme, this predilection to “see” people as fundamentally different and morally inferior can be applied to almost anyone. Such animus renders large sectors of the public indifferent to factual data that contradicts deep-seated feelings and points of view.

     Equally important, though, is the role of corporate media outlets. Ralph Ellison, hardly an apostle of black radicalism during his lifetime, presciently describes what happens when the media spins racial animus in his 1952 novel Invisible Man. After the young narrator threatens to be a whistleblower, the black college president tells him: “‘These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you’re lying, they’ll tell the world even if you prove you’re telling the truth. Because it’s the kind of lie they want to hear …’”

     Sound familiar? To date, neither the GOP nor Trump’s voters have given any indication that they’ll demand accountability for any of his lies, or that there’s a line in the sand he cannot cross. In previous eras, blatant disregard for the law and flouting age-old political norms were taboo in American political culture. Likewise, overt and tacit support for extreme forms of castigation and stigmatization were generally reserved for racial, religious, gendered, geographical, and sexual Others, notwithstanding white communists and socialists. It was almost unthinkable for white citizens to vilify, or tolerate the vilification of, a decorated war veteran like Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman before Trump’s presidency. But there was little outcry when Vindman was dismissed from the National Security Council and escorted out of the building in utter humiliation.

     So, again, the paradigm has shifted. We must be realistic if we hope to provide meaningful insight for readers today and tomorrow. Richard Wright was correct when he stated many years ago that “the Negro is America’s metaphor.” And we would do well to revisit 20^th century black writers like Wright, Ellison, and many more, including Margaret Walker, Alice Childress, Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Jayne Cortez, and a long list of others who’ve been neglected by scholars and forgotten by the public. But for now, the most important question concerning the fate of the nation isn’t whether a law prohibits presidential actions. The question is who will enforce the law? 

Tony Bolden is Editor of The Langston Hughes Review and author of Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture, The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture, and the forthcoming book Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk.