Revolutionary Republicanism: 1776

        In 1976, for the US Bicentennial Celebration at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), I was asked to speak on … well something relevant. At the speech, I looked out at an audience far larger than I’d expected — at least one Speech teacher had required attendance — and started out with a thoroughly-rehearsed ad lib on how I was from Chicago and Chicagoans rejected the elitist concept that one had to be an expert to talk usefully on a subject, “OR, Chicagoans rarely let our ignorance get in the way of shooting off our mouths. And tonight I’m going to shoot my mouth off on the Declaration of Independence as a revolutionary document, far more revolutionary than most of us recognize.”

        And I proceeded to talk about something I did know about: from around Shakespeare’s time the Homily — a canned sermon — on Obedience to Authority and “An Exhortation concerning good Order, and obedience to Rulers and Magistrates.” 

 

        On the basis of Holy Scripture and Natural Law, the writers of the Homilies were convinced that

Almighty God has created and appointed all things in heaven and on earth and all about, in a most excellent and perfect order. In heaven, he has appointed distinct and several orders and states of Archangels and Angels. In earth he has assigned and appointed Kings, Princes, with other governors under them, in all good and necessary order. […]  The sun, moon, stars, rainbow, thunder, lightning, clouds, and all the birds of the air, keep their order. The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts keep themselves in order […].

Human beings also have all parts both within and without, like soul, heart, mind, memory, understanding, reason, speech, with all and singular corporal members of our body in a profitable, necessary, and pleasant order: every degree of people in their vocation, calling and office, is appointed to them their duty and order: some are in high degree, some in low, some Kings and Princes, some inferiors and subjects, priests, and layfolk, masters and servants, fathers, and children, husbands and wives, rich and poor, and everyone needs the other, so that in all things God, in good order, is lauded and praised, without which no house, city or commonwealth can continue, endure or last. For where there is no right order, there reigns abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin and Babylonian confusion.

Take away Kings Princes, Rulers, Magistrates, Judges, and such estates of God's good order, and no one shall ride or go by the highway un-robbed, no one shall sleep in their own house or bed un-killed, no one shall keep their spouse, children, and possession in quietness, all things shall be in-common, and there must needs follow all kinds of mischief, and utter destruction of souls, bodies, goods and social well-being. But blessed be God, that we in this realm of England, feel not the horrible calamities, miseries, and wretchedness, which all they undoubtedly feel and suffer, who lack this godly order: and praised be God, that we know the great excellent benefit of God shown towards us in this behalf, God has sent us his high gift, our most dear Sovereign Lord the King, with a godly, wise and honourable counsel, with other superiors and inferiors, in a beautiful and godly order.

        I have no doubt that somewhere in the back of a church or two, some rebellious soul was mouthing silently the subversive old rime, from John Ball, and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, “When Adam delved and Eva span, / Who was then the gentleman?” I.e., when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden to earn their livings by toil like digging and spinning — “From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude,” serfdom and exploitation, “came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men” (“naughty” was a much more powerful word back then). Still, the orthodox, non-heretical, traditional, obvious view was that the universe was a Great Chain of Being, running from the hand or footstool of God down through the orders of the angels to the stars and planets, and then humans in our order, and down through plants and animals to the minerals and down to your basic rock. Everything in its order, held together by the love of God for all and the love of each conscious creature for those above and below, and by our sense of different obligations to those above and below.

 

        This “most excellent and perfect order” had been obvious among the educated (and otherwise privileged) since the time of Aristotle.

 

        Human hierarchy was part of this “godly order”; human love and obligation was natural.

 

        It’s a beautiful and useful view, especially from the top. From the bottom … well looking up, the human part might look more like a multistory outhouse, if one were so privileged as to own an outhouse. And if you lost faith in that “godly order,” well you were “an heretic,” and if you acted or even spoke aloud that loss of faith, you were open to a charge of treason and finding yourself, if male, hanged, drawn, and quartered, or, if female, burned alive. So if there were any doubts, most people probably kept them quiet, and they were lost to history; and this orthodox view of hierarchical society came down to the time of the American Revolution, and parts last to this day.

        Seriously.

            

        If you play Twenty Questions, you begin with “Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?,” and in that order because, ultimately, that is the order in the Great Chain of Being. If you talk of “higher” and “lower” animals, higher and lower in terms of what? Possibly in terms of a simplistic idea of evolution, more likely in terms of the Great Chain of Being and the possibility of drawing a firm line and making radical distinction between humans as “the paragon of animals” and “a little lower than the angels” — and the rest, many of whom you probably want someone to kill and skin and cook or pluck and cook and feed you, without your feeling guilt. (Well, unless you prefer cooking, or killing them, yourself.)

 

        Against such well-established doctrine, it’s difficult to argue, and Thomas Jefferson and the guys didn’t bother. Instead, in the subversive tradition of John Ball, they offer a competing creation myth, if not for the universe, then for human society — and like John Ball find justification for rebellion against “the unjust oppression of naughty men.”

So now, please read again:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Democratic Authority (Mostly Small-Scale)

"We elected you, and we can diselect you." —

Member of Chicago Grammar School Club to

President of the Club (me,  mid-1950s)

“And this took place in the United States, a

culture that educates its children against

blind obedience.” — Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

on Milgram obedience experiments, in Ethology:

The Biology of Behavior(1970: p. 448; ch. 18)

Part of the lore of US warfare in Iraq is that the neoCons et al. who devised it didn't plan much for the aftermath in part because they firmly believed that the default setting — the universal ideal — for human government is what we in the US vaguely call "democracy." Get rid of oppressors like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, and voilà! soon, very soon the society is moving toward becoming Denmark or even the greatness of America. Similarly for the disintegration of the USSR and Warsaw Pact — and, for a while, it indeed did look like a number of countries would “have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people” might actually expand. 

That Big Idea didn't hold up well, which did not surprise those who studied the development of actually-existing societies we call, still very loosely, democratic. That's mostly because the range of what we (loosely) call "democracy" does develop and has social and economic and cultural roots, roots that may not go down as deep as we believe — but it needs those roots.

I'm not going to deal much with Big Ideas, though there is an idea here: by age 20 I knew that democracy is far from natural and the general culture does not do a good job teaching it.

Back in high school Civics — and in grammar school before that — back in a time and place where one had to pass an exam on the US and State Constitutions and governments to get a grammar school or high school diploma — in Chicago in the mid-1950s, Mr. James Connelly taught us in Civics that the United States was a federal republic, where sovereignty rested in the People, who established a constitution giving authority to a government of elected and appointed officials, officials who then ran the government but served the People. That was our official ideology, our small "r" republican doctrine, and I believed it and figured most Americans believed ... except —

Except there was that memory from back with my grammar school club and the doctrinally ambiguous challenge to me, personally, "We elected you, and we can diselect you." Okay, "potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu" in a formula I'd later learn from Hannah Arendt and have driven home in street demonstrations: as Mr. Connelly said, the People always retained sovereign power, from which they conferred authority  which they could take back. Except that my grammar-school classmate had questioned my authority precisely because it had been given to me by him and the other members of the club. The very limited authority of club officers was something he understood and figuratively owned and ... therefore, it seemed didn't see it as very binding.

Weird. We were taught and told and, well, indoctrinated that legitimate authority came from the People. The kid back in high school accepted — willingly and perhaps too eagerly — the authority of parents and teachers and others he had no say about, but resisted even highly limited peer authority over himself that he himself had granted.

The old “consent of the governed” bit wasn’t working out, and my fellow American youngster preferred authority over him to be built into the system and pretty much based in age and status and other criteria beyond his control. I saw that, felt it a bit as disrespect, and then did what most of us most of the time do when dealing with contradictions and what I much later learned to call cognitive dissonance: I mostly ignored it and moved on.

Mostly, but the experience stuck, and moving on included high school and college fraternities where I served a term as secretary of each and used the office to rewrite portions of our constitutions and make sure the guys debated the matter and voted on it. Get them to "buy in" as we would later say by exercising their power over our organizing documents, acknolwedge the authority and feel the worth of the group by participating in governing the group.

My college fraternity chapter in the 1960s, though, offered additional opportunities. At least back then, and on our campus, pledges lived in the house, which offered ... well, some pretty obvious opportunities. Our pledge-training (sic) policy was laisse-faire through the class of 1965: laisse-faire combined with occasional strong punishments for screwing up (“PT,” “sweat sessions”). The class of ’65 had problems, and it became clear we, the fraternithy Chapter, were doing things wrong.

So a few of us checked out how parts of the military handled training, and in my course work I was also studying some relevant anthropology. We went over to a system of “little things”: rules for minor behaviors, none of which individually worth rebelling against but all of which together were practice in accepting the Chapter’s authority.

It worked. 

Usually it worked, and in one case that impressed me, with a guy in the class of ’66 I’ll call Terry. 

Now, a couple of upperclassmen in the chapter were outright geniuses. Terry wasn’t, but he was brilliant, going on to Harvard Law after graduation and not long after that doing some pro bono work that established some important law. Me? Well, an eminent Medievalist, after a couple or more gin and tonics once corrected some self-deprecating remark I made with, more or less, “No, Rich; you’re bright. Not brilliant, but bright” — and that’s about right. I was also a house officer when Terry pledged, and he kind of almost sort of respected my intelligence. He was smarter than I was or am — and as ... let’s say as firm in his opinions as I — but I had more experience; and as ambiguous as we arranged for pledges to feel about their status, he could figure out I outranked him. And the one time he screwed up (under the rules we’d set up), I was the one who quietly, privately, but in some detail, clarified for him that he was less clever and generally estimable than he thought. He was furious while being chewed out, but he submitted to it. 

We became friends, and one night after he initiated, and we were talking in my room, I said I really had to get to sleep and said good night, and he responded, “Good night, Mr. Erlich” — and then proceeded to pound his fists into the walls, while I said, “We got you! We got into your head!” 

As we had: I was a house officer, and when Terry was a pledge he called me to my face “Mr. Erlich” and threw in the occasional “sir.” (We hadstudied the military and some ideas on child-rearing of the traditional, though non-abusive, sort.)

Little rules, fairly easy to remember, very easy to obey, none worthy of rebellion — but often just there, frequently, calling for obedience and functioning to instill, figurative drop by figurative drop, some acceptance of the authority of the chapter.

I helped set up the program, but with a condition for my participation, one necessary for my integrity as someone who had issues with authority, even when I was in authority.

Between the end of Informal Initiation (“Hell Week”) and formal, ritualistic initiation, the guys undergoing initiation cleaned themselves up and then had this especially liminal period — I saidwe’d looked at some anthropology — marked by time alone in a quiet room, sitting for their Pledge Test. The test covered the usual quasi-useful history of the fraternity and such, but had one and only one question they had to get right, and keep taking the damn test until (sometimes with coaching) they did get. I had insisted that they answer the question, “What is the rationale for the pledge rules such as?”, and here some were listed. 

To initiate they had to figure out that many of the rules were arbitrary and intentionally so. If they studied during study hours that was in part because we told them to study, but also in part common sense. If they ordinarily used the back door to the house and the back stairs — that was onlybecause we told them to do so.

Part of the goal with a fraternity (beside and along with more serious partying) is to control to a fair extent where we lived: at least being able to paint a room the color we wanted and set rules for behavior. For that we needed pledges to go from being trained to accept authority of those above them in a hierarchy to active brothers — full citizens, so to speak — who would accept consciously the authority of the constituted group as group, and of peers they’d elected. We needed them to sit in a circle of approximate equals as a chapter and accept the authority of rules they’d help make.

And there was nothing inevitable or all that natural about the process, and it didn’t always work even for a small fraternity chapter, with well-schooled if not necessarily educated guys, who lived in a Republic with an official policy of popular government and official democratic ideals and vocabulary.

Note the official. About the time Terry was learning to call me “Mr.” and throw in the occasional “sir,” Stanley Milgram was conducting his problematic experiments on Obedience to Authorityand demonstrating how easy it is to get obedience where there’s mystique, in the Milgram case the mystique of “Science” and an authoritarian acceptance of rank. And Milgram et al. did that even “in the United States, a culture” far less than Austrian Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt thought “that educates its children against blind obedience.” We are a culture that trainsmany in obedience, to those with real power over us — as in the ability to help or hurt us — but also to those with the right mystique.

Fraternity chapters are short on mystique. And the moral here, if you’re still with me, is that one of the obstacles to achieving democratic-republican ideals is that (statistically) normal humans are like that kid in my grammar school club with little respect for authority he understood and had granted — even if all too willing to obey people just there, over him in a hierarchy over which he has no power. N = 1, proves very little, and not more with N = 75 or so for my fraternity chapter over a couple of years; but these small experiences were enough to get me accept the possibility that even Americans really aren’t that big on democracy or republicanism but are susceptible to confident fanatics like the Taliban, or “strong-men” like Saddam Hussein or authoritative bullies like Donald Trump, even when those strong-men/bullies have only the most limited charisma. 

We need more teaching of Civics and teachers like Mr. Connelly. And we need more parents and teachers and administrators and coachesand other older folk more often stepping back and letting young people function in organizations of the kids, by the kids, and for the kids — even when the kids may seriously mess up. We need to provide training starting very young in choosing which authority and authorities to accept, and to prefer authority based in the ideal of republics with liberal-democratic aspirations. 

I Pledge Allegiance: Flag, Republic, Nation

We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; 

one country, one language, one flag! — 

Pledge as written by Capt. George T Balch

(used in various places 1887-1923)

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, 

one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. — 

Pledge as written by Francis Bellamy in 1892

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, 

and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation 

{under God}, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. —

Form recognized by the US Congress in 1942, 

with “under God” added Flag Day 1954

            The last time I was in the United Kingdom was shortly after Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee, and there were still many flags flying; interestingly, and relevant here, only one of the flags I saw was the Union Jackof the UK — at a touristy location —  while the rest were the national flags of England (the cross of St. George), Scotland (the cross of St. Andrew), and Wales (the Welsh Red Dragon). The United Kingdom is one country with at least three nations, united (more or less) under the monarchy and the Parliament at Westminster. Kingdom and country are one thing; nation is another.

            The current US Pledge of Allegiance substitutes the Flag for the Monarch as a focus for allegiance, and conflates — in a colloquially correct and politically useful way — the American Republic and the United States as “one Nation under God.” 

            Especially with US President Donald J. Trump identifying himself (correctly) as a nationalist, and with nationalism on the rise in the US and elsewhere, the convenient conflation of Republic and Nation in the Pledge is not holding and perhaps should not.

            So, is, or are, The United States of America basically, even essentially, the American Republic or the American Nation (under God)?

            Citing a 1991 book by Anthony D. Smith, the Wikipedia entry has it that “A nationis a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture. […] It is a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity, and particular interests.”^[3]And when it possesses and can hold its own territory, and establishes its own government, we have a nation-state.Stricter definitions by nationalists have usually required also one origin, one history, one religion — and, at least since the great Eurasian migrations of ancient and medieval times, one land and one descent: nationhood rooted “in blood and soil.”

            “One Ruler, One Law; One Faith” for one old formula that could work for a multinational empire or country — and tossing in Racism and one form of Romanticism one could get «Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer»: “One People, One Realm, One Leader.” And those “People” — the Folk — would be a subgroup of a Race, the Nation in Adolf Hitler’s phrase “Nation and Race” (Mein Kampfvol. 1, ch. 11).

            That’s one extreme, and not the idea of Nation meant, say, in the name of the oldest US magazine, the Leftist, The Nation. 

            The Right-wing extreme is, though, what’s meant by Right-wing extremists who talk of the US as part of “the Aryan Nation,” and it is a strong possibility for those who speak of the US as “a White, Christian Nation,” with “White” and “Christian” excluding Jews and other swarthy Caucasians, and “Christian” kind of iffy for Catholics. 

            Is the United States, essentially— of its essence — an English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon, White Christian (Patriarchal) Nation, with a territory? In that case we — or they(I’d be excluded) — in that case Americans, realAmericans would want a strong state to protect the Nation and Motherland, but the nature of that state is negotiable, with the traditional upshot a Leader of some sort, perhaps elected, perhaps hereditary, perhaps just, “Let the strongest rule.” 

            So it is for a minority of Americans, but in part or parts this is also the case for a fair number: those for whom America is a Nation of some sort and under God, being, clearly, a substantial number. 

            Or is America a Nation, but one where the Republic part isn’t negotiable but essential to our culture?

            Or is America essentially a Republic, like the old Roman Republic, but one that hadn’t fallen under an Emperor and, eventually, Emperors who made a state religion of the Christian Church — but instead an alternative Rome that had continued as a multi-national, religiously diverse polity, based in law and (the modern contribution) developed a written Constitution? And evolved out of a good deal of the monstrousness that was even the Roman Republic at its best. Okay: let’s imagine an evolution to us, with the American flag as a symbol and focus for allegiance, maybe just a tiny Roman-ish/American eagle at the top. 

            It makes a difference how we define ourselves.

            If the United States are/is essentially a Nation with a territory, a central task would be preserving the purity of the Nation. Not just regulating immigration: the Roman experience warns against weakness, division, and incompetence allowing an influx of whole tribes. No, traditional nationalism has a traditional hang-up with by-God purity, and it doesn’t take much penetration of foreign elements to impurify the body of the Nation. 

            If we’re essentially a Nation under a Leader, there is much to be said for the primacy of the Leader’s protecting the purity of the Nation with a beautiful if largely symbolic wall, backed by the force necessary to keep out even small groups of what must be seen as invaders. If the Leader can fulfill that most basic duty and then go on to embody and channel and to a some extent fulfill the will of the Nation, then it doesn’t matter much if the Leader himself is flawed or performs acts that in ordinary people would be criminal. The Leader of the Nation is the perfect democrat, bypassing elitist bureaucracies and institutions to perform the will of the demos: the true People, the ultimate Sovereign, and the figurative King that can do no wrong.

            If we’re essentially a Republic, especially one with liberal democratic aspirations and dedication to the rule of law, then things are different. In that case, “No one is above the law”; the President is the commander-in-chief only of the military, not of the country s/he serves; a Leader of the Folk is a danger; if you’re born here, you’re a citizen of the Republic; and for all the usefulness of “civic/civil religion,” our literal allegiance is to the Constitution and Republic, not to the symbol of the flag. 

            My oath was to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and I swore my loyalty to the Republic. There are a lot of “republicans” like that out there. We need to talk with each other and with the Nationalists; and this force of “republicans” must prepare, if necessary, to resist takeover of our country by Nationalists.

"Our Democracy" and the Electoral College

Once again it looks like the popular vote for President of the United States is going to go to a Democrat (Hillary R. Clinton) and the vote in the Electoral College to the Republican (Donald J. Trump). Okay; possibly the worst results of these results will be environmental degradation and violent weather, but, fortunately, I'm old and will be dead before the worst hits or will get enough sympathy to be evacuated out when the Pacific overwhelms my neighborhood.

Two things here.

First, don't get your hopes up for reform of the Electoral College, not until a fire-breathing Republican wins the popular vote and loses in the Electoral College. Second, don't talk about "Our democracy" in the same paragraph in writing or within five minutes in talking about the Electoral College.

The US of A is not a democracy. We're a federal republic with occasional democratic aspirations and a history of increasing democracy — but we were designed as a "mixt constitution," with democracy only a part. Over simplifying a lot (and to hell with it; I'm a retired English teacher, not a historian), to oversimplify a lot, the grand design has the House of Representatives for representative democracy; the original Senate, with senators selected by state legislatures as federalist and aristocratic — way more aristocratic nowadays, as in rich, than even some of the planter elite could've dreamed — and the Presidency as mildly, constitutionally, monarchical. 

And the goddamn White trash rabble were to be kept away from selecting the president (to say nothing of those even lower than poor White men in the divinely-ordered Great Chain of Being and the really-convenient-for-the-well-born, food chain of politics). 

Against some pretty tough competition — I'm looking at you, original-version of the Senate — the Electoral College may be the most openly un- or even antidemocratic part of the Constitution. (The parts on slavery and women work more indirectly [the "s-words" slave or slavery don't appear in the original Constitution] or through silence.)

As it evolved, and since 1913 and the 17th Amendment and the popular election of senators, the Electoral College has been pretty much undemocratic in the same way the Senate is undemocratic and gerrymandering — not explicitly mandated by the Constitution but traditional — like gerrymandering is undemocratic. The rule can be "One person, one vote," but that doesn't means that everyone's vote counts the same.

E.g., my vote hasn't been as important as some except for the time I was in Ohio when it first became "a swing state" and we got what we'd grumbled we hadn't gotten: respect and the attention of candidates. Place here your favorite version of the advice to be careful what you wish for. 

I live in ungerrymandered California, and in an area where we have some hotly contested state and local races. Ventura County, though, went for Hillary Clinton 54.01% to Donald Trump's 38.25%, which came out to 143,095 votes to 101,351. We're both urban and rural in Ventura County, and I live in a port town of 22,399, but the county churned out 264,965 votes in the 2016 presidential election, against, say, the 255,791 votes I add up for the three electoral votes from the State of Wyoming. 

You see where this analysis is going, and I will "leave as an exercise for the student" to work out what part of 55 electoral votes for Hillary Clinton we got in California for the 5,481,885 people who voted for her, as opposed to the 3 electoral votes representing the 174,248 people in Wyoming who voted for Donald Trump. (Use a calculator and, if you know how to do it, scientific notation.) 

Nowadays, we have pledged electors who almost never vote other than they've been instructed to by the laws of their states, so the undemocratic part here is in the numbers and the feeling that having some votes are worth more than others — way more between Wyoming and California — is undemocratic. It doesn't prove the Electoral College system is a bad idea.

Arguably, the system ensures that Wyoming will get some attention, and candidates won't spend all their time in large centers of population. And anything that gets candidates out of the NYC-DC axis and into small towns and rural areas is good. Indeed, it would be a contribution by the Trump campaign to America if it demonstrated that the Electoral College can be gamed against the popular vote precisely by getting out into the rural counties and getting enough "more-equal-than-thou" votes to outweigh New York and California and Illinois.

Except there will still be too much concentration on the "swing areas" and gaming the system, and too little serious discussion spread over way, way too much time.

Arguments can be made for the Elector College, but in updated forms of defense of the College as it was intended to be: a check on democracy, at least "democracy" as defined as "one person, one (equal) vote." Just please spare us the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian B.S. of the purity of solid yeoman farmers and the wisdom of simple country folk. People are people. All of us act dumb some of the time, and some of us are just stupid most of the time. So it's arguable that democracy needs its limits, and liberal democracy demands limits to prevent "the tyranny of the majority." Those limits on democracy, though, are part of "Our republic"; don't get ingenious and insist on limits on democracy "central to our democracy." 

Reparations Debate: John Conyers, Ta-Nehisi Coates and House Resolution 40

            During the US National Student Strike in the spring of 1970 — after the US Invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State University and Jackson State — there was a meeting of Illinois "student leaders" in Chicago or Springfield or some such appropriate place, and I went there as one of the representatives of the Graduate Student Association of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

            Early in the meeting, an undergrad got up and started making a speech, and, after a few minutes, I said something like, "Point of order, sort of," at which the undergrad stopped and told me he was making a speech. I replied that I understood that, that I'd heard his speech from others, that I could make his speech myself. (It was against the War and for peace and racial justice and other good things, and, actually, I had made that speech or soon would.) I noted that there was a useful custom in parliamentary procedure to start with someone's making a motion, which usually gets seconded, and then people start speechifying and debating and discussing: "Something specific! What do you want us to do?"

            The undergrads looked at me with bemused disapproval as the graduate students in the room applauded. If you were in "The Movement" and over 23, you'd heard The Speech and had attended many too many meetings with people working on our consciousness and enthusiasm and really just wanted to know what someone wanted you to do.

            There was and is much to be said for putting a motion on the floor to do something and have the debate and arguments start there. Even if it's a bad idea, if the motion is well stated, it focuses the discussion and can lead to a better idea. In any event, having a motion on the floor — as they say in parliamentary jargon — having something specific that at least a couple people want done is a better place to start a practical political debate than philosophical First Principles or appeals to shared sentiments.

            If you’re the American Continental Congress, first you decide whether or not you want independence, and then you get some bright folk to come up with a Declaration proclaiming and justifying the act.

            Sooooo … So here I want to repeat a suggestion from Ta-Nehisi Coates: "For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr. […] has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for 'appropriate remedies.' […] A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions," Coates adds, "But we are not interested." We are not really interested, he says, in "The Case for Reparations" for "Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy," not interested even though, "Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole" (Atlantic, 24 June 2014).

            I'm interested.

            Partly I'm interested because "the old schooling sticks," and I was brought up in the "Justice, justice shall you pursue" tradition; and Justice, the Prophet Amos insisted, should "flow forth like rivers / And righteousness as an every-flowing stream," not trickle down drop by drop. Also, I'm interested in the debate in itself and how simply — if honestly — pursuing a serious debate in itself ensures this much justice: making us examine our history and ourselves.

            The reparations issue is complex.

            Women as a very large group — a majority of the American population — have an argument for money owed for uncompensated labor, and, God knows, if we are going to talk about White Americans as receivers of stolen goods, the descendants of peoples Europeans weirdly called "Indians" have some bills to present for the deaths of a number of cultures and theft of two continents.

            (Minimally, we might stop celebrating Columbus Day as a holiday: Matthew White estimates the death toll from the "Conquest of the Americas" on at 15 million, making it #12 on his list of the 100 worst mass homicides in recorded history, with about the same body count as World War I, and nobody celebrates Kaiser Wilhelm.)

            Irish Americans might note that the word "plantation" comes from English colonization of Ireland, and the descendants of poor Irish and English in colonial America could argue that the high death rates among indentured "servants" — contract slaves — was one of the reasons African slavery got introduced and became, among the planter class, popular. Which gets us into useful discussions of what I have called (following Steven Pinker) "the continuum of cruelty" of which Black African chattel slavery in the New World was the most horrifically extreme case.

            Alternatively, many of us Euro-Americans can argue that our ancestors weren't around during the era of slavery but back in Europe getting the shit kicked out of us until the family got over here (where we were usually just exploited for a couple generations). My incandescent-White Scandinavian-American colleague who taught a course in The Immigrant Experience pointed out that people doing well back in The Old Country usually remained back in The Old Country; Americans generally are the descendants of European losers. He could note that his ancestors managed to fight on the defeated side in some six different wars; and I could note that my grandparents fled the goddamn Russian Empire of the goddamn Romanoffs, with my father's father one step ahead of a murder rap for killing the goddamn Cossack who was raping my grandfather's sister during a pogrom.

            "We weren't even in America to profit!" is an argument we need to consider; one kind of counter-argument, however, might remind me that I grew up in Chicago, "The City that Works," and it worked better for me than it might have because it systematicallydidn't work well for Black people. Further, my family was in the car wash business, and we made a higher profit than we might have because Black labor was cheap, in part because Black workers were systematically betrayed by unions that were supposed to represent them (and in one case would've been betrayed worse if "the old schooling" hadn't stuck enough with my father that he drew some lines when offered "sweetheart" contracts).

            Another counter-argument to "we just got here" suggests that that "one nation" referred to in the Pledge of Allegiance has real existence and duration over time and that Americans of all ethnicities in complex ways participate in — are part of — that nation. If the nation as a whole owes some debts and dues, we might all have obligations, if different ones, whenever our ancestors arrived and however badly they were treated.

            Now I find the idea of America as "one nation" as overly abstract and metaphysical and "one nation under God" —and given its unity by God — downright mystical and vaguely blasphemous. But that's a minority view. Further, I do believe in the American Republic and have sworn to "preserve, protect, and defend it," insofar as it's most directly embodied in our evolving Constitution. So if not a "nationalist," I'm a republican (by God!) and would have to admit also to debts of honor owed by the Republic.

            And so forth.

            We may decide that there's just no way we can work out an equivalent of "Forty acres and a mule" nowadays, and what we will do about reparations is nothing directly. But at least that would be a conscious decision — choosing not to act is an ethical/political action — and the discussion would almost certainly get the American government doing things we should be doing anyway to mitigate present inequities, whatever their causes.

            So, a motion is on the floor, and I for one urge the Congress of the United States to adopt House Resolution 40, or whatever might be its current form. Serious talk aims at action or a decision not to act, and establishing a serious Commission to Study Reparations for African Americans is a solid, sensible first step.