Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2024: Where Do We Go from Here?

By Jim Miller

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we will surely be witness to the usual celebrations of his legacy, many of which tend to embrace a vague mythological version of King befitting a corporate equity training.  As we enter 2024, an election year the prospect of which has filled many of us with anticipatory dread for a long time, the truly radical nature of King’s vision is a haunting reminder of precisely how debased American society and politics has become.  

Dr. King fought what he characterized as “the triple evils of racism, materialism, and militarism,” sought to restructure “an edifice which produces beggars,” and called for us to move forward with a “divine dissatisfaction . . . until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.”  King believed that the “whole structure must be changed” for America to be reborn as a truly humane, egalitarian, and civilized society. Only then would we have “democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action.”  

An honest recounting of Dr. King’s vision, without apologies, holds a mirror up to our current situation and forces us to confront the fact that the core problems that he raised are still with us and have worsened in recent years.  We live in a world torn asunder by war, riven by inequality, and threatened by a myriad of existential threats.  While it is true that President Biden thinks of himself as a leader who honors King’s legacy, it is also clear that King would be quite critical of Biden’s presidency for being too timid on questions of social justice and deeply flawed in terms of foreign policy.  

Just as King asked unsettling questions of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in his own time, his legacy prompts us to do the same when it comes to the Biden Administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party who seem satisfied to embrace seemingly endless war abroad and an uninspiring defensive battle to hold power domestically that pins its hopes on the American people hating the other guy more than they dislike Biden.  In sum, they lack what the first President Bush derisively called “the vision thing” at a time when it has never been more desperately needed.  

On the other side of the political spectrum, we are witnessing the boldest embrace of fascism we have seen in the United States since Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and others in the corporate sector openly promoted anti-democratic forces in the 1930s.  

Indeed, the candidate currently leading in most of the way-too-early Presidential polls is promising to purge the United States of those he perceives as internal enemies.  As Trump recently put it, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections . . .  They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream . . . the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”  

In sum, just as Dr. King was wedged between sometimes feckless allies on the one side and violent segregationists on the other, those who still believe in his vision of a thoroughgoing democracy that looks to challenge the profound inequities brought to us by capitalism, deeply rooted American racism, and unquestioned militarism are up against similar challenges.  But rather than tossing King’s utopian vision aside in favor of an all-too-cynical realpolitik, it behooves those who believe in his dream to continue to keep the beacon of hope burning by standing firm against the looming threat of fascism AND relentlessly holding the Democratic party accountable.  

This means, defeating those who represent an existential threat to democracy while firmly critiquing the cynical triangulation of ostensibly progressive local, statewide, and national political figures who take the easy way out when it comes to the core problems of sustained economic and racial inequality made manifest by issues of affordable housing, homelessness, criminal justice, climate justice, education, health care, and other areas where intractable wrongs exist.  

We need to insist that someday, despite the current chasm between our creeds and our deeds, we’ll finally get to the promised land.