What Does Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Mean in the Wake of the Assault on American Democracy?
...we should recommit ourselves not to false unity but to a deep questioning of the whole of our society.
By Jim Miller
It’s MLK Day, America’s annual celebration of the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who, in one of his final speeches, called on us to “question the whole society,” and come to see how “the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together.” For King, these were “the triple evils that are interrelated.”
As opposed to the mythologizing of King as a milquetoast saint of tolerance and unity, he was actually a radical who counseled us that “an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
His principled nonviolence was in the service of a broader vision of social justice that continues to uncomfortably remind America of its unfulfilled promise. It was a deep challenge to American racism, inequality, and institutionalized violence that he paid for with his life.
In the wake of the last four years, the memory of Dr. King’s dream of a thoroughgoing, multiracial democracy that finally made the words in the Declaration of Independence real should haunt us because the gap between our creeds and deeds has widened rather than closed.
On this MLK Day, we are only a little over a week removed from an unsuccessful fascist revolt against democracy that gave full-throated expression to the worst of our anti-democratic impulses and the ugliest forms of American racism, complete with Confederate flags and the theatrics of lynching. And all of this with the approval and encouragement of our still sitting President and a shamefully large number of Senators and Congressmembers who voted to undermine American democracy just hours after the mob stormed the Capitol.
But the deep racism made plain at the Capitol is not simply the purview of the rioters, it is the stock-in-trade of the entire Republican party who have become addicted to the weaponization of white racial resentment as a way to stir up the electoral base.
Indeed, the magic trick of the American right has been to redirect anger from the realm of the economic to the cultural sphere. Thus, millions of Americans now subscribe to a variety of angry white identity politics that speaks to them with a deeply emotional tribal appeal detached from both reality and, in many cases, their own interests.
The real beneficiaries of this are those who have gained from some of the most egregious economic exploitation of our time. As the Guardian reported in separate articles last Friday, billionaires added $1 trillion to their net worth during the pandemic while their workers struggled to make ends meet, and those very same billionaires contributed $20 million to 42 rightwing lawmakers who voted to invalidate Biden’s victory.
The anti-tax group the Club for Growth, the Guardian informs us, was the vehicle they used, and the biggest recipients of their largesse were Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.
As one observer in the Guardian piece puts it, “Here’s the thing about the hyper-wealthy. They believe that their hyper-wealth grants them the ability to not be accountable . . . But that doesn’t make you any less accountable for funding anti-democratic or authoritarian candidates or movements.”
Truer words have never been spoken, and MLK would remind us that the evil of the racist mob that took the Capitol is interrelated with the evil of the billionaire class that sits atop the edifice that creates beggars and has cynically used its wealth to undermine American democracy.
It is also important to note that the third evil of war and the militarization of American culture that King condemned in the Vietnam era is today embodied in a military industrial complex that has extended to heavily armed police forces peopled in far too many instances with officers sympathetic to authoritarianism as evidenced by the disturbingly large presence of current and former law enforcement and military personnel at the Capitol riot.
This begs the question that so many at Black Lives Matter protests over this last year asked: whose side are the police on? In recent days, we have learned that too many of them are not on Team Democracy.
Hence, on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we should recommit ourselves not to false unity but to a deep questioning of the whole of our society. We need to make sure that this moment does not pass with a superficial analysis that isolates a cadre of “extremists” as the source of our problem. Instead, we need to understand and act with the understanding that the triple evils that King outlined are indeed interrelated.
We cannot fight racism without addressing economic inequality, and we need to persist in uncovering the ways that the billions of dollars we spend as a nation on militarizing our country and police is at odds with democracy.
What we need are not more laws that undermine civil liberties and further empower authoritarianism that will more often be unleashed against progressives and people of color.
Instead, we should have the courage to take on not just the garden variety racists dumb enough to post their crimes on social media, but also those who fund the forces of hate in order to maintain unjust power.
That, rather than the usual ritual pieties of this holiday, would truly honor the legacy of Dr. King.