Legends, Hoaxes, and the Big Lie: Zero-Sum

You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings…You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both.

--Populist politician Tom Watson, to an interracial audience in an 1892 speech made in Georgia.

 

As I stated earlier, I had earlier planned to do a series on the Wilmington Massacre for years, but didn’t. I thought it important to show (1) a definite conspiracy that (2) received official recognition as such (albeit a century too late), that (3) deftly illustrates some of the mechanics and motivation of a true plot, one that could not be hidden because of its size and brazenness. I wanted to go more into detail about it. I wanted to do a better job with it.

Still, I felt compelled to post the last three items because of their relevance to current events, an issue acutely noticed by those of you have commented. Indeed, the Wile E. Coyote coup attempt of 6 January 2021 bore some resemblance to the events occurring in Wilmington during the second week of November 1898, even though there were some key differences. The Wilmington coup successfully replaced a duly elected government. The January insurrection ended in over 400 arrests, numerous injuries to Capitol Police, and the death of one of the assailants. Wilmington was an attack on the local government. January 6 constituted an assault against the nation. Although the Wilmington coup rallied lower-class Red Shirts with nakedly racists attacks, those storming the Capitol on January 6 merely dog-whistled, downplayed, or denied the charge of racism.

Although right-wing pundits on Fox and other conservative sources have tried to deflect blame on racists by asserting that the real attackers were secret “Antifa” operatives executing a false-flag operation, cameras captured images of noted white supremacists representing a host of different organizations, from the Proud Boys to neo-Nazi groups, participating in the violence. This should come as little surprise seeing that during one of the presidential debates, Donald Trump told one of these groups to “Stand back and stand by,” strongly suggesting they ready themselves for brown-shirt tactics. It should come as even less surprise that, after egging them on to approach the Capitol, with his recently unlicensed attorney Rudolph Giuliani calling for “...trial by combat,” they would engage in violent action.*

The connection between racism and the 1898 Wilmington Coup should be obvious, even to Klansmen, the cognitively impaired and quadrupeds. But the same racist themes played out not only in the January 6 coup, but in the entirety of the Trump presidency, although in coded terms, circumlocution that skirted overt references to white supremacy. So it’s easier to deny the racists undertones of the insurrection earlier this year, despite the waving of the Confederate battle flag in the Capitol itself. Yet, both of these events had a common root.

They boil down to what Dr. Richard Hofstadter termed “status anxiety.”

We’ve perhaps heard, and maybe even bought into the mantra that the main issues driving Trump voters were recent or threatened job loss and the perceived growing weakness of the United States as a global power because of a litany of treaties that they interpreted as making the US more reliant upon foreign powers.** More sophisticated explanations would say that the American electorate has the same set of issues from one national election to the next, but that various issues change the priority, or the importance of these issues.

In the end, however, none of this seems to explain Trump’s ascendancy or the desperate attempt to maintain it. A 2018 University Pennsylvania study done by Dr. Diana Mutz (Political Science/ Communication,University of Pennsylvania) for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, found that the cited issues for Trump’s electoral victory were simply not in evidence. In “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote,” Mutz notes that economics could not explain voter disenchantment with the incumbent party:

 

A second reason for skepticism regarding the left behind thesis involves timing. Trump’s victory took place in the context of an economic recovery. Throughout the year preceding the election, unemployment was falling, and economic indicators were on the upswing. Likewise, the dramatic drop in US manufacturing jobs took place during the first decade of the 21st century; since 2010, manufacturing employment in the United States has actually increased somewhat.... Research on economic voting suggests that recent economic events are most influential for voting….Given all of the positive economic indicators, why would 2016 be ripe for an economic backlash?”***

 

Cutting to the chase, when you examine the possible causes for Trump’s presidency, and hold them to scrutiny, the only one left standing is status anxiety. As Dr. Mutz writes:

 

How plausible is status threat—whether from a sense of declining racial or global status—as an explanation for changes in voting behavior in 2016? With respect to global status threat, the received wisdom from decades of research has long been that “voting ends at water’s edge.” In other words, outside of foreign wars, international affairs are assumed to have little if any electoral importance …. Racial status threat makes perfect sense occurring immediately after [eight years] of leadership by America’s first African American president. It is not racism of the kind suggesting that whites view minorities as morally or intellectually inferior, but rather, one that regards minorities as sufficiently powerful to be a threat to the status quo. When members of a dominant group experience a sense of threat to their group’s position, whether it is the status of Americans in the world at large or the status of whites in a multiethnic America, change in people’s sense of their group’s relative position produces insecurity.”****

 

This fear of losing power or status has, at its core, a central belief in the zero-sum game. This is the contention that for one party to gain power, another must lose it. An example of this happened during the Charlottesville Protest of 2017, when white supremacists armed with Tiki torches chanted “Jews will not replace us.” If, at the time, you wandered what that meant, as I did, then you have to look at the statement in the broad context of a belief that Christian moral authority, and natural intellectual superiority entitled one group to hold the reins of power for the benefit of society as a whole. They assumed that leadership positions were limited in number. Thus, if a perceived out group, such as Jews, were to gain equal access to power, they could not take these rarefied positions without displacing the Christians already there.

The flaws of zero-sum game theory lie in a faulty premise, namely that those who see themselves as the “in-group” are really insiders. As the Tom Watson quote at the top of this post implies, there are those who maintain considerable amount of political and economic power through inheritance and connections. Getting the rest of us, that is the bulk of us, to believe that there are limited opportunities for leadership, and therefore personal autonomy, benefits what Dr. C. Wright Mills (Sociology, Columbia) called the ruling class by getting everyone else to squabble, sometimes violently, for a little slice of the remaining pie.

Everyone knows that the propagation of white supremacy has carried within it a tremendous impetus to suppress the advancement of people of color (especially women), non-Christians, immigrants, and, nowadays, LGBTQ citizens. The irony, however, is that white supremacy has also been a tool to suppress the social mobility of most white people.

If you’re thinking the previous sentence has to be a typo, then I’ll paraphrase it: in the US, white supremacy has historically been a tool to inhibit the social advancement and the economic freedom of most white people. In the podcast Be Antiracist, Dr. Ibram x Kendi (Radcliffe Fellow, Harvard) spoke to attorney, economic policy advisor and political commentator Heather C. McGhee about the ways in which white supremacy and bigotry economically disadvantaged the bulk of Euro American society:

Kendi: When some Americans imagine the transformation of this country, they imagine that they’re going to lose if we actually create an equitable and just anti-racist America. And it seems, as you’ve written, that that’s based on a zero-sum myth.

McGhee: Um-hmm. So I left a career in economic policy to go out on this quixotic journey, in some ways, to find the answer to the question of why can’t we seem to have nice things, and what are the roots of our dysfunction. And it’s there that I came upon this paradigm of the zero-sum. It’s a term that means there’s no such thing as mutual progress. When you have people who are in a competition with one another, if team A scores one more point, team B scores one less point. The points will always add up to zero: positive on one side, negative on the other. Progress for team A has to come at the expense of team B. There’s a limited, or fixed, pie.

And that idea resonated so deeply with me, it sorta gave me a name and a description to something I’d sensed my whole life: this fear that when white supremacy falls, that the world will become one that white people should fear. Therefore, racism is really great for white people, really terrible for people of color. And so, their self-interest is preserving racism at all costs.

And it’s the at-all-cost piece that really felt so important for me to lay out. What are the costs of racism to our entire society? What exactly is the price white people are willing to pay to keep the system as it has been. And once I started looking, the list just kept growing. And that made it clear to me that we have these self-interested elites packaging, marketing, selling this zero-sum lie to most white Americans, and they’re doing it for their own profit. But our side, when we only talk about racism as something that’s good for white people, are kinda, like, helping out a little bit….We haven’t told the full story of what it has cost this entire country

Kendi: ...This is what I’ve been sort of saying, and I want to know whether I’m just wrong: that white Americans typically compare their lot to people of color. And so, in other words, if their school has more resources, in a way their child’s school is almost like a first class school. They’re like, ‘Whoa! If we create equity, then I’m gonna be back in coach. I don’t want that. I’m gonna lose. My kid’s gonna lose.’ But it seems to me that white Americans should be assessing themselves from other white people in the Western world. And when they make that comparison, that’s when they can see actually what they don’t have, how they’re in coach.

McGhee: And in fact maybe in other societies in the Western world everybody’s just in first class…. This really comes from, and is a feature of how brutally hierarchical our society is. In the first chapter of The Sum of Us, I go back in our history to the beginning, to find out where this zero-sum worldview and this lie came from, whose interest it served, and why it’s sorta reanimated generation after generation. And as it turns out, it was created as a way to sorta discipline white Europeans, in the colonial era, to be satisfied with their lot in a society where wealth was still quite concentrated, and where, because of chattel slavery and the plantation economy, there actually wasn’t a lot of room. A white person who was not a plantation owner, their labor wasn’t needed in the Southern economy, right, ‘Like what do we need you for, right?’ This myth of white supremacy was sold to white masses so that they could have, of course as W.E.B. Dubois said, the psychological wages of whiteness rather than material wages. And those psychological wages were knowing always that in a deeply unequal economy they could nonetheless count on being more than, and better than, black people.

In the above, Dr. Kendi and McGhee make the point of contrasting American life to life in the rest of the Western world. American "conservatives" decry many of the things that are the norm in Europe as unrealistic, almost fanatically socialist, among them free universal health care, solid infrastructure due to decreased wealth disparity, and considerably more leisure time – in some cases more than double that of the typical American worker. European incarceration rates are much lower than those found in the US.**** Europeans tend to have more robust labor laws that are actually enforced. Compare this to current right-wing initiatives to push so-called “Right to Work” laws on a state-by-state basis, giving employers increased means to thwart labor initiatives for higher pay, better safety and so forth by decreasing union revenue, and inhibiting union political activity -- restrictions that don’t apply to employers.*****

McGhee and Dr. Kendi also examined how far the propagation of zero-sum mythology goes back in the United States. You’d have thought that some whites would have put two and two together to figure out that racist dogma has actually robbed them of true power and authority.

Actually, there were Euro Americans who figured this out. Watson did in 1892. The Fusionist/GOP Party of North Carolina did as well, and at about the same time. And the trend would continue into the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. During the 1940s, a coalition of white and black Alabama coal miners came together to improve pay and working conditions, in the process galvanizing worker resistance in the steel and textile industries too. In 1948, members of the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) successfully bargained for higher wages and better working conditions by maintaining a united front of black and white workers in a strike against a large lumber company. William Fesperan and his Young Patriots Organization, replete with their Confederate battle flag regalia, figured it out when joining Young Lords leader José Jiménez and Black Panther Fred Hampton Sr. to form the Rainbow Coalition in 1969.****** In 2020, Euro-Americans from across the nation joined with their African-, Asian- and Latino-American countrymen to protest the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.*******

As Dolly Parton would say later that year, “Of course black lives matter.” So she’s figured it out too.

"How does this tie into the notion of the Deep State, or imperium in imperio?" some might ask, right about now. 

I'm pretty sure most of you can already predict where I'm heading with this.

_______________________

*The buildup to the coup perfectly illustrates an earlier post in this blog on Dr. Mark Granovetter’s (Sociology, Stanford) Threshold Model of Collective Action. In his statistical analyses, Granovetter found that riskier actions, including aggressive ones, can coax the involvement of more reluctant participants if those at lower thresholds hold special status. What more special status could there be than a once-popular big-city mayor, and the current President of the United States?

**This included not only treaties pertaining to security, such as NATO, but to the Paris Agreement on planet-wide climate change and trade deals, with their perceived imposition of regulatory requirements: concerns that led to the UK defection from the European Union (Brexit).

***There are numerous other reasons why the traditional models of loss don’t apply in this particular election, but space limitations don’t allow for a discussion of them all. Click here [https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/19/E4330.full.pdf] to read Dr. Mutz’s study in full.

****Turkey currently has the highest rate of incarceration in Europe with 357 per 100,000 compared to 639 per 100,000 in the US. For Australia the rate is 160 per 100,000, in Japan it’s 38 per 100,000.

*****A 2011 Economic Policy Institute study found 3.2% lower wages, 2.6% less health insurance and 4.8% fewer pension programs in Right-to-Work states than in the rest of the nation.

******Many of the YPO came from southern states and relocated to the Chicago area in hopes of better job prospects and opportunities. On a curious side note, the Confederate symbology was not a deal-breaker for Hampton in forming this political coalition. But in discussing the symbology with the Panthers, and what it meant to them, the YPO decided to ditch the CSA-inspired items.

*******Members of the same groups are speaking out currently against the violence and bigotry directed to their countrymen/countrywomen whose ancestors came from the Far East.