It was impossible for me and many others not to admire John Thompson as a basketball coach and human being. He walked with great dignity, spoke with such honesty, gave no quarter to racists, and took obvious pride in his African American roots. He didn’t mince words and he loved his players who in turned loved him back and played for him with passion and energy. In his coaching heyday, the Big East and his Georgetown Hoyas were “Big.” No other conference and no other team had such stature and commanded such attention. Both were electric. At a time when racial tensions were high his close friendship with Dean Smith, the legendary white coach of North Carolina, who early on recruited Black players, didn’t go unnoticed. He will be missed and for his players, like Patrick Ewing, who now coaches Georgetown, it must be a very sad day.
In the calculus of Trump and his acolytes, the path to another term lies in the over performance of Trump’s base on election day compared to 2016 on the one hand and on the other, the suppression of the vote for Biden-Harris ticket and other Democratic candidates, especially in the battleground states. And the connective tissue between the two is racism.
Trump didn’t double on racism, but tripled down in Kenosha, WS yesterday. We will see this repeated daily until election day.
Seems like Trump has concluded that the incitement of turmoil in the streets is his only path to a second term. And to gin up turmoil and violent confrontation, Trump will enlist the help of his rabid supporters as he did in Kenosha and Portland this past week. We should’t fall for the bait. It will require on our part discipline, a refusal to respond to provocations, and an insistence on protest actions that are peaceful and non-violent.
If the center of political gravity in the Democratic Party (as well as the larger democratic coalition) was leaning in a progressive direction six months ago, the Democratic Party convention tells us that this tendency has become more pronounced due to the force of an unforeseen and deadly pandemic, an imploding economy, the uprising in response to the police killing of George Floyd, and the fascistic shadings of the Trump administration and his base.
In other words, today’s Democratic Party isn’t the party of Bill Clinton. Nor is it in the tight grip of neoliberalism. The latter, if we understand as a particular mode of accumulation and political governance, had considerable sway among Democrats in the last two decades of the 20th century. But by the time of the Great Recession of 2008, its advocates were fewer in number and are still fewer today. The Democratic Party that will face off against Trump and his Republican gang is far more diverse and complicated. As it tacks in a progressive direction, it contains multiple tendencies at the leadership and mass levels that are fluid, permeable, and grow and shrink, depending on the issues and conditions at hand.
Only by collapsing moderates, liberals, and even some progressives into the neoliberal camp or by declaiming that anyone who embraces anything less the demands of the “insurgent wing” of the Democratic Party is a neoliberal can a case be made that neoliberalism retains anywhere near the same influence that it did two decades ago. Not only is this a faulty conflation, but, if embraced by too many, will lead to a politics that doesn’t match the moment, too static when it should be fluid, too narrow when it should be expansive, too subjective when it should be sober minded and strategic. And who needs that with the most important election in arguably the country’s history roughly two months?
