Book review: “Cry My Beloved America” by Alexander Polikoff

Alexander Polikoff’s Cry My Beloved America is a most depressing book, especially in these days before the November 5 presidential election.  But that’s not Polikoff’s fault.  He’s just the messenger.

His book is a synthesis of all the many problems that bedevil American politics, and it’s hard to see them listed and described in one place.

Polikoff, though, is used to looking at difficult challenges.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, he was a social justice hero in Chicago as the lawyer who fought against police spying and nuclear power plants and who spearheaded the battle against what he once called “residential apartheid,” the government-sponsored separation of housing for poor black families from housing for  middle-class white families.

In a 1960s lawsuit that took on the Chicago Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on behalf of Dorothy Gautreaux and other CHA tenants, Polikoff won ground-breaking concessions from the courts and housing officials.  Chief among them was the end of the decades-long practice of placing all public housing units in African American neighborhoods.  Instead, new units would be scattered throughout the metropolitan area. Another result was the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program that placed 7,100 families in scattered-site housing, with more than half moving to affluent, white suburbs.

Now, at the age of 97, Polikoff is following in the footsteps of his grandfather who, in his eighties, wrote a memoir titled America I Love You.  Polikoff’s book, in a way, is also a love letter to this nation, but one that looks at the many ways the United States is failing to live up to its ideals and principles.

 

Indictment of Republican party

Cry My Beloved America is an indictment of the Republican party’s use of racism to divide the country and gain political power. This started under Richard Nixon as a Southern strategy that has demonized African Americans in a way to garner support in the states of the American South which had been solidly Democratic for a century after the Civil War.

Polikoff calls out four Republican presidents — Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump — for such race-baiting in policies and in politicking.

Democratic presidents, he notes, haven’t been models of enlightened rule, but, unlike those Republicans, they didn’t “exploit our racial divide for political gain” or seek “to advance the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the less well-off.” Neither did they get the nation involved in foreign policy disasters such as Afghanistan and Iraq, nor turn their back on the catastrophic implications of climate change.

 

“A political machine”

Paralleling this use of the race card, Polikoff writes, has been the rise of movement conservatism, aimed at attacking the U.S. laws, programs and institutions that seek to foster equality among citizens.

In fact, a vast array of think tanks, academic institutions, law firms and organizations, such as the National Rifle Association, engaged in focused spending to promote issues and politicians, have been working overtime for years to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, all in the name of the idea of a free market.  One result of this is the creation of “Behemoths,” huge and hugely powerful corporations that squeeze out competition and wield immense influence over lawmakers, particularly with campaign contributions.

Throughout Cry My Beloved America, Polikoff relies on a number of recent books that examine movement conservatism and other aspects of the nation’s political ills, such as Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer.  Indeed, he notes:

“[Dark Money] recounts how, under the leadership of the Koch brothers and other millionaire and billionaire business moguls, and long before Donald Trump’s election in 2016, modern movement conservatism became a political machine that creatively mobilized [their forces], crippled a twice-elected Democratic president (Obama), and began to supplant important functions of the Republican Part, all while shaping how Americans thought about business and government.”

 

Weaponization of politics

One method, Polikoff writes, is the weaponization of politics through the fostering of white supremacy, a war on truth, the dehumanization of Democrats and the sabotage of institutions, such as promoting Congressional gridlock.

Anyone who’s paid attention to politics and U.S. government in recent years can cite examples of this — for instance, Donald Trump’s characterizations of his Democratic opponent Vice President Kamala Harris over the past two months.

These strategies gain heightened effectiveness through what Polikoff calls “The Right-Wing Information Bubble,” a network of newspapers, television stations and other outlets that increasingly are the primary source of “news” for Republicans, particularly the Trump Republicans.  Such “news” is heavily edited and slanted to fit the party line.

Another important factor is the American electoral system that, because of compromises at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, gives greater power to small, low-population states.  Each state, no matter how large or small, gets two members of the U.S. Senate.  Day in and day out, this gives them leverage over more populous states.  This outsize power is also exercised in the Electoral College.

 

Avoiding dystopia

Summing up, Polikoff writes:

“The threat to American democracy from movement conservatism and the concentration of corporate power is now embodied in an extremist demagogue. But the threat is broader than Trump.”

If Trump wins this election, “deification of the ‘free market’ and demonization of government intrusion will persist.”  And, even if Trump loses to Harris, “One way or another, the oligopoly will accommodate to the elected leader, whether it controls him or her.  Exactly as I.G. Farben and other German monopoly behemoths accommodates Adolf Hitler.”

To address these many problems, Polikoff argues that the Democrats need to focus on gaining majorities on both sides of Congress, majorities of party members who are “unbought” by the corporate behemoths. And then, these Democratic majorities need to impose a raft of new rules to clip the wings of the behemoths and level the playing field for all Americans.  To replace the “free market” with a “shared prosperity market.”

In conclusion, Polikoff writes about the steps he proposes:

“They are not a prescription for utopia.  They are, rather, a way to avoid dystopia.”

And, he adds a way to buy time to build a new consciousness based on such values as social solidarity, community, ecological stewardship and economic, social and political equality.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

11.2.24

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 11.1.24.