(Excerpt from A Perfect Presidency, A Political Novel)
Since the meeting was called, as he now understood, to discuss the Movement’s campaign, Le expected the others to respond to the secretary’s question. But they all looked at him as if he were invited to this meeting to respond to such a question. He had the information to answer at least partially the secretary’s question. But that information came from his research paid for by the Russell campaign. He felt a little awkward either to answer or ignore it. After a long minute, he decided to reveal what he had found: if it somehow helped this group of Republicans to fight the Cook campaign’s racism, it would certainly help the Russel campaign as well.
“Racism is inherent in the nature of men, in fact of all animals. God imbeds in every one of us an inherent sense of being suspicious of anything we are not, or less familiar with. It starts out as a defense: defending yourself, your family, then village, nation. Even when there is no defensive need so serious that you have to combat to death against others, many members of society still feel the urge to fight, meaning to find a target.”
Maven felt a little itchy. He did not want a lecture on racism. He wanted an answer to the Movement’s exploitation of racism. But he stopped himself from cutting in as he realized that his friend, Senator Hill, had no intention of interrupting Le who was his guest.
“The white folks do not monopolize racism. It is in every society. The Vietnamese loathed the French because they looked ‘weird’ when they first met. Only big cannons sending big explosives inland helped the French to stay in Indochina for a long time. Kings and rich people discriminated against peasants and poorer people, getting them to gather food and other goods for them. Slavery in America could be explained as privileged white people from Europe suddenly discovered another people, the black, who were less familiar to them than another white guy, so they enslaved the black to do menial works for them instead of the underprivileged white. Suddenly, they found a formula to enhance their profits and their own security when they installed the underprivileged white as their slave drivers and reinforced in them that primitive urge to discriminate – racism. Then, the underprivileged white not only forgot who their oppressors had been but identified with them.
“Even when societies developed to a certain point that forced labor was not needed and members of society understood one another and were not suspicious of others, discrimination would not disappear. It is the perquisite of power. And power is celebrated all the time, everywhere including the U.S.
“So, racism, a form of discrimination, is, for a lot of people, probably irradicable. Presently, it is a fact of life or politics. We can only try to manage it through legislation and education. In this country we have been relatively successful in controlling it. People have been mostly politically correct. Racism, racist language or behavior was still taboos. Until now.” He paused for his listeners to absorb the information.
“The problem that concerns you tonight, I assume, is not that racism exists in this country, but that a faction of the Republican Party is weaponizing it to win this election, or worse for a more nefarious purpose.”
He addressed Davendorf, “Mr. Davendorf…”
“Call me Jeff.”
“Thank you, Jeff.”
But the secretary cut in, impatiently, “So, I understand that whoever controlling the party want to adopt a racist strategy to win the next election. But what changes? What have they done? What can we do about it?”
Le continued where he left off, “Jeff said that just one official of the Movement is racist; the rest of the Movement or at least the leader is not. That doesn’t matter. The Movement approves the weaponization of racism that means they support it whether they are racist or not. You must acknowledge that fact before you can determine what countermeasure to take to fight back. But before you take countermeasure, you must understand why the Movement decides to use racism in taking over the government. Jeff has just mentioned: to win the election. If so, they would stop flaming racism after the election. What if they would not, and winning the election is just one step in a more elaborate scheme?”
Davendorf sounded a little defensively, “The party is now absorbed into the Movement. Willie repeated many times to the Republican leaders at the meeting that racism is just a strategy not a platform.”
Le said calmly, “The situation in the Republican Party, as far as my research can determine, is very uncertain. I think that when Mr. Wilcox agreed for Mr. Richardson to adopt the white nationalist, the term I believe Mr. Richardson prefers to racist, Mr. Wilcox deferred the decision to Richardson and did not anticipate or probably did not have enough time to think where that strategy would lead to. Now, the national campaign adopts such a strategy, it is possible that he and his friends may have lost or would lose control of the campaign, the Movement, and ultimately the party.”
“It is difficult for me to think that my party, the Party of Lincoln has turned into a racist party,” lamented Secretary Bennett.
“It’s sad indeed, Mr. Secretary,” Le said. “But racism has never disappeared in this country, or anywhere else for that matter. They can be in subtle form such as a grocery store clerk looks past a colored, a weird designation because ‘white’ is also a color, and greets a white man behind him ‘may I help you’, or white people keeps looking at and talking to one another, ignoring another member of the same group who is ‘colored’. Or much more brutal though more sporadic, such as killing a black kid for smiling at your girlfriend, or a father-son team baseball batting a Japanese-lookalike Chinese man to death because they were angry at the Japanese auto manufacturers for causing them to be jobless, or tying a black man behind a truck and dragging him through the city streets. Sporadic incidents. What should be a concern for all of us is the degree or scale of racism and for us to determine if the sporadic incidents would in fact the tip of an iceberg. Hundreds of years after its defeat in the Civil War, racism is prevalent in the Southern states.”
“The immediate issue is the Zachary Cook campaign exploiting the racist base instinct of the voters,” Maven wanted the group to refocus on his immediate concern.
Hill knew that his friend was impatient. He understood his concern about the conservatism that he embraced being usurped and drastically changed by an extremist faction of the Republican Party. He and Davendorf were desperate in reaching out to outsiders for a solution, not a lecture on racism that he believed he knew what it was. But Hill saw Le, as unexpected as it was, a deep source of information on racism. He did not think the Republicans had ever spent enough time to ponder on the issue. Le seemed to have something to say about it.
The senator wanted to explore more on what Le had said. “It is indeed an urgent issue, but it is an issue that needs to be analyzed and examined and understood further. I think that racism has been a taboo in our society for so long and has therefore never been talked about in a meaningful way. Like Dinh said, it is right in front of us, but we have looked away without taking an in-depth examination of its cause, its danger, and possible ways to prevent it from acting out. We do not have a lot of time now for such an extensive discussion, and this is not the proper venue anyway, but I think Dinh can use his research to shed some light on the problem to help us all. Frankly, Tim, Jeff, and Joshua, this is not just a Republican problem. It is a national problem. Everyone, Democrats included, needs to pitch in to deal with it.
“But now, we would like to hear from Dinh about the state of racism in our country, what is the Republicans strategy, and how they plan to carry it out.”
“I will try. I will say that we start to go through a perfect political tsunami. But the metaphor actually is an understatement of the havoc racism will inflict on Democratic America and the world.”
Secretary Bennett, “Is it your finding, or your opinion?”
Le decided to treat it as a serious, not a sarcastic question, “It is happening, and the outcome is not yet completely clear, so this is just my projection, which is based on the facts that I will try to summarize tonight for you.
“Racism has so far been just a knee jerk reaction from an animalistic feeling of a few individuals or groups of such individuals whose understanding of things are limited. Racist violence was sporadic, isolated, and mostly inorganized. Until now.
“Many segments of our society are deeply dissatisfied with one aspect or another of the state of the nation. We have the anti-globalists, anti-abortionists, anti-immigrants, the small-government advocates, the pro-independence Southern old-timers, the old money resenting the new wealth of the young technology tycoons and deeply offended by these new billionaires who make and accumulate money so easily that they seem to make a mockery of the old fashion way of making money.”
“So how all that is connected to racism?” asked the secretary.
“Racism was not exploited because the other side of the equation was the Democrats, who were also mostly white. So, the Republican political attack always seemed dull and routine, directed at their nemesis using a worn-out label: the liberals. But the majority of the population did not buy the arguments that globalization was bad, immigrants were bad, or abortion as a woman’s right was morally wrong.
“Then the catalyst presented itself: the meteoric rise of China.”
JOHN P. LE PHONG