Bamboozler's Targets: Then, Nattering Nabobs of Negativity - Today, Critical Race Theorists

Not long before Nixon’s Vice President,?Spiro T. Agnew, resigned from office in disgrace for tax evasion, he talked a good game of smack. David Remnick would later write in the New Yorker,?

Wielding a rhetorical style that might be described as “surrealist-alliterative,” Agnew denounced opponents of the war in Vietnam as “an effete corps of impudent snobs”—as “ideological eunuchs,” “professional anarchists,” and (strangely, wonderfully) “vultures who sit in trees.”?

Those pontifications pale in comparison to my favorite petty political pronouncement of all time, “Nattering Nabobs of Negativism.” Using words written by presidential speech writer, William Sapphire, Agnew threw the red meat NNN to the California Republican state convention on September 11, 1970:?

“In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club — the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”

One of those hopeless hysterical hypochondriacs of history was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I write in my new book in press,?Twelve Steps for White America: for a United States of America?(#12swa),?

The MLK remembered is an American icon of Ahimsa, nonviolence, a visionary of a future where desegregation and the American dream of a meritocracy is realized. However, especially toward the end of his life, he increasingly addressed economic issues. King went to Memphis, where he was assassinated advocating for better wages for sanitation workers. The policy context for that time was the Vietnam War. He protested war spending when our own people languished in poverty.?King lost favor in the civil rights movement and died with a 75% disapproval rating.?That low favorability rating, 25 points more unfavorable than in 1963, comprised a growing contingent of activists who embraced change by any means necessary. His adherence to nonviolence in the face of White supremacists’ anti-Blackness was considered insufficient to impact the drastic change that was needed. By the end of his life, it was clear that his message of economic justice was even more controversial than his dream of civil rights. His message of nonviolence (Ahimsa) was more palatable than a message of nonstealing (Asteya), then and now. But the message of economic justice was there all along.?

Two years after the NNN comment the Nixon-Agnew presidential ticket trounced the anti-war McGovern-Shriver ticket in a 49-state landslide victory. That wipeout did not age well. Today, MLK is a federal holiday and Agnew is relegated to pathetic criminal infamy. Nixon and Agnew won big in the short term but proved catastrophic historically. Or did they? The Bamboozlers Playbook is alive and well. Before NNN, it was McCarthy’s communists. Now, it is AOC Bernie Socialists, the BLM Woke or, God forbid, Critical Race Theorists shaming poor precious preyed-upon white babies, who count on?Matt Gaetz, (under investigation for sex trafficking a minor), to tell General Milley (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), how to root out CRT evil from military academies.?

Pouncing on political party opponents with culture war distractions is a bamboozling tradition in the United States rooted in racialized marginalization. Consider this excerpt from #12swa:?

“Bamboozle” is an 18th-century term for self gain through exploiting others with deceit and trickery. Its meaning was extended in the 19th century by the context of Jim Crow minstrelsy: anti-Blackness as entertainment. The 20th-century version of bamboozling presented as distraction, disinformation, scapegoating, voter suppression, and brutality. Bamboozling is alive and well in the 21st century. Today, social media propagates bamboozling where echo chambers congeal contorted coalitions. Gerrymandered minority rule in government perpetuates plantation control over the many by the few.???

Power Whites bamboozle Exploited Whites to advance a Power White agenda using Otherness. (“We are valued White Americans and not Others; i.e., devalued Black Americans”). White supremacy ensures that Exploited Whites abhor Otherness (realized as anti-Blackness) and vote against Exploited Whites’ own self-interests to sustain Elite Power Whites’ advantage. If Exploited Whites withdrew from the automated?Whiteness Political Coalition?to vote with marginalized Others, the power White status quo would erode.???

A minority of entrenched Elite Power Whites protect their interests while bamboozling hordes of Exploited Whites to do their bidding to sustain rigged advantage. This bamboozling Whiteness collusion surges now as CRT hysteria about what gets taught to “our” children. Desperate bamboozlers see the handwriting on the wall in the form of demographic inevitabilities.?

They fear that if minority rule by White Americans no longer holds, what could become of rigged advantage?

For exploited White Americans, rigged advantage is synonymous with?the?United States of America. Aghast, if?a?truly United States of America no longer equates with rigged advantage, they screech “take back?our country” from others - vandals at the gate who threaten rigged advantage. These history-winner narrations rail against the actual truth of history because it threatens their con. Some of these Exploited White Americans, who feel aggrieved, are too triggered to see that their anger and resentments toward “Others” performs junkyard dog duties for an elite few Power White masters.?

Sadly, they feel the truth of their exploitation, but they are trained to:?

·???????displace the blame for that exploitation onto “Others”;?

·???????vote against their own interests; and?

·???????despair the loss of a social contract (that their Whiteness-Inclusion-Collusion was supposed to guarantee a future they were dupped to believe was rigged for?all Whites, not just Elite Power Whites clinging to the metastasizing power of rigged advantage).??

The cacophony of their bamboozling bombast cannot erase history which, so far in the United States, has been doomed to repeat itself, because????????

we have never uprooted the legacies of slavery.

We just trim the weeds in the garden of democracy and sing about “change gonna come.”

Twelve Steps for White America: for a United States of America

(and related workbook with contributor, Christine Sleeter),?will be published this fall by Cognella Press. Visit?www.williamwatson.org?for more info.

#12swa #democracy #criticalracetheory #riggedeconomy #publishing