In his classic history of American liberal thought, V.L. Parrington notes at one point that many of the great advocates of the Abolitionist struggle in letters—James Russell Lowell, e.g.—settled into a comfortable Brahmin conservatism after the Civil War. Convinced that they had won the struggle—the beast of the Slave Power had been defeated, and human bondage was no more—they thought their work was done. In effect, they retired from political life.
Only Wendell Phillips (in Parrington's telling) refused to believe that all social problems had been solved at a stroke. He alone moved on from struggle to struggle. Only Phillips realized that when one victory has been won—it merely creates an opening for the enemies of justice and freedom to regroup and concentrate their forces elsewhere; and so—eternal vigilance is required. There was no comfortable Brahmin retirement for him.
"The lovers of justice, [Phillips] knew very well"—writes Parrington—"can indulge themselves in no vacations, for the devil is on the job night and day, and while the assailants sleep he is at work repairing any breaches in the walls of his citadel. When conscience is tired he counts on gaining his greatest victories."
This certainly describes pretty aptly the course of American history after the Civil War. The struggle against slavery may have been won. But the struggle for substantive equality was just beginning. The forces of reaction and retrenchment were already at work—seeking ways to restore slavery in all but name; to inflict a condition of apartheid on African Americans; to purge Black voters from the rolls and exclude Black candidates from public office.
By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly all the gains of the Reconstruction period had been wiped away.
We are quite evidently in another such period of sleep today. "Conscience is tired" again in America. We had a great period of social protest and apparent racial progress during the Black Lives Matter era. But people evidently wore themselves out. The same people who were loudest in denouncing racial injustice in July 2020 seem to have little to say on the topic today. Conscience yawned, stretched, turned over, and went back to sleep.
And the sleep of conscience produces monsters—to rephrase a caption of Goya.
We are in a period of astonishing political and cultural retrogression—rivaling the Southern reaction of the late nineteenth century that overthrew the achievements of Reconstruction. As a New York Times story published yesterday thoroughly documents—the Trump administration's supposed purge of "DEI hires" at the federal government has in effect amounted to a thinly-disguised pretext for terminating Black women and people with disabilities from employment.
And with the federal government normalizing blatant discrimination against Black workers—it's only a matter of time before the same practices creep back into the private sector (if they haven't already). As one labor leader quoted in the Times article notes: "This will be a model for what happens across this nation, [...] If the model employer, the federal government, is unilaterally terminating high-performing Black employees, what hope is there?"
We are living under a more-or-less self-avowed white supremacist administration at this point. The executive branch's official social media channels churn out white nationalist propaganda that doesn't even try to hide its origins in the imagery and rhetoric of the extreme right. The Trump administration is purging references to slavery and racial injustice from the federal government's official museums and historic monuments. At the same time, they are working to rename military bases after Confederate generals and restore tributes to Confederate leaders on U.S. federal property.
And, of course—with the Supreme Court having green-lit the practice of partisan gerrymandering—and eviscerated large portions of the Voting Right Act—a white majority in the South is working once again to entrench permanent one-party rule in large parts of the country—just as they did during the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era.
The devil is hard at work restoring his bastions indeed.
But the Trump administration's extreme-right retrenchment is not the only certain sign that conscience is sleeping. We also know it from the relative silence of everyone else—even those who ostensibly disapprove of the administration's moves. During the Southern white reaction to Reconstruction in the late nineteenth century—the political retrogression gained so much steam in part because all the Brahmin liberals had lost interest in politics.
So too—today—Trump's far-right overthrow of our multiracial democracy is being abetted not only by the enthusiasm of his trollish MAGA followers—but by the indifference of the non-racist majority. We are tired (and not entirely without justification) of all the virtue-signaling and cancel culture and self-reproach and endless calls for self-examination of the 2020 era. We wore our consciences out.
And even those of us who still spend nearly every day decrying Trump's injustices often forget to observe the element of racism that runs through all of them. We learned our lesson well from the political strategists of the 2024 election: "don't talk about race," they told us; "it's too divisive."
Plus, Trump's attacks on our democratic instructions have been so sweeping—and have cast so wide a net—that one now has so many issues to choose from, it's easy to avoid the verboten topic of race. American liberals right now are playing a game of triage—trying to figure out what if anything can be salvaged from the wreck of our hopes—and so, as always happens in such moments—the people who were already most marginalized get pushed out of the life raft.
So conscience falls silent—and the devil has no one to stand in his way. And not only in matters of racial justice. Since today is Labor Day, I should add something too on the score of Trump's crimes against the struggle for economic equality.
Historically, reversing the gains of Reconstruction was only one of the ways the devil had his way after the Civil War, after all. Parrington's point was also that Old Nick recovered lost group by concentrating monopoly power in the hands of big business—enriching the few at the expense of the working majority.
And that too, of course, is something we are seeing in the Trump era as well. The president has used the spoils of his office to enrich himself and his family through running various crypto-related Ponzi schemes. And at the same time, he is working to roll back labor protections—unlawfully breaching labor contracts with federal employees that were the product of collective bargaining.
Here, too, the example of Wendell Phillips is relevant to us today. Phillips—in Parrington's telling—was one of the few Abolitionist leaders who glimpsed some analogy—however imperfect—between the bondage of literal hereditary slavery and the (certainly preferable, but not entirely dissimilar) unfreedom that comes from poverty and wage exploitation—that is, from having to choose between starving on the streets or selling one's labor in the marketplace.
As Shelley once defined "slavery," at the dawn of the proletarian era: 'Tis to work and have such pay / As just keeps life from day to day / In your limbs, as in a cell / For the tyrants' use to dwell[.] In other words: wage-slavery was not so entirely unlike caste slavery as the Boston Brahmins of the late nineteenth century might have liked to believe.
The fact that workers have some ability to bargain collectively for something better than starvation wages today—the fact that the choice that confronts them now is not exclusively between the most abject forms of toil or starving in the streets—is in part because of the very gains of the labor movement that Trump is seeking to reverse.
And so, all the old patterns—wage exploitation—and the racial hate that is cooked up by demagogues in order to divide the victims of it, and pit them against each other—reassert themselves. As Carl Sandburg once wrote of the laboring masses: "Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget."
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