Reader TTS

After Trump, the natural hope is that America’s second Catholic Presidency may attract some of the Camelot talent of Kennedy’s first. That looks as imaginary as the Arthurian legend. Joe

Biden will be surrounded by bright, successful lawyers like Antony Blinken, an experienced diplomat in the role of new US Secretary of State. Only in television dramas are lawyers noted for

thinking outside the box.  Kamala Harris as Vice President also brings a sharp legal mind to the White House and Linda Thomas Greenfield, an African-American from Louisiana, brings her

considerable diplomatic experience in Africa to the role of ambassador to the United Nations. With Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban-American, as head of Homeland Security, John Kerry dealing with

climate change, and Janet Yellen (Polish-Jewish) as treasury secretary, Biden has been awarded an alpha plus for diversity. It is not merited, though, if this diversity is cosmetic or an

end in itself. Nesrine Malik in The Guardian (7 December) makes the point. “When people are hired to make a government ‘look’ a certain way, by governing parties with conservative politics

it’s usually a way of making changes so everything stays the same – or gets worse”. How probable is it that some sharp black minds in the Biden cabinet will link up with Black Lives Matter

to initiate deep systemic change in US policing? I wouldn’t bet on it given Republican manipulation of law and order issues. But the value of diversity is not the only message from Biden’s

appointments. The other is that fellow Americans are in safe, predictable, experienced hands – the damage and social wounds visited on the homeland by Trump will be repaired and healed, the

trajectory of domestic and foreign policy pursued by Obama will be resumed. America’s time of shame has passed. And all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well. Well not quite.

Both Antony Blinken and Kamala Harris supported the invasion of Iraq. Neither is on the radical wing of the Democratic Party. No big thinker such as Arthur M Schlesinger Jr – who opposed the

Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 – will be sitting in the Oval Office. Not that anyone heeded Schlesinger at the time. President Kennedy authorised a CIA plot to overthrow Castro with a small

rag-tag Cuban exile force which was shot up, mopped up and defeated. We can be confident that Joe Biden will treat US enemies more rationally than Trump and try to get the nuclear deal with

Iran, reneged on by the US, back up and running. That’s hardly radical. He won’t risk removing all the damaging sanctions that are crippling Iran and playing into the hands of the Iranian

Revolutionary Guards. It will be back to traditional US Middle East policy. For there to be more substantial change, the Democrats will require two terms in office. The first to restore the

status quo ante of 2016. The second to reach forwards with vision to 2028. The US has got rid of Trump. It has not got rid of the causes of Trump. What is the underlying problem, usually

dubbed populism, which the US has experienced in its direst form? Deep-seated inequality, easily manipulated citizens, fears caused by globalisation, a flawed political culture? We are

encountering the same phenomena in the UK where thankfully there aren’t more guns than people, nor a Republican Party demonstrating a prodigious level of cynicism and irresponsibility –

though some might fear the right wing of the Conservative Party is fast heading that way.  In a period of overlapping crises business as usual is folly. Crises call for a “prophetic

pragmatism” described in Michael J. Brown’s Hope & Scorn: Eggheads, Experts & Elites in American Politics. Cornel West, the philosopher, American activist, Southern Baptist, black

intellectual, used the term in 1989 for an intellectual leader, acting as a “critical organic catalyst” in his community. Anyone called an intellectual instantly falls into the popular

category of patronising elites. In the UK, as in the US, there is a perennial tension between academics, experts, Booker Prize winners, public intellectuals imagining different worlds, and

the premise on which democracy rests: the people – who should have ‘voice’ – as the source of political authority. When the tension becomes acute and a divisive populism degrades public

discourse – Trump at one point bizarrely described the American people as the “super-elite” – anti-intellectualism becomes the common sense of the day, a mark of popular authenticity. The

trouble is someone has to think outside the box when the box is increasingly liable to flooding, forest fires, tornadoes, demagogues, religious extremism and malign viruses.  The influential

Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci – who took the time to talk to Lancia and Fiat workers in Turin where he studied – introduced the concept of the “organic intellectual” (Prison

Notebooks 1926-1937). Such a person as part of an organisation of the people, for example trades unions and women’s organisations, was able to overcome the detached intellectual’s democratic

deficit, to guide and represent workers, opening up new horizons. Brazil’s Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, for example, advocated adult education through literacy, drawing out the

knowledge that came from poor people’s own experience of oppression, allowing them to decide for themselves what action to take.  But in the UK our days of “worker education” are past. Our

popular mass media don’t help and haven’t helped. I remember during the apartheid era taking a group of black South African trades unionists up to the Liverpool docks to meet dockworkers.

You could spot those who read the _Daily Worker_ (now the_ Morning Star_) – they knew a lot about what was going on, asked insightful questions, while those who read the _Sun_ knew almost

nothing, hung back and looked sheepish. The Press hasn’t changed much. But today’s social media creates many more silos and walled gardens of the soul while the _Mail_ and the _Sun_ still

cultivate resentment. Movements such as Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street and Extinction Rebellion have rejected “elitist” leadership structures and rely on social media or “assembly

spaces” for generating dialogue, ideas and a fresh view of history. No Cornel Wests here yet. Where then should we seek Britain’s organic intellectuals? If the US is anything to go by, we

should look in the churches, particularly among theologians who are women and in the black community. In Latin America the liberation theologians took that role and the Argentinian Pope

Francis carried their option for the poor, and popular piety, with him to Rome. In the UK, evangelicals such as Reverend Joel Edwards, director-general of the Evangelical Alliance from

1997-2009, led the way into engagement with key social and geo-political issues. David Lammy, now a forthright Labour Shadow Minister for Justice, carried his formation in the Anglican

Church into politics. In the future the black Pentecostal Churches, now so distant from secular culture, may produce some surprises. When it comes to thinking outside the box, black lives

matter but so do black minds.  A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed

now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation._