There is a school of thought in progressive circles that no matter who won the hotly-contested 2020 presidential election, the outcome would be Ronald Reagan’s 11th term.

As with all good humor, there is a whiff of truth in the comparison between Reagan and two, white septuagenarians, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, both of whom have checkered histories of catering to the wealthy and antagonizing African Americans. When Trump was battling the Justice Department’s accusation that his family’s real estate business discriminated against black tenants, Biden was railing against school integration. Shortly after Trump purchased full-page ads in New York newspapers championing the death penalty for five black and Latino youths wrongly accused of sexually assaulting a white jogger in Central Park, Biden sat down to write a draconian omnibus crime bill that targeted African American drug offenders. While Biden was amending bankruptcy laws to protect creditors, Trump was exploiting loopholes in the tax code to shield his windfall profits. 

In my book, Class War in America: A Tragedy in Four Acts, I make the case that every U.S. president since at least 1980 shares the same political DNA: all have been cheerleaders for Wall Street and carnival barkers-in-chief, pointing out, in varying degrees of subtlety, the mutant features of black Americans, like freak shows at the state fair.

This is hardly an accident; rather it is the defining political strategy of a class war that dates back to the post-civil war period known as Reconstruction when poor and working-class whites joined tentatively with freed slaves to modernize the state –creating public education, expanding health care and mass transit, repairing a regressive tax system, and excising racial inequities from the criminal justice system – and lay the foundation for what would become the most prosperous nation in history. 

Jim Crow effectively dismantled this rainbow coalition and the whole of American history ever since has been a call-and-response between liberal racial democracy and conservative racial capitalism. Why does the ruling class and its vassals traffic in tribal folklore and superstition? It all comes down to math really. In the dry calculus of war between employers and employees, we, the workers, are many, and they, the bosses, are few.

In that vein, Reagan’s dog-whistle appeals to white voters was –similar to South Carolina’s race-baiting U.S. Senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, or Alabama Governor George Wallace –intended to put down a working-class insurrection that began in the depths of the Great Depression by depicting the most liberal and radical workers, African Americans, as unfit to participate in public life. So profoundly pathological is the 1 percent’s loathing of interracial alliances between their employees that the bosses could be said to suffer from a psychological disorder known as iridophobia, or fear of rainbows. 

“I can hire one half of the working class,” the railroad magnate Jay Gould is reported to have boasted in 1881, “to kill the other half.” Such macabre math is what lays at the heart of the videotaped police slayings of unarmed African Americans that began to dominate the nightly news broadcasts in 2014 as the country dug out of a deep recession.

Racism reinforces a culture of make-believe, but is so baked into every American institution –education, labor unions, the news and entertainment media –that it has become as normative, unquestioned, and reflexive as drawing breath. It’s doubtful that either Biden or Trump know the history of racism’s use as a tool of war, but intuitively, they know this:

They’d much prefer a race war, to a class war.

This web site is a forum for the American working class to interrogate our triumphs and failures, and strategies for the days ahead, for making America, at long last, a “bright and shining city on the hill.”

It’s not that everything you’ve been taught is a lie but the chances are that you only know the half of it. Americans are neither one thing or another, but all things and the other in a land of limerick-like contradictions as jarringly hideous as Trump and as breathtakingly glorious as Viola Liuzzo.

Liuzzo was a Detroit housewife and mother of five who watched televised accounts of law-enforcement’s savage attack on more than 500 peaceful protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965. Nine days later, the 39-year old was moved to tears by Martin Luther King’s televised appeal for people of conscience to help register voters, and decided in that moment to heed King’s call and make the trip to Selma in her 63 Oldsmobile.

Shuttling a black volunteer from Montgomery to Selma one night three weeks later, Liuzzo and her passenger were accosted by a car carrying four Ku Klux Klan members. Liuzzo was fatally shot, her car veering into a ditch. 

On the afternoon she left for Alabama, though, her husband, a business agent for the Teamsters, arrived home to find his wife packing a suitcase. He tried desperately to dissuade her from going, but she would have none of it. As she opened the front door to their home to leave, suitcase in hand, he made one final, desperate plea.

“Vi,” he said, “this is not your fight.”

“This,” she said bluntly, “is everybody’s fight.” And with that, she turned to walk out the door, headed south.