Franz Fanon, the late, brilliant, and often-quoted theoretician and writer, famously said, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” Public education has to play a great part in that struggle, since youth must understand the politics of their age. Social change and major transformations of society depend on the level of youthful sophistication in the politics of their own being. Public education has to help prepare them for the battle.
Each age tends to either bring out new conflicts over who is in charge and what direction they want to drive the country, or to reify earlier conflicts over power and authority with new challenges for dominance and control. Today, there is a serious social war occurring over the re-rise of oligarchy and the so-far limited ability of the mass public to harness it. It is an old enemy of democracy, and it never has been really rooted out of the American system.
Rarely, unfortunately, has modern youth been educated properly to both recognize it and to fight it. Public protest, for instance, is fine and can sometimes be temporarily somewhat effective against oligarchy’s re-rising. But when youth and regular citizens are deliberately kept ignorant of the re-rise and ascendance of oligarchy in society, nothing but heartache and despair will beset the daily social scenes.
And make no mistake about it, whether he is a worthy champion for the oligarchic forces in America currently or not (some think he’s merely a useful idiot), oligarchy as a mass entity has gathered up enough strength and support to be an overwhelming threat to U.S. democracy as we know it.
The rich and the well-to-do plan to have it all their own way now. Period. They lost their goldenzopportunity with the Civil War (the dominance of wealthy property owners and slave masters) and the Gilded Age (the age of the robber barons).
But in January 2010, in the Citizens United case, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the oligarchs the upper hand. All they needed then was the coming of the useful idiot, braggart, criminally sinful, and greedy POTUS along with a compliant Congress and state administration.
All those elements are in place now, and the legal arena of this country, even in this short time, has already been upturned to open the doors wide for the political takeover by the oligarchs. Law and order in America is increasingly coming to mean, what’s the advantage to the wealthy and major propertied citizens? To hell with the others.
The political fight has now been enjoined, and ready or not, 21st-century youth have either got to understand and save American democracy or watch it die. It is now that serious.
Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). It is the stepparent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.
