The politics of the past
“The past is never dead,” wrote the American novelist William Faulkner, “It’s not even past.” Faulkner had in mind the troubled history of the American south, but his insight applies just as well to the resurgence of tribalism on both sides of the Atlantic. New populist leaders, in Europe and elsewhere, have shown that xenophobia, or economic grievances can be reliably exploited to upend the political status quo.
Many countries with deeply troubled histories have tried to address them with various forms of restorative justice. During the last 30 years more than 40 nations have used Truth and Reconciliation Committees (TRCs) to come to terms with the recent past. These establish an official narrative of painful events but also offer a roadmap towards effective reconciliation which often includes political power-sharing, and economic redistribution.
South Africa’s TRC played an important role in ensuring that the nonviolent transfer of political power remained viable after decades of apartheid. Similar initiatives, with equally complex outcomes, have been pursued in Guatemala, Ireland, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. In each case the TRCs sought to encourage restoration rather than retribution. Or, in the findings of the commission which probed the abuses of Canada’s residential schools: “Now that we know about [this] legacy, what do we do about it?”
Societies which evade that question remain vulnerable to political manipulation. In 2005 Thomas Frank wrote about the Republican party’s use of divisive social issues to capture the votes of the white working class even though the party espoused policies that were, by any reasonable measure, against these voters’ economic interests. A new book by Jonathan Metzl covers similar territory in the wake of the Obama presidency.
In “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland” Metzl finds that longstanding grievances have led many working class whites to forgo treatment that would have been provided by the Affordable Care Act rather than accept what they perceive to be an un-American overhaul of the healthcare system. This is not a consequence of irremediable racism so much as the result of a political culture. As Metzl recently told an interviewer “health risks rise when the politics of racial resentment shapes the health care policies [in] your state or community ... it really was the policies themselves that were racially motivated, not the individual people or their psychologies.”
Racial, class and ideological tensions have always been at the heart of Caribbean and our post-independence history is replete with actions that echo the dismissive assumptions of the plantation economy. As in other postcolonial countries the middle classes who assumed political and economic power in the Caribbean have never agreed on how to address our problematic past. In many instances the entrepreneurial classes, more concerned with profits, have ignored the need for social justice, but there has also been a rich tradition of intellectuals who have pushed in the opposite direction. Fifty years ago, for example, Walter Rodney clearly stated that our own tribalism would only get worse if working people could not be persuaded to put economic interests ahead of racial affiliations.
It is always easy to identify the mistakes of a previous generation and blame it for problems that we cannot solve, but a closer look at any period always discloses a range of opinions that could have produced different outcomes. Brexit was not inevitable, nor the rise of half a dozen strongmen who have consolidated their political power in recent years. What remains important at moments of political crisis is that these alternative opinions can be heard and taken seriously. If that doesn’t happen, which is often the case, then we have only ourselves to blame. Or, as Aldous Huxley once observed: “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”