Three Truths (And a Really Big Lie)
Election Reflections #7: “I’ve got a shotgun, and you ain’t got one.”
This land is MY land, this is not your land.
I’ve got a shotgun, and you ain’t got one.
And I will shoot you if you don’t get off my property;
‘Cause, this land was made for only ME!
That’s what had become of Woody Guthrie’s iconic This Land Is Your Land, one of my all-time favorite songs written by one of my all-time favorite people, by the time my nieces LaCrystal and Mary, back when they were 12 and 10 years old, got done with it.
These two little girls, before they were even teenagers, were already satirically and ingeniously (not to mention, hilariously) articulating all kinds of profound things about American society, touching on everything from manifest destiny and the land taken by force to the persecution of immigrants and the exploitation of those with less power. In four short stanzas, they captured how the game is rigged, the scales, unbalanced and the playing field, far from level.
Of course, that’s not necessarily what they were intending to do. They mostly loved turning the song on its head and enthusiastically acting it out as they sang it. “I’ve got a shotgun and you ain’t got one.” But the clincher was the ending: “This land was made for only ME!” Because, who we believe this land was made for, whether both you and me, or only me, changes everything. I think Woody would have loved it.
This particular letter is different from the others in that I’m not spending a lot of time on context-setting or situating the points being made in our shared story. There’s more of that later, but for now, I want to get straight to the point. It’s also a bit longer than my usual letters, but this topic feels immensely important. I’ve tried to cover as much ground as I could as succinctly as possible while hopefully keeping it readable and worth reading. That said, I have three fundamental truths to share about our nation, its future and its fate:
Truth One: The vote is the single most powerful social mechanism in existence.
Truth Two: For the first time in history, those of us committed to a society that works for all of us vastly outnumber those content with one that only works for some of us.
Truth Three: The only way we lose is by not showing up.
That’s it. If you take in nothing else from these Election Reflection letters except that, we’re in a good place. We have a way forward. Because, right now, if we can grasp them, these fundamental truths can turn what feels like a worst-case scenario into a best-case future. I’ll explain more, later, but first, one other equally important point. That Really Big Lie I mentioned in the title? Rejecting it is just as critical as embracing the above three societal truths.
Over the years, we’ve told ourselves a lot of corrosive and destructive lies – everything from “Negroes are raping our women” to “Immigrants are taking our jobs,” from “communists are taking over America” to “gays are the greatest societal threat since communism.” But I’d argue that this one is more corrosive and destructive than all the others, perhaps even combined. That’s because it’s like acid poured on the girders that keep our nation standing. That lie? Democracy doesn’t work.
It’s a simple lie. The best ones are. That makes it transmittable like an airborne virus. And, when combined with the obscuring of the Three Truths mentioned above, we have a perfect political storm, one where an ever-diminishing minority faction can make a legitimate run at turning us into an entirely different kind of society – an oligarchy instead of a democracy.
Sure, these days, this faction is using American religion for that purpose, but this is only the latest foray into creating a society that only works for some of us. We’ve already covered plenty of earlier iterations of this behavior in other letters, so we won’t do that here. But grasping that right now, religion is the institutional weapon of the day, not the driver is immensely important.
Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will… It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is, in fact, a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise… This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it. – Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda
All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. – Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf
Democracy doesn’t work.
Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels summed up the key to using disinformation as a weapon by saying, “He who controls the medium controls the message. He who controls the message controls the masses”; and by stating that Nazi success would never have been possible without two inventions, the airplane and the radio. Goebbels, who believed fervently in propaganda’s power, was the propagator of what has been commonly called the “Big Lie” strategy. A quote widely attributed to him describes it this way: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Democracy doesn’t work.
But notice that the propagators of this big lie didn’t start spreading it until our sociological shift became obvious. Before, when, everywhere we looked, we were confronted with Eurocentrism, when virtually everyone identified as straight and when not believing in the Christian God could cost you your career, when we drank from separate drinking fountains and my granddad had to step off the sidewalk into the gutter, “Majority rules” was the rallying cry. “We’re the majority,” they exclaimed, “And therefore, we rule. That’s democracy!”
They were all for democracy (or, at least their perverted version of it) then. (We covered the stark difference between "majority rules" and "the people rule" and how critical this understanding is to our future back in Stayed on Freedom.) But once the Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, made citizens of everyone born here and extended the power of the vote to include (male) former slaves, this group began propagating a different Really Big Lie – one that was consistent with the workings of democracy even as they tried to game it.
Democrats, almost all of whom were pro-slavery, realizing that all those electoral votes they once had by virtue of slave ownership were now going to be aligned against them, did a number of things. They enacted grandfather clauses. They, as we saw in Things That Need Doing, flat-out executed people who dared register to vote, which was Jimmie’s, Herbert’s and Lamar’s fates, among so many others.
But most pernicious was the lie itself – they created the idea of racial whiteness out of whole cloth, turned it into a social franchise, then invited the same Euro-ethnics they’d exploited and used as wage slaves since before the Revolution to join it. They told them, “You’re white, now. You’re one of us. Welcome.” This led to an onslaught of SCOTUS cases by people seeking to legally be classified as white and, is no doubt where the saying, “I’m free, white and 21” came from.
With one smooth move, they’d garnered the votes to turn the emancipated back into a powerless minority. That Really Big Lie”? Race is real. That simple, three-word assertion split a nation into quasi-species and led to all kinds of atrocities from Jim Crow to the acronym O.R.I.O.N. – Our Race Is Our Nation.
I’ve got a shotgun and you ain’t got one.
But it was in 2012, after this faction’s failed attempt to “one-term” Barack Obama (“Don’t Re-NIG in 2012”) that they started to see the writing on the wall. This multifaceted supermajority that had run roughshod over everyone from non-whites to non-Christians to non-straights now found itself in a position where its reign was rushing toward its own end. It’s hard to believe in “majority rules” when you’re no longer the majority.
Both laws preventing Asians from becoming naturalized citizens and immigration policies explicitly favoring Europeans were being rescinded. Population growth among every historic minority group was rising, gays were coming out of the closet in droves and seemingly overnight, families of mixed ancestry and ethnicity were everywhere. These were just some of the changes rendering rulership based on majority power untenable.
And all of a sudden, people who’d ostensibly gone to war in defense of democracy were now against it. But that’s not exactly how they put it. They didn’t come out and actually say, “We’re against democracy,” or more accurately, “We were for it when it benefitted us to be for it. It doesn’t anymore, so now, we’re against it.” Instead, they put the blame on the system.
“Democracy is a failed experiment,” they proclaimed, “We tried it and it didn’t work.” But that’s nonsense. We haven’t really tried democracy because we’ve never actually achieved it; a governance system where the power is truly in the hands of the governed. Even today, it remains more of an aspiration than a reality. And that’s unfortunate, because democracy, true democracy, is our only viable future. Today, the same factious spirit that built slavery, created legal whiteness and preached segregation is now turning religious supremacy into political strategy. But, “No lie,” as Martin said, “Can live forever.”
Just after the election, I came upon an op-ed where the writer, rightly defending Kamala’s respectable showing, said, “Of course, the Democrats need to clean house...” inferring that her loss was on the party infrastructure, not on Kamala. But in actuality, it’s not on either. The problem is a simple one. Only a handful of states were in contention, and in those states, Kamala lost by razor-thin margins.
In those states, every voter disenfranchisement scheme, every law passed that made it harder for certain people to vote, every intimidation effort and poll closure, every elimination of same-day registration or reduction of absentee voting timeframes – all made possible by the Supreme Court’s gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and by Congress’ refusal to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act – had an effect.
We don’t get the degree to which the presidential election has been winnowed down, allowing a diminishing minority faction to remain competitive while running on supremacist ideology. Take felony disenfranchisement. Dr. M. Marit Rehavi and Prof. Sonja Starr discovered, in an analysis of sentencing patterns, that African Americans receive almost 60% longer sentences than Euro Americans for not just the same crime, but the same conviction. And though African Americans are only 13% of the population, they constitute 38% of all felony disenfranchised persons.
In the 2012 national elections, an estimated 5.85 million citizens were disenfranchised due to convictions. The state with the highest numbers? Florida, with 1.5 million disenfranchised, almost all of whom vote Democrat. (They’re part of what I call the “Third-Third”, which we’ll explore further below.) To give a sense of how much this kind of disenfranchisement matters, in 2016, Donald Trump carried the state with 4.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton’s 4.5 million; a difference of 100,000. And, had Clinton won Florida, she would have won the presidency.
It’s not Democrats who need to clean house. We, the people need to clean house. Every single member of Congress who stood in the way of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and who is up for re-election in 2026 (every member of the House and a third of the Senate) should be fired and replaced by someone who will enact this vital law. Every single one.
Malcolm X, in March 1964, the last year of his life, travelled to Washington to hear the Senate debate the Civil Rights bill where he and Martin would meet for the first and only time. The behavior he saw on display from a bloc of 18 Democrats and one Republican would utterly disgust him. Led by Democratic Senator Richard Russell, the contingent attempted to filibuster the bill’s passage, with Russell saying, “We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.”
A few days later, on April 3, 1964, Malcolm fired back with The Ballot or the Bullet, ranked 7th out of the top 100 American speeches of the 20th century. (If interested, you can read more about my take on Malcolm in the NowSociety article, Malcolm X, the Original X-Man.) “Look at it the way it is,” he said:
What alibis do they use, since they control Congress and the Senate? What alibi do they use when you and I ask, "Well, when are you going to keep your promise?" They blame the Dixiecrats. What is a Dixiecrat? A Democrat. A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise. The titular head of the Democrats is also the head of the Dixiecrats, because the Dixiecrats are a part of the Democratic Party. The Democrats have never kicked the Dixiecrats out of the party…
The Dixiecrats in Washington, D.C., control the key committees that run the government. The only reason the Dixiecrats control these committees is because they have seniority. The only reason they have seniority is because they come from states where Negroes can't vote... Half of the senators and congressmen who occupy these key positions in Washington, D.C., are there illegally, are there unconstitutionally.
I was in Washington, D.C., a week ago Thursday, when they were debating whether or not they should let the bill come onto the floor. And in the back of the room where the Senate meets, there's a huge map of the United States, and on that map it shows the location of Negroes throughout the country. And it shows that the Southern section of the country, the states that are most heavily concentrated with Negroes, are the ones that have senators and congressmen standing up filibustering and doing all other kinds of trickery to keep the Negro from being able to vote. This is pitiful… These senators and congressmen actually violate the constitutional amendments that guarantee the people of that particular state or county the right to vote.
You don't even need new legislation. Any person in Congress right now, who is there from a state or a district where the voting rights of the people are violated, that particular person should be expelled from Congress. And when you expel him, you've removed one of the obstacles in the path of any real meaningful legislation in this country. I say again, I'm not anti-Democrat, I'm not anti-Republican; I'm not anti-anything. I'm just questioning their sincerity, and some of the strategy that they've been using on our people by promising them promises that they don't intend to keep.
We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.
“There ain’t no room,” Curtis Mayfield sang on People Get Ready, “For the hopeless sinner who would hurt all mankind just to save his own.” “Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner, for there’s no hiding place against the kingdom’s throne.” That’s the true choice – social equality or social supremacy, a society that works for all of us or just some of us. And no matter how we’ve framed it in the past, black or white, red or blue, north or south, left or right, the so-called faithful or the godless, “all” or “some” is what it’s always been about.
This land was made for only ME.
It’s because of the degree to which we’ve bought into this one Really Big Lie that makes grounding ourselves in the Three Truths so necessary.
Truth One: The vote is the single most powerful social mechanism in existence.
This one thing is more powerful than banks or billionaires, dotcoms or unicorns, preachers and pulpits, religious texts and papal pronouncements, guns and troops, arsenals and bombs. It’s more powerful than every civic appointment and position of authority, every law, and even the Constitution itself, which was ordained by we, the people. It’s how we, as our nation’s lawmakers, law-keepers and law-changers form a more perfect union and how a government of the people, by the people and for the people persists.
But if that’s all true, how did we go from 60 years ago, where people were willing to die so that everyone would have a chance to cast their vote, or Malcolm’s declaration: “If you never see me another time in your life, if I die in the morning, I'll die saying one thing: the ballot or the bullet, the ballot or the bullet,” to where we are today – a place where only 2/3 of even eligible voters vote?
It started with efforts to game the vote itself, including limiting voters to unattractive choices. Remember the white primaries the NAACP fought against, covered in We’re Gonna Make It Anyway? Texas Democrats concocted a scheme that allowed members of their party to choose the candidates that would represent the party during the general election. But because Democrats were segregationists and most Texans, Democrats, the only real choice any Texan, irrespective of political party had was between two segregationist candidates who differed mostly by degree. No one else stood a chance.
Take Democrat George Wallace, who, at 39, made his first run at the governorship. I remember, even as a little Alabama boy, struggling to understand how to categorize him. There he was, shouting bad things on the TV, and my grandmother Mary, sadly shaking her head, saying, “George Wallace used to be such a good man”. I didn’t understand how that could be; how a good man becomes a bad man. “It’s just a saying, sweetheart,” she said, “Like, ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’.” She explained how goodness was still a part of him, “But that ain’t the voice he’s listening to right now.”
She told me about the kinds of things he used to stand for, including the customary respect he showed to African American attorneys when he was a sitting judge. It was she who informed me that the same guy ranting right then during some speech about the dangers of integration had himself been endorsed by the NAACP, but he had – in 1958 – the first time he ran for governor of Alabama. Still, he’d get trounced by John Malcolm Patterson, the rabidly segregationist candidate backed by the Ku Klux Klan, an organization Wallace had historically stood against. His monumental loss would be a watershed moment for him, and four years later, when he ran again, he’d completely reversed course.
Ever the pragmatist, when asked why he’d so radically shifted tactics, he replied, "You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor." And in a very real sense, it worked; in the 1962 election, he was victorious, and by the time of his January 1963 inauguration speech, he was all in. “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,” he declared, “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation today, segregation tomorrow – segregation forever!”
Truth Two: For the first time in history, those of us committed to a society that works for all of us vastly outnumber those content with one that only works for some of us.
But that’s not how it feels. That’s because of how things have been reframed. Like Goebbels figured out, if we can define the terms, the outcome of the argument is already a foregone conclusion. Take most sites that seek to identify what they describe as “media bias”. As a general rule, their working assumption is that the more left- or right-leaning reporting is, the more biased it is. That therefore means that if reporting falls squarely in the center it’s inherently unbiased, “fair and balanced”. Breaking us down into red states and blue states also does this. The framing itself leads us to think that there are two equally biased sides and that the right place to be is in the middle. To split the baby.
But in almost every choice of consequence, it’s not enough to just split the difference between the two endpoints. Imagine if groups like the Freedom Riders had been content to say, “We’re willing to meet you halfway – how about we agree on desegregating half the water fountains and integrating half the buses?” It’s what Martin was getting at when he said, “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it,” and why Howard Zinn said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” It’s why we can’t be apolitical. And that’s before efforts to frame the story as if the Third-Third doesn’t exist.
When we talk “likely voters”, we’re really only including two-thirds of the nation’s voting-age population, which, in this last election was split into two roughly equal groups. Trump supporters are the first third and Kamala supporters, the second, with a few thousand undecideds thrown into the mix. That leaves the Third-Third. Because of the way the antiquated Electoral College works, we spend almost all our time on the campaign trail trying to woo those undecideds. But that’s not who these people are. They’re not undecided, they’re uninvolved.
Almost as a rule, they want absolutely nothing to do with the version of America supremacists envision. But they’re also too worn down by our nation’s political antics, by poverty and by powerlessness to devote much energy toward standing against it. “It’s not that we don’t care,” John Mayer sang in Waiting on the World to Change, “We just know that the fight ain’t fair.” “But one day,” he concludes, “Our generation is gonna rule the population.”
Think about it – when you see all those red states during election coverage, even in races where more Americans vote Democrat and even when Obama and Biden won both the popular and the electoral vote, pictorially, it looks like red-state voters outnumber blue. But that’s actually not what the numbers say. Last week, my long-time friend Kerry Knight and I discussed this very thing over coffee – how the red state/blue state visual based on the amount of land each state has rather than its population biases our thinking as if it’s acres, not people who do the voting. It leads us to believe that a circle is, in fact, a square.
Truth Three: The only way we lose is by not showing up.
By “showing up,” I mean a lot more than merely voting, though that’s definitely where it starts. It means not focusing solely on the presidency, just one race that happens every four years while overlooking the importance of hundreds of other races that have greater direct impact on our lives. That’s what the people of Ferguson learned to do.
It means making every public office accountable to the people. Not shrinking the circle of our “we”, nor deluding ourselves into thinking that the job of public officials is to represent the people from their districts, their state or their party, instead of the people of the United States. That’s the oath – the entirety of the US of A, rather than any fraction of it.
It means making serving a term in public office accessible. Every American of voting age has a right to serve such a term, and perhaps, at some point in their lives, should. We can’t have a government by the people, of the people and for the people without the deep involvement of the people. Understanding how governance works would only make us more effective voters and make democracy stronger.
And that’s before we get to the ways the Electoral College has convinced most Americans that their vote doesn’t count. Even though a plural majority of eligible voters are against the supremacy ideology being spouted with increasing regularity, they also recognize that unless they’re living in a “battleground” state, their vote is merely symbolic.
Whether they’re in a red or blue state, the choice is already decided. So, dispensing with the Electoral College would galvanize everyone to get out to vote. And there’s another powerful benefit – doing so would also increase participation across all other down-ballot races, which strengthens democracy.
Three Truths: 1. The vote is the single most powerful social mechanism in existence, 2. For the first time in history, those of us committed to a society that works for all of us vastly outnumber those content with one that only works for some of us, and 3. The only way we lose is by not showing up.
One Really Big Lie: Democracy doesn’t work.
Learning to embrace the former and reject the latter could change everything for us and for the future.
I want to end this letter with a 1976 video of Pete Seeger, one of my musical and social justice idols as Woody Guthrie was to him, the amazing Judy Collins, Fred Hellerman and Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie singing This Land Is Your Land. Studs Terkel recites Woody’s own words during the intro, which sums up so much of what this letter is about:
I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling.
I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.
I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.
“As I was walkin’,” Arlo sang, “I saw a sign there. And that sign said, “No trespassin’”. But on the other side… it didn’t say nothin! Now, that side was made for you and me!” I’d defy you to keep your foot from tapping and yourself from singing along.
Woody wrote on his guitar, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Pete wrote on his banjo, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
But that’s not all those machines do.
They champion the kinds of monumental truths that force supremacy to surrender and kill Really Big Lies.