BONUS ELECTION ISSUE
THE AFRICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE
BAVUAL FALL 2024
10.00
HARRIS VS. TRUMP ‘24 THE STAKES FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS AND ALL AMERICANS
09 27 05 ISSUES
MY TAKE DONALD TRUMP IS NOT THE FUTURE, A PROGRESSIVE SOCIETY IS
DONALD TRUMP WHAT’S ON THE LINE FOR ALL AMERICANS, INCLUDING BLACK AMERICANS
21 07
KAMALA HARRIS
THE DRIFT WHY DEMOCRACY IS UNDER THREAT BY FASCISTS WORLDWIDE
A PROFILE OF THE 49TH VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
A PROFILE OF THE 45TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
33 HOW THEY VIEW AMERICA THE POLITICAL PARTIES’ VISION FOR THE FUTURE BAVUAL ELECTION 2024 | 3
BAVUAL THE AFRICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE
Bavual Vol. 3 Bonus Election Issue Fall 2024
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THE COVER: A.I. GENERATED IMAGE OF KAMALA HARRIS VS. DONALD TRUMP
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MY TAKE
Earl A. Birkett
DONALD TRUMP IS NOT THE FUTURE, A PROGRESSIVE SOCIETY IS For nearly 5,200 years of its civilized history, most of the Earth has been ruled by single rulers, nearly all of whom were patriarchal and, except for the occasional enlightened emperor, extremely tyrannical. They dominated the known world that consisted of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, and were called pharoah, warlord, Caesar, king and dictator. Worshipped without question by their subjects, many of whom were enslaved, their word was final. Dissent was quickly snuffed out. The Greeks first gave the world democracy - a word they coined - in the 6th century BCE by forming the first city-state in Athens complete with a constitution, administrative and judicial offices and a legislative assembly chosen from all eligible citizens (which prophetically excluded women, slaves, foreigners and youth below the age of military service). Its unique feature is that no one was subject to rule by another power or a single person. It was the Romans who introduced the concept of a Republic, a representative democracy where a small class of wealthy and noble families manipulated the voting system in such a way that only they were allowed to serve in the ruling Senate. The emperor, or Caesar, was usually chosen by the Senate, direct plebiscite, the army and even by lot. Britain’s 13 increasingly unruly colonies in America, broke from the king and formed their own nation, the United States of America, in 1776. They adopted a Constitution in 1787, which set up a republican government consisting of an Executive, the President, a Legislature, the Congress, and a Judiciary, the Supreme Court. Each of the three branches were given checks and balances on each other so that none of them would emerge to rule absolutely over the other. To check the power of the President, the drafters gave Congress the power to impeach the executive whenever he exceeded his legal authority. That power plus the creation of the Electoral College, designed to override the popular vote, and the belief that anyway the voters would never be so morally bankrupt as to actually elect a
demagogue to the office (after all George Washington, a patriot and public servant, was their model), no further protections were put in place. Also, political parties had not formed yet, so it was assumed that each branch would naturally want to maintain their independence. With some key adjustments along the way , including the Civil War debacle, the Constitution held for 237 years - until 2024, when it is being tested as never before. The formal virus of Donald John Trump that was injected into the political bloodstream in 2015 gave the U.S. its first serious internal challenge to democracy ever, first with a cult-of-personality presidency from 2017 to 2021 and now the prospect of electing a dictator to rule a gangsterized police state beginning in 2025. It took America more than two centuries to rise from a paradise for wealthy white male slave owners to one that embraces all manner of people poor whites, freed blacks, ethnic minorities, women, non-Christians and finally the sexually different. All this has made the shrinking white male evangelical Christian majority feel as if they are under threat of losing their economic, political and cultural dominance and privilege that they have enjoyed since America’s beginning and being replaced by everyone who isn’t them. They pretend to be superior, but in fact they feel deeply inferior and afraid and have coalesced around a crude, ignorant and amoral racist and misogynist, a civilly liable business fraud and rapist, a 34-count convicted felon, an ex-president deemed by health experts to be responsible for the deaths of 500,000 people to the covid virus and a traitorous demagogue/wannabe dictator who “promises” to permanently restore them to their former glory - yet another one of his more than 30,000 documented lies over his four years in office. Americans do not want a dictator, they want trusted leaders who will continue the long, difficult and successful march to what their forefathers promised them in writing: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
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THE DRIFT
WHY DEMOCRACY IS AGAIN UNDER THREAT BY AUTHORITARIANS WORLDWIDE It’s like the plot to a horror movie: you narrowly escape from the clutches of a deadly monster, maybe even kill him as well, and observe the carnage or the threat from the rearview mirror, only to straight ahead out of your front window only to see the fiend, even more threatening this time, coming right at you all over again.
elsewhere, faced the threat of revolution simmering just below the surface that would almost come to pass during the great Depression of the 1930s.
The trumph of democracy over dictatorship in World War II, followed by the liberation of nations primarily in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean that choked under the yoke of colonialism since the 19th century, and Such is the plight of the world in the first quarter of the granting of civil rights to American blacks, gave the 21st century, for it faces the same ominous humanity a collective freedom that it had never threats that it faced during the same period of the tasted before and determined never to lose it again. 20th century. It is a period that gave rise to revolution and a Stalinist dictatorship in a Russia That is, until 2024. transformed into the Soviet Union, samurai rule in Japan, authoritarian nationalism under Chang Kai- The Spanish-American philosopher George Shek in China, the gradual rise of fascism in Italy, Santayana’s timeless aphorism, that “Those who Nazism in Germany and the seeds of dictatorship in cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat regions as diverse as Cuba and the Philippines. it,” remains as true today as it was when he first Even the United States, suffering from decades of uttered it in one of his published works, Reason in Jim Crow segregation in the South and Common Sense, in 1905. 6 | BAVUAL ELECTION 2024
Germany and Italy may have been defeated in 1945, but the heinous virus of authoritarianism, both communist and fascistic, that Hitler and Mussolini left in their wake remained airborne, metastasizing worldwide, and finding a permanent host in countries as diverse as Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, Maduro’s Venezuela, Orban’s Hungary, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Republic of Iran and, sadly, many countries in North, Central and Southern Africa. According to Pew Research, 59 of the world’s 195 countries - just over 30 percent - are governed by authoritarians. Anti-democratic movements fester throughout Europe with varying degrees of success: victories in Italy and Hungary but defeats (thus far) in France and Germany. Pew identifies 24 democratic countries where a median of 31 percent of their citizens are supportive of some form of authoritarianism. Sentiment is highest in India, at 85 percent, and in two of the world’s six largest economies: the United Kingdom, at 37 percent, followed by the United States, at 32 percent. The 2024 U.S. presidential election is a decision between an authoritarian Republican, Donald Trump, and a pro-democracy Democrat, Kamala Harris. As of this writing, polls show the race to be a tie with a slight edge to Harris. It is harder now to identify wannabe dictators than it was in the mid-20th century as most no longer strut around in uniforms and make bombastic speeches like cartoon parodies. They wear business suits and, to many people, seem to be stable men and women making calm, reasoned arguments but which are, given slightly closer inspection, the same tyrannical demagoguery as dictators of old. A key example of this neo-dictatorial style is Vladimir Putin. Dictatorships can take many forms: military regimes, oligarchic, indirect military regimes, dominant party regimes, monarchies, and personalist regimes. Some authoritarians like Putin and Trump combine regimes such as oligarchic, dominant party and personalist. Authoritarians take advantage during periods of economic stress, such as high inflation, recession or depression, and usually after a conflict like World War I or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where the aggressor nation loses and its ruling government is blamed for the ruinous aftermath. It does not help that the government is also seen as weak and inept. They have a knack of persuading intellectually weak and usually religious or superstitious individuals who fear that their supposedly privileged status is
eroding by blaming outsiders and/or the elite for their problems. How does one spot an authoritarian in the making? There are red flags: narcissists who display sociopathic signs in childhood, either as bullies or resentful for being bullied in school; suffer from abuse from one or both parents; harbor a lifelong resentment of authority; choose unsavory role models; and develop an unusual lust for status, dominance, greed, selfishness, and absolute loyalty and constant worship from others. They can either be brave in battle or cowardly armchair warriors, more often than not the latter. Demagogues usually blame a single group as the culprits: religious, racial or ethnic minorities, immigrants, intellectuals, journalists, bankers, political opponents. These groups are demonized as objects of irrational hatred by the fearful masses who are thus brainwashed into voting against their own interests. Trump blames immigrants largely from Mexico just as Hitler blamed the Jews in Germany. Once in power, the authoritarian leader consolidates his power by staffing the government with his corrupt cronies, suppressing all opposition and dissent, manipulating or banning elections, demanding total loyalty from the military and police, seeking revenge on his enemies and forming alliances with fellow authoritarians. Under this rule, the only beneficiaries are the leader and his gang and perhaps the wealthiest elite, who must pay a tribute to Dear Leader to maintain their privileged status. How does authoritarian rule end? Almost always tragically. Despots seldom resign peacefully for fear of the consequences before the courts or among the angry masses who realize they have been duped all along. They wage wars of survival, both external and internal, unleash the military on their own citizens, and if they cannot flee in time are killed in a bloody coup. There is one time tested way to prevent the rise of such a megalomaniac, and that is for the majority to vote against him when he is running for office, before he is given power. Getting the despot out of office after he was assumed power is not impossible, but it very, very difficult to do by ballot and without a revolution that is almost always costly in lives lost and resources consumed. Yes, Winston Churchill was right: democracy is indeed the worst form of government - except for all the other forms.
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THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION ELECTION DAY TUESDAY NOVEMBER 5, 2024
THE WINNER IS DECIDED IN THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE, NOT BY POPULAR VOTE TOTAL VOTES VOTES NEEDED TO ELECT THE PRESIDENT
538 270
VICE PRESIDENT COUNTS THE ELECTORAL VOTE JANUARY 6, 2025
Only two candidates are likely to appear on the ballot in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia: Vice President Kamala Harris, who was nominated for president by the Democratic Party after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race July 21 after having won the Democratic primary previously, and Donald Trump, whom the Republican Party designated as their nominee in their primary during the same period. The DNC formally ratified Harris’ nomination at their convention in Chicago in August. (Harris had already received enough votes to win the nomination from the party delegates earlier in the month.) Harris selected Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota to join her on the ticket as the vice presidential nominee. Previously, the RNC officially chose Trump as the nominee at their Milwaukee convention in July - in spite of his 34-count felony conviction in New York for business fraud to conceal wittholding information from voters in his 2016 presidential campaign. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio - who in 2016 called Trump “America’s Hitler” before seeking Trump’s endorsement in his 2022 Senate race - was nominated to be Trump’s vice presidential running-mate. Because the U.S. electorate has been polarized along party lines due to cultural and economic differences since at least the 1990s, only a handful of swing states, whose votes are attainable by either candidate, will receive the bulk of their attention. They include New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. As of publication, televised debates between Harris and Trump, and also Walz and Vance, have not been determined. Although several minor party and candidates, chiefly Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver, People’s Party nominee Cornel West and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, will be on a number of state ballots, none of them realistically has a chance at being elected. However, they could still draw enough votes in swing states in a close election to determine whether Harris or Trump prevails in the Electoral College. Also at issue are expected attempts by Republican election officials in swing states to suppress Democratic voter turnout, especially in black and latino communities, and Trump supporters’ reaction to the election results should Harris win. Trump-led Republican insurrectionists could repeat the aftermath of the 2020 election, when they tried to overturn the election by both illegal and violent means. 8 | BAVUAL ELECTION 2024
ISSUES WHAT’S AT STAKE FOR ALL AMERICANS, INCLUDING BLACK AMERICANS
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