Book Review: Custer Died For Your Sins
Book Review: Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria, Jr., (University of Oklahoma Press, 1988 ed. with new preface by the author)
When Custer Died For Your Sins was published in 1969, it was one of those radical landmark books of the sixties, that era of free thinking and fighting the establishment. It was an example of how the civil rights struggle was affecting a wide range of minority groups, of various racial, ethnic and sexual identities--and those groups were beginning to ask, "What about our right to equality?"
Reading the book now, though, I find much of what Deloria says is just plain common sense, and of course, as someone who lived through the sixties, I do recognize that some specific issues he discusses have become dated (his chapter on Indian leadership, for example). Still, though, I find much of his material does remain radical, continuing to challenge some widely held attitudes.
One example is how Deloria argues that what was called "civil rights" when the book was first published (and which is now often labelled "DEI") is not about seeking equality--it's about seeking respect. Nowadays that assertion could make for a heated discussion on social media.
What may be most relevant, though, to our contemporary political climate--not just when addressing Native American rights--is his description of America's political parties. He begins by asserting, "Republicans represent the best of the white economics. The Democrats represent all of the deviations." White economics? Deviations? I can already picture social-media influencers debating those assertions.
Here's Deloria's description of the Republican Party, "The Republican Party has ostensibly stood for less government as a political philosophical position. But when you listen carefully to the Republicans you do not really hear less government, you hear a strange religion of early Puritan mythology. The Republican Party is in reality the truest expression of America's religion of progress and white respectability. It stands for the white superman who never existed. The peddler's grandson who conquered the unknown by inheriting a department store--such is the basic American religion unmasked."
Explaining the Republicans as a religion rather than a political party perhaps explains why they don't care if the poor starve and the sick die (remember, "We're all going to die," that Republican woman said, defending her vote for cutting Medicaid), and why they constantly follow a leader they often literally view as a sort of Messiah. Any deviation from the party leader is utterly unthinkable. Now it's Trump, but a half-century ago it was Reagan, before him, Eisenhower, before him, Theodore Roosevelt, and back when the party was founded, Lincoln.
Deloria further argues, "The measure of truth in the above assertion is the Republican willingness to lose elections rather than depart from cherished doctrines and myths. Only a religion can attract and hold such loyalty."
Nowadays, of course, today's Republicans appear to have given up on winning--or losing--elections by clinging to their cherished doctrines and myths. They're now resorting to attempting to rig elections, "rather than depart from cherished doctrines and myths."
As for the Democrats, they won't appreciate what Deloria says about them either. He argues, "The other party is something else. Popular conceptions [maintain] that the Democrats are the party of the people. The old [Franklin] Roosevelt coalition of labor, minority and ethnic groups, and farmers fails to acknowledge one unpublicized member--the special interests."
Those of us familiar with how people talk about politics know that "special interests" tends to be used derisively, as a label that's put on "big money," what supposedly "corrupts" politics--Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and so on. People tend to forget that any group of people who share a "special interest" for any reason are a "special interest group." In that way, labor is a special interest. Farmers are a special interest. Minority and ethnic groups represent a host of special interests, sometimes conflicting ones.
Roughly twenty years ago, the comedian Stephen Colbert graphically demonstrated this aspect of the Democratic party, when he brought TV cameras to a Democratic convention and gathered together a focus group--a black guy and an "Arab-tino," a labor rep and a "tree-hugger," a gay man and a lesbian, an American Indian and an Asian Indian, got them all arguing at once, and then announced how he was looking forward to the Republican convention, "where none of these voices will be heard."
Deloria makes roughly the same point in his own way, "More than the Republicans, the Democrats are the party of the special interests," he argues. "Who else piles special programs on top of special programs? Could the Republicans create the poor as a class in themselves? For, the Republicans know no poor because it is not within their religous comprehension." Once you understand that, you can understand how the Republicans could care less about anything other than helping the rich get richer.
Deloria was writing in the 1960's but we may project his observations into the decades that followed and on up to the present, "Until 1968 the Democrats won election after election by gathering the rejected into an amalgam of special interest for the sole purpose of splitting the pie which they would then attempt to create. The pie never exists; it is continually being created by the adjustment of the governmental machinery to include additional special interests, while eligible parties [those the Republicans deem eligible] participate in the American religion carefully being nurtured by the Republicans in their isolation." Maybe in the past few decades the Democrats have lost some of the coalition it takes to constantly envision and divide an imaginary pie, while the Republicans' cozying up to actual religions--the Christian right, but also the Jewish Zionists--allows them to more freely make no distinction between church and state.
Deloria's book was published shortly after Nixon was elected in 1968, and in it, Deloria states that Nixon's election was the last gasp of the Republicans' "quasi-religous nineteenth-century, Horatio Alger, WASP ethic."
Unfortunately, though, we know that wasn't the last gasp of it. We now know that when Reagan was elected, that was supposed to be the last gasp of it--then "the last gasp" was supposed to be the election of Bush I, then Bush II, then Trump the first time around, and now Trump the second time around. This ethic is getting a lot of last gasps. Maybe it's time to stop thinking of this "ethic" as a "last gasp" and start thinking of it as an ongoing stream of American thought that must be defeated every single election unless we want Republicanism to be both our one and only church and our one and only state.
Deloria's description of the political parties may remain controversial, but he also reminds us that voters, not parties, are responsible for electing our members of congress. His book was published shortly after the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and he made the following observation about the issue of gun control, "Congressman after Congressman came on TV and admitted that a vast majority of the American people wanted stricter gun control laws. But each stated he couldn't do anything about it because of the big bad NRA lobby. Anyone swallowing that type of statement deserves to live in the land of the sniper."
posted by Lyn Jensen | 12:38 PM
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