Carroll Fife has this quote from Huey Newton on her Twitter page:
“I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible…I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing a line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.”
Anything said by Huey Newton has the force of gospel truth for the Council Member from district 3. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panthers who was murdered “in a West Oakland neighborhood plagued by violence and crack cocaine,” was a dialectician. Of particular interest is his statement that anyone who disagreed with him was “blind” and needed to have “their understanding…developed.” Just how this “development” should proceed, he never made clear. There’s a hint of coercion: what if I don’t want my understanding “developed”? Dr. Newton, who was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, was clearly someone who on at least that one occasion turned to violence to make his case.
But what I want to talk about is this idea that so many progressives have, namely that if you don’t agree with them, you need to have your consciousness raised or “developed.” There’s nothing inherently bad about this approach: we all want others to agree with us on the big issues, and if they don’t, we hope to persuade them.
What happens when we know beyond a certainty that we’re right about something, and others still insist on believing the opposite? We see this all the time in Trump world. We wonder why Republicans can’t admit truths that are so clear to us and should be clear to any intelligent person. It can’t be because they’re unintelligent, because they’re not. It can’t be because they’re uninformed, because the facts are there for all to see. Then what is it?
It’s because they’re malicious. Truth, based in facts, is unimportant to them. The only thing that matters to them is power. But I’m not just accusing right wing conservatives of this deformation of their character. Far-left Democrats suffer from the same mental defect, starting with Carroll Fife. Her years-long war against the Oakland Police Department is a good example. It’s so evidently wrong, so twisted and sick, and so hurtful to her own constituents, Black people, that one wonders whose side Fife is really on. Criminality runs rampant in her community. Is Fife on the side of criminality? She would deny it, of course, but that is the de facto impact of her policies.
The odd thing about Fife is that her hero, Newton, always insisted on winning over his opponents through dialogue. Fife on the other hand has no interest in exchanging ideas with her political opponents. She’s notorious for cutting off everyone who disagrees with her about anything, including me. It’s rather disgraceful for an elected politician to insulate herself in this arrogant way. But Fife is wrapped in a tomb of her own making, an isolated, embittered old politician disliked by her colleagues and virtually the entirety of city government.
What on earth is so horrible about dialoguing with a political opponent? I think we know the answer to that in Fife’s case. I wrote earlier that she’s not unintelligent. But her intelligence is of a specific type: feral. Like an animal or insect, Fife possesses a primal canniness that warns her when she’s threatened. This instinct enables her to protect herself, but it also, sadly, prohibits her from forming meaningful relationships. Anyone who’s watched her performance at City Council meetings has seen the Fife madness. Her rage against the police, against public safety, is stunning. At the Nov. 18 meeting on Flock cameras, Fife actually claimed she was against them because they threatened transgender people! If she really believes that, she’s delusional, but she doesn’t. So baleful is she toward the police that she’ll say anything in the hopes that her fellow councilmembers will believe it. Rowena Brown, who also voted against the Flock cameras, apparently is as crazy as Fife, but the rest of the Council, for now, held their ground, supported the cameras, and repudiated Fife. Again.
Steve Heimoff