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CLIMATE CHANGE FOSSIL FUELS PEAK OIL MAY 12, 2014 ISSUE

By Chris Hayes

APRIL 22, 2014

The New Abolitionism

Averting planetary disaster will mean forcing fossil fuel

companies to give up at least $10 trillion in wealth.

B efore the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the

Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty

rhetoric about “violations of the Constitution of the United

States” and “encroachments upon the reserved rights of

the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words

was money. So much goddamn money.

The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of

dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the

property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth

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stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be

taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day

political movement that contended that mutual funds and

401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil

institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or

less overnight. This was the fear that approximately

400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the

Civil War.

Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves

as property. It was precisely this ontological question—

property or persons?—that the war was fought over. But

suspend that moral revulsion for a moment and look at the

numbers: Just how much money were the South’s slaves

worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which

comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in

1860 by the number of slaves and then using the

Consumer Price Index to adjust for inflation. But as

economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue,

using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesn’t

really tell us much: “In the 19th century,” they note, “there

were no national surveys to figure out what the average

consumer bought.” In fact, the first such survey, in

Massachusetts, wasn’t conducted until 1875.

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In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South

held in bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery

in terms of the percentage of total economic value it

represented at the time. And by that metric, it was colossal.

In 1860, slaves represented about 16 percent of the total

household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the entire

country, which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion.

Ten trillion dollars is already a number much too large to

comprehend, but remember that wealth was intensely

geographically focused. According to calculations made by

economic historian Gavin Wright, slaves represented

nearly half the total wealth of the South on the eve of

secession. “In 1860, slaves as property were worth more

than all the banks, factories and railroads in the country

put together,” civil war historian Eric Foner tells me.

“Think what would happen if you liquidated the banks,

factories and railroads with no compensation.”

* * *

In 2012, the writer and activist Bill McKibben published a

heart-stopping essay in Rolling Stone titled “Global

Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” I’ve read hundreds of

thousands of words about climate change over the last

decade, but that essay haunts me the most.

The piece walks through a fairly straightforward bit of

arithmetic that goes as follows. The scientific consensus is

that human civilization cannot survive in any recognizable

form a temperature increase this century more than 2

degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Given that we’ve

already warmed the earth about 0.8 degrees Celsius, that

means we have 1.2 degrees left—and some of that warming

is already in motion. Given the relationship between

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carbon emissions and global average temperatures, that

means we can release about 565 gigatons of carbon into

the atmosphere by mid-century. Total. That’s all we get to

emit if we hope to keep inhabiting the planet in a manner

that resembles current conditions.

Now here’s the terrifying part. The Carbon Tracker

Initiative, a consortium of financial analysts and

environmentalists, set out to tally the amount of carbon

contained in the proven fossil fuel reserves of the world’s

energy companies and major fossil fuel–producing

countries. That is, the total amount of carbon we know is

in the ground that we can, with present technology,

extract, burn and put into the atmosphere. The number

that the Carbon Tracker Initiative came up with is… 2,795

gigatons. Which means the total amount of known, proven

extractable fossil fuel in the ground at this very moment is

almost five times the amount we can safely burn.

Proceeding from this fact, McKibben leads us inexorably

to the staggering conclusion that the work of the climate

movement is to find a way to force the powers that be,

from the government of Saudi Arabia to the board and

shareholders of ExxonMobil, to leave 80 percent of the

carbon they have claims on in the ground. That stuff you

own, that property you’re counting on and pricing into

your stocks? You can’t have it.

Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it’s a bit tricky to put

an exact price tag on how much money all that

unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial

analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20

trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet,

we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most

profitable corporations and the nations that partner with

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them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth. Since all of

these numbers are fairly complex estimates, let’s just say,

for the sake of argument, that we’ve overestimated the

total amount of carbon and attendant cost by a factor of 2.

Let’s say that it’s just $10 trillion.

The last time in American history that some powerful set

of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth

was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than

600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve

ever fought.

It is almost always foolish to compare a modern political

issue to slavery, because there’s nothing in American

history that is slavery’s proper analogue. So before anyone

misunderstands my point, let me be clear and state the

obvious: there is absolutely no conceivable moral

comparison between the enslavement of Africans and

African-Americans and the burning of carbon to power our

devices. Humans are humans; molecules are molecules.

The comparison I’m making is a comparison between the

political economy of slavery and the political economy of

fossil fuel.

More acutely, when you consider the math that McKibben,

the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) all lay out, you must

confront the fact that the climate justice movement is

demanding that an existing set of political and economic

interests be forced to say goodbye to trillions of dollars of

wealth. It is impossible to point to any precedent other

than abolition.

* * *

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The connection between slavery and fossil fuels, however,

is more than metaphorical. Before the widespread use of

fossil fuels, slaves were one of the main sources of energy

(if not the main source) for societies stretching back

millennia. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, nearly all

energy to power societies flowed from the natural

ecological cascade of sun and food: the farmhands in the

fields, the animals under saddle, the burning of wood or

grinding of a mill. A life of ceaseless exertion.

Before fossil fuels, the only way out of this drudgery was

by getting other human beings to do the bulk of the work

that the solar regime required of its participants. This

could be done by using accrued money to pay for labor, but

more often than not—particularly in societies like the

Roman Empire that achieved density and scale—it was

achieved through slavery. Slavery opened up for the slave

owners vast new vistas of possibility. The grueling

mundane exertions demanded of everyone under a solar

regime could be cast off, pushed down on the shoulders of

the slave.

In this respect, the basic infrastructure of energy

distribution and exploitation in the plantation South was

not so different from feudal Europe or ancient Egypt.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, coal, whale

oil, pneumatic power and all manner of mechanization

penetrated the more urbanized North, while the South

remained largely mired in the pre-industrial age. In 1850,

only 14 percent of the nation’s canal mileage and 26

percent of its railroad mileage ran through slave states,

and the industrial output of the entire region was only

one-third that of Massachusetts alone.

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Not only that, but as time marched forward, the South

lagged further and further behind. In Battle Cry of Freedom,

James McPherson notes that while in 1850 slave states had

42 percent of the population, they “possessed only 18

percent of the country’s manufacturing capacity, a decline

from the 20 percent of 1840.” The same holds true for the

South’s percentage of railroad miles, which was declining

as the war approached. In 1852, James D.B. DeBow, a

vociferous advocate of diversifying the Southern economy,

lamented that “the North grows rich, and powerful, and

great, whilst we, at best, are stationary.” (This

underdevelopment would haunt the South well into the

twentieth century: in 1930, only 38 percent of residents of

the former Confederate states had electricity, compared

with about 85 percent in states that had been free.)

This lagging wasn’t just happenstance: many historians

argue that it was, in fact, the availability of the cheap,

plentiful energy resource of slavery that meant the South

faced less pressure to urbanize, electrify or industrialize.

Slavery, and the energy it provided, was a kind of crutch

giving the antebellum South its own version of what

modern-development economists now call, in a very

different context, a “resource curse”—that is, an

overreliance on a resource (in this case, enslaved human

beings) that stunts economic diversification and

development.

Crucially, as slavery became more profitable to the planter

class and ever more central to the economic health of the

South, the ideas about slavery grew increasingly

aggressive, expansionist and reactionary. “Very few people

at the time of the Revolution and the Constitution publicly

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affirmed the desirability of slavery,” Foner observes. “They

generally said, ‘We’re stuck with it; there’s nothing we can

do.’”

Even in much of the South, slavery was at first seen as a

necessary evil, a shameful feature of the American

experience that would necessarily be phased out over time.

Many slave-owning founders shared in this consensus.

Slave owner and Virginian Patrick Henry referred to

slavery in a private letter as an “abominable practice…a

species of violence and tyranny” that was “repugnant to

humanity.” His fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee called

the slave trade an “iniquitous and disgraceful traffic” in

1759 while introducing a bill to try to end it. Thomas

Jefferson, at times an ardent defender of slavery and the

white supremacy that undergirded it, confessed in 1779

that “the whole commerce between master and slave is a

perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the

most unremitting despotism on the one part, and

degrading submissions on the other.”

When Jefferson wrote those words, slavery had nowhere

near the economic grip on the South that it would have

during the cotton boom in the first half of the nineteenth

century. Between 1805 and 1860, the price per slave grew

from about $300 to $750, and the total number of slaves

increased from 1 million to 4 million—which meant that

the total value of slaves grew a whopping 900 percent in

the half-century before the war.

This increase in the price of slaves was due largely to two

factors. In 1808, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves

took effect, permanently constraining supply. From then

on, all new slaves came as the offspring of existing slaves.

And then there was cotton. It’s hard to overestimate the

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impact that cotton had on the South during the decades

leading up to the war. No place on earth produced more

cotton, and the world’s demand was insatiable. Economic

historian Roger L. Ransom writes that “by the mid-1830s,

cotton shipments accounted for more than half the value

of all exports from the United States.” So lucrative was the

crop that the planter class rushed into it, leaving behind

everything else. As McPherson notes, per capita

production of the South’s principal food crops actually

declined during this period.

All of this led to a heady kind of triumphalism. In 1858,

Senator James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina

plantation owner, took to the floor of the Senate to inquire

mockingly:

What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three

years? I will not stop to depict what every one can imagine,

but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry

the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you

dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to

make war upon it. Cotton is king.

It is perhaps not surprising that under conditions of

stupendous profit and accumulation, the rhetoric of the

South’s politicians and planter class changed to a florid

celebration of the peculiar institution. “By the 1830s, [John

C.] Calhoun and all these guys, some of them go so far as

to say, ‘It would be better for white workers if they were

slaves,’” Foner tells me. “They have a whole literature on

why slavery should be expanded.” Indeed, here’s Calhoun

in 1837:

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I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races

of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other

physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought

together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States

between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive

good.

Here’s Hammond in the same “Cotton is king” speech,

playing the same notes:

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial

duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class

requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its

requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must

have, or you would not have that other class which leads

progress, civilization, and refinement…. Fortunately for the

South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand.

A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper,

in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer

all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them

slaves.

“Our negroes,” according to Southern social theorist

George Fitzhugh, “are not only better off as to physical

comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is

better…. [They are] the happiest, and, in some sense, the

freest people in the world.”

So the basic story looks like this: in the decades before the

Civil War, the economic value of slavery explodes. It

becomes the central economic institution and source of

wealth for a region experiencing a boom that succeeded in

raising per capita income and concentrating wealth ever

more tightly in the hands of the Southern planter class.

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During this same period, the rhetoric of the planter class

evolves from an ambivalence about slavery to a full-

throated, aggressive celebration of it. As slavery becomes

more valuable, the slave states find ever more fulsome

ways of praising, justifying and celebrating it. Slavery

increasingly moves from an economic institution to a

cultural one; it becomes a matter of identity, of symbolism

—indeed, in the hands of the most monstrously adept

apologists, a thing of beauty.

And yet, at the very same time, casting a shadow over it all

is the growing power of the abolition movement in the

North and the dawning awareness that any day might be

slavery’s last. So that, on the eve of the war, slavery had

never been more lucrative or more threatened. That also

happens to be true of fossil fuel extraction today.

* * *

America is in the grip of a fossil fuel frenzy almost without

precedent. By 2015, the United States is projected to

surpass Saudi Arabia as the largest producer of oil in the

world. After sixty years of being a net importer of fuel, we

are now a net exporter, and it’s possible that we will break

our 1970 record for peak oil production. This comes

thanks to both deepwater drilling and shale fields like the

Bakken formation in North Dakota, whose previously

inaccessible reserves have been unlocked by horizontal

drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies, also known

as “fracking.”

These same technologies have also produced an

unprecedented natural gas surge, as fracking wells are

sunk into the soil of ranches and parks and hillsides across

the country. Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale alone

produces about 14 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day

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—the equivalent of more than 2.4 million barrels of oil.

Shale extraction has quadrupled in the past four years and

now accounts for about 40 percent of the annual natural

gas yields in the United States, which recently surpassed

Russia as the world’s largest natural gas producer.

At the very same time that extraction has come to play an

increasingly dominant role in the US economy, we have

seen a dramatic reversal in the politics of fossil fuel and

climate change. Whereas high-profile Republicans once

expressed ambivalence about our reliance on fossil fuels,

viewing it as a kind of necessary evil that would ultimately

be phased out, in the last five years the extraction of fossil

fuels has become—to steal a phrase—“a positive good.”

During the 1988 vice-presidential debate, Dan Quayle

argued that “the greenhouse effect is an important

environmental issue. It’s important for us to get the data

in, to see what alternatives we have to the fossil fuels…. We

need to get on with it, and in a George Bush

administration, you can bet that we will.”

That wasn’t quite the case, but in 1989, Newt Gingrich was

one of twenty-five Republican co-sponsors of the Global

Warming Prevention Act, which held that “the Earth’s

atmosphere is being changed at an unprecedented rate by

pollutants resulting from human activities, inefficient and

wasteful fossil fuel use, and the effects of rapid population

growth in many regions” and that “increasing the nation’s

and world’s reliance on ecologically sustainable solar and

renewable resources…is a significant long-term solution to

reducing fossil-generated carbon dioxide and other

pollutants.” In 1990, President George H.W. Bush said at an

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IPCC event, “We all know that human activities are

changing the atmosphere in unexpected and in

unprecedented ways.”

While his son did little to curb carbon emissions when he

took his turn at the presidency, he did at least give it lip

service. Speaking ahead of the 2005 G8 Summit, George

W. Bush said, “It’s now recognized that the surface of the

earth is warmer, and that an increase in greenhouse gases

caused by humans is contributing to the problem.” As part

of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, he

signed into law minimum efficiency requirements to begin

to phase out the use of incandescent bulbs in 2012. (A law

that would, in the Obama era, become a top conservative

target, as the Tea Party rallied to support the incandescent

bulb as if it were a constitutionally enshrined right.)

And in 2008, somewhat miraculously, John McCain’s

platform featured support for a cap-and-trade bill that

would have effectively put a price on carbon. But even by

that year, you could already feel a seismic shift in the

rhetoric. I sat in the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul in 2008

and watched Sarah Palin lead thousands of people in a

thunderous chant of “Drill, baby, drill!”

After Obama’s election, things moved quickly: McCain

dropped support for his own legislation to regulate carbon

pollution. In 2010, Bob Inglis, a conservative congressman

from South Carolina, was soundly defeated by a Tea Party

challenger in the Republican primary, due chiefly to

Inglis’s refusal to deny the science on climate change. A

year later, Gingrich called his appearance alongside Nancy

Pelosi in a 2008 ad urging action on climate change the

“dumbest single thing I’ve done in years,” recanting his

acceptance of the science and embracing denialism. He

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was not alone—in fact, outright denialism is now more or

less the official Republican line. In 2011, and again in

January of this year, Republicans on the House Energy and

Commerce Committee voted to block the EPA from

regulating carbon emissions and against amendments that

would acknowledge that climate change is, in fact,

happening.

And it’s not just denialism: extracting and burning carbon

is now roundly celebrated by conservative politicians, as if

plunging holes into the earth to pull out fossilized peat is a

sign of the nation’s potency. In 2012, Mitt Romney said he

would build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline

himself. Texas Representative Steve Stockman tweeted in

March 2013 that “the best thing about the Earth is if you

poke holes in it oil and gas come out.”

Remember, all of this is happening at the same time that

(a) fossil fuel companies are pulling more carbon out of

the ground than ever before, and (b) it’s becoming

increasingly clear that those companies will have to leave

80 percent of their reserves in the ground if we are to

avert a global cataclysm. In the same way that the

abolition movement cast a shadow over the cotton boom,

so does the movement to put a price on carbon spook the

fossil fuel companies, which even at their moment of peak

triumph wonder if a radical change is looming around the

corner.

Let me pause here once again to be clear about what the

point of this extended historical comparison is and is not.

Comparisons to slavery are generally considered

rhetorically out of bounds, and for good reason. We are

walking on treacherous terrain. The point here is not to

associate modern fossil fuel companies with the moral

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bankruptcy of the slaveholders of yore, or the politicians

who defended slavery with those who defend fossil fuels

today.

In fact, the parallel I want to highlight is between the

opponents of slavery and the opponents of fossil fuels.

Because the abolitionists were ultimately successful, it’s all

too easy to lose sight of just how radical their demand was

at the time: that some of the wealthiest people in the

country would have to give up their wealth. That

liquidation of private wealth is the only precedent for what

today’s climate justice movement is rightly demanding:

that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel stay in the ground. It is

an audacious demand, and those making it should be clear-

eyed about just what they’re asking. They should also

recognize that, like the abolitionists of yore, their task may

be as much instigation and disruption as it is persuasion.

There is no way around conflict with this much money on

the line, no available solution that makes everyone happy.

No use trying to persuade people otherwise.

* * *

If I’ve done my job so far, you should, right about now, be

feeling despair. If, indeed, what we need to save the earth

is to forcibly pry trillions of dollars of wealth out of the

hands of its owners, and if the only precedent for that is

the liberation of the slaves—well, then you wouldn’t be

crazy if you concluded that we’re doomed, since that result

was achieved only through the most brutal extended war

in our nation’s history.

So here is why we’re not doomed. Among many obvious

differences between the slave power and the fossil fuel

cabal is this definitive one. Slaves were incredibly valuable

in large part because they produced huge amounts of value

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with relatively little capital required. Slave owners merely

had to provide food, water and shelter (often wretchedly

insufficient) and maintain a system of repression and

surveillance to guard against the ever-present threat of

rebellion or escape. Compared with many other kinds of

investments, unlocking the value of slaves required very

little of the plantation owners.

Such is not the case with fossil fuels. Fossil fuel extraction

is one of the most capital-intensive industries in the world.

While it is immensely, unfathomably profitable, it requires

ungodly amounts of money to dig and drill the earth,

money to pump and refine and transport the fuel so that it

can go from the fossilized plant matter thousands of feet

beneath the earth’s surface into your Honda. And that

constant need for billions of new dollars in investment

capital is the industry’s Achilles’ heel.

A variety of forces are now attacking precisely this

vulnerability. The movement to stop the Keystone XL

pipeline is probably the largest social movement in

American history directed at stopping a piece of capital

investment, which is what the pipeline is. Because without

that pipeline, a lot of the dirty fuel trapped in the Alberta

tar sands is too costly to be worth pulling out.

The divestment movement is pushing colleges,

universities, municipalities, pension funds and others to

remove their investment from fossil fuel companies. So far,

eighteen foundations, twenty-seven religious institutions,

twenty-two cities, and eleven colleges and universities

have committed themselves to divestment. Together, they

have pledged to divest hundreds of millions of dollars from

the fossil fuel companies so far.

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Of course, that’s a drop in the global pool of capital. But

some of the largest funds in the world are sovereign wealth

funds, which are subject to political pressure. The largest

such fund belongs to Norway, which is seriously

considering divesting from fossil fuels.

Investors, even those unmotivated by stewardship of the

planet, have reason to be suspicious of the fossil fuel

companies. Right now, they are seeing their investment

dollars diverted from paying dividends to doing something

downright insane: searching for new reserves. Globally, the

industry spends $1.8 billion a day on exploration. As one

longtime energy industry insider pointed out to me, fossil

fuel companies are spending much more on exploring for

new reserves than they are posting in profits.

Think about that for a second: to stay below a 2 degree

Celsius rise, we can burn only one-fifth of the total fossil

fuel that companies have in their reserves right now. And

yet, fossil fuel companies are spending hundreds of billions

of dollars looking for new reserves—reserves that would be

sold and emitted only in some distant postapocalyptic

future in which we’ve already burned enough fossil fuel to

warm the planet past even the most horrific projections.

This means that fossil fuel companies are taking their

investors’ money and spending it on this extremely

expensive suicide mission. Every single day. If investors

say, “Stop it—we want that money back as dividends rather

than being spent on exploration,” then, according to this

industry insider, “what that means is, literally, the oil and

gas companies don’t have a viable business model. If all

your investors say that, and all the analysts start saying

that, they can no longer grow as businesses.”

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In fact, in certain climate and investment circles, people

have begun to talk about “stranded assets”—that is, the risk

that either national or global carbon-pricing regimes will

make the extraction of some of the current reserves

uneconomical. Recently, shareholders pushed ExxonMobil

to start reporting on its exposure to the risk of stranded

assets, which was a crucial first step, though the report

itself was best summarized by McKibben as saying,

basically, “We plan on overheating the planet, we don’t

think any government will stop us, we dare you to try.”

That is the current stance of the fossil fuel companies: “It’s

our property, and we’re gonna extract, sell and burn all of

it. What are you gonna do about it?”

Those people you see getting arrested outside the White

House protesting Keystone XL, showing up at shareholder

meetings and sitting in on campuses to get their schools to

divest are doing something about it. They are attacking the

one weak link in the chain of doom that is our fossil fuel

economy.

As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Power

concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it

never will.” What the climate justice movement is

demanding is the ultimate abolition of fossil fuels. And our

fates all depend on whether they succeed.

Read more of The Nation’s special #MyClimateToo

coverage:

Mark Hertsgaard: Why TheNation.com Today Is All About

Climate

Naomi Klein: The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face

Are Not Just External

Dani McClain: The ‘Environmentalists’ Who Scapegoat

Immigrants and Women on Climate Change

/

Chris Hayes Chris Hayes is the Editor-at-Large of The Nation and host of “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC.

Mychal Denzel Smith: Racial and Environmental Justice

Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Earth Day’s Founding Father

Wen Stephenson: Let This Earth Day Be The Last

Katha Pollitt: Climate Change is the Tragedy of the Global

Commons

Michelle Goldberg: Fighting Despair to Fight Climate

Change

George Zornick: We’re the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Cheap

Date

Dan Zegart: Want to Stop Climate Change? Take the Fossil

Fuel Industry to Court

Jeremy Brecher: ‘Jobs vs. the Environment’: How to

Counter the Divisive Big Lie

Jon Wiener: Elizabeth Kolbert on Species Extinction and

Climate Change

Dave Zirin: Brazil’s World Cup Will Kick the Environment

in the Teeth

Steven Hsieh: People of Color Are Already Getting Hit the

Hardest by Climate Change

John Nichols: If Rick Weiland Can Say “No” to Keystone,

So Can Barack Obama

Michelle Chen: Where Have All the Green Jobs Gone?

Peter Rothberg: Why I’m Not Totally Bummed Out This

Earth Day

Leslie Savan: This Is My Brain on Paper Towels

Take Action: Stop Cove Point

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By Dave Zirin

TODAY 12:05 PM

Mask Off: The 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team Has Long Been a Symbol of Reaction

Like it or not, the “Miracle on Ice” team has long allowed itself to

be used by the worst actors in our politics.

T he 1980 underdog, gold medal-winning “Miracle on

Ice” US Olympic hockey team has long been heralded

as perhaps the greatest sports story of the 20th century,

but it was always more than that. Forty years ago, the

victory was held up as a symbol of a new, and much craved

for, “national unity.” After the scarring divisions in the

United States caused by the war in Vietnam and the loud

and proud movements for civil rights, the 1980 team said

Captain of the 1980 US men’s Olympic hockey team Mike Eruzione speaks during a Trump campaign rally. (Patrick Semansky / AP Photo)

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to the country that we could proudly unite once more and

achieve the impossible—and over our enemies, the Soviets,

no less.

It was national pride for a group of all-white, unknown

college kids as they defeated a big, badass Soviet squad—

think Ivan Drago on skates—during their impossible

journey to gold. A sister of one of the US hockey players—

as people shouted “The Russians! I can’t believe we beat

the Russians!”—said that she hadn’t seen so many flags

since the ’60s. “And we were burning them then.”

The memories of that universal unity and joy have now

been ripped to shreds and, tragically, it’s been done by

many of the players themselves. At a Trump rally in Las

Vegas, most of the members of the 1980 team took the

stage, many wearing the bright red Make American Great

Again caps, and praised Trump, as he basked in their

worship. Trump asked team captain Mike Eruzione,

bizarrely, to tell the crowd he was a good golfer, and

Eruzione responded, “Whatever you say, sir.”

The team proceeded to smile while Trump blasted the

South Korean film Parasite for winning Best Picture. They

grinned along as Trump whined that they don’t make films

like the plantation slave epic Gone With the Wind anymore.

Trump also “joked” about serving an endless number of

terms. As he waxed nonsensically about autocracy, the

players from the 1980 team provided the backdrop.

Following the shock, outrage, and, it must be said,

mourning of seeing this beloved team joyously consent to

being props for the Mad King, the team’s Twitter account

offered a meek defense, writing: “This is about proudly

/

representing the United States of America. Whether your

beliefs are Democratic, Republican or Independent, etc.

we support that and are proud to represent the USA.”

One could certainly argue, as many have over social media,

that this is yet another example of Trump poisoning

everything he touches: that he can take even something as

pure as the 1980 US Olympic hockey team and turn it into

something ugly. This perspective, however, ignores the fact

that this is not the first time the 1980 team has been a

symbol of right-wing propaganda. We forget that 40 years

ago, their victory was less a symbol of unity than a pivot

towards reaction.

When they won the gold, their triumph was broadcast as

an opportunity to turn the page on the previous decades

when people actually fought an unjust war and pushed for

civil rights. This rosy-cheeked team was pumped

throughout the media as a reminder of better days. It was a

cultural projection that fit like a glove, with the

presidential campaign of the first person to use that “Make

America Great Again” slogan, Ronald Reagan. As Reagan

preached national unity, while ruthlessly rolling back

recent victories, the 1980 team was the symbolic

touchstone. Reagan loved to wax rhapsodic about a Leave

It to Beaver era before people questioned their

government. For him, this team was catnip, and the

players were glad to be part of it. As he said in remarks to

the US team in 1987 in the Rose Garden:

I think Americans see in this team a national symbol, a

symbol of what might be called the corny, homegrown

conviction that victory can come to those who live by the

amateur spirit, who play fair and by the rules, that nice guys

in a tough world can finish first.

/

Dave Zirin Dave Zirin is the sports editor of The Nation.

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COMMENTS (2)

The game was also used by Reagan as a way to symbolize

the breaking of détente with the USSR and entering a

much more militant mindset: reheating the Cold War,

putting the nation, we now know, dangerously, close to

nuclear war.

Like with so many things Trump, the rally pulled off the

mask and revealed where the team actually stands. As in

1980, the team is using their victory less to bring the

country together than to drag it into the past. They aren’t

dupes. They are doing this of their own free will. They

want to have their cake and eat it too: to cozy up to

reaction while insisting that the attendant mud doesn’t

tarnish their gold. It doesn’t work that way in 2020. As

with anyone who stands too close to Trump, they leave

that rally visibly stained, for all to see.

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