The tragedy of Herschel Walker isn't over yet (an opinion found on CNN)
Opinion by Peniel E. Joseph
snip
I grieve for the parts of America that enthusiastically embraced Walker’s candidacy. Some people are hopelessly unaware of the negative message their support of him sent to millions of Black Americans, who won’t soon forget it.
The GOP embrace of Walker represents an American tragedy. Walker’s behavior on the campaign trail included incoherent ramblings about movies and farm animals, nonsensical asides that went nowhere and dancing in front of overwhelmingly White audiences in bizarre scenes that recalled the minstrel shows of the Jim Crow era. The whiff of the Jim Crow era’s objectification of Black men as intellectually feeble but physically powerful grew stronger as Walker’s humiliating campaign continued to showcase the GOP’s failure to understand or connect with Black voters.
snip
For too many White voters who remain enthralled by Trump, MAGA and January 6, Walker represents the only form of racial “progress” they find acceptable – and that problem wasn’t defeated at the polls the way Walker the candidate was. For too many of these voters, only a Black man who knows his “place”— as a figurehead for a Republican Party openly pursuing a policy agenda of voter suppression, educational censorship and reproductive injustice — is worthy of the support of many parts of Georgia’s electorate, a mere two years after George Floyd’s murder sent the entire nation (and parts of the world) into a period of public rebellion and private introspection.
White support for Walker sends the exact wrong message for America at this moment in our history, not simply about political parties or ideology but also about the direction of our country. Still, I found hope in Warnock’s victory. While all the votes have yet to be counted, almost 100,000 more Georgians voted in support of a campaign whose belief in multiracial democracy represents ancestral dreams in action.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/opinions/herschel-walker-tragedy-raphael-warnock-hope-joseph/index.html
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It is still hard to believe that in the year 2022 we still have a long way to go. Solutions are tough to come by and I fear I will not see it in my lifetime. But we all must find a way to work together. We should and must do all we can to stop global climate change but what good will it do us if our planet is burning with hate, inequality and, injustice? We are not looking for perfection, we are looking for peace. At least I am
= new reply since forum marked as read
And as I am fond of you saying "pellucidly clear"
BUT,
Walker tied himself closely with tRump. BAD mistake. GA voters rejected most who did that, especially voters in more sophisticated big population areas. Atlanta alone's half black. Republican candidates for state offices who spoke against tRump all won.
Walker ran for the U.S. Senate. Anyone who did would face enormous opposition. Over $425M was spent on this runoff alone. He would have been a shoe-in for any of a hundred house seats.
Walker was inexperienced and ran a bad campaign. He has fame, speaking talent and charisma but made a lot of beginner mistakes, including ignoring advice. (Sound like anyone?)
Republican turnout dropped in part because of low stakes. Dems would hold the senate in any case.
Donations dropped, including both "grass roots" and wealthy, as our much better campaigning won out. The Walker campaign was broke in the last days as we continued to flood the media.
Baggage? You bet -- and the Walker campaign failed to overcome that. But we KNOW conservatives, including some black conservatives -- and Walker was one of theirs, will vote for almost anything Republican, just allow them to forget the worst, including that he was a tRumpist, long enough to mark their ballots.
We didn't. 
Walker came so close anyway! Because this is Georgia, and Georgia is a conservative, Republican aligned state. That doesn't just include a majority of black voters, it includes those black cons who tend to vote BLUE against the racist GOP. Blue is not the same as liberal.
It is a very tough read, but damn if the authors (anthropologist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow) are showing us that NOTHING is preordained, and humanity can and HAS overcome periods of authoritarianism throughout our history and prehistory.
Democracy is just as much in our genes as authoritarianism, if not more so. This book explodes the fables of the unchallengeable power of Kings, Princes and other types of Authoritarians of the past in a very scholarly manner.
The future is truly What WE can make of it. Nothing is pre-ordained.
It is giving me hope, at the least - I'm about a third of the way through.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow. It was first published in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2021 by Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books).[1]
Graeber and Wengrow finished the book around August 2020.[2] Its American edition is 704 pages long, including a 63-page bibliography.[2] It was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing (2022).[3]
Drawing attention to the diversity of early human societies, the book critiques traditional narratives of history's linear development from primitivism to civilization.[4] Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia.[5] It relies on archaeological evidence to show that early societies were diverse and developed numerous political structures.[2]
The Dawn of Everything was widely reviewed in the popular press and in leading academic journals, as well as in activist circles, with dividing opinions being expressed across the board. Both favorable and critical reviewers noted its challenge to existing paradigms in the study of human history.
Summary
The authors open the book by suggesting that current popular views on the progress of western civilization, as presented by Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari, are not supported by anthropological or archaeological evidence, but owe more to philosophical dogmas inherited unthinkingly from the Age of Enlightenment. The authors refute the Hobbesian and Rousseauian view on the origin of the social contract, stating that there is no single original form of human society. Moreover, they argue that the transition from foraging to agriculture was not a civilization trap that laid the ground for social inequality, and that throughout history, large-scale societies have often developed in the absence of ruling elites and top-down systems of management.
(My bold)
I will check for that at my local library
