See What Happens?

What Happened Next? After the Supreme Court of the United States, in 1954, overturned its earlier validation of “separate but equal” schools, hospitals, public washrooms, busses and trains for Blacks and Whites, and told the Topeka Board of Education that segregated education is in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution? After US Marshalls and federalised National Guardsmen were required to enforce the Court’s ruling? 

SEE WHAT HAPPENS when you convince yourself that your principles are self-evident, true and universal? When all evidence to the contrary is simply pushed to one side and dismissed as aberrant or insignificant?

See what happens when you give up on the prospect of ever persuading Southern Whites to abandon Jim Crow? When your fear of the Klan overwhelms your determination to change the hearts and minds of your neighbours. When you turn, instead, to the civil rights lawyers and begin the long, painful ascent through state and federal, courts. When, in 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States overturns its earlier validation of “separate but equal” schools, hospitals, public washrooms, busses and trains for Blacks and Whites, and tells the Topeka Board of Education that segregated education is in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. When US Marshalls and federalised National Guardsmen are required to enforce the Court’s ruling. When all that Southern Whites see are the ghosts of the Union soldiers who occupied the defeated Confederacy at the end of the Civil War.

Even then, we didn’t learn.

See what happens when Dr Martin Luther King’s extraordinary strategy of non-violence sears the consciences of not only the liberal North, but also the racist South, setting in motion a national change of heart, only to be condemned as too slow and insufficiently radical by his younger followers? When the ghettos erupt in violence, looting and arson. When the heavily-armed Black Panther Party scares the skin-deep liberalism right out of White America. When the FBI’s COINTEL programme is unleashed upon the Civil Rights Movement. When the final passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 seals the fate of the Democratic Party in the South and sets the Republican Party in pursuit of its racist “Southern Strategy”. When James Earl Ray guns down Dr King in Memphis.

Even then, we didn’t learn.

See what happens when the Supreme Court upholds a woman’s right to abortion? When seven (out of nine) unelected judges, strike down state laws that, for better or for worse, reflect the values and beliefs of the electors and their representatives in those states. When the opportunity offered to the Republican Party to drive a wedge between the “secular-humanist elites” of the big cities on both coasts, and the “God-fearing” working-class communities of the much smaller towns and cities of the “flyover” states, is simply too good to pass up. When the arguments between the “Pro-Life” and the “Pro-Choice” movements divide not only men, but women as well. When religious belief and political ideology find themselves on a collision course.

Even then, we didn’t learn.

See what happens when a charismatic conservative, Phyllis Schlafly, attracts more and more conservative/religious women to her cause, and powerful men shower her Eagle Forum with advice and money? When all the easy, liberal states are safely included in the feminists’ “Yes” column, but the hard ones in the South and the Mid-West show no signs of following suit. When the clock is running down on the Equal Rights Amendment, which had sailed so effortlessly through the Democratic Party-controlled Congress, but which now seems certain to fall victim to the United States’ arcane federal constitution. When – yet again – the clear will of the majority will be thwarted.

Even then, we didn’t learn.

See what happens when you tell White men, already alienated by the claims and counter-claims of the Black civil rights, women’s liberation, and anti-Vietnam War movements, that the liberals are coming for their guns? When centuries-old family traditions of hunting in the forests and mountains of America, and of acquiring the marksmanship needed to bring down game animals, is presented as some sort of political sickness. When the stark reality of a criminal fraternity accustomed to carrying and using handguns has rendered it only prudent for ordinary citizens to similarly arm themselves. When the social and economic conditions that unhinge the most damaged members of American society are routinely ignored, and their bloody rampages are, instead, blamed on the ready availability of firearms. When trust and confidence in the political process has reached such a low point that many Americans feel it necessary to arm themselves against their own government.

Even then, we didn’t learn.

See what happens to a nation when the core values that once encouraged its citizens to refer to themselves as “We, the People”, fracture and are rearranged into antagonistic belief systems? When long-established economic, sexual and racial hierarchies are challenged by those expected to endure their subordinate status in perpetuity? When the rights enjoyed by the privileged few are claimed by the disenfranchised many? When, in short, the purpose and distribution of social, economic and political power are subjected to unrelenting questioning – and there is no agreement as to the answers?

It is only then we learn that the rights we seek are never given. If we cannot summon sufficient strength to take them, and hold them, then we must resign ourselves to living without them.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 29 June 2022.

An Act Of National Self-Harm.

A Dangerous Leap Backwards: A United States forced to live by the beliefs and values of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries cannot hope to go on leading the “Free World”, or compete economically with nations focused fearlessly on the future. The revocation of Roe v. Wade represents the American republic’s most serious act of self harm in 165 years.

THE REVOCATION of Row v. Wade, like the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, is an act of national self-harm. Louis XIV’s decision to revoke the royal promise of religious toleration, drove tens-of-thousands of Huguenots (Protestants) out of his realm. Thousands fled to the Netherlands and Great Britain, thousands more to the rising state of Prussia. Economically, culturally and militarily, the triumph of religious bigotry over rational political compromise weakened the French state profoundly, The revocation of Roe v. Wade is certain to have a similar effect on the future of the United States.

Intelligent American capitalists will be swift in their condemnation of the Supreme Court of the United States’ decision to overturn what most Americans believed to be a settled legal/constitutional right. Removing the option of easily available abortion services from a large percentage of the US female population cannot help but result in a serious dislocation of the American workforce.

While US women continued to be able to exercise personal control over their own fertility, their long-term participation in the paid work-force remained assured. The removal of that control in approximately half of the fifty US states raises serious supply and demand issues for American employers. The impact of millions of young women being required to carry their pregnancies to full-term is readily imagined. Such an arbitrary restriction in the supply of available workers can only exacerbate already serious labour shortages and worsen wage inflation.

The revocation of Roe v. Wade is also likely to incentivise the migration of large capitalist enterprises out of radically anti-abortion states like Texas, Missouri, Mississippi and Alabama. Relocating to a more liberal state may prove to be one of the few ways successful corporations can keep their most valuable senior female employees on the payroll. The Supreme Court’s decision has given these employees every incentive to move out of “Pro-Life” states – quite possibly to a new job with one of their former employer’s competitors.

Nor can it be long before the Pro-Choice forces invite “progressive” Americans to boycott the products of corporations which refuse to leave Pro-Life states. Already many corporate leaders are reassuring their female employees that they will pick up the cost of out-of-state terminations. This can only be a short-term fix, however, given the likelihood that Pro-Life legislatures will attempt to deny pregnant women access to FDA-approved abortifacient medication, or, even more controversially, prohibit them from crossing state-lines while pregnant.

Unintended consequences such as these will impose increasingly intractable problems upon those Republican Party-dominated states proclaiming themselves to be simultaneously pro-business and anti-abortion. Should it become obvious that the state’s outlawing of abortion is negatively impacting its ability to attract investment, or, worse still, promoting dis-investment, then the Republican Party is likely to fracture.

The enormous difficulties associated with ideologically-inspired attempts to reverse the tides of social and economic change – Prohibition being the most notorious – are about to be encountered all over again by a new generation of Americans. This time, however, it may require something more radical than the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment to the US Constitution which brought Prohibition to an end in 1933.

At some point, and the decision of the six conservative Justices of the Supreme Court to revoke Roe v. Wade has undoubtedly brought this point closer, Americans are going to have to come to terms with the fact that their beloved constitution is no longer fit-for-purpose.

A revolutionary document, in its time, the passage of two centuries has exposed the deeply anti-democratic elements deliberately woven into the constitution of the American republic by its founding fathers. So strong are these elements that it required a bloody civil war to expunge the pernicious influence of slavery upon the evolution of American liberty. It is no accident that it is precisely in the constitutional amendments giving effect to the abolition of slavery that the justices responsible for handing down Roe v. Wade in 1973 went looking for the legal principles confirming women in the ownership of their own bodies.

Unsurprisingly, given its dramatic post-war role in expanding the ambit of personal liberty, American liberals have come to regard the Supreme Court as the most effective instrument for securing the social changes they desire. Beginning with Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, which racially-desegregated public schools in 1954, the Court handed down a series of progressive judgements (Row v. Wade being one of the most significant) which were believed by most Americans to have changed their society forever.

Most – but not all. American conservatives were both astounded and outraged by the emergence of a liberal Supreme Court. Their consternation was understandable, because for most of US history the Court had been a bastion of political reaction. It was the infamous Dred Scott Decision of 1857, which declared that no Black person could ever be a US citizen, that made the Civil War inevitable. An equally reactionary Supreme Court struck down much of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s.

In the eyes of conservative Americans, the liberal Supreme Court of the past 70 years has been a dangerously aberrant entity. Consequently, the American Right has spent the past 50 years availing itself of every opportunity to replace liberal justices with legal conservatives. Thanks to Donald Trump, the weight of judicial opinion on the Court has finally been shifted sharply to the right. The revocation of Roe v. Wade may only be the beginning.

The “originalist” doctrine of Justice Samuel Alito, and his five Roe v. Wade concurrers, holds that the US Constitution must be interpreted according to the prevailing legal concepts and moral precepts of the historical period in which it was written. Present-day legal and ethical ideas cannot be grafted retrospectively onto the reasoning and intent of the original authors. While this doctrine holds sway on the Court, the Constitution can only become a reactionary cage in which Americans will remain confined for the next 30 years.

Perhaps the most surprising feature of the political reaction to the revocation of Roe v. Wade is the absence of any significant argument condemning the whole anti-democratic schema of the US Constitution. While there has been bitter condemnation of the Court’s judgement, the wider objection to unelected judges, appointed for life, thwarting the will of a clear majority of the American people, has not yet become a feature of the debate. Nor is there any evidence of a growing political movement in favour of summoning a second Constitutional Convention to draft a new, genuinely democratic, set of rules for Twenty-First Century America.

A United States forced to live by the beliefs and values of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: brutal eras in which slavery was legally sanctioned, women treated as chattels, and LGBTQI persons persecuted and imprisoned; cannot hope to lead the “Free World”, or compete economically with nations focused fearlessly on the future. In order to form “a more perfect union” a second American revolution has become as necessary as the first.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 27 June 2022.

Struggling Upwards For America’s Soul.

Justice Denied: At the heart of the “Pro-Life” cause was something much darker than conservative religious dogma, or even the oppressive designs of “The Patriarchy”. The enduring motivation – which dares not declare itself openly – is the paranoid conviction of male white supremacists that if “their” women are given personal control of their wombs, then white Americans will soon be “outbred” by Blacks and Hispanics.

THIS IS WHERE it was always bound to end: at the base, not the summit, of the political pyramid. The acceptance of racial equality. The recognition of a woman’s right to choose. These are battles that have to be won on the ground and in the ballot boxes, not at the Supreme Court Of The United States.

Dr Martin Luther King understood this necessity better than most of his white supporters. The whole point of his campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience was to produce not only political but spiritual transformation.

Nonviolence certainly ennobles those who practice it, but of equal importance is the impact on those who resist its objectives. Against the hardened shells of unrepentant racists the disciplined sacrifice of the civil rights activists make no impression. But these lost souls are fewer in number than many reformers suppose.

What many knee-jerk racists saw happening in the streets and at lunch counters across the South gave them pause. It made them think. And when they learned about the children killed in the Birmingham bombing, it made them ashamed.

This was precisely the response Dr King was hoping to evoke. The fight he was engaged in was for the souls of the whites who had been raised to see African-Americans as something less than truly human. He knew the battle for racial equality would never be won until his movement had made the process of dehumanisation morally repugnant – not only to decent America, but also to its indecent bigots. Only when these ‘good ole boys’ no longer had the stomach for repression would the Civil War finally be over.

The great tragedy of the Civil Rights Movement was that it required a measure of patience and forbearance beyond the reach of all but a handful of very special human-beings. The race-riots of the mid-Sixties: in Watts, Detroit and Newark; were catastrophic to Dr King’s cause. “Burn, baby, burn!” let White America off the hook. The violence and destruction, no matter how egregiously provoked by racist police officers, reconfirmed all the old racial prejudices.

Ultimately, Dr King’s moral struggle failed. Supreme Court rulings might compel racism to adapt, but they could not kill it.

Something very similar happened in relation to the struggle for the right of women to control their own fertility. The protagonists for abortion never truly plumbed the depths of their opponents’ determination to overturn the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision, referred to simply as “Roe v. Wade”, which decriminalised terminations in the first trimester of a woman’s pregnancy.

At the heart of the “Pro-Life” cause was something much darker than conservative religious dogma, or even the oppressive designs of “The Patriarchy”. The enduring motivation – which dares not declare itself openly – is the paranoid conviction of male white supremacists that if “their” women are given personal control of their wombs, then white Americans will soon be “outbred” by Blacks and Hispanics.

The family size of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants has been steadily shrinking for generations. The United States of America, which these “WASPs” regard as their own, could not be permitted to fall under the sway of ethnicities typically producing larger families. Not for nothing did the Far-Right demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, greet Black, Hispanic and Jewish counter-demonstrators with chants of: “You will not replace us!”

It is surely instructive that the legal grounds for protecting American women’s right to abortion is located in the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Passed by Congress in 1866, this amendment guaranteed the bodily liberty of America’s former slaves, along with the “equal protection of the laws”.

The Supreme Court has found that without individual privacy, individual liberty is rendered legally unintelligible. Private decisions about what we do with our bodies, and who we choose to perform those acts with, cannot be the proper business of federal and state legislators.

To revoke Roe v. Wade not only strikes at the heart of women’s freedom, but at the bodily freedom of all Americans.

To “breed” slaves it was necessary to impose a tyranny of terrifying intimacy. Neither the womb, nor the child that issued from it, belonged to the female slave. White Supremacy’s need for this intimate tyranny endures, extending now to the wombs of all American women. With the Supreme Court under its sway, the struggle for America’s soul must toil upwards.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 May 2022.