THE ENEMY WITHIN: REPUBLICANS FOR AN APARTHEID, AUTOCRATIC AMERICA

    Notwithstanding its pledge of allegiance, America has never, ever, been “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  It has always been a collection of diverse peoples from different countries, with different histories, cultures, languages.  Not surprisingly, they settled in enclaves, both rural and urban.  When they have moved or migrated, they have mixed but not compounded with others, with a resulting sense of isolation and instability in their neighborhoods or communities.  For many, the antidote is compensatory alternatives, many inherently competitive, offering a shared, unifying experience, like sport-team fandom and, now, more than ever, political partisanship.  Those not understanding these psycho-social dynamics in the context of American history are not going to understand the nature, magnitude, and urgency of the problems in dealing with their political manifestations now threatening American democracy.

Most mainstream media commentators have largely passed over the facts of this past for a fascination with the present.  So they mainly describe rather than explain, the political phenom of our times.  Yes, Donald Trump is a vivid, revolting spectacle of psycho-social diseases and disorders on the political stage.  More importantly, he is an acute manifestation of an endemic disease in the American body politic, one which traces itself back to the beginning of this country: resistance or opposition to democracy.  What has survived and spread for centuries is not going to shrink when he leaves office or disappear in the course of a few elections.  It is important to understand why.

Today’s post-election commentary reflects a tardy recognition that Republicans are waging an accelerating campaign against American democracy, its lofty values in The Declaration of Independence, and its structures and operations in The Constitution of the United States.  Accordingly, recent decisions by a Republican-majority Supreme Court which equate money and speech, declare racism dead in formerly Confederate states, and curtail voting rights and voting disproportionately affecting minorities reinforce anti-democratic practices.  But these are only recent, intensified developments.

Yesterday’s news—that is, history—show that today’s Republicans descend from those who have opposed democratic values from the beginning to the present.  Many of the men who signed both foundational documents agreed on a contradiction: the idealism of human equality and the actuality of legal slavery.  During the American Revolution, the population split into thirds: one-third supported the rebellion; one-third; the monarchy; and one-third stood aloof from the struggle.  Although these divisions did not closely correlate attitudes about equality and slavery, regional differences existed.

The Civil War converted the contradiction into a conflict.  Although racism was prevalent north and south, the North had ended slavery more than half a century before fighting began and resisted the expansion of slavery beyond the South.  Neither the Union defeat of the Confederacy nor Reconstruction ended racism, its spread, or its poisoning of politics.  Worse, the North’s generosity and forgiveness in victory were repaid by the South’s resentment, resistance, and revenge in defeat.  The North tried no Confederate leader for treason and punished few for other illegal conduct during the war, but it was clumsy in liberating slaves and enabling liberated slaves to positions of political and economic power.  To counter their rise and restore white supremacy, the South resorted to Jim Crow laws and the KKK.

Meanwhile, endemic Southern poverty, increased by wartime devastation, economic disruption, and social and political dislocations, prompted more poor whites to abandon Dixie and migrate on the Oregon Trail to the Northwest, where its bigotries metastasized.  These destination states—Idaho, Oregon, Washington—became home to militant groups of bigots, xenophobes, isolationists, and Aryan or Christian culture warriors.  They took with them their hatred of the “Union” and nostalgia for Dixie.  White Southerners and sympathizers rued the loss of, romanticized about, and yearned for a restoration of, the “Southern Way of Life.”  They honored the “Lost Cause” by erecting monuments to and statues of traitors to the United States.  Their message: “the South will rise again.”

The influx of European immigrants in the decades just before and after the turn of the century prompted the KKK revival in the South.  The Depression between the two world wars propelled another wave of poor Southerners, white and black, to the North Central states.  There, whites, abetted by new KKK groups, polluted politics by exploiting the racism of mid-nineteenth-century European immigrants to reduce competition from blacks for jobs in heavy industries.  Political acrimony and instability resulted in part from this racial animus.

The “Second Reconstruction,” as racists perceived it, began slowly with Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, continued with the Civil Rights Movement in the 50s and 60s, and seemed to triumph with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Then the racist reaction once again set in.  Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, campaigning for the presidency, led Republican delegates at their national convention to oppose the act.  Four years later, Alabama governor George Wallace, famous for urging “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," demonstrated the political appeal of racist rejection of civil rights, in Upper Midwest states like Michigan and Wisconsin, and in Dixie-bordering states like Maryland.  To counter his appeal and convert Dixie racists from Democrats to Republicans, Richard Nixon adopted a “Southern strategy.”  Ever since, Republicans have been the white peoples’ party.  Today, another third of the nation, much of it with Southern roots, supports the attitudes and values of “Dixie.”  It constitutes Trump’s “base” and will continue support of his anti-democratic successors.

Thus, America is divided, with Democrats accepting and promoting democracy, Republicans decrying or repudiating democracy.  They know that the dynamics of demographic growth are generally unfavorable to them; most people of color (except macho Latinos or anachronistically anti-communist Latinx) are going to constitute a majority-minority electorate and dominate American politics in a few years.  To retain political power and remain politically viable, Republicans know, as Trump himself has admitted, that they must not rely only on their advantage in the Electoral College, but use additional anti-democratic means in attempts to win elections.  They know that, failing to manipulate elections to elect Republicans, they must turn to courts and Republican legislatures with fact-free or fabricated claims of large-scale voter fraud and numerous ballot-processing or vote-counting irregularities to justify overturning popular elections.  Trump’s efforts, based on just such blatant but baseless claims failed in 2020, but similar efforts in future elections might prevail.  Of course, the purpose of these efforts is to rig elections for Republicans or to delegitimize elections of Democrats.  If they succeed, they would transform America from a constitutional democracy into an apartheid autocracy ruled by a shrinking minority of whites.

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This summary of relevant history rebuts the mainstream media storyline that, during the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress are afraid to admit the truth about the election or public-spirited in trying to soothe Trump's ego to help him save face and ease him out the door without doing more damage to democracy.  Far from being afraid or public-spirited, Republicans are backing Trump’s rebellion against democracy.  The latest give-away of latent racism is that, even as his time in office runs out and his hold of presidential power nears its end, House Republicans—most leaders and about half the rank-and-file members—signed their support of the Texas case to the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s election, which, in the targeted states, targeted metropolitan areas with large, Democratic-inclined, minority populations.  Some people think that the Court’s prompt rejection of that case will end Republican coup attempts against democracy.  They let the wish father the thought.  The down-ballot results in state elections should chasten such reckless hopes.

One conclusion is inevitable.  That anti-democratic, necessarily racist, third of the electorate is not going away and is likely to become more determined, more skilled, and more effective in its opposition to democracy and its core values: equality, justice, and liberty.  Unless checked, it will increase in numbers, strength, and daring.  Mainstream media bromides about civility, decency, respect, reason, truth, et cetera, et cetera, alone will be of little help in resisting this trend.  For Trump has transformed this silent but restrained minority into a loud and unleashed pack.  His behavior has released those aggrieved and resentful in the middle class from its inhibiting norms of respectability.  The Right has abandoned that ethos, the Left is forsaking it, and the path away from it leads to political chaos, civil disorder, and the death of democracy.

The prescriptions to avoid this dystopian future are numerous.  Among the many, I offer a few suggestions.  First, let history give some hope of recovery and betterment, though its fulfillment will take time.  Patience and persistence must attend constructive efforts; the prompts to racism cannot be overcome in a minute.  Second, realize, not just read about, the core values and core social values of democracy; practice them in one’s private and public life, not least by thinking and treating all people as political equals in this democracy.  Third, give more attention to the foundational policies and practices of democracy: the census, voting rights and regulations, campaign regulations, and the reform of anti-democratic provisions in the Constitution and in Congress.  To that end, do not be content to contain anti-democratic forces but commit to their reduction in numbers and strength.  The main strategies should be enhanced political education at all times and broadly acceptable reforms.

Post-election political education should focus on public accountability of Trump’s and his administration’s conduct.  Vengeance may be the Lord's, but accountability is ours.  Since Republicans deny the truth, Democrats must realize that forgiveness leads to forgetfulness if not tacitly accepted falsehood.  All Americans, those who revile Trump and those who revere him, need to know the truth to better guide us as a democracy.  Otherwise, silence amounts to denial of or complicity in its demise.  I rephrase Jefferson: the price of democracy is eternal vigilance.  I add that freedom in America includes an end to racism and equality for all.

Public accountability is necessary without mandating civil or criminal prosecutions—and shouted down as political vendetta.  An irony, even a silver lining, of Trump’s pardoning many likely involved in illegal activities is that they can be subpoenaed to testify about their conduct without fear of prosecution—ergo, no vendetta.  The pardon voids appeals to the Fifth Amendment but does not protect them from prosecution for contempt for refusing to testify or perjury for lying under oath.  So Biden can charge the Department of Justice to create a truth commission independent of the White House yet enable civil or criminal investigations against those not pardoned.  This charge would affirm the government’s commitment to truth and the rule of law, and set a standard by which justice should be done.

BIG YUCK! FIGHTING COVID-19 WITH INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

Big Yuck!  Fighting Covid-19 with Individual Freedom and Personal Responsibility

I thank Steve Pearce, head—and epitome—of the New Mexico Republican Party, for prompting this blog.  In a recent statement, Pearce opposed Governor Michelle Grisham’s efforts to slow, stop, or reverse the spread of the coronavirus which has sickened or killed thousands of New Mexicans.  Like most Republicans—north of 90 percent of them support the president; north of 70 percent support his positions on the pandemic and the election—, Pearce opposes her efforts on ideological grounds.  Individual “freedom” and “personal responsibility” resist steps toward government tyranny, matter more than human lives lost to disease and death, yet are a better approach to dealing with covid-19 than public requirements for face masks, social distancing, and restricted gatherings.

Pearce is either cynical and deceptive or naive and self-deceived.  I suspect all of the above.  He has held these Republican slogans so long that his ability to think critically about them has just shut down—so, too, other Republicans.  As a result, Republicans have no idea what responsibility means because they have debased this moral concept by transforming it into a political vacuity.  So let me tell him and them.  It is a moral agent’s willingness to be accountable to themselves or others for acts committed or omitted—that is, to accept judgment, praise or blame, reward or penalty—for acts committed or omitted because of their consequences.  The agent can be an individual, an organization, or an institution, as we know from litigation which determines responsibility or accountability.

In contexts of cause-and-effect, responsibility is clear-cut.  If I back into someone else’s car and dent a fender or break a taillight, I am clearly the responsible agent.  So, too, if I run a red light and get hit by a car with the green-light right-of-way.  But, in contexts of statistical co-occurrence of widely distributed effects like infectious diseases, the identity of the infecting person is hard to know and responsibility hard to establish.  With rare exceptions, the widespread distribution of the disease makes it hard for people with the best will in the world to know whether they are infected, have infected others, and, if so, which ones.  It is as hard for others to trace infections to their sources.  Unlike causing traffic accidents, infecting others is anonymous, unaccountable, antithetical to moral or legal responsibility.  Taking “personal responsibility” is an impossibility, and exercising individual “freedom” from public requirements is a political license to take no responsibility for endangering others, and to disregard a fundamental principle of law: liability for damages.

In this larger sense, Pearce’s advocacy of these lofty abstractions “freedom” and “social responsibility” puts him squarely in opposition not only to “law and order,” but also to the good of society.  By contrast with the Preamble to the federal Constitution, which articulates a purpose to promote the “general welfare,” the Preamble to New Mexico’s Constitution asserts a contradiction.  “We, the people of New Mexico, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of liberty, in order to secure the advantages of a state government, do ordain and establish this constitution”—“the blessings of liberty” versus “the advantages of a state government”—about which the drafters assure us without agreeing on what they are.  Even so, public health has been historically accepted as one such advantage.  Pearce dissents; he would have us act as if individual “freedom” and “personal responsibility” are better prophylactics than sound medical and health-care advice.

More generally, Pearce denies the “advantages of a state government” and opposes its efforts to realize them.  Instead, he believes, not in the public good, but only in private goods, profits, and prosperity.  Accordingly, he has no sense of society, no belief in a fair distribution of wealth, no commitment to “liberty and justice for all,” necessarily with equal political rights, and little appreciation of the value of human life.  Worse, he and most Republicans believe that anything which unites people in joint action to support those in need is socialist—another word and its cognates whose meanings are unknown in the Republican Party but which can be used to exploit others’ ignorance and fear.

    One reasonable conclusion about his opposition to efforts to minimize the effects of the coronavirus pandemic is that Pearce does not care about public health or your health, only theirs.  Pearce knows that, if he or any member of his family contracted covid-19, he or any of them would go to the head of the line, get the best treatment—case in point: Rudy Giuliani—let his bills be paid largely with money from those at the back of the line, who expect long waits and trust to luck.  So he advocates individual “freedom” and “personal responsibility” for suckers who buy into the morally vacuous, corrupt slogans of Republicans everywhere. 

POLITICAL PRIVILEGE IN A TIME OF PESTILENCE

If you have not read Max Boot’s column “The coronavirus shows how backward the United States has become” (Washington Post, 18 March), you need to.  It details the many ways in which the United States, instead of being the world’s leader as the world’s richest country, is middling among the world’s wealthiest countries (OECD).

One damning paragraph reads:

Our health-care failures are particularly important now. We spend more on health care than any other country in the world, but we are the only OECD country without universal medical coverage (27.9 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2018). Child mortality in the United States is the highest in the OECD, and life expectancy is below average. We have far fewer hospital beds per capita than other advanced democracies (2.4 compared to 12.2 in South Korea), which makes us particularly vulnerable to a pandemic.

A particularly appropriate example is my hometown’s Cleveland Clinic.  Known for its excellence in cardiology and oncology, it attracts wealthy Arabs who seek treatment and, for preparation and recovery times, buy luxurious mansions on Bratenahl Boulevard with a nice view of Lake Erie.  Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans have little or no health insurance and get little or no medical attention except in emergencies.

I do not begrudge Arab potentates the best medical care which their money can buy.  The present system is quintessentially American, biased in favor of the powerful, not the people.  The U.S., always in love with gleaming gadgets, has, and prides itself on having, the most advanced medical technologies in the world; but loving ordinary people not so much, it has a mediocre health-care system.  In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the elites in politics, finance, business, entertainment, and sports get coronavirus testing on demand; ordinary people get a wait in line or quarantine at home.

I emphatically begrudge elected Democratic and Republican members of Congress their health insurance and care.  They vote themselves the use of taxpayer money for their insurance and care but do not vote taxpayer money for insurance and care for all others.  They justify this diversion of public funds to their private purposes on the assumption that they are more deserving than everyone else.  To adapt a line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “all people are equal; some are more equal than others.”

This inequality is just one of many obscenities—others include income and wealth inequality, and inequality before the law—in which they are complicit.  Their complicity defies an important principle of leadership: good leaders look out for their followers.  Army officers in the field—I cannot speak for Navy and Air Force officers in rear areas—know to address the needs of enlisted personnel before they address their own.  But not our representatives.  They are content to serve themselves with government perks.  Not one—here in my part of the polity, not Udall, Heinrich, or Small—has renounced their health-related privileges in the name of fairness to all until all have adequate health insurance and care.  Time now, ladies and gentleman, for a little public service.

Worse still, these privileges cushion, swaddle, or cocoon representatives so that they perceive no urgency to solve problems affecting other peoples’ lives; they ignore them, defer them, or deflect them to others.  It is no surprise that the U.S. has not stockpiled enough, say, masks, gloves, and gowns to protect medical personnel in a health-care crisis.  Elected officials know that their doctors and nurses will have what they need when they need it.  Theirs is an “I’m all right, Jack” attitude; it explains why they have looked out for themselves and not the rest of us.

Otherwise, Congressional officials would renounce their privileges to show an operational, not merely an oratorical, belief in equality, especially in these pestilential times.  To that end, I suggest that Udall, Heinrich, and Small denounce those privileges, renounce theirs, and propose legislation to strip all senators and representatives of their publicly funded health-related benefits until they have passed legislation and appropriations which guarantee all Americans of adequate health insurance and care.

Now roused from their lethargy and indifference to the health concerns of ordinary Americans, they are rushing about in a frenzy and frantically trying to do what they long since should have done.  But they also need to take a longer view of the likely problems in just health-care alone.  They need to realize that the coronavirus is just a harbinger of things to come; global warming ensures the emergence, and long-distance travel expands the spread, of new harmful organisms against which we have little immunity.

They also need to address current large-scale problems in housing, education, and the environment—all people problems.  They need to prepare the country for future large-scale disasters.  Consider the coming Big One in San Francisco: the earthquake which will destroy the city by shifting the peninsula westward into the Pacific Ocean.  Thousands will be killed, tens of thousands injured, buildings and bridges collapsed, highways and runways torn up, harbor facilities wrecked, fires uncontrolled, water mains ruptured, power lines down, communications disrupted.  The city will be isolated from the rest of the country.  Yet the government assumes that Greyhound buses, FedEx or UPS trucks, and military helicopters will get hordes of first responders, and tons and mountains of supplies, respectively, to the area in time to reduce or prevent greater loss of life and property.  Right now, FEMA can do no better than repeat a Puerto Rico relief effort, and Congress can do no better than hold hearings in the aftermath to learn what went wrong.  Look around you, Congress; it is going wrong right now.

If you do not have trouble breathing thanks to the coronavirus, take a deep breath and then count the ways in which our elected officials of both parties have engaged in ideological mud-slinging or -wrestling, and not addressing or anticipating the nation’s expanding and proliferating problems.  Where are the bold, broad initiatives to deal with them?  Udall, Heinrich, Small—if you are not advocating, promoting, or drafting them—and making news in Congress which gets reported in state and local media—, you are not doing a job worth doing, only going along to get along.  How’s that working for us? 

POLICE MISCONDUCT IS ANOTHER WHITE PRIVILEGE

At an age when remembering names gets increasingly difficult, I cannot recall all the victims of the many notorious instances of white police, abusing, suffocating, wounding, or killing black men and women.  Gratuitous, excessive abuse of blacks is commonplace, but perhaps the most outrageous instance occurred in Kenosha, WI, when police chained Jacob Blake to his hospital bed; in critical condition, with damaged organs and spine, from seven bullet wounds, police seemingly feared that he could still escape and elude them.  The choice is between thinking Kenosha police slow-footed or sadistic.

(Although I emphasize police shooting of blacks—police shoot proportionately more blacks than whites—police are simply reckless of human life, especially in pursuit.  In Salt Lake City, a distraught mother called for medical intervention to help deal with her 13-year-old autistic son.  A “trained” police officer responded, tried to forcibly restrain the boy, who got free and fled, and shot him several times.  The boy is hospitalized in serious condition, and police are telling the usual story, unsupported by them and contradicted by his mother, that the boy had a weapon and threatened others.)

Two questions are why police outrages against blacks are more frequent and why police do not learn from the media that their misconduct has dire consequences for their communities.  One answer to both is that they are reacting to and resisting pressures to change their conduct in ways contrary to personal and political beliefs, motivations for becoming police, accustomed practices, and community expectations.  They do not become police to be social workers.

Mitt Romney might say, “police are people, too.”  Agreed: still, the questions remain: what kind of people, what kind of backgrounds, what kind of attitudes and values.  I am no sociologist, yet I know that almost no police come from rich, college-educated families in wealthy communities like Darien, Winnetka, or Malibu, or go to the Ivies, the Seven Sisters, or Stanford.  They come from lower-middle- or low-income families, with little family history of higher education or professional occupation.  Most are born and raised in white urban enclaves, or towns or cities in rural areas, of conservative politics and various bigotries against racial, religious, or ethnic minorities.  When they become police, they do not check their predispositions at the door.

In these respects, police share this profile with Trump’s base and many of his other supporters.  A sign of kinship is the NYPD union’s unprecedented endorsement of the Republican presidential candidate.  Police belief in “law and order” is not surprising or inappropriate, but, in the context of race-based policing, the union endorsement means that a majority of police are racist, that policing is political, and that it will be practiced accordingly.  Police unions and chiefs downplay publicized episodes of outrageous police misconduct with an abridged version of the adage about “a few bad apples.”  They omit the rest of it: “spoil the barrel.”  Police unions are barrels, members are rotten apples, and their political stance allies them with politicians who tolerate or encourage those likely to perpetrate more abuses and killings, especially of those protesting misconduct.  By contrast with their killing of Jacob Blake, police gave a “pass” to armed, white Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and wounded several protestors in Kenosha—clear evidence of police racist propensities.  Everywhere, police will continue to give preferential treatment to “law and order,” pro-police groups and individuals—paramilitary groups, organized vigilantes, and “lone wolves”—and permit right-wing violence when anti-racist protesters gather or march.  Yet people are people, too, and police are becoming their enemy.

Such police prejudices reflect the prejudices of the white majorities who control most communities.  Of course, police fight crime, guard buildings, prevent violence, control quarrels, catch speeders, stop drunk drivers, etc.  The large racial disparities in charges, especially misdemeanors, reflect society’s racism in using the legal establishment—police, prosecutors, and judges—to keep blacks docile, down, and debt-ridden.  So actual police misconduct—physical and verbal abuse, harassment, excessive force, injury and death, etc.—is a function of race.  To privilege whites for being white and punish blacks for being black, states laws protect police conduct otherwise liable to legal action.  Different legal standards for police admit, tolerate, even encourage race-based misconduct and enable them to operate with impunity because of immunity.

What state governments leave undone, Internal Affairs (IA) divisions of police departments get done.  Police departments rely on IA divisions to obstruct citizen complaints about police misconduct, make a muddle of investigations, and issue reports of results ignoring, or diminishing the seriousness or soundness of, the complaints.  I take IA in the Las Cruces Police Department as typical.

The approach begins by handling complaints about citizens and complaints about police differently.  Police accept an anonymous citizen-on-citizen complaint for investigation and assume the complainant is truthful.  But IA requires a signed statement for citizen-on-police complaint which implies that the citizen is likely to be untruthful.  The complaint form warns the citizen about possible prosecution for false charges as determined by the police and requires willingness to take a polygraph test as administered by police—a threatening advisory meant to deter citizen complaints.

IA assumes the officer’s honesty, gives the officer opportunities at self-exoneration, and protects his or her response from informed scrutiny.  IA gives the citizen’s complaint to the accused officer for rebuttal, allows days to prepare for an interview, and requires no signed acknowledgement of a warning about perjury or agreement about a polygraph.  It gives the citizen no chance to address the officer’s rebuttal and expose self-protective dishonesty.  Meanwhile, police unions or chiefs offer false narratives about the episode or make discrediting comments about the complainant.

In the end, IA validates few citizen complaints and issues final, often vague or evasive reports.  Except in the most extreme episodes, IA lives up to its name by doing its best to keep citizen complaints internal affairs, hidden from scrutiny.  The last things which the police want are transparency and accountability.  A city law office often helps them to resist requests for public information by redacting or withholding documents.

In Las Cruces, the mayor has long resisted or eroded police reform for reasons of his own, but a majority of Councilors may be willing to take police misconduct seriously.  So far, Council’s only decisions have been to hire a Police Auditor and a group of police experts to review LCPD performance.  The problems are that an auditor is no better than the data which IA provides and such groups have ratified double standards, and police policies and practices, which have allowed police misconduct everywhere forever.  They euphemize the facts and fiddle with problems lest they lose contracts from cities and support from police unions.  So long as reform is delayed or denied, so long city government—mayor, councilors, and staff—remains complicit in police misconduct.

AMY CONEY BARRETT: ABORTION, PRECEDENT, AND ROE V. WADE

At this particular point in the election season, undecided voters are a puzzlement.  They have all the information to make a choice between two candidates bearing little resemblance to Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.  They may not have the judgment to go with it.  Not long ago, an NPR program interviewed undecided voters.  One could not make up his mind between his disapproval of Trump’s authoritarianism and his approval of Trump’s anti-abortionism.  I cannot compute any equivalence between democracy and the welfare of hundreds of millions in this country alone, and a matter controversial for decades, seemingly unresolvable forever, yet affecting a small fraction of the population.

Obviously, others think and feel differently.  I can understand that they loathe the idea of terminating their pregnancy, but I cannot understand that they loathe the idea of others’ terminating their pregnancy.  I find their impulse to intervene in others’ lives as repugnant as they find abortion.  I hate their moral imperialism.  I hate their arrogance in using the legal system to impose their beliefs on others in a country presumably as committed to liberty as to life.  “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry once famously said.  I hate their ignorance about the history of diverse beliefs and practices which are part of the issue of abortion.  And I hate the misogyny of women as well as men seeking to control women’s bodies.

Amy Coney Barrett may be one such woman; we shall soon find out.  She may be as ideological as Trump and Republicans hope and everyone else fears.  But I am not going to demonize her because of my concerns about her jurisprudence.  I take some comfort in the respect which she gets from all quarters.  If she is as thoughtful as her colleagues say that she is, I expect her to square the circle of her views on precedent and abortion.

Let me begin with a few remarks about Judge Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade.  First, most people concerned with the abortion issue have not read it.  As a result, those who advocate abortion rights and support his opinion, modified by later court decisions, are ignorant of its flaws.  Yet they need to know them to develop a replacement if Roe v. Wade continues to be undermined or is overturned.  Second, many legal scholars on both sides of the issue have long criticized his opinion as poorly reasoned.  Barrett is not alone in criticizing it as a miscarriage of legal thinking.

Blackmun’s opinion makes three radical mistakes.  The first one is its failure to draw the obvious inference from his historical summary of diverse moral, philosophical, and religious beliefs and practices about life and abortion.  Blackmun says that the Court cannot do what moralists, philosophers, and theologians cannot do, namely, define the beginning of life.  But he fails to see that beliefs and practices about life and abortion are religious beliefs and practices, and are or should be protected by the First Amendment.

The second radical mistake is its belief that science, with knowledge about gestation and viability, can provide a neutral, objective, and operational rule of thumb to guide decisions on abortion.  Blackmun does not know that science cannot answer or supplant religious beliefs and practices, and that any stipulated legal rule, scientific or not, would violate the religious beliefs and practices of those whose religious beliefs and practices do not align with it.

The third radical mistake is its acceptance of arguments that abortion rights emanate from the words and wording of sundry Constitutional articles.  These “penumbras,” or shadows, are visual metaphors to which critics, not all “originalists,” respond by saying, in effect, that they are in the eye of the beholder, not in the text of the Constitution.

Although I am a left-leaning Independent, I am less alarmed than left-leaning media would have me be on two subjects on Barrett’s views on precedent and abortion.  Barrett recognizes the importance of legal stability and continuity which the principle of stare decisis (let it stand) reinforces.  She also recognizes the importance of correcting flawed precedents or creating new precedents to accommodate changes.  On this point, she agrees with the justice whom she replaces.  As shown in “On the Basis of Sex,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues against precedent when it no longer addresses current conditions.  “We’re not asking you to change the country; that’s already happened without any court’s permission.  We’re asking you to protect the right of the country to change.”

Though both Ginsburg and Barrett would depart from precedent to support change, the difference between them is one of direction.  Ginsburg looked forward and worked for the evolution and expansion of rights for all.  Barrett looks backward and works for the regression and contraction of rights for some.  Her legal doctrine of originalism looks primarily to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, secondarily to the dozen and a half amendments since 1791.  It implies that those who drafted and ratified the Constitution and Bill of Right possessed a wisdom which those living after them in quite different conditions and circumstances do not have and cannot achieve.

 One question is how Barrett conceives of the law’s relationship to society if the Court reverses long-established legal positions.  If she wishes to reverse precedents and the trajectory of law which they have described and to attempt to restore past arrangements, she must persuade the public that the law should not accommodate changing conditions and circumstances.  She is not likely to succeed.  Item: federal and state laws have been moving to eliminate barriers of race, gender, sexual orientation, physical handicap, and the like and advancing full rights of all citizens.  It makes neither social nor humane sense to use the law to re-erect those barriers—dissolve marriages, disrupt families, discharge employees, etc.—on an originalist understanding of the law as conditioned by custom and culture in late eighteenth-century America.  Were it not for the “Civil War Amendments,” Barrett’s originalism would imply legal permission to resume slavery and revert to a fractional value of black lives.

Another question is whether Barrett acknowledges and respects non-Catholic moral and religious beliefs and practices.  Item: arguments about abortion hinge on definitions: what is human life and when does it begin.  Her Catholic belief is that life begins at conception.  That religious belief conflicts with her legal originalist philosophy.  For an originalist position must admit that, back in that day, Christians thought that life begins at quickening or birth, and Jews thought (and still  think) that it begins at birth.  So there is nothing “originalist” about the belief that life begins at conception.

If Barrett is as honest about her legal philosophy and her religion as she wants us to believe, she could vote in good conscience against the defective Roe v. Wade precedent.  And, if so, she would propose or support an opinion recognizing abortion as a religious matter entitled to protection by First Amendment provisions for freedom of, and from an establishment of, religion.  But these hypotheticals assume a rational consistency in a nominee whose legal and religious commitments are conflicted.

A WORD OR TWO ON WHITE RACISM

    My long-since-retired nannie—yes, I was to the manor born and with a silver spoon fed—feared that young black men from inner-city Cleveland 7 miles away were going to come to her house, and rape and murder her.  She watched more television than she saw her situation: life in a house on a 2-mile, winding, dead-end road through a white suburb and atop a high, steep, heavily wooded escarpment.  She was an attractive woman even in her 80s, but how young black men were going to single her out and why they would come all that way to rape and kill her she could not explain, even to me, who asked ever so gently how and why.  But there it was, up front and personal: this absolutely irrational fear of people of color, especially young black men.  Nothing—not her faith, her friends, or her family; no facts, no argument, no appeal—could relieve her fears.

Before war’s end, she left our service to marry, we moved into the “big house” next to a country club, and my parents replaced her with a black woman to be a nannie more for my sister than for me.  They added a childless, middle-aged, black couple also as live-ins.  Katherine was cook and maid; Eddie was handyman and chauffeur.  They thought of me as their son, and I knew them as loving adults, a second set of parents.  I spent much time in the kitchen with Katharine; at my urging, Eddie, a local Golden Gloves champion, organized a boxing club to meet only when my piano teacher could come to the house (so much for lessons).  When my parents spent summer weekends golfing, they took me to their relatives in the country, where I played with their nieces and nephews.  And there was John, forever my paternal grandmother’s handyman and chauffeur, and butler at my parents’ small, select dinners and great soirees.  Though he always called me “Master Michael,” he did so out of an affection which was reciprocated, and we talked.  As soon as I could—it was 1968—I became a life member of the NAACP to honor him.

Throughout my adult life, I have, in one or another of many ways, been involved with minorities.  So it is hard for me to understand persistent bigotry.  It is learned; it can be unlearned, and ignorance is no excuse.  My theory is that bigots prefer either to go silent or to plead ignorance rather than to admit their reliance on prejudice to buck them up.  (Appalachian Whites supported the Confederacy, less because they believed in slavery—few owned slaves—or in “states’ rights” than because they believed in the whiteness of their skin as a sign of superiority.)  Whatever their facade of strength, bigots are weak people who need a belief in their superiority to others to persuade themselves than they are not inferior.  But they are, and their racism proves it.

Racism takes strange guises, the more interesting ones among Whites who think themselves enlightened.  In a self-examination of the suburb at the turn of the century, Cleveland Heights—a self-proclaimed “Nuclear-Free Zone” (you get the idea)—undertook a citizens’ survey in various areas of concern.  I signed up for the group on diversity.  A dozen people attended its first and only meeting: nine male and female whites, and three female blacks.  Most of the whites discussed the need to better integrate residents; the three female blacks sat silent throughout the discussion, as I did.  As the end of the hour approached, I pointed out that no black men were present and said that many were not likely to want integration; and I pointed out that no Orthodox Jews were present and said that they were uniformly opposed to integration.  I said that the group on diversity needed to recognize how diversely diversity manifests itself and that some may perceive integration as a threat.  After some uncomfortable stirrings in silence, the meeting broke up.  The three black women quietly thanked me for saying what they were reluctant to say.  As I left the building, the white woman group leader accosted me, accused me of looking like one of those western men who beat their wives, and stomped off.

Not too many years later, I attended meetings of the Outreach Committee of my wife’s church in Ashland, OR.  My punishment for missing a meeting was appointment to attend a session of organization representatives to discuss racism.  We sat at tables of eight participants each and watched a movie called The Color of Fear.  The people in the movie represent Afro-Americans, Asian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Caucasian Americans—all male, as I recall.  One of the white men is the “mark” of unconscious racism, and one black man is silent but increasingly agitated.  Finally, he bursts out in a furious tirade at the hapless “mark,” and the movie soon ends.  The people at my table, some of whom were liberal ex-pats from San Francisco, were stunned.  Since some knew me, they asked for my opinion; I deferred to hear their opinions first.  All expressed surprise and shock, with a dollop of fear thrown in for good measure.  I asked questions: why, since they read newspapers and magazines, and saw newsreels (years ago) and television, with beatings, murders, sit-ins, marches, and riots the regular fare, did they not know that blacks were angry; how, except for denial or a lack of empathy, could they not understand why blacks were angry; and what did they think that their reaction said about their racial stance.  They answered with a silence of shame or resentment.

Nearly 20 years later, the tactic of some white anti-racists is to accuse all whites of being racists because all have been raised in a culture tainted by racism.  They allege that those who appeal to their friendships with blacks or to their involvement years ago—they take careful aim at people of my generation—in the civil rights movement are merely displaying credentials which prove nothing about their racial prejudice.  By a perverse logic, they interpret the denial of racism as evidence of racism; by a perverse anti-factuality, they imply that white partners in interracial relationships are racists.  My take on these white anti-racists is that they protest too much.  A good way to deflect scrutiny and accusation from themselves is to direct scrutiny and accusation at others.  Business in anti-racism is good, and Robin DiAngelo has made herself rich and famous.  Yet there are many “tells” in her White Fragility which indicate that she herself is racist: no background with minorities, especially blacks; no education in the streets, as it were, only education in college; no experience with blacks except as professional colleagues; and an insulting rhetoric arousing white resistance then taken as proof of white racism.

I want to end with some words of comfort on white racism.  I have no such words, only pity, for people who are racist, know themselves to be racist, and need to be racist as a necessary prejudice of self-support.  But to conscientious, well-intentioned whites concerned that they may be racist or complicit unawares in racist beliefs or conduct, I say, skip the guilt.  No whites can be free of some degree of taint of racism in a culture in which racism figures importantly.  The Devil is in the denial.  But that same culture also contains the resources to reduce that taint of racism in an on-going process of moral cleansing.  I am not free of sin, but I am no sinner.  Those who wish to confront racist sin can, not by prayer (only), but by courageous introspection, gritty determination, and constant vigilance educate and thereby reform themselves.  Along the way, they can, as the late John Lewis said, cause “good trouble.”

A THIRD WORD ON WHITE RACISM

My nannie is not the whole story.  In my neighborhood lives a couple of elderly whites who are long retired, live in comfort, but are not in good health.  They relocated from a state to figure prominently in this fall’s election.  As long as I have known them, I have known that they are angry people, particularly roused by politics.  Recent news from Kenosha about the police near killing of Jacob Blake, the protests and vandalism, and the talk about white racism has infuriated them.

Back in 2008, while we walked our dogs together, Rex (so I shall call him) and I talked about serious topics from our different perspectives, until he got angry and we changed the topic.  One day, months before the election, I said that I was having difficulty writing a blog on the Republican Party because I could not figure out what it stood for, since it was divided on so many traditional positions.  Rex got angry, shouted an obscenity, and stalked off.  We eventually resumed a cordial relationship and civil conversations.  Still, I shall not mention that the Republican Party has now taken a pass on a platform and has nothing to stand on as a political party, only a cult figure to kneel to in worship.

Years later, while I walking my dogs in a field below their house, Regina (so I shall call her) screamed at me, “You Liberals are to blame for everything wrong with this country.”  I said nothing, waved, and kept walking.

Recently, Rex and I accosted me in a local store.  He began by telling me that I would think him a racist because of his views on the Kenosha protests.  I told him that I neither discuss issues by labeling others nor like being told what I would think about them.  As his remark suggests, Rex was too quick to protest too much.  It was a pre-emptive defense of what he knows or fears may be, and be seen to be, his underlying racism.  I silently accepted his self-identification, though but I seldom care and rarely leap from a person’s views to a person’s biases.  Ad hominem-ism is not my thing.

The specific issue was the shooting of Jacob Blake, and the twists and turns of our exchange illustrates difficulties in justifying a political position reflecting prejudice and disregarding fact.  Rex was already angry and got angrier as our exchange proceeded.

Rex began by deploring the violence and damage which attended the protests, and stressing the need for law and order.  I agreed but added that law and order addresses only the consequences, not the causes, of the protests, with others likely until the causes are addressed.  I added that shooting a man in the back is not law and order.  (If the conversation had occurred a few days later, I might have asked him whether law and order applied to President Trump, who urged North Carolinians to cast both by-mail and in-person ballots—a deliberate act of double voting being a felony in the state.)

Rex shifted to justifying the police because the victim resisted arrest.  I disagreed by noting that he had not been charged, was walking away from the encounter, and was threatening no one.  Rex insisted that walking away itself was resisting arrest; I said that it was no such thing.  I added that any charge, if one had been made, was no reason to shoot the victim, much less in the back seven times.

Rex shifted to defending the police because he was protecting himself from a man with a knife.  I disagreed by noting that the knife was on the floor, nothing indicated that the victim was reaching for it, and, given the locations of knife, victim, and police, the police could not see or know about a knife on the floor before shooting the victim.

Then I added three points which caused Rex to break off and hurry away.  One, police accept risk in taking the job; if they cannot, they should seek a job less dangerous.  I referenced Army policy when I was in Vietnam (as he was, in the Air Force).  There, a rule of engagement permitted soldiers in hostile populated areas to fire only after being fired upon.  Two, resisting arrest is not a crime justifying enforcement which risks the victim’s life.  Such enforcement (aka, “excessive force”) is an execution.  Three, police violence in the name of law and order should matter less than the value of a human life.

Whatever Rex thought of my other responses, my last one may have hit home.  He is a member of a mainstream Protestant faith and of a weekly Bible study group.  He may have read about the value of human life and learned that Jesus loves everyone and that Christians are enjoined to love others, even enemies.  If so, my final comment may have unintentionally shown him the gap between his angry political position and his earnest religious convictions.  The discrepancy is painful, and the pain from the tension between his two contradictory sets of values fuels his anger.

This discrepancy between political and religious thoughts and feelings explains a lot about why many Christians can be Trump supporters yet believe themselves righteous Christians.  Trump represents himself as straddling the gap, so that supporting him gives temporary relief to underlying tensions between conservative politics and Christian faith.  The great danger to American democracy comes from the Christian right, whether conservatives or white nationalists, which conjoin the political and the religious rather than accept what can be a tolerable tension in their separation.  Poor Rex and Regina, still divided—racist and Christian—and more angry than loving.