For the past four days, I have been mulling over the recent Supreme Court decisions about student debt, affirmative action, discrimination, and abortion. I keep thinking, “Nice country we have if we can keep it.” Three more years to the 250th anniversary.
This essay is about the determined efforts accelerating after the 1976 Bicentennial by the Federalist Society, whose motto most likely should be, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression,”
However, that is attributed to Franklin Leonard, a young black American working as a Hollywood producer who worked out a system to sift out the best-unused scripts registered with the Writers Guild of America. His work altered the way Hollywood worked.
Two centuries before he managed that, a newly arrived immigrant to the American Colonies wrote Common Sense pamphlets that changed the idea that some men were born to rule others.
Thomas Paine ridiculed the idea that an island could rule the continent of North America. “Where…is the King of America?…I’ll tell you, Friend…so far as we approve of monarchy…in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries, the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”
Paine’s work had much to do with popularizing the idea of independence, for it was less intellectually dense than the newspaper articles written by educated populists and aristocrats and compiled as the Federalist Papers.
In the 18th century, this Declaration of Independence was quite radical. History written by the winners has absolved them from ignoring women and people who weren’t of white European ancestry for a very long time. That was then, and this is now.
An additional historic moment troubles me. The period from 1840 to 1860 saw territorial expansion and a growing issue with how human slavery would be accommodated —or not—in the ever-increasing continental nation. What would a weak national government do if Southern lawmakers made good on their threats? Politicians in the agricultural states defended the enslavement of their Black and Indigenous neighbors by arguing that true democracy was up to the voters and that their voters wanted an economy based on enslavement and all the social privileges that came with it.
Cannon fire aimed at Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor in1861 marked the official beginning of the American Civil War. When it ended, there were more than 620,000 dead Americans, but 3,900,000 enslaved people were freed.
The past two terms of the Supreme Court sound like the cannon fire 162 years ago that shifted an acrimonious debate into a cruel war.
America today is a nation at war with itself over issues never settled in post-Civil War decades. A political party formed to fight segregation has now morphed into a political party intent on protecting the perceived privilege of white Americans who think they have been here for several centuries. Never mind that they all came from somewhere else, seeking freedom and opportunities not available in their birth nations.
With their quaint notion of text originalism, Federalist society members still must own landline telephones and manual typewriters. Time doesn’t stand still. History is not obligated to repeat mistakes generation after generation, although it tends in that direction.
I have been privileged to spend an entire career working for reputable news organizations. I have lived in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, and the West Coast, and reported in Appalachia in the 1960s. I helped create media companies all over the globe.
Some of my friends have very different political views than the ones which inhabit my writing. That doesn’t make them bad people, just satisfied and indifferent to how others are doing. That so much false information has become commonplace is not their fault. Instead not recognizing it as such is the problem.
By: Kenneth Tiven