Reply #45: I feel sure of it

[Lexingtonian]

I take it from this you are saying that the Progressives/Liberals ARE going to prevail this time, or have a chance to?

Yes. The social rights issues of our times are slipping our side's way, the basic economic rights to match them will follow as I see it. As a historical pattern the social rights have to be won first, at great cost and bare survival of the cause of the justice.

I also understand that you say our constitutional protections for equality have been subverted and unenforced, so this is an area we must work on?

As I see it, since WW2 and clear since Brown v Board all of our national arguments have turned on realization or denial of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

All of our great present problems go to this. Gay rights, womens' rights, religious bigotry in public life, minority rights, breakdown of church/state barriers, conservative Christian privilege, underfunding of minority education, and a lot of the nastiness of our economic system- offloading costs- all point to electorates, organized groups, legislatures, and courts who variously refuse to act according to the letter, let alone the spirit, of this part of the Constitution. Republicans hate it deeply.

To be precise, the country considered the 14th terribly radical when it was ratified (in 1868) and stopped enforcement of it during Reconstruction. But the Supreme Court decided to enforce it piecemeal, creating the Civil Rights Era, for a 20 year period from Brown v Board to Roe v Wade. (Yes, Roe is built on the right to privacy construct for individual abortions- but the individual right extends to national legalization on the basis of the guarantees of the 14th.) Nixon famously capitalized on the 'backlash' to it all in 1968 and appointed the likes of Rehnquist to the Supreme Court precisely to stifle this work. But since taking the 14th to its ultimate perversion in Bush v Gore (it was created to get black mens' votes properly cast and fairly counted in the South), the Rehnquist Court has quietly turned on Rehnquist and begun very slowly reextending the 14th properly in verdicts like Lawrence v Texas.

Nixon and his cronies probably didn't care too much about the race/gender/religion parts per se- they just saw that when social rights equality is achieved (i.e. privilege is diminished), economic rights and power distribution to the disenfranchised follow soon thereafter. To some degree they did it because they saw how deeply flawed people of their time were on all sides (the Left was far from perfect) and to some degree it was simply a hatred of and unwillingness to countance the progress of 'socialism' or 'Communism'. John Roberts seems to be the next Justice put in by Nixonites to try to maintain this line.

There was an attempt to improve on this, or reiterate it, or simplify and bypass the technical difficulty in handling the 14th in the form of the Equal Rights Amendment.

I basically agree that we have lost a sense of citizenship and contract with our government. It's everyone out for themselves...

So what's the antidote, realizing that we may not want to repeat the cycle again and again?

We have a younger half of the electorate that is greatly more Modern, i.e. largely accepts the breakdown of the American race/gender/religious social caste system and a lot of them deep down truly don't know why it was worth maintaining in the first place. They see it as irrelevant (and it is, in a globalized economy and its selforganizing societies) and only as posing obstacles, as having little or no palpable benefits. They agree with what was and is being achieved in breakdown of this system (Roe, gay marriage, gay equality, post-prison criminal rights, maintaining the New Deal safety net). They're internalizing the new ways and the old is obsolete to them.

On the other hand, relatively few of the young are embittered against the older order- they haven't suffered that much of its particular oppressiveness. The fighting is very much in the older half of the population, the more victimized and victimizers of the scheme, for the time being. In 10-15 years I think we'll see the younger generations fighting about the economic equalization aspect, i.e. universal health care.

I think Democrats are slowly grasping that the game is not about workers' rights, gay rights, womens' rights, election reform, or the New Deal in isolation. There has to be a realization that Democrats can and must achieve all of these things together, not separately, and that Democrats have a Constitutional basis/center that surpasses all the attitudes, the '-isms', in relevance to the situation. Lincoln's Republican Party ultimately defined itself by the 13th Amendment. Our contemporary Democratic Party has to arrive at a definition of itself by the 14th, or something like it. Barak Obama's highlight convention speech a year ago was such a hit internally- and its content was entirely to identify the Democratic Party with a solemn commitment to the spirit, a lot of the words, and concrete implementation of it. But then the Party (and Obama, sadly) had a failure of nerve. Let's hope that doesn't repeat itself.

I'm not sure we should expect elected politicians to be ahead of their constituents on this matter central to our times, but appointed people- Supreme Court Justices, Attorney Generals, Secretaries of Labor, lower level appointees- should be the manifestations and the great antidote.