gracchusdixit

If there were any lingering doubt that the conservative cabal that now holds the Supreme Court of the United States in its deadly grip is not the dispassionate arbiter of the constitution it pretends to be but, rather, a partisan instrument of the rabid political right, that doubt should forever be laid to rest.  In the final days of its most recent term, perhaps the most infamous in the history of the court, the cabal handed down a series of monumentally illogical and morally indefensible decisions, revealing their true colors and exposing their intellectual hypocrisy for all the world to see.

The first of those decisions overturned Roe v. Wade, which for half a century secured the right of women to make their own reproductive choices, albeit encumbered by a host of ludicrous limitations.  The main excuse served up for extinguishing this most basic and personal of rights, which condemns half the population of the nation to perpetual sexual servitude, was that the Constitution nowhere mentions abortion.  This lame excuse would be laughable if its consequences weren’t so tragic.

The second decision overturned a perfectly reasonable gun law in New York on the grounds that it violated a “right to self-defense”—the only problem being that a “right to self-defense” doesn’t appear in the Constitution any more frequently than “a right to abortion”.  Which is to say, never.  This obvious contradiction, however, did not seem to trouble right-wing ideologues like Samuel Alito.

The third of court’s egregiously dishonest decisions condemned the Environmental Protection Agency for “overreaching” its heretofore uncontested authority to limit fossil fuel emissions in the face of the existential threat posed by global warming.  That threat was dismissed by John Roberts, the consummately smug and condescending Chief Justice, as nothing more than “the crisis of the day,” as if the survival of humankind were a trivial nuisance compared with the sacrosanct profits of the corporations Roberts defended when he wasn’t sitting on the bench.

Thanks to the conservative cabal’s peek-a-boo, hide-and-seek theory of constitutional interpretation, gun-toting lunatics may now legally carry their murderous weapons into public places, even as women may legally be prosecuted for the “crime” of defending themselves against the consequences of rape, incest, or unwanted pregnancy.  The rest of us, meanwhile, are condemned to sit idly by as the planet burns.

There is at least one consolation in this dystopian nightmare.  It is that we can finally discard the fantasy that the Supreme Court of the United States is anything but what it has been throughout most of our history:  a cravenly political and anti-democratic institution, intent on imposing its antediluvian agenda on an unwilling country, particularly when that country does not fit its vision of what the nation should be, which is to say, white, Christian, capitalist, and quiescent.

The very idea that such a malignant and antiquated institution would, or ever could, hover cherubically above the down-and-dirty fray of politics was always an illusion.  For the better part of two hundred years, conservatives and liberals alike have paid lip service to this illusion, because the truth was too disagreeable to contemplate, too intractable to deal with, or too embarrassing to admit.  For an American politician to acknowledge that the Olympian gods of our national mythology, the “founding fathers,” might have erred so fundamentally would have violated that most self-serving American idea—that we are a morally exceptional people, whose political institutions should be a model for the rest of the world.  Such an acknowledgement would, more to the point, have amounted to a kiss of political death.

Thanks to the conservative cabal that now controls the court, that fairy tale has been exposed for the bunkum it is and always has been.  The sooner we disabuse ourselves of this ludicrous fiction, the sooner we can take the steps to end the political tyranny of an institution that is not only out of touch but out of control.  

The place to begin is by exposing and punishing members of the court like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, whose personal corruption is simply too blatant to ignore.  For years, these men have accepted lavish perks from billionaire conservative donors, not only advancing the political agenda of those donors but brazenly advertising the fact.  If Thomas and Alito were ordinary citizens, like you and me, they would already be in jail.  At the very least, they should be impeached and disbarred.  

Let us also stop pretending that a drunken sexual predator like Brett Kavanaugh is qualified to serve on the highest court in the land.  If he had not been anointed by the radical right, it is doubtful that he would have been nominated to sit on the Supreme Court in the first place.  Indeed, if he were not a child of privilege, by way of Georgetown Prep and Yale Law School, it is unlikely that he would be welcome at a backyard barbecue in Poughkeepsie.

And finally, let us admit to the fact that each and every member of the conservative cabal that now controls the court, including the Chief Justice himself, is an out-and-out liar.   In their confirmation hearings, they all promised to honor established standards of objective and dispassionate judicial process; they all promised to abide by the principle of stare decisis; they all declared that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land and therefore deserved deference.  The simple truth is, they perjured themselves and should suffer the consequences. 

No other democratic country in the world concedes to its highest court the sweeping powers we have granted to the Supreme Court of the United States.  The “mother country” of our political institutions, the United Kingdom, did not even have a supreme court until 2009, and even now, that court has no authority to overrule the actions of parliament or its prime minister.  

That we have spurned this tradition, conceding to our highest court the right to abrogate and rewrite our laws, overrule the decisions of our democratically elected institutions, and defy the obvious wishes of the American people, is an abomination.  The only possible rationale for such a concession would be an absolute guarantee that the Supreme Court was committed to justice, to upholding the rights of the powerless, and to defending individual citizens against the depredations of the powerful.  

It is abundantly clear, however, that the conservative cabal now in charge of the Supreme Court of the United States is committed, not to justice, but to the opposite principle.  Their motivating purpose is to return the country to an earlier age, when the interests of those at the top of the social and economic pyramid were immunized against any challenge from below, when women, people of color, and the most vulnerable members of our society knew their place. 

Let us finally expose the members of this cabal for who they truly are.  They are social, political, and sexual rapists hiding behind the raiment of their judicial robes.

The words, “Equal Justice Under Law,” are engraved on the architrave surmounting the majestic portico of the Supreme Court of the United States.  They express not only the purpose of the court but the intent of the Constitution the court was created to uphold.  The fact remains that “justice” is by no means a straightforward idea.  From the poets and philosophers of ancient Greece to the legal and political scholars of the present day, countless thinkers have for centuries debated its meaning and how it should be applied in law and life.  You might therefore imagine that the Supreme Court of the United States would, at the very least, consider the question of justice in deciding the cases that come before it.   If that is what you imagined, however, you would be wrong.  

Scarcely two weeks ago, a “draft opinion” authored by Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s arch-conservatives, was leaked to the press.  It concerns a case called Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, filed by the State of Mississippi, seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that for the first time in our history confirmed the constitutional right of women to make their own reproductive decisions.  Nowhere in the tortuous 98 pages of Samuel Alito’s tirade does the word “justice” appear.  Nowhere does “Justice” Alito even acknowledge that some measure of justice may be owed to the millions of women whose lives will be upended if Roe is overturned.

Any decent person who takes the time to read Alito’s “draft opinion” will find the experience embarrassing, shameful, and dispiriting.  Embarrassing, because it is difficult to fathom how such a cruel, narrow-minded, and intellectually dishonest man could ever have been confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court.  Shameful, because Alito’s cruelty is not only unapologetic but gleeful.  And dispiriting, because his “draft opinion” seems likely to become law.

Alito doesn’t bother to cloak his purpose.  Indeed, it takes him only five pages to get to his brutal point:    

We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled.  The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Everything in this pronouncement is false on the facts, illogical, and designed to deceive.  That the Constitution “makes no reference to abortion” is an irrelevance.  The Constitution “makes no reference” to a host of private and personal matters, including sex and gender, marriage and divorce, conception and contraception—not to mention the concept of “fetal personhood,” the most preposterous of the innumerable fictions peddled by the anti-abortion movement.  There is a host of less private things the Constitution also says nothing about, like airplanes and highways, television and iPhones, electricity and the internal combustion engine.  If we were to follow Alito’s “reasoning” to its absurd result, states like Mississippi would be free to ban, not only abortion and contraception, but skate boards, sitcoms, and any other aspect of the modern age their luddite legislators might object to, on the grounds that the Constitution “makes no reference” to such things.

Furthermore, Alito’s dismissive characterization of the rights protected by the 14th Amendment is flatly untrue.  In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, theSupreme Court ruled—explicitly—that such rights include “personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child-rearing, and education.”  Alito may disagree with Casey, but he cannot simply wish it away.  And yet, that is precisely what conservatives like Alito are forever doing:  wishing away legal decisions that do not agree with their prejudices.  

Consider the Holy Grail of the political right, which is the fiction that the Second Amendment enshrines an “individual right” to own guns.  In reality, the Second Amendment does no such thing.  When the amendment was adopted, the American Republic was fragile, surrounded by enemies, and had no standing army.   Its only means of defense was a “well regulated militia” empowered to “keep and bear arms” for that purpose and no other.  Which is precisely what the Second Amendment says.  To think that it says anything else is a complete fabrication.

Which makes it all the more ironic that Samuel Alito’s anti-abortion argument relies  so heavily on the proposition that the only valid interpretation of the Constitution is one “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition”.  Alito seems too dim to realize that “history” and “tradition” are subjective terms, susceptible to many meanings.   One person’s traditions are not necessarily another’s, and no account of the history is ever definitive.  Were the “founding fathers” noble-minded patriots or selfish slave-owners?  Did the United States need to drop atomic bombs on Japan to hasten the end of the Second World War or was that decision a cold act of self-interested realpolitik?   The only truthful answer to such questions is:  It depends on your point of view.

Nor are History and tradition fixed entities.  They exist in time, and evolve over time.  There were times in our lamentable history when loathsome traditions like slavery, Jim Crow, the political and economic suppression of women, child labor, and a thousand other barbarisms were taken for granted.  Most decent and honorable people today deplore such barbarisms, but if Samuel Alito had his way, they would still be on the books, sanctified by “history and tradition”.  

Alito’s zeal to make this conception the litmus test of constitutional interpretation borders on the absurd.  He quotes abhorrent “authorities” from the 17th century about the “quickening” of a fetus in a woman’s womb, as if a benighted age in which “witches” were burned and millions were slaughtered in religious wars had anything useful to say to those of us living today.  He invokes anti-abortion statutes from the 19th and early 20th centuries, enacted by many of the same repressive states that are trying to ban abortion again, as if they were praise-worthy illustrations of “history and tradition” rather than shameful examples of cultural and moral backwardness.

As if all that weren’t enough, Alito contradicts himself by advocating the abandonment of stare decisis, the principle that previous judicial decisions should be given deference and, absent compelling reasons, should be allowed to stand.  He apparently doesn’t realize that stare decisis is the legal equivalent of “history and tradition”.  If he wants us to abide by an 1877 statute that banned abortion in South Dakota, he cannot logically also urge us to jettison Roe.  Yet that is precisely what he does.  

The reason for all this vicious nonsense, of course, is that Samuel Alito doesn’t give a fig about logic or consistency, fairness or justice.  His only purpose is to justify his own prejudices and to cloak them in a fustian shroud of legal legerdemain, hoping that no one will notice the shabbiness of his real intent.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when he declares that Mississippi’s legislature “made a series of factual findings” in passing its abortion ban, and then goes on to quote the pseudo-scientific nonsense of Mississippi’s statute as if it were anything but utter rubbish; without blushing, he adopts the phrase, “unborn human being,” as if there were such a thing.  At the same time, he fastidiously avoids words that have actual biological meanings, like sperm and ovum,  zygote and blastocyst, “embryo” and “fetus”.  This is because Alito’s purpose is to gin up sympathy for the organism occupying a woman’s womb rather than considering what might be a just outcome for the women herself.

When all is said and done, Samuel Alito is not a constitutional or legal thinker.  He is a “judge” only in the Old Testament sense, a religious zealot whose sole concerns are punishment and damnation.  His “opinions” are drawn directly from the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church to which he belongs and more particularly from the medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, still considered by his church to be the ultimate authority on matters philosophical.  

Although Alito is an intellectual pygmy next to Aquinas, the thinking of the two men is marred by the same fatal flaw.  It was Bertrand Russell who identified that flaw when he summed up Aquinas this way:

He is not engaged in an enquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance.  Before he begins to philosophise, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith.  If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation.  The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.

Russell’s words apply to Samuel Alito no less than to Thomas Aquinas.  “The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance” is not jurisprudence, and it certainly isn’t justice.  It is a vicious form of prejudice.

Mark Twain famously quipped:  “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”  Never has this wisecrack from America’s foremost wiseacre seemed wiser than now.  As the brutal battalions of Vladimir Putin pummel Ukraine, ending three generations of peace in Europe, upending the rather smug assumptions of the global political elite, and quite possibly reanimating the Cold War, pundits both here and abroad have been blathering interminably, blaming Putin for what many call his criminal behavior but also trying to make some sense of it.  The predominating narrative is that Vlad-the-Mad is no less unhinged from reality than his American doppelgänger, Donald Trump, and could quite possibly be insane.  

The truth, alas, is more mundane—but no less terrible for being so.  

In reality, there is nothing in the least degree unusual, inexplicable, or surprising about Vladimir Putin’s behavior.  On the contrary, the only surprise would have been if he had behaved in any other way, for he is merely the latest in long series of murderous Russian autocrats.  However “abnormal” his actions may seem to the rest of the world, they are little more than the latest example of the grotesque abnormality of Russian history as a whole.

The first unhinged autocrat to declare himself “Tsar of All Russia” was Ivan IV, who in the 1500‘s was the ruler of Muscovy, one of the most dismal patches of earth on the planet.  Ivan’s declaration was by definition the act of a madman, since”Russia” was little more than a fiction, and the title, “tsar,” was a preposterously grandiose attempt to mimic the Caesars of ancient Rome.

Preposterous or not, Ivan was called “The Terrible” for good reason.  Among his other atrocities, he murdered his own son in a fit of drunken and demented rage and beat his daughter-in-law so brutally that she miscarried the very child that would ultimately have been his heir.  In this, Ivan initiated a long tradition of Russian autocrats doing their very best to destroy themselves along with the people they ruled.

After Ivan, there were glimmers of hope that things might improve, but they quickly proved to be illusive.

In the late 1600‘s, Peter, called “the Great,” took the throne.  By the standards of the time, Peter was an enlightened monarch, determined to drag his reluctant nation from its medieval past into the modern age. The methods he chose, however, were anything but modern or enlightened.  

Out of the gate, Peter gained power by pushing his sister off the throne and forcing her to become a nun—the act of a “modern” man, if ever there was one!  He then played the same trick on his first wife, compelling her to exchange their conjugal bed for a convent.  Later, he humiliated his nobles, or boyars, by forcing them to shave off their beards and cast off the long robes that had for centuries signified their exalted status.  And finally, when he decided to build a new capital city, which he christened St. Petersburg to glorify himself, he did so with the forced labor of serfs, at least 100,000 of whom died in the process.  However “enlightened” Peter may otherwise have been, he didn’t hesitate to use the darkest of means to achieve his purposes.

Much the same can be said of Catherine, also called “the Great,” who became Empress of Russia in the late 1700’s.  Catherine rose to power by orchestrating a coup d’état that toppled her own husband, a decent but sadly ineffectual man who died soon thereafter, in all likelihood because Catherine had him murdered.  Like her predecessor, Peter, Catherine professed to admire the European Enlightenment and showered her largesse on many of its leading figures, including Voltaire, the foremost French philosophe.  

None of this, however, prevented Catherine from behaving as the ruthless autocrat she actually was.  She personally owned half a million serfs and treated them as little more than as disposable beasts of burden, whose sole purpose in life was to be worked to death; she branded Russia’s Jews as “foreigners,” denying them legal rights; and she brutally suppressed any challenges to her “enlightened” rule.  

Despite all that, Catherine managed to convince herself that she was adored by her subjects, a fantasy that constantly had to be propped up by her sycophantic enablers.  The most infamous of these was Grigory Potemkin, who also happened to be one of Catherine’s innumerable lovers.  During a tour of the Crimea, which Catherine has stolen from the ailing Ottoman Empire, Potemkin lined his beloved’s route with an 18th century equivalent of Disneyland:  make-belief villages, filled with faux prosperous and cheering crowds.  Thus, the  phrase, “Potemkin Village,” has become the ultimate metaphor for the tendency of autocratic regimes everywhere to deceive, not only those they oppress, but also themselves.

Not long after Catherine’s death, her grandson, Alexander I, ascended to the throne,  riding a wave of high hopes and expectations, much as Vladimir Putin did 200 years later.  Alexander talked a good game, presenting himself as an “enlightened” monarch who promised to reform and liberalize Russia’s repressive governing institutions.  

It didn’t long, however, for Alexander to revert to type.  Not only did he join the coalition that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte, he enthusiastically backed its decision to crush the liberté, égalité, fraternité promised by the French Revolution:

Even when the last of the Tsars, Nicholas II, was overthrown, Russia’s infatuation with autocracy continued unabated.  For all Lenin’s talk about “the proletariat,” he didn’t give a fig for common people, happily turning Russia into a one-man dictatorship the moment he got the chance.  His successor, “Uncle Joe” Stalin, went even further, murdering several million political opponents and starving millions more along the way.  

There is, in short, nothing new about the murderous behavior of Vladimir Putin.  Nor is there anything novel about his pathological fixation with “the west”.  Throughout their history, Russians have never been able to decide who they are or where they fit in.   Is their country part of Europe or Asia, or is it some combination of the two?  There is ample reason for this confusion, since their country straddles both ends of the vast Eurasian land mass, and the cultural, social, and religious traditions of Russia are a tangled mess that cannot readily be sorted or classified.  

Whatever the causes of Russia’s cultural confusion, it has produced no end of mischief for centuries and continues to do so now, as the latest Russian autocrat works out his mad anxieties in front of our eyes, spilling the blood of Ukrainians and his own people with equal abandon.

Russia has been governed by lethal gangsters like Vladimir Putin for more than five hundred years, and anyone with an ounce of historical perspective should have realized this long ago.  The very idea that such a nation would ever abandon its past and bow its head to the “ideals” of western democracy was always a dangerously naive conceit.  That the paid pundits who populate cable news embraced this folly is trivial.  That countless western political and diplomatic leaders did the same has proved to be a tragic mistake.  They should have paid more attention to Mark Twain.  When history rhymes, it rhymes with a vengeance.

Three hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Roman Republic fought three life-and-death wars against a nation of merchant adventurers called the Carthaginians, who had migrated from the Levant to establish a fabulously rich trading city on the coast of North Africa.  As the Romans were extending their influence up and down the Italian peninsula, the enterprising Carthaginians were planting colonies throughout the western Mediterranean.  It was inevitable that these two expansive empires would clash.  And so they did.

In their first confrontation, Rome eked out a victory—just barely.  But Carthage remained unbowed, and, before long, one of the most famous generals in history, Hannibal Barca, led a Carthaginian army over the Alps from his base in Spain, determined to make the Romans pay for his country’s humiliation.  For 20 years, he roamed up and down the long spine of Italy like a ravening wolf, defeating one Roman army after another.  The stubborn Romans finally realized that they were never going to get the better of Hannibal on the battlefield, so they adopted a strategy of evasion and delay.  It worked.  When Hannibal’s financial and political capital ran out, the Romans turned the tables by invading his homeland, and he was recalled to take charge of the defense.

In 202 BC, not far from the modern city of Tunis, the mighty Carthaginian general at last met his match in a cunning Roman commander known to history as Scipio Africanus.  Having studied the tactics of his foe, Scipio drilled his legions to counter Hannibal’s every move.  Which is precisely what happened.  Defeated at last, the great Hannibal was forced to flee, ending up in a small, obscure town on the southern shore of the Black Sea, where he hoped simply to disappear.  To no avail.  The relentless Romans hunted him down and took his head.  They also took what remained of Carthaginian wealth and military might.

By any rational standard, this should have ended the matter altogether.  But it wasn’t enough to satisfy a stubborn and irascible Roman senator named Marcus Porcius Cato.  In his eyes, the mere existence of Carthage, no matter how humbled, posed a mortal threat.  At the conclusion of every meeting of the Roman Senate, Cato stood up, wrapped himself in the folds of his blindingly white woolen toga, and declared:  “Carthago delenda est.”  “Carthage must be destroyed.” 

Many of Cato’s fellow senators loathed the man, but they were eventually pummeled into submission and declared a final war on Carthage.  The outcome was by then inevitable.  The citizens of Carthage were slaughtered or sold into slavery, its walls and temples were demolished, and the very soil that had once sustained its population was sown with salt.  This pitiless end to centuries of strife secured the safety of the Roman Republic and paved the way for the steady, relentless march of its empire.

Today, more than 2,000 years after the Roman Republic faced the Carthaginian threat, our own American republic is confronting a crisis no less dire.  If we hope to survive it, we might learn something from the steely—one might even say, cruel—resolve of the ancient Romans.

The threat to our republic doesn’t come from geopolitical foes; it doesn’t come from the foreign terrorists; and it doesn’t come from hordes of desperate and harmless immigrants gathering at the southern border.  It comes from within.  In fact, it comes from one of our two major political parties and from the members of that party who have embraced the traitorous delusions of Donald Trump.

A Democratic Congressman recently lamented that the financial future of the nation was being held hostage because one of our two major political parties is “crazy”.   If the Republican Party were crazy in a strictly clinical sense, there might be some hope of a cure.    The dispiriting reality is less tractable.  The Republican Party isn’t medically crazy;  it is morally crazy.  Having abandoned every pretense of being a legitimate political institution, it has become nothing less than a criminal and seditious enterprise, determined to gain and retain power at any cost.  

There was a time, no so very long ago, when Republicans would at least pretend to care about democracy and the constitution.  That time is gone.  The political agenda of the Republican Party now resides entirely in fueling discontent, no matter how delusional.  

The Republican minority leader of the Senate openly boasts that his sole purpose is to undermine the agenda of the elected President of the United States, thereby defying the will of the majority of the American people.  The Republican minority leader of the House of Representatives, after egging on those who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election, now defends those who stormed the Capitol of the United States as guiltless patriots.  The Republican appointees who control the Supreme Court no longer bother to hide their ideological biases or blatant conflicts of interest; on the contrary, they make speeches justifying them and gladly accept lavish fees for doing so.  Republican-controlled state legislatures across the land make no apologies for committing the most flagrant acts of voter suppression since the days of Jim Crow.

All of this amounts to a barely concealed coup d’état by which a political, social, and religious minority of Americans intend to impose their so-called “values” on the rest of the nation.  Confronting this coup d’état, most liberals are either tongue-tied or twist themselves into intellectual knots when forced to grapple with the practical question of what is to be done.  The very qualities that make liberals “liberal” in the first place—tolerance, a regard for reason, a respect for the preservation of social and political “norms”—also make them ill-equipped to deal with political opponents who don’t give a damn for any of those things.  As a result, the political terrorists who run the Republican Party are able to run rings around their well-meaning but feckless opponents on the left.

We have seen this tragedy before.  In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the “moderate” Alexander Kerensky was quickly steamrolled by Lenin’s Bolsheviks.  In the 1920s, the enlightened patriots who had united Italy after centuries of division and conflict could not prevent Mussolini and his fascist thugs from hijacking their work.  Not long after, the liberals in charge of Germany’s Weimar Republic proved to be utterly feckless when Hitler and his stormtroopers bullied their way into power.

There are those on the left—including the current President of the United States—who still cling to the belief that right-wing thuggery can be defeated by reason, that Americans will opt for decency over demagoguery, that good will inevitably triumph over evil.  These beliefs would be laudable if they weren’t so hopelessly naive.  They are, in any event, profoundly dangerous.

The only way to quash this conflagration is to fight fire with fire.  If liberals hope to have any chance of saving our democracy from those who would destroy it, they must be no less relentless than their foes.  Right-wing members of the House and Senate who conspired in the assault on the Capitol should be expelled from Congress.  Federal and state officials who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election should be tried, and, if judged guilty, imprisoned.  Judges who have compromised themselves for partisan purposes, up to and including current members of the Supreme Court of the United States, should be impeached and removed.  Just as a Republican president named Dwight David Eisenhower once sent federal troops to the former slave-states of the south to enforce the right of black students to attend public schools and universities, the current president, Joe Biden, should dispatch federal troops to those same states to prevent any attempt to suppress voting rights.

There is no compromising with the existential enemies of democracy.  If we do not destroy them, make no mistake about it:  they will destroy us.  

The fragile political and social consensus that has precariously held our country together for decades may soon be torn apart, with consequences that could endure for generations.  If so, the blame will fall squarely on the conservative clique—though “cabal” might be the better word—that now controls the Supreme Court of the United States.  Thanks to that cabal, the court is poised to eviscerate or abolish Roe v. Wade; quash voting rights, ensuring that Republicans will exercise autocratic power in perpetuity; end affirmative action, reinstating white privilege as the litmus test of racial justice; hamstring the authority of the federal government to protect the public health; stifle the ability of states and municipalities to rein in gun violence; and all but eliminate the most basic environmental protections.  As to combatting COVID-19, well, you can forget about that.  To quote Samuel Alito, who, with the possible exception of Clarence Thomas, is the craziest of the right-wing radicals on the court:  

The pandemic has resulted in previously unimagined restrictions on individual liberty…it is an indisputable statement of fact that we have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive, and prolonged.

It would seem that Alito’s view of “previously unimagined restrictions on individual liberty” does not include the Palmer Raids, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War Two, the anti-communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era, the massacre of innocent Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, the CIA’s criminal program of torture at Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo.  Either Samuel Alito is ignorant beyond belief or morally depraved.  In either case, he is manifestly unqualified to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.   

None of which, of course, means that he and his right-wing co-conspirators on the court are politically stupid.  As they rip our democracy to shreds, you can be sure that they will justify their depredations by trotting out several disingenuously seductive arguments:

First, they will claim that they are merely acting as impartial arbiters of the constitution and the law, without regard for partisan political considerations.

Second, they will assert that they are exercising an authority uniquely vested in the Supreme Court, which is to check the unconstitutional excesses of the other branches of government.

Finally, they will invoke two pet theories of constitutional interpretation, “originalism” and “textualism,” both of which were championed by the feverish judicial imagination of the late Antonin Scalia and have since become holy writ on the political right.  

It would be bad enough if these spurious arguments were accepted solely by the blinkered ideologues who read The National Review or the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal.  Unfortunately, they have also been swallowed by far too many left-leaning bien pensants who earn a living by telling the rest of us what to think.  Their tacit, sometimes explicit, acceptance of these bogus arguments makes them all the more difficult to oppose.  But oppose them we must.

To begin with, the notion that the Supreme Court is an “impartial” arbiter is preposterous, and those who make this claim are either naive or duplicitous.  The duplicitous include the current chief justice, John Roberts, his right-wing confrères on the court, and just about every Republican politician in the land.  The naive, alas, include more than a few of the otherwise shrewd founding fathers.  To cite but one example of the latter, in the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton made this breathtakingly gullible pronouncement: 

It may in the last place be observed, that the supposed danger of judiciary encroachments on the legislative authority, which has been upon many occasions reiterated, is, in reality, a phantom.  Particular misconstructions and contraventions of the will of the legislature, may now and then happen; but they can never be so extensive as to amount to an inconvenience, or in any sensible degree to affect the order of the political system. 

Those words would sound quaintly innocent today, were it not for the fact that the Roberts court is strangling our democracy to death, one lethal twist of the juridical knot at a time.  

And yet, this shouldn’t surprise us.  At various times in its disreputable history, the court has supported slavery and segregation; has denied, not only the citizenship, but the basic humanity of African-Americans; has upheld the right of employers to terrorize their workers, all the while denying those workers the right to join unions; and has done everything in its power to prevent the federal government from trying to rescue the nation from the economic calamity of the Great Depression.  Not only has the Supreme Court of the United States never been “impartial,” it has been blatantly partial from day one, and its political bias has tilted sharply to the right.  

Whatever that political tilt, the more important point is that the Supreme Court exercises too much power in our public life and far more power than it is constitutionally entitled to.  Although the principle of “judicial review” (legalese for the court’s presumptive authority to block decisions made by the two other branches of government) is now taken for granted by nearly everyone in our political establishment, this notion is a complete fabrication. 

The Constitution of the United States defines the authority of the three branches of our government clearly and specifically.  Article I dedicates 2,271 words to the legislative branch; Article II spends 1,075 words on the executive branch; and Article III sums up the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, in a mere 377 words—which tells you all you need to know about the relative importance accorded to the three branches by the founders.   Nowhere in the 377 succinct words of Article III does the phrase “judicial review” appear; nowhere is there even a hint that the Supreme Court has the authority to impose its will on the other branches of government or to preempt their decisions.

Those who assert the preeminence of “judicial review” routinely invoke supportive quotations drawn from the letters, speeches, and writings of the founders.  For every quotation supporting the supremacy of the court, however, countless others can be found to argue against it.   Most of what the founders had to say about “judicial review” was, in any event, said after the constitution had been written, with the purpose of securing its ratification by appeasing the slave states of the South, where the fear of the central government in all its parts ran deep, as it does today.

The fact remains that the founders were sufficiently learned and articulate to have stated their intentions, not after the fact, but in the constitution itself.   If they had truly intended to give the Supreme Court a veto over the decisions of the other branches of government, they could easily have written that authority into the constitution.  That they did not, cannot magically be dismissed by any amount of ex post facto rhetorical prestidigitation.

The tough-as-granite truth is that the Supreme Court granted the power of “judicial review” to itself, in what can only be described as a breathtaking usurpation of authority.  This constitutional coup d’état occurred in 1803, when the court handed down a decision in a case called Marbury v. Madison.  Not only was the case itself politically fraught, but John Marshall, the chief justice at the time, was as politically entangled as a judge could possibly be.  Although Marshall claimed that this decision was grounded in “iron logic,” Marbury was little more than a slippery quicksand of tautological arguments and circular reasoning.  That it continues to be given deference today, 200 years later, is one of the most egregious examples of intellectual folly in history.  

Even if the Supreme Court did have the authority to impose its views on the other branches of government, the two theories of constitutional interpretation invoked by conservatives—“originalism” and “textualism”—would be no less flimsy than the false logic unpinning Marbury.  Indeed, these “theories” have never been anything more than a specious pretext for advancing the preordained agenda of the political right, little of which actually appears in the “text” of the constitution as it was “originally” written. 

The actual language of the 1st Amendment, for instance, not only guarantees religious freedom, it prohibits the “establishment” of any particular religion or religious creed.  The actual text of the 2nd Amendment says nothing whatsoever about an “individual” right to own guns.  And the actual words of the 15th Amendment declare:  “The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”  

You can be sure that the conservative cabal that now controls the Supreme Court will evade, ignore, or analyze that language away as they pursue their agenda..  You can be equally sure they will do everything in their power to pretend that they are precisely the opposite of what they truly are—political hacks, ideological zealots, and moral criminals.  They have conned us long enough.

Since the moment, three hundred and sixty eight days ago, when a violent mob attacked the Capitol of the United States intending to overturn the 2020 presidential election and, in the case of at least some of the mobsters, murdering as many Democratic members of Congress as they could lay their hands on, we have been told that our democracy is in peril, thanks to delusional conspiracy-mongers who refuse to believe that Donald Trump lost the election and a Republican juggernaut of voter suppression and election-rigging designed to ensure that, win or lose, their candidate will prevail next time.  

This danger is incontestably real, but it is far from being the greatest danger our democracy faces. 

On a dreary November day in 1947, Winston Churchill voiced a much quoted but no less dreary appraisal of democratic government:

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe.  No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.  Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

If those words still seem just a bit sharp after all these years, there is good reason.  Having done more than any other person to save western civilization from fascism, Churchill was speaking, not as a venerated wartime hero, but as the head of an opposition party that had been ousted by the very democracy to which he gave grudging praise.  A lesser man might have been less generous.  There are times, nonetheless, when even Churchill’s churlish endorsement can seem too generous.  

Now is one of those times.  

In a recent series of public opinion polls, a majority of Americans declared that, if a presidential election were held tomorrow, they would vote for Donald Trump over Joe Biden.  Take a deep breath and try for a moment to wrap your head around that thought.  

After four years of witnessing Trump’s pathological narcissism, boundless corruption, bungling denial of a global pandemic, and, worst of all, feckless attempt to orchestrate a coup d’état, a majority of our fellow countrymen seem eager to return this malevolent thug to the Oval Office.  Granted that Joe Biden is not perfect; indeed, his imperfections have been recounted in these pages more than once.  Even so, Biden—or Bozo the Clown, for that matter—has more capacity for running the country than a criminal nincompoop like Trump.  And yet, a majority of Americans seem to think otherwise.  

How is this even possible?   

If we are to believe the aforementioned polls, the answer seems to be that a large dollop of our fellow citizens are more piqued by higher prices at the gas pump than outraged, or even perturbed, by an attempt to destroy American democracy.  Which calls into question the survival of that democracy, not to mention the sanity of its citizens.

Don’t get me wrong.  Democracy is far more than the least of all political evils insinuated by Churchill’s famous aperçu.  On the contrary, it is the only political system that can be justified on ethical and moral grounds, because it is the only political system grounded in the fundamental and equal dignity of all human beings.  Every other political system, including the so-called “meritocracy” of modern capitalism, pigeonholes human beings according to purported differences in their abilities, capacities, or virtues.  When these “differences” are peeled back and stripped bare, one inevitably finds that they, oh so conveniently, serve the interests of those in charge.  

Nonetheless, the fact remains that democracy is beset by its own contradictions and devils, the first of which is a series of unanswered questions that lie at its very heart.  Lincoln famously proclaimed that democracy is government “of the people, by the people, for the people”.  But who are “the people?  Who qualifies to be a member of the demos that constitutes democracy?  And who determines what those qualifications should be?

No democracy in history has ever answered these questions satisfactorily:  not ancient Athens, where democracy began; not the Roman Republic; not the various republics spawned by the French Revolution; and certainly not the United States of America.

The conventional answer, which we now take for granted, was served up more than a century ago by Woodrow Wilson when he concocted the neologism, “self-determination,” the idea being that, if Serbs or Slovaks, Czechs or Croats, Bengalis or Bosnians, want their own country, they should have it.  Donald Trump and the blinkered idiots who hang on his every idiotic word would cheer this idea, if they knew who Woodrow Wilson was or were capable of understanding anything other than their own slavering self-pity.  

The problem, of course, is that “self-determination” is a stubbornly vague concept, and those who advance it have never resolved the antecedent questions it raises:  What does “selfhood” actually mean?  How and by whom should it be determined? 

The reason “self-determination” remains a vague concept is that the only possible answers to such questions are fundamentally disagreeable.  When “self-determination” is grounded in ethnic, linguistic, or religious criteria, the result cannot possibly be democratic.  To cite but one example, the current prime minister of India believes that his country should be “determined” by the religious and cultural traditions of Hinduism.  Whether one agrees with that proposition or not, it cannot possibly be construed as “democratic,” because it ignores the wishes and rights of millions of India’s Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jain, and Zoroastrian citizens.  

To think that democracy is nothing more than “majority rule,” howsoever “majority” is defined, is to misunderstand it entirely.  A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is a government in which all citizens have a voice and the dignity of every citizen is secured.

There is, moreover, no moral calculus that entitles a particular ethnic, linguistic, or religious group to its own “nation” in which the basic human rights of the other human beings who live within its borders are ignored, repressed, or “cleansed”.  Nor is there any practical argument that such “nations” are the only legitimate political community by which human beings can organize themselves.  On the contrary, history is replete with alternative polities, in which human beings of diverse cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions have lived together harmoniously, enjoying secure and prosperous lives.  

Those who argue that democracy can only flourish in political entities with homogeneous populations sharing the same language, the same religious beliefs, and the same cultural traditions are fundamentally wrong.  In truth, homogeneity is the very antithesis of democracy—little more than a thinly disguised brand of racism.  The keystone of democracy is a belief in the equal worth and dignity of every human being.  True democracies can only exist when they are inclusive and open.

For a democracy to be inclusive and open, its citizens must be open to the world around them, which requires them to be informed.  Ignorance is another of the devils that beset democracy, and the most “democratic” of our nation’s founders, Thomas Jefferson, gave us a clear warning of its danger:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.  If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.

Unfortunately, most Americans seem oblivious to Jefferson’s admonition or simply don’t care.  The average American can tell you more about the menu at McDonald’s than the three branches of government; only one in five can locate the Pacific Ocean on a map; fewer than one in five can locate Israel, Afghanistan, or Alabama.  Simply put, Americans are among the most ignorant and uninformed people in the democratic world.

Ignorance this monumental can’t be overcome by school “vouchers,” “home schooling,” or larding up the curriculum with superstitious fairy tales instead of science and facts.  America’s public education system hasn’t failed kids and their parents, as conservatives would have us to believe; America’s parents and kids have failed our public education system by turning their minds and hearts against its fundamental purpose, which is to open minds, cultivate reason, and turn us all into informed citizens. 

When the Democratic candidate in Virginia’s recent gubernatorial election dared to say that parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach and how to teach it, he was almost lynched.  But he was also right.  Putting an ignorant populace in charge of public education is the equivalent of asking a blind man to fly a Boeing 747.

As dangerous as it is, ignorance not the worst devil that besets democracy.  The worst devil is the willingness—one might even say, the eagerness—of its citizens to jettison the very system that gave them the freedom to govern themselves in the first place.  

In this, Americans are not unique.  Can anyone seriously doubt that a majority of the German people adored Adolf Hitler and would have elected him “democratically,” if they had been given a chance?  Can anyone deny that a majority of Russians would quite happily vote for Vladimir Putin, if Russian elections were “free and fair”?  Can anyone credibly challenge the “democratic” popularity of Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, who is by any rational standard a fascist, a racist, and a murderer?  

The bleak truth is that democracies have a weakness for demagogues and “strong men,” and their citizens are all too often willing to exchange their rights and freedoms for jobs, cheap prices at the pump or the grocery store, or a chance to “wave the flag” and thump their chests.  Think Caesar; think Napoleon; think Mussolini; and, yes, think Donald Trump.

The great Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes, once observed that democracy is not a process but, rather, an outcome.  If democracy is to survive, those who hope to defend it must exorcize its devils.  They must move past their fixation on process—on voting rights, gerrymandering, the filibuster; et cetera, inter alia, ad nauseam.  They must focus, instead, on achieving true political, social, and economic equality.  Until that day comes, the danger will remain.  Unless that day comes, American democracy may yet destroy itself.

For more than 200 years, Americans have venerated our “founding fathers” as if they were demigods, endowed with superhuman wisdom and foresight.  There is no doubt that some of them were extraordinary people and more than a few were exceptionally courageous.  Those of the founders who signed the Declaration of Independence, pledging to one another “Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor,” weren’t posturing for posterity.  Had their rebellion against the British Empire gone the other way, they might well have ended up on the gallows.

The fact remains that even the most brilliant of the founders thought they knew far more than they actually did, and, because of their ignorance, bequeathed to us a system of government so ill-conceived and deeply flawed that it has never worked well and barely works at all today.  Because our reverence for the founders is so reflexive, we are not only blind to their failings but politically paralyzed, unable to confront the obvious dysfunction of our governing institutions and incapable of correcting them.  

This dysfunction began a mere 70 years after the Constitution was ratified, when the nation descended into a savage civil war that cost 600,000 lives.   A mere 20 years later, the noble aim of that war—the abolition of slavery—was undone by “Jim Crow,” a regime of de facto slavery that legalized segregation of the races in the putatively defeated South.  Today, a mere two generations after “Jim Crow” was supposedly abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the old evil has come roaring back.  In one Republican-controlled state after another, the voting rights of minorities are being squashed and democracy itself is being systematically undermined.  

None of this is accidental.  It is, instead, the direct result of what the founders thought they knew about government—but didn’t.  

Nowhere is their ignorant conceit more evident than in the pages of the Federalist Papers, a series of essays written between 1787 and 1788 by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, with the purpose of persuading skeptical voters to ratify the Constitution.  Next to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself, no document holds such biblical status in the mythology of our nation.   Yet, the Federalist Papers are riddled with nonsense, and Federalist Number 10—revered as holy writ by right-wing conservatives—is the most nonsensical of them all.

Number 10 was penned by James Madison, under the pseudonym Publius, which was adopted to honor an ancient Roman aristocrat for his role in establishing the Roman Republic.  The authors of the Federalist Papers looked to that republic as their model, all the while they rejected true democracy, which had been invented by the Greeks.   To quote Publius himself:

…democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths. 

Historically speaking, this is utter and complete rubbish.  In the 2,000 years that ensued between the invention of democracy in ancient Greece and the advent of the American Revolution, not a single polity in the western world governed itself democratically.  Even the famous city states of the Italian Renaissance—Venice, Florence, Genoa, and the rest—were in every case ruled by oligarchs, autocrats, or monarchs.  For Madison and his confrères to have generalized about the failings of democracy from the experience of one small, ancient nation was absurd enough in the 18th century.  For us to accept that generalization today, when we know so much more about the classical world, would be ludicrous.

Even within the confines of ancient Greece, democracies were few and rare.  Of the thousand or so Greek city states, only 50 were ever governed democratically, and we know next to nothing about most of them. The only Greek democracy about which we have substantial direct knowledge is that of Athens.  

Far from being a “spectacle of turbulence and contention” or “short” in its life, Athenian democracy lasted three hundred years and bestowed upon western civilization many of its greatest glories.  It was democracy that built the Parthenon, inspired the exquisite artistry of Phidias and Praxiteles, and produced the incomparable dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.  One is left to to wonder why the founders attacked this democracy with such ignorant fervor.  

One reason may be that they simply didn’t know what they were talking about.  The first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t published until the year the Declaration of Independence was signed, and the last volume didn’t see the light of day until the American Revolution was long gone.  The towering achievements of classical scholarship lay far in the future.  What the founders thought they knew about the politics of Greece and Rome was therefore grounded entirely in the unfiltered testimony of ancient sources whose agendas were—to be charitable—suspect.  Foremost among those were the philosophers Plato and Aristotle and the historians Thucydides and Xenophon.  All had ideological axes to grind; all loathed democracy; all had prejudices that neatly aligned with those of the founders.

Plato was an embittered aristocrat who believed that only men like himself—wealthy, well-connected, and well-educated—were fit to govern.  He despised Athenian democracy for executing his teacher, Socrates, and didn’t hesitate to abandon his native land when offered a chance to mentor the tyrant who ruled the rich Sicilian city of Syracuse.  Aristotle was generally more moderate than his intellectual master but shared his contempt for democracy.  Moreover, he had close connections with the Macedonian royal house of Alexander the Great, which was determined to extinguish that democracy.

Thucydides and Xenophon were, like Plato, disgruntled aristocrats who deemed themselves to have been ill-treated by the democratic government of Athens.  The former led a failed military expedition during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, was exiled, and never got over the slight.  The latter was another student of Socrates, who blamed the great man’s death on the “turbulent” Athenian mob.  Xenophon’s loathing for that mob was so all-consuming that he too betrayed his country and went over the Spartans, on whose authoritarian constitution he showered lavish and sycophantic praise.

If ignorance were the only cause of the founder’s misconceptions, it would be as unfair to blame them as it would be to condemn the men of the Middle Ages for thinking that a flat earth was the center of the universe.  There is, alas, ample evidence to suggest that their motivations were neither completely ignorant nor entirely innocent. 

The founders embraced the testimony of Plato and Aristotle, Thucydides and Xenophon, precisely because they themselves were rich, entitled, and deeply afraid of what might happen if “the mob” were ever able to exercise political power and govern.   In its seven  letter-sized pages, Federalist Number 10 mentions the “rights of property” no fewer than ten times, more than any other “right” or liberty.   

It’s time we stopped kidding ourselves.  The system the founders bequeathed to us was primarily designed to thwart democracy for the purpose of protecting property rights, and for more than 200 years, it has succeeded in achieving precisely that.  The problem is that it has achieved little else.

On some deep, inchoate level, millions of Americans know this.  They sense, if they do not explicitly understand, that “representative government” is a duplicitous euphemism for “the fix is in”.  Donald Trump was able to con his way into the White House, despite the obvious reality that he wasn’t even remotely capable, because he successfully peddled a false hope:  the hope that the aspirations of ordinary people might somehow be achieved if only he were given total power.

That Trump came so close to achieving total power was the direct result of the ignorance and prejudices of the founders.  They feared democracy so much, they put so many insurmountable obstacles in its way, that the only alternative left for the American people, when our system crumbles under the weight of its own failings and contradictions, is to embrace an autocrat who promises to give them what they need and want.  That is how the Roman Republic died.  That is how the Caesars came to power.  

Our only chance of escaping a similar fate is to acknowledge the ignorance and prejudices of the founders, to consign their political ineptitude to the dustbin of history, and to create a true democracy.  The electoral college must be abolished.  The filibuster must be abandoned.  The Supreme Court must be stripped of its entirely self-anointed power to frustrate the wishes of the majority.  States’ rights must be subordinated to universal human rights and the interests of the nation at large. 

If we fail in this, if we continue to pretend that the founders were not the ignorant and prejudiced men they actually were, if we drag our feet and convince ourselves that all will be well in the end, another, smarter, more malevolent Trump awaits us.

For the better part of three thousand years, the bleak yet beautiful land we now call Afghanistan has enticed, entrapped, and ultimately humiliated one ambitious conquering power after another.  The United States of America is merely the latest in a long list of hubristic nations to see its vainglorious pretensions laid low by Afghanistan’s daunting terrain and deadly history.  

As the last Americans on the ground scurry to escape before the curtain finally drops on a twenty-year, trillion-dollar war, we leave behind nothing but blood and ignominy.  Thousands of Afghans who believed our promises have been betrayed.  Thousands of American families, whose daughters and sons were told they were fighting for a noble purpose, will be left with nothing but flag-draped coffins.  Friends and foes around the world  will see in this debacle dispositive proof—as if any more were needed—that the United States is neither the great power it pretends to be nor the trustworthy ally it claims to be.  

If there is any small consolation in this, it is the fact that we are not the first great power to have made the colossal mistake of thinking that we could march into Afghanistan and leave in any condition but disgrace.  And if history is a guide, we will probably not be the last.  

The Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great three millennia ago may have been the first to see its ambitions interred in the land often dubbed “the graveyard of empires”.  Having subdued most of the Middle East, the Persians looked down their long noses at Bactria, as Afghanistan was then called, as a trivial side-show.  And so it was, until Alexander of Macedon came along.  As the Persians were tied up trying to tame the ever-quarrelsome Bactrians on their eastern border, wily Alexander attacked them from the west, and, in a series of lightning-quick battles, toppled the Persians before they knew what hit them.  

Alexander the Great’s military acumen, alas, was not accompanied by an equal dose of common sense.  Not satisfied with defeating the Persians, the Great Man decided to push on to the fabled land of India.  This meant slogging and fighting his way through the pitiless mountains valleys of the Hindu Kush.  Alexander and his army barely got out of alive, and by the time they did reach India, the Great Man had a mutiny on his hands.  For the first time in his brief but meteoric career, Alexander was forced to give way.  He turned tail and headed home.  

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was the British who invaded Afghanistan—three times—with the aim of defending India, the “jewel” in their imperial crown.  The first invasion was an unmitigated disaster.  The second, intended to avenge the first, led to a symbolic military victory but no practical results.  And the third ended in a humiliating stand-off, whereby the Afghans gained their complete independence in exchange for a promise to leave India alone.  The damage done to the prestige of the British Raj was incalculable.

Sixty years later, it was Russia’s turn.  A communist government came to power in Afghanistan and introduced a series of political, economic, and social changes,  Among the latter was the novel proposition that women ought to have the same rights as men.  This was  enormously popular in urban centers like Kabul and Kandahar, but in the rural hinterlands, where attitudes on such matters haven’t changed since the middle ages, the reaction was nothing less than furious.  A rebellion broke out, stirred up by the people we now call the Taliban, and the new government soon found itself in trouble.

When Russia stepped in to support its friends in Kabul, the United States saw an opportunity to poke a stick in the eye of its existential foe.  The CIA began to shower the Taliban with money, weapons, and covert assistance.  It paid off.  After ten bloody years, the Russians were forced to withdraw—a humiliation that played no small role in the final collapse of the entire Soviet system.

Fast forward 30 years, and the United States of America decided that Afghanistan’s daunting history was not going to deter an “exceptional” nation like ours from flexing its muscles.   On the pretext of hunting Osama Bin Laden, we launched our own invasion.   When Bin Laden was finally discovered and killed, not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, you might imagine that we would have taken the opportunity to proclaim “mission accomplished” and gracefully withdraw.  Instead, for reasons that no one has ever been able to explain coherently, we decided that our “mission” was now going to be the creation of a new nation state, modeled along the lines of our own.  There was only one problem:  most Afghans didn’t care—for the simple reason that we never consulted them in the first place.

For more than a decade, we squandered countless lives and immeasurable treasure in an attempt to impose our “values” on an altogether different society, one that was either hostile or at the very least unable to adopt those values for practical or historical reasons.  In the process, we pitted the most powerful military force on the planet against the rag-rag band of fundamentalist guerrilla fighters we had once supported.  Though never more than 80,000 in number and outmatched by every measure of technology, training, weaponry, and firepower, the Taliban defeated the United States of America and did so decisively.  Once we could no longer deny this reality and decided to cash in our chips, the papier-mâché government we had installed in Kabul promptly collapsed, and its corrupt president fled the country, taking with him a carload of cash.

The tragic dénouement of our twenty-year foray into Afghanistan is not a “strategic withdrawal;” it is not a “choice” made for want of sufficient “political will;” and it is not a reluctant nod to public opinion.  These are euphemisms peddled by generals and politicians, pundits and journalists.  We are leaving, because we suffered an utter and complete defeat. 

For years, our military leaders assured us (as they invariably do) that victory was just around corner and could be achieved if only we spent more money, deployed more troops, had more patience, and let “the professionals” do their jobs.  This is the same fairy tale told by the four-star incompetents who presided over the catastrophes of Vietnam and Iraq.  Even now, it is being recycled, retroactively, by an assortment of former generals who decline to take any responsibility for the calamity they played no small role in causing.

Even so, it would be unfair to lay all the blame at the feet of the generals.  They prosecute wars and may be guilty of doing so with exorbitant overconfidence, but they aren’t the ones who start wars in the first place.  That dishonor belongs to politicians and, in no small measure, to the American people themselves.  It is the American people who are ever ready to wave the flag, beat the drum, and parrot jingoistic poppycock—until, of course, their kids start dying and their taxes go up.   As a people, Americans are the very embodiment of Tom Paine’s “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots”.  

If any good is to come from this particularly shameful episode in our generally shameful history, let it come in the form of four simple lessons:

First, no matter how righteous we imagine ourselves to be, we have no right to impose our values on other nations or peoples without their participation and consent.  If we truly believe in the worth of those values, the only way to persuade others to adopt them is to set a virtuous example.  Military conquest is neither persuasive nor virtuous. 

Second, the vast sums we spend on our military establishment and the never-ending “war on terror” are a grotesque waste, not only of money but of moral authority.  For all our technological prowess, the armed forces of the United States have proved themselves to be remarkably incapable of winning wars; our intelligence agencies keep getting the most basic (and obvious) things wrong; and the “war against terror” is an out-and-out scam.  Climate change, COVID-19, Republican governors who seek to ban the wearing of masks, and gun-toting domestic terrorists like those who attacked the Capitol on January 6th are far more dangerous to the average American than ISIS or the Taliban will ever be.

Third, the most terrible decision any nation can make is the decision to wage war.  The only possible justification for that decision is self-defense in the face of imminent danger.  Anything else—”preemption,” the protection of our “interests,” the preservation of our “values”—is immoral, and those who invoke such excuses for slaughtering other human beings are little more than war criminals.

Finally, let us set aside the self-congratulatory myth that we are an “exceptional” nation and “indispensable” to the safety and security of the world.  All that is rhetorical eyewash, designed to obscure the sometimes brutal, often lawless, and rarely just imposition of our economic and political interests on those unwilling to play by our “rules”.  Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has been nothing less than a global hegemon, running an empire in all but name.  If our humiliating defeat in Afghanistan teaches us nothing else, it should teach us that the time has come for that empire to bite the dust.

Next to Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” and Nathan Hale’s “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” there may be no phrase in the lexicon of patriotic American rhetoric that is more quoted than “Remember the Alamo!”  From the day this phrase was first uttered 185 years ago, it has been invoked, repeatedly, reflexively, and with little thought, to signify heroic self-sacrifice.  It has also become the de facto motto of the state of Texas, where everything must, by definition, be heroic or just plain big.  

Despite all that, this famous rallying cry begs a fundamental question, which is:  Precisely what are we being called upon to remember?  The answer is not so obvious as it might seem.

The phrase, “Remember the Alamo,” commemorates a 13-day siege in the winter of 1836 that took place at a run-down mission church in the town of San Antonio, Texas, then part of the newly independent nation of Mexico.  A rag-tag group of roughly 200 North American émigrés, who called themselves “Texians,” had holed up within the crumbling walls of the mission in an act of rebellion against Mexico’s entirely legitimate authority.  After a good deal of dithering on both sides, the siege reached a boiling point and came to a swift end when the Mexican army, in the space of 90 minutes, breached the mission walls and overwhelmed its defenders, killing all but a few.  

A few months later, the winds of fortune turned.  Sam Houston, the leader of the rebellion against Mexico, won the battle of San Jacinto, egging on his troops with the slogan, “Remember the Alamo”.  He promptly declared Texas to be an independent republic and all but anointed himself as its first president.  This state of affairs lasted a mere 10 years, until Texas was annexed by the United States and admitted to the union as the 14th “slave state,” briefly tipping the balance away from “free states” toward the slave-owning states of the south.  

And therein lies the real meaning of “Remember the Alamo”.

For almost 200 years, we have been brainwashed into thinking that the Alamo’s defenders were “heroes” who sacrificed their lives for a cause greater than themselves.   At the same time, we have been asked to forget what that cause actually was—which was nothing less than the perpetuation of chattel slavery. 

Twenty years before the siege, the Mexican people had declared their independence from the empire of Spain and, after ten years of bloody struggle, won their freedom.   The constitution of the new republic they created outlawed slavery and awarded the franchise to everyone, regardless of religion or race.  This enlightened conception of democracy and freedom was then unthinkable in the so-called “land of liberty” to the north.  Not only unthinkable, but to the slave-owning whites who exercised a stranglehold over the politics of the United States, positively loathsome.  

All the legendary “heroes” of the Alamo—William Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davey Crocket of coonskin cap fame—owned or traded slaves, or both.  So, too, did the patron saint of Texas, Sam Houston.  Houston’s political mentor was none other than Andrew Jackson, a genocidal racist who, when he wasn’t butchering American Indians, was lashing those of his own slaves who dared to disobey or run away.  To such men, the prospect of Mexico reasserting its historical sovereignty over the American southwest was nothing less than an existential threat.  The end of slavery would have sent them all to the poor house.  

The unpleasant reality is that men who died at the Alamo weren’t “heroes” defending the cause of liberty; they were slave-owners defending their property rights.  The story behind the words, “Remember the Alamo,” is a lie. 

It is not, however, the first, let alone the biggest, of the many big lies that underpin the traditional narrative of American history.

Christopher Columbus, to begin with the most obvious example, did not “discover” America.  By the time the Great Navigator accidentally landed in the Caribbean, ignorantly convinced that he had reached India, the “new world” was already inhabited by a population of at least 50 million. 

The Puritans who stepped off the boat at Plymouth Rock were not pious innocents seeking religious freedom.  They were bigoted fanatics.  The only freedom they were seeking was the freedom to impose their cramped and toxic theology on everyone else—which they promptly set about doing, hunting down “heretics” and hanging “witches” at every opportunity.

The stalwart “pioneers” who “settled” the American west didn’t risk their lives to civilize a barren wilderness populated by barbarous savages.  They stole the land from its Native American owners.  When the rightful owners predictably resisted, the “pioneers,” backed by the federal government, proceeded to evict or exterminate them.  

The motives of our venerated “founding fathers” were mixed at best.  For all their talk of equality and human rights, the constitution they bequeathed to us was explicitly designed to suppress democracy and uphold slavery.  For more than 100 years, the “checks and balances” they concocted did precisely that.  Long after the abolition of slavery, our anti-democratic constitution still ties us up in political and institutional knots, making it all but impossible for millions of Americans to receive the simple justice they deserve.

The men and women of the armed forces of the United States are not “heroes” defending an imperiled nation with blood and self-sacrifice, though that is how they are endlessly told to think of themselves.  The reality is that Americans haven’t fought a “defensive” war in more than half a century, nor have we had a citizen army since the dark days of Vietnam.  The members of our present-day military are paid mercenaries doing the dirty work of a hegemonic global power.  Their “mission” is not to defend an imperiled nation but to enforce the economic and political interests of a de facto empire.  If they were told the truth, and not spoon-fed lies, I have little doubt that many of them would throw down their weapons and walk away.

These are but a few of the many lies that Americans believe about our country and its history. 

So, if you’re wondering why Republicans in Texas are determined to eviscerate voting rights, why the current governor of Texas is ready to violate the constitution by building his own wall on the border with Mexico, why so many Americans are positively eager to embrace the outrageous falsehood that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, and why so many Republican members of Congress are ready to defend and excuse the seditious mob that stormed the nation’s capitol on January 6th, I have only this to say:  

Remember the Alamo!

The current term of the Supreme Court of the United States is about to come to a close. After handing down a series of major decisions at the eleventh hour, the court has announced that it will, when its next term begins in October, take up what is sure to become one of the most momentous cases in its history. The fate of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that at long last gave women the right to make their own reproductive decisions, will hang on the outcome.

Two years ago, the State of Mississippi, which is at once the poorest, least educated, and most “religious” in the country, passed a law that bans abortions with few and niggardly exceptions and criminalizes those who provide them.   This law is not merely draconian.  It was specifically and perversely designed to provoke an all-or-nothing showdown at the Supreme Court.  Under the terms of Roe v. Wade, the Mississippi law is flatly unconstitutional.  Which is precisely the point.  Mississippi’s Republican legislature aims to give the newly emboldened conservative majority on the court a chance to eviscerate Roe or overturn it altogether.

Trying to predict Supreme Court decisions is about as useful as casting horoscopes, and nobody knows how all this will turn out.  The fact remains, nonetheless, that at least five, and quite probably six, members of the court seem more than likely to take Mississippi’s bait.

The irony here could not be greater.  Just as anti-abortionists have finally achieved their long-sought goal of securing a decisive majority on the highest court in the land, ordinary Americans have no less decisively concluded that they do not want to see Roe v. Wade tampered with.  In poll after poll, large majorities say they want Roe to stand.  Even in oh-so-religious Mississippi, four out of ten support the right to an abortion under all or most circumstances.

Which is not to say that Americans are unreservedly in favor of abortion.  That is clearly not the case.  It is equally clear, however, that they are remarkably sensitive to the personal and moral complexities involved and are loath to embrace extreme measures on one side of the issue or the other. 

Radical anti-abortionists, both on and off the court, are well aware of the public’s ambivalence, even as they refuse to acknowledge the moral and legal ambiguities of their own views.  Because they know that their chance to roll back the reproductive rights of women is deeply controversial and may be transitory, they are desperate to avoid any misstep that could cost them the moment; so, they have been frantically tweaking their inflammatory rhetoric, hoping to give their radical views a reassuring, albeit false, patina of reasonableness.

Heretofore, anti-abortionists have stridently insisted that “life is sacred,” absolutely and under all circumstances.  Indeed, they have gone further, asserting that the sanctity of life begins the moment a spermatozoon wiggles its way into an egg.  Which means—to them at least—that interrupting gestation at any stage is the equivalent of “murder”.  

Some anti-abortionists still voice these antediluvian notions, including the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the newest member of the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett.  Like “Bloody Mary,” the Tudor queen who sought to reimpose Catholicism on Protestant England, Barrett would no doubt be quite happy to see the Holy Inquisition and its instruments of torture dusted off and returned to service, so that the heretics among us could receive their just deserts.

Most anti-abortionists, however are shrewd enough to realize that the “life is sacred” drumbeat no longer draws a crowd. That is because, among other reasons, it is ludicrous on its face, coming, as it does, from people many of whom are perfectly happy for police officers to gun down black and Hispanic Americans, see no problem in inflicting capital punishment on the guiltless victims of a racist legal system, insist on the right of psychopaths to own lethal weapons no matter the cost to the rest of us, and are shockingly indifferent to economic and social conditions that crush the life out of those less fortunate than themselves. Anyone but a moral troglodyte can see that those who call themselves “pro-life” have a very selective view of which lives are “sacred” and which lives are not.

Thus it is that cannier anti-abortionists have turned to alternative and presumably more palatable strategies.  One of these is the preposterous claim that overturning Roe v. Wade would somehow be more “democratic” than leaving the fate of reproductive rights up to the Supreme Court.  Here is how one anti-abortionist recently made the case in the editorial pages of the Washington Post:

Almost every other developed country has made abortion legal, and they did so almost uniformly through democratic debate…as such, the resultant settlement is supported by all major political actors.  This fact has given secure access to abortions for women who want them.  Overruling Roe would return abortion policy to where it was previously: the people of each state.  Liberal states such as California or New York would surely pass bills allowing abortion well into a pregnancy…Meanwhile, conservative states such as Mississippi would pass laws banning or severely restricting abortion.  Even conservative states, however, would likely retain exceptions for cases such as those that threaten a mother’s life.  This surely will distress activists on both sides, but over time, democratic compromise will win out. 

This argument is so riddled with illogic and intellectual bad faith that one scarcely knows where to begin. To say that “almost every other developed country has made abortion legal, and they did so almost uniformly through democratic debate” does not lead to the conclusion that the reproductive rights of American women should be left up to the states. To propose, as the author does, that there is something “democratic” in allowing “liberal states” and “conservative states” to reach entirely different decisions regarding fundamental rights is not only absurd but immoral. In a democracy, fundamental rights belong to everyone, no matter where they live. Which is precisely the situation in the other “developed” countries the author cites.

This sort of addled reasoning has been going on for a very long time.  The late Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, famously observed that “the Constitution says nothing about abortion,” by which he meant to insinuate that no branch of the federal government has any business meddling in the matter.  Like so much of what Scalia had to say, this slippery remark was intended to justify his own prejudices.  No less than Amy Coney Barrett, Scalia was a revanchist Catholic and a staunch opponent of reproductive rights.  For Scalia, handing the decision to the states was a sleight of hand, intended to slice those rights to pieces, one state at a time.

The problem, of course, is that Scalia’s observation cuts both ways.  Just as the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion, it also has nothing to say about automobiles, airplanes, or the airwaves, but the federal government has been regulating all three for decades, with the explicit approval of the Supreme Court.  All the while the Constitution says nothing to guarantee a woman’s right to an abortion, it says nothing to deny that right.  Nor does it say anything to prohibit the federal government from enforcing such a right on a national basis.      

As if sophistic arguments about “democracy” weren’t shameful enough, anti-abortionists have adopted another, even smarmier tactic, which is to express lavish empathy for the “difficult choices” confronting women but to conclude, oh so reluctantly, that their personal—for which, read “selfish—freedom must give way to the greater moral good.  Here is how one anti-abortionist put it:

I understand how tough this decision is.  But after much thought, I have reached the conclusion that the ‘moral balance” comes down on the side of protecting the life of the unborn child, just as we must protect the lives of young children who cannot care for themselves.  Anything else would be murder.  

Like most flawed arguments, this one hinges on a false premise.  Just as there is no such thing as an “undead corpse,” there is no such thing as an “unborn child”.  The organism that occupies a woman’s womb is at various stages a zygote, embryo, or fetus—but it is not a “child”.   Still less is it a “person,” with any of the legal and moral rights that personhood entails.  

Anti-abortionists can deny or decry this reality all they want, but they cannot change it.  That is why they are so desperate to pass laws that would create a fairy-tale category called “fetal personhood”—a logical absurdity without precedent in the Anglo-American (or any other) legal tradition.  One might just as well declare caterpillars to be butterflies or molecules to be men.

The final word on this matter rightly belongs to that icon of libertarian conservatives, the novelist and self-anointed politicalphilosopher, Ayn Rand.  Though Rand had many disagreeable qualities, intellectual cowardice and inconsistency were not among them.  When a difficult, even a terrible, choice had to be made, she rarely flinched.  It is no surprise, therefore, that she confronted the casuistry of anti-abortionists head-on, declaring that “an embryo has no rights…a child cannot acquire any rights until it is born”.  Indeed, Rand went further, dismissing anti-abortion arguments as “vicious nonsense”.  

When it comes time for the Supreme Court of the United States to pass judgment on the reproductive rights of a hundred million American women, let us hope that its conservative members, at least one of whom is an unapologetic devotee of Rand’s ideas, will not only remember her words but abide by them.