Hegemony by another name
Politics is about power. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I finished watching Matt Bernstein’s video Jubilee Must Be Stopped (with Big Joel) over eggs, potatoes, and tea this morning.
I haven’t watched any Jubilee videos myself, but they are the platform behind viral clips featuring “woke” people going tete-a-tete with some sort of right-wing equivalent (flat Earthers versus scientists, anti-vax versus “pro” vax, anti-trans versus pro-trans, etc.)
Matt and Big Joel agree that the platform, whose ostensible mission is to facilitate understanding through conversation and, ultimately, forge a centrist “middle ground” does no such thing. Jubilee platforms “gladiatorial” rhetoric, often in the form of verbal abuse against the right-wingers’ opponents. In fact, that “liberal” extreme is usually a centrist position that’s rather mainstream, so what the platform effectively does is to shift the Overton Window to the right, towards a fringe that’s on the margins for good reason.
This video nicely complements an article I read over the weekend about the ahistorical beliefs around “originalism” when it comes to interpreting the US Constitution. You can read the full piece here in The New Republic (it’s worth your time).
It opens with Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese declaring war on the legacy of the Warren Court for daring to guarantee equal rights and protections under the law to Black Americans, women, and other undesirable persons. “Originalist” judges would roll back these gains by focusing on the meaning of the Constitution as it was understood when it was written, an outlook taken to comic lengths by justices like the late William Rehnquist, who relied on etymology-thick dictionaries to parse the Founders’ intent.
I’d learned about this view back in high school in AP US Politics and Government. Our textbook was written by conservative scholar and pundit James Q. Wilson. I took that class in Fall 2000, during what was to be a disputed (then stolen) presidential election where SCOTUS seats were a major issue.
The Democratic candidate, Al Gore, at the time referred to a “living, breathing Constitution” when asked about his views on how the document should be interpreted. This sounded fine to me, seeing as it required interpretation to take into account actual reality and not to mold the latter to fit a distorted vision of a past reality.
What the textbook did not say was what originalism aimed to accomplish. It was presented as one valid way of understanding the law, one among many in the raucous American political tradition. Of course we disagree about everything! That’s freedom! That’s democracy!
That’s absurd.
24 years on, I can see that while my public education was, by all fair measures, a good one, it was hardly complete. Centrist ideology, painting disagreement as a matter of opinion rather than as an expression of social conflict, penetrated our materials and discussions through and through (don’t get me started on our discussions about Affirmative Action). Presenting a “both sides” view on political issues is ridiculous.
In short, you’re either with the people or with the powerful.
Those were Al Gore’s most controversial remarks during the 2000 Democratic National Convention. The Supreme Court, with its originalist Republican majority, decided to innovate, just this once, to make sure that he’d never serve as president as it ruled against continuing recounts later that year.
To their credit, before sabotaging the legal, democratic process, the Justices did listen to both sides.
