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fourth of july
A Major Question for a Smoky Independence Day
What exactly does the Supreme Court recommend we do about the most dangerous crisis our species has ever faced?
Jul 04, 2023
The original 13 states have been largely blanketed in smoke this holiday weekend—the ongoing Canadian fires, which we now learn may burn till the snow falls in October, are changing the very quality of summer sunlight to something grayed-out and menacing. But it’s nothing compared to the smokescreen coming from D.C.
The big Supreme Court decisions of recent days—allowing commercial bigotry, ending affirmative action, and preventing the White House from expunging student debt—are venal and mean. But they are also something else: an effort to make sure that the more functional politics of an earlier era can’t interfere with the bought-and-paid-for nihilism of the present.
I wrote about a lovely time machine a few days ago—the lithium-iron battery that lets you store the afternoon’s sun to provide light and heat for the night to come. But the gang of six justices now recasting our nation’s politics have invented a time machine of their own, one that lets you go back in history and erase goodness.
There’s something uniquely painful about surrendering ground you thought you had gained.
The theory that undergirded the student debt decision is the same one the Court used to gut the Clean Air Act last summer—something they’ve ginned up out of thin air called the Major Questions Doctrine. It holds that if the government wants to do something important, Congress has to spell out every detail: It’s not enough that Congress gave a mandate to protect clean air, it has to specify precisely what pollutants in what amounts. In the case of student debt, the Congress, reacting to 9/11, allowed the secretary of education to henceforth alter student debt payments in times of emergency, an authority the Biden White House seized on, quite sensibly, during the pandemic. The timing of those Congressional actions is important.
The Clean Air Act was adopted in 1971, back when we actually had a fairly effective Congress—among other things, it also passed the Clean Water Act (itself gutted earlier this term) and the Endangered Species Act, and set up the Environmental Protection Agency; these represented the powerful organizing of environmentalists, which shifted the zeitgeist so dramatically that bipartisan majorities fell in behind them; they’ve been weakened some since but never scrapped, because the public (unlike the billionaire class) essentially supports them. As for student loans, our politics had begun to break down by 2001, but at least an emergency like 9/11 could summon up some of the old spirit.
Now, after the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have all but broken the back of our democracy, the Supreme Court justices have taken time out from their Alaskan fishing trips to go back and try to eradicate those better moments in our history. As Elana Kagan pointed out in her dissent on the student loans case, it’s nothing more than an exercise of raw power:
“From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint. At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent.
“That is a major problem not just for governance, but for democracy too. Congress is of course a democratic institution; it responds, even if imperfectly, to the preferences of American voters. And agency officials, though not themselves elected, serve a President with the broadest of all political constituencies. But this Court? It is, by design, as detached as possible from the body politic. That is why the Court is supposed to stick to its business—to decide only cases and controversies, and to stay away from making this Nation’s policy about subjects like student-loan relief.
“The court exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”
The anti-gay bigotry and affirmative action cases did not depend on the Major Questions doctrine, but they were decided in the same spirit of erasing history. After many years of spirited organizing, for instance, Colorado’s legislature in 2008 added “sexual orientation” to the list of things businesses couldn’t discriminate against. Now the court has ruled, in essence, that they were wrong—that if you can claim your religion is sufficiently hateful, it gives you an out and you can go back to being a bigot.
There’s something uniquely painful about surrendering ground you thought you had gained. So here’s my Major Question this smoky Independence Day:
What exactly does the Supreme Court recommend we do about the most dangerous crisis our species has ever faced? And I don’t mean the grave danger of gay people needing a wedding website.
Or here’s how Martin Luther King put his Major Question, in Montgomery in 1965 at the end of the eight-day march from Selma:
I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ Somebody's asking, ‘How long will prejudice blind the visions of men?’
The Supreme Court’s answers are: We will do nothing about our problems, and it will take forever.
The judicial slaughter of our better angels is an affront to everyone who did all that work to pass these laws decades ago. I know many of those people through my work at Third Act, and it is of course painful to us. But we also know that we have the ability to organize again—that having won these battles once it may still be within our power to do so again. The irreplaceable Rebecca Solnit, writing yesterday in The Guardian, puts it well:
Memory is a superpower, because memory of how these situations changed is a memory of our victories and our power. Each of these victories happened both through the specifics of campaigns to change legislation but also through changing the public imagination. The supreme court can dismantle the legislation but they cannot touch the beliefs and values. We still believe in these rights.
I confess that there are moments when my faith slips; it should not be this hard. And I do not know if the spirit of cynicism and nihilism embraced by everyone from Donald Trump to RFK Jr. won’t triumph this time. But many of us will keep writing and working and organizing, and we will do it in the belief that most people are mostly good and that over time that goodness will tell—the belief that even the Federalist Society can’t indefinitely hold down the human spirit. Here’s a great essay from one of my colleagues about figuring out they were non-binary in their 60s, and here’s the other piece of reporting that’s kept me going this weekend: an account of the current Miss Texas Averie Bishop at the end of her year-long reign.
The perch has normally been occupied by apolitical women, but in Bishop’s case, the pageant queen has used it to push back against the far-right policies supported by Texas’s White male leaders.
Her platform—diversity and inclusion—represents much of what Texas has been outlawing. In June alone, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed laws banning diversity offices and training at state universities, “sexually explicit” books at public schools, drag shows and gender-affirming care for youths.
During some high school visits, Bishop asked students to raise their hands and share communities they identifiedwith. She said students often mentioned the LGBTQ community.
“They’re going to see a completely different Texas in the next decade compared to the one that we have now,” Bishop said.
Let us hope that she is right, and let us make it so.
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Defend Our Liberty From Moms For Liberty
The far-right group embraces book banning, but held its national convention in Philadelphia, in an unmistakable message about the central role the group sees for itself in American culture and politics.
Jul 04, 2023
In May of 1933 in Berlin, Nazis gathered in the streets, built a gigantic bonfire, and burned thousands of books.
The books had been seized from the city’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. The nonprofit institute was the first in the world to focus on the science of gender and sexuality. It was supportive of LGBTQ studies and provided gender-affirming health care.
Before the raid, the organization had a number of transgender employees and hosted an extensive library of materials on LGBTQ health. Tragically, at least one transgender woman is believed to have died in the violent attack that preceded the book burning.
As Nazi atrocities go, this was an early and foreboding event.
We’re witnessing the wholesale forgetting of the authoritarian forces behind book-banning and censorship. And the worst thing we could do would be to look away.
The attack on scholarship and on a vulnerable community heralded an eventual descent into unimaginable violence. Book burning and banning, while not invented by the Nazis, became closely associated with them—and with authoritarian repression more generally.
It’s stunning now, after so many years and lessons learned, to watch the meteoric rise of the right-wing, pro-censorship group Moms for Liberty.
The group embraces book-banning as a centerpiece of its activism. Its favored targets are materials relating to Black, brown, and LGBTQ communities. For its national convention the weekend before the Fourth of July, it chose to bring its supporters to Philadelphia, a city with a rich civil rights history and ties to our nation’s independence.
That sends an unmistakable message about the central role the group sees for itself in American culture and politics. So does the attendance of the half-dozen presidential candidates, including Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
This is especially disorienting for a younger generation that grew up with incremental but seemingly irreversible progress toward freedom and inclusivity.
We saw the rise of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at work and school and the legalization of same-sex marriage. We saw the election of our first Black president. We took it for granted that we would always have the right to reproductive freedom. Until we didn’t.
We’re witnessing the wholesale forgetting of the authoritarian forces behind book-banning and censorship. And the worst thing we could do would be to look away.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is not looking away—it named Moms for Liberty as an extremist group in its annual Year in Hate and Extremism report.
Some media outlets have been vigilant about debunking Moms for Liberty’s claims to be a low-budget, grassroots group. Ditto any claims that it is peaceful: There are numerous reports that local Moms for Liberty operatives have turned threatening and aggressive.
The organization was even forced to apologize after a local chapter approvingly quoted Hitler in its newsletter.
But this criticism hasn’t really dented Moms for Liberty’s ability to attract money or the attention of presidential candidates. It will take more than that to protect the freedom to learn.
We need a multiracial, multigenerational, cross-cultural response that clearly affirms American values.
We need to assert the right of parents to decide if their kids are mature enough to read a book, but not to make that decision for everybody else’s kids.
We need to stand up for accurate and honest school curricula in which our nation’s full history is taught and the stories of all Americans are included. That fosters respect, understanding, and empathy—and prepares kids for meaningful civic engagement.
The last big right-wing group to promote book-banning and censorship—the Moral Majority—collapsed under the weight of its own financial and sexual scandals, but not before it did serious harm to marginalized communities in this country. We can’t wait around for this movement to burn itself out as well.
Fighting censorship is as American as you can get, and that’s what this year’s celebration of our country’s birthday should be about.
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Want to Reclaim the Spirit of 1776? Reduce Inequality
In both 1776 and the mid-20th century, our most financially fortunate found themselves in relatively equal societies, and shared a sense of responsibility to the greater good.
Jul 04, 2023
Over ten generations have come and gone since 1776. Yet the giants of 1776 still fascinate us. Books about Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington still regularly dot our bestseller lists.
What so attracts us to these “founding fathers,” these men of means who put their security, their considerable comfort, at risk for a greater good? Maybe the contrast with what we see all around us.
Today’s men of means display precious little selfless behavior. Our CEOs, bankers, and private equity kingpins remain totally fixated on their own corporate and personal bottom lines. They don’t lead the nation. They steal from it.
In both 1776 and 1976 America, the top 1% overall took less than 10% of the nation’s income. The top 1% share today, economist Emmanuel Saez details, is running at over double that level, well over 20%.
So who can blame the rest of us for daydreaming about a time when a significant chunk of our elite showed a real sense of responsibility to something grander than the size of their individual fortunes?
Actually, suggests University of Michigan sociologist Mark Mizruchi, we don’t have to go back to 1776 to find Americans of ample means who cared about “the needs of the larger society.” We had this sort of elite, he argues in The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, right in the middle of the 20th century.
Many of America’s top corporate leaders, Mizruchi writes, spent the years right after World War II engaged in public-spirited debate over how best to put the Great Depression behind us and build a prosperity that worked for everyone.
These corporate leaders didn’t try to gut the social safety net the New Deal of the 1930s had created. They supported efforts to stretch this safety net even wider. In the postwar years, major corporate executives helped expand Social Security and increase federal aid to education six-fold. They even accepted high federal income tax rates on high incomes—their incomes.
Mizruchi takes care not to go overboard here. Corporate leaders of the mid-20th-century years regularly did do battle, at various times and on various issues, with unions and other groups that spoke directly for average Americans. But these corporate leaders also did display, notes Mizruchi, “an ethic of responsibility.” They compromised. They tried to offer solutions. They behaved, on the whole, far more admirably than the union-busters, tax-dodgers, and bailout artists who top Americans biggest banks and corporations today.
What explains why our corporate elite behaved so much better back in the post-war years? Mizruchi explores a variety of factors. In the 1950s and 1960s, for one, our corporate elite had to share the political center stage with a strong and vital labor movement. Today’s corporate leaders face a much weaker labor presence.
This weaker labor presence has allowed wealth and power to concentrate ferociously at America’s economic summit. We have become, over recent decades, a fundamentally much more unequal nation.
This inequality, in turn, may be the key to understanding why corporate leaders after World War II much more resembled the elite of 1776 than our own contemporary corporate movers and shakers. In both 1776 and the mid-20th century, our most financially fortunate found themselves in relatively equal societies.
On the eve of the American revolution, as researchers have documented, England’s 13 American colonies had a much more equal distribution of income and wealth than the nations of Europe.
In the years right after World War II, the United States enjoyed a similar epoch of relative equality. Corporate CEOs in the 1950s only made 20 to 30 times what their workers made, not the nearly 400 times more that top corporate execs routinely rake in today.
In both 1776 and 1976 America, the top 1% overall took less than 10% of the nation’s income. The top 1% share today, economist Emmanuel Saez details, is running at over double that level, well over 20%.
Did this relative equality of revolutionary America and America right after World War II help shape how elites interacted with their societies? That certainly seems plausible. More equal societies, after all, have narrower gaps between those at the economic summit and everyone else. The narrower the gap in any society, the easier for all—elite and average alike—to feel invested in their society and share a sense of responsibility for its future.
The takeaway for our Fourth of July, 2023 edition? If we want to rekindle that spirit of 1776, not just daydream about it, our course stands clear. We need to create a more equal America.
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