MAYBE WHEN I'M DONE with Louis Boudin's evisceration of the Supreme Court invented judicial power for the Supreme Court to do everything from overturn laws adopted by the Congress and President to amend the Constitution by a simple majority of fewer than ten unelected, lifetime appointed autocrats who face no real consequences for even their clearest wrongdoing, I'll take on the latter days of Jefferson, Madison and the rest of the founders in their dotage as Jacksonian notions of democracy were taking over what those founders had wrought. From what I've seen, when faced with something more closely matching their conceptions of the government they were setting up in reality as opposed to their enlightenment imaginings, their aristocratic snobbery didn't like it, one bit. I assume that's one of the biggest reasons that in his last decade Jemmy Madison soured on democracy and even "liberty."
That would not be to set up Andrew Jackson as anyone who should be remembered with honor or that his concepts should be emulated any more than those of Jefferson and Madison as demonstrated in their actual exercises of power when they went from on-paper theorizing to actual administration and, in the case of Madison, legislating. I'm all for learning the cautionary lessons of the past but there is no point in pretending we can or should try to recreate some golden age because there has never been a golden age, neither in reality nor in the concepts of any people no matter how smart they may have been.
Reading about the passing of the "old court" as represented by John Marshall and Joseph Story to the one dominated by Jackson's appointees in the Taney Court and how the Taney Court used the rulings of the earlier "justices" to extend their power to do some truly terrible things has sparked my curiosity to know more about that era.
I have come to believe that the Supreme Court has, actually, been the most sordid and corrupt of the branches of the government - it certainly has been since the crisis of Nixon's crime spree, when it has systematically used to rulings of, especially, the Warren Court to keep our political system corrupt with big money and extending that influence to even foreign despots who are some of the worst enemies of democracy today. The dark-money as "free speech" horseshit by the Roberts Court should go down along with the crimes of Nixon and other infamous presidents as the worst official acts by any officials in American history, their overturning of the Voting Rights Act added to its overturning of campaign finance reform proves that it is the greatest danger to egalitarian democracy in our history.
It is one of the stupidest conceits of modernism, of the "enlightenment" that what they do is free us from the shackles of the ignorance and corruption of the past even as they elevate figures such as the slave owners, land speculators and genocidalists such as Jefferson, Madison and, yes, Jackson, and insist that their concepts and ideas and words MUST be what govern us today, going on two centuries after those mere mortals drew their last gasps and rotted. The heavy hand of "originalism" of "textualism" that are the excuse for the gangsters in black robes for doing all of the evil they have done to us is credulously sucked up by even such fools as believe they are "liberals" or even "left of center" out of misplaced and ignorant piety. The cult of "the founders" has been promoted, mostly, to further the interests of America's indigenous form of facism, white supremacy.
I was meaning to write something about a passage from Isaiah that was in the lectionary yesterday, a famous passage, Isaiah 65:17,
See, I am creating new heavens and a new earth; The former things shall not be remembered nor come to mind.
The prophet goes on in terms of a new Jerusalem but I think that can be generalized to describe the ongoing act of Creation, as the present passes into the past and doesn't exist anymore. Only when we deify the mere humans of the past and make them the measure of our law and our politics the limits of their knowledge and wisdom should never limit us even when we imagine we are to be governed by their intentions.
I don't trust anyone's good intentions to not risk having the potential to lead us to the kind of hell they were only too willing to live in, especially those who could rig things so that it was least hellish for them on the basis of them making it more hellish for others. Slavery that Jefferson and Madison and Jackson lived off of was certainly that, as was the genocide and the subjugation of Women and wage slaves and the underclass. I don't trust anything that produces or enforces inequality and which sets it up as an engine of progress or good because what it does produce is obviously none of that. The evidence of that comprises our history and our present and is found starving and freezing and dying of exposure all over the place. Yet dreams of progress blind especially the bestest and brightestest among us, many of whom are "journalists" who miss what's right there in front of their eyes, continually. And many of whom get published in academic journals and magazines and on the NYT op-ed pages.
The fact that all of those flourished under the Constitution and laws that the 18th and early 19th century legends created and adopted is a warning to us that today, when so many of us are unwilling to live in that kind of a hell, that keeping them unchanged will always risk reproducing that inequality and cementing our feet in it. That is the goal of the Roberts Court, that they have made the Warren Courts' decisions intended to do something else to that purpose only proves the dangers of allowing them to get away with being able to amend earlier decisions of the court, exploiting the oversights and foolishness inherent to them as easily as they do the Constitution, even the Civil War Amendments, for the purposes of their patrons and their class and their own, white-supremacist ideology.
I think the idolatry of worshiping the secular, civic past is the kind of idolatry that is incompatible with the monotheism of the Jewish tradition and especially of Christianity. Entirely incompatible with it. I think the Jewish scriptures, their catalog of the sins and folly of the kings of Israel and Judah and other assorted gentile rulers, are far superior to the popular history such as most Americans believe in, most of that coming from trash like the movies and TV and even the better end of that PBS style historical documentary. At least when you take it as a warning about the evils of the past and what isn't to be done.
Any "Christianity" that indulges in it is heretical and idolatrous. I think we are to learn what not to do from the past whereas most founders fetishists think that we are to learn what we must continue to do with the insane idea that if we did as they wanted we'd get something other than what they produced. Which is total lunacy.
No comments:
Post a Comment