WHEN I WAS GROWING UP in the early post-WWII years I heard a number of times variations on the claim that "it can't happen here." Which in my family was considered to be nonsense. The faith that the United States couldn't ever become something like the Third Reich or Italy under the fascists or other kind of "right-wing dictatorship" because of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was something easy for a middle-class or affluent white American male to believe because those things worked for affluent white males of the kind who comprised virtually all of the on-air and in print media producers. Young people now might find it hard to believe how few of those were even white women back then.
I never believed it, our WWII veteran parents didn't believe it, my grandparents who had experienced anti-Irish bigotry and witnessed other kinds of bigotry didn't believe it. I have never believed in American exceptionalism. I don't believe any human group or nation is exceptional. Perhaps it's being Vatican II Catholic in Northern New England at the very end of Protestant hegemony here but I have never believed that any People anywhere were reliably virtuous or reliably safe from their weakness and selfishness and our inevitable ignorance that "it" couldn't happen among them. Sin is a universal certainty. No one is safe from evil, anywhere, anytime. The closest thing there is to that kind of safety is to be found in actual equality, not in some daffy notion of absolute "rights" and "complete freedom" without mandatory responsibility for the results of actions and consequences under those.
It wasn't until much later that I read the statement of a Black Civil War soldier who made the point that whatever the Constitution said about freedoms and rights, Black People had lived as slaves under it for generations and he was not deluded that it was something under which Black Peoples' rights were protected. On the contrary, as was proved by the then recent experience of the Dred Scott ruling, as much Constitutional law as Brown v Board or any other act of the government, proved that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were more than merely implicated in the subjugation and enslavement of Black People, they had been quite comfortable with it for more than a generation, by that point. The Constitutionally established Supreme Court used it to deny the person-hood of Black People EVERYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES. And after the national baptism in blood, the Civil War, The Constitution was, in the post-Reconstruction period, intrinsic to the resubjugation of Black People under Jim Crow and lynch law and the dainty Supreme Court contribution to both, "separate but equal". Which rested on the Supreme Court told Constitutional lie that things were equal. "Equal Justice Under Law" should be the first part of the Supreme Court's hideous secular-pagan temple that is removed and put in an exhibition of official hypocrisy and legal corruption.
That the Roberts Court is using the First Amendment to reimpose voter suppression, racial segregation and discrimination and other features of Jim Crow and expanding that to discrimination against LGBTQ+ People, reimposing the subjugation of Women at the same time UNDER THE CONSTITUTION proves that it is MORE USEFUL FOR THAT than it has proven in history to be useful for establishing equal justice, equal rights and equal freedom under equal responsibility. That we are seeing a national resurgence of police killings of Black People as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are demolished is not any great surprise considering what else is happening, especially in the entertainment media and, yes, even the "news division" of media corporations. America has been led into fascism by Hollywood and TV shows, comedians who aren't funny and who replace racism and bigotry for humor, Trump being a product of that kind of entertainment as much as Reagan was.
Any Native American could have said the same thing, that the Constitution had been in effect as the American government had murdered their People and stolen their lands and tried to wipe them out. I have pointed out the conclusive documentation that it was still an active governmental policy during the height of admitted eugenics in the 1930s in even states like Vermont to wipe out Native Americans. It is an absolute historical fact that the Nazis were learning some of what they soon would implement from American eugenicists. The Supreme Court had, less than ten years earlier found that such involuntary eugenics was not banned under the Constitution with the Bill of rights, EVEN WITH THE CIVIL WAR AMENDMENTS ON TOP OF THOSE. Eugenics was, as established Supreme Court law by as lauded a Constitutional expert as Oliver Wendell Holmes jr, fully consonant with such a genocidal program. As his secretary Francis Biddle discovered to his certain discomfort when he was a Judge at the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis lawyers could cite Holmes SUPREME COURT RULING to excuse the genocidal actions of their clients.
Our national myth of freedom and justice for all has been a false front on the fact that our indigenous form of unequally applied fascism, white supremacy, has ruled us through a combination of voter suppression under a campaign slavery then of apartheid terrorism and murder and the Constitutionally set up inequality of the Senate and the Electoral College. Jim Crow and the return of de facto slavery was first accomplished under the Electoral College by a corrupt deal between Rutherford Hayes and the slave power and appointments by that regime to the Supreme Court. We are still living under that form of governance, today. American Apartheid ruled for generations in the former slave states and elsewhere for decades without much of any opposition under the Constitution. If the Civil War didn't wipe it out, the idea that the temporary fixes of the Civil Rights era would permanently end it without abolishing the mechanisms that empowered it from the star, is a delusion of college-credentialed People trained to not think about reality as opposed to the mythology of the Constitution and, even more so, the Bill of Rights.
I will point out that, in his more candid writing, John Marshall admitted that the adoption of the Constitution without the Bill of Rights was a close call for the document. The main part of the Constitution which gives us the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted Senate, etc. was very far from universally acceptable to those at the time of its adoption. One of the idiot Trumpers recently cited Patrick Henry to such stupid effect when he was among the more vocal skeptics of the thing.
I will also repeat that it is a fact that the most lauded of the Founders, Madison especially, was not enthusiastic for a Bill of Rights and it is not that surprising that as dedicated a group of slave owners and rich aristocrats as who governed the country and most of the states adopted a Bill of Rights that has proven to be so ineffective in guaranteeing equality. Madison's part in its creation under the First Congress was his reluctant keeping of a bargain he had to make with the Virginia legislature for them to adopt the scheme to start with. Do you think he and his fellow slavers really intended it to promote full equality and equal rights for all? He became ever more cynical about democracy as even poor-whites of no property were enfranchised in the Jeffersonian revolution. Though I don't suppose some Broadway song and dance guy is going to tell that in some pop music spectacle.
Any progress towards equality from the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was through struggle against the order set up under both of those. As the Trumpian danger to even that Constitutional order proves, the right to lie as granted so stupidly under the absolute language of The First Amendment endangers even the peaceful transfer of power, the lauded fruit of the Constitution, itself. It's clear from both the Bush II and Trump regimes that the Electoral College is a corruption of that lauded practice of American Democracy, as well. It has worked to thwart the majority of voters more than twice in our history, always to terrible effect, perhaps the Jeffersonian example being the sole exception where it might, might have been better.
It may be easy for affluent white People to believe that the Constitution and the golden calf of the Bill of Rights protects us from "it happening here" but that is as big a lie as anything that comes out of Trump's mouth or thumbs twitting on any given day. It certainly has happened, constantly and consistently for Black People, Native Americans, other People of Color, LGBTQ+ People, Women (especially Women belonging to those and other subjugated groups) . . . And that's not to mention even white men in the economic underclass.
In just about every way it has happened here and it is happening here under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights right now. For Black People living under American apartheid it was always like living under fascist terror and it is still like that. Government actions especially police actions, the administration of "justice" by the judicial system has always valued Black lives, the lives of other targeted minorities and Women and the economic underclass as worth far less to nothing as compared to those of affluent white lives. That our government acts against us in a system of unequal or, really, any scale of economic valuation is proof of the failure of egalitarian democracy under the Constitution. I think it's dangerous to allow rich people to hire better or more lawyers than the poorest person can get, even in civil cases. If I were to write a new constitution, I'd put that into it.
The media certainly has contributed to it happening here, not only the alleged news and what they choose to put on but far more potently in the entertainment media which constantly streams that message to fill the minds of the large majority of Americans who get all of their ideas primarily from that. Or from the minds of their parents and associates who have spent decades absorbing that message. The media are free to do that BECAUSE THE FIRST AMENDMENT SAYS THEY ARE AS FREE TO DO THAT. That we may be free to promote egalitarian democracy in the outskirts of the media is of piddling significance because it is such a harder sell and will never have as much money backing it up. Of course the discrimination and devaluing of lives has an economic motive driving it, everything the media does is about money, in the end. EQUALITY IS FAR LESS PROFITABLE FOR THOSE WITH MONEY AND SO POWER, so it is in their economic self-interest to promote inequality and discrimination JUST AS IT WAS FOR THE SLAVE POWER AND THEIR NORTHERN ALLIES TO PROTECT AND PROMOTE THE ENSLAVEMENT OF BLACK PEOPLE. The media especially the entertainment media, has always devalued Women and objectified them, commercial culture, "pop culture" has been the main propaganda force doing that.
The Republican Party since 1964 when the Goldwater faction took it over sought to harness white racism as a means of achieving power, a trend which has only accelerated and swamped those of a milder oligarchic tendencies to the point where Trump and his Trumpzis now control the Rotten Old Party. So racism and other forms of bigotry spread through paranoid rantings on FOX Lies and its imitators serve a double purpose for those who really do control the media and, so, politics in the United States. The First Amendment with it's irresponsible, values neutral, pseudo-scientific objective language is less than no help in correcting that. How can it when even "civil rights attorneys" who get on MSNBC declare that Trump and his allies "have a right to lie?"
I could point out the role of the Republican Party, Republican women such as the putrid Phillis Schlafly, in thwarting the movement for gender equality, using anti-LGBTQ+ hatred as their major propaganda too. The media and "pop culture" made things much, much easier than it should have been considering Women outnumber men. I will remind you that the Constitution as it is in 2023 as it was in the beginning, does not establish that Women are equal, the actual majority of the American People does not have that explicitly pointed out in the actual governing document of the country. The attempt to put that in fell to the First Amendment permitted regime of lying that has governed us as much as anything. In America, one of the surest means of thwarting egalitarian democracy is through lying in the mass media. One of the less effective means of obtaining equal justice is through telling the truth in opposition to those lies.
So the complaint that I have told it plain, that it happens here (especially to targeted minority groups) and is getting worse BECAUSE OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS, as made worse under the Supreme Court and its extra-Constitutional usurpation of the power to nullify duly adopted federal laws giving "constitutional" excuses for it, is an expression of an entirely a-historical, white-supremacist parochial mythology which even a fairly cursory reading of American history refutes.
Our relevant professionals are not required to tell the truth and serve justice and egalitarian democracy. I'm talking about lawyers and the judges and other professions which are comprised entirely or mostly of lawyers. It is what lawyering turns into under any system which allows it, the highest end lawyers are largely in the business of gaming the law and The Constitution for the benefit of those who can pay the most and want inequality and the profits and psychopathic gratification they receive from feeling superior. Trump's use of lawyers and their diligent devotion to aiding and abetting their criminality is an example. The Constitution and its established order has let him get away with flagrant criminality almost every time. The one time it didn't was when he and his Nazi father were prosecuted for discrimination under civil rights laws which the Roberts type Court will demolish. They are under their use of the First Amendment for LGBTQ+ people, already. In a way lawyering is set up to favor those who serve the gangsters, those who break "the law" and those who have enough power to make the wrong they want to do unillegal, to use O Henry's brilliant neologism which describes that perfectly.
Trump as a political disaster happened UNDER THE CONSTITUTION BY THE RULES SET BY IT. Bush II happened under the Constitution as rigged by the five Republican-fascists of the Rehnquist court with the collusion of Bush family members in Florida and at FOX Lies. The vilely sanctimonious Republican lawyer James Comey, as head of the FBI and the New York Time under its Supreme Court granted "right to lie" made it certain that he would prevail in the last weeks of the the 2016 election, the New York Times printed its Sullivan Decision protected lies that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted. And Trump gained office with fewer votes under the Electoral College. The same Electoral College he and his goon gang of lawyers and Republican-fascists in state governments tried to rig in 2020. If they had not done that it is very likely Trump would never have been president and the Supreme Court would not be dominated by Republican-fascists right now.
The fact that we are in real danger of Republican-fascists winning in 2024, AFTER the hard experience of the Brooks Bros. putsch of 2000 and the Trumpzi insurrection of 2021, the basic Constitutional corruption AND THE SUPREME COURT USURPATION OF POWERS not having ever been fixed no matter how bad it has gotten up until now is a guarantee that sooner or later MUCH MORE OF IT THAN ROUTINELY HAS HAPPENED HERE WILL HAPPEN IN EVEN WORSE FORMS. Never forget that the same Bill of Rights which got a right to lie for FOX and the NYT puts automatic weapons in the hands of the mass killing fascists and Neo-Nazis.
You can count on it happening here, the only difference now is that it is going to happen to a lot more White People than before, though a lot of those are obviously too TV and movie and internet addled to even understand who is doing it to them. They think it's Black People, Latinos and drag queens who are their oppressors, that's how easy it is for the media to sell lies. That is another thing that has gotten worse. The mass media allowed to lie, to tell any lie, to deny even the worst lessons from the past, THE SHOAH FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE!, is as free to tell those lies as the lies that the Nazis told and the fascists in Italy and the Imperial military establishment told in Japan and the Stalinists in the Soviet empire and the Communist Party in China or the Kim regime in North Korea are free to tell the lies that they depend on. Lying always will be the foremost danger to equality and democracy. Any First Amendment which does not explicitly say there is no right to lie is a guarantee of "its happening" under it. A first amendment that does not constantly have provide the incentive to get the truth right while permitting ever more lying is morally degenerate. Egalitarian democracy, legitimate and decent government is a product of morality, in the end. It cannot exist in moral relativism which permits lies and false witness to flourish. Democracy is equal or it cannot be legitimate government.
Egalitarian democracy depends, absolutely, on the voters knowing and valuing the truth or it is vulnerable to lies and those who lie. If even an effective minority of voters believe lies, democracy is damaged and endangered. Allowing the mass media to carry lies is one of the greatest dangers to democracy there is, allowing those lies to weaponize prejudice and bigotry is the proven tool of then enemies of egalitarian democracy and even any would-be democracy short of equality under the law. Ours is such a stupidly self-endangered democracy, I wonder if the reason that the slave-owners and land-stealers and financiers who adopted the Bill of Rights didn't fear the truth because they feared it would set Black People and Native Americans and Poor-whites free, to the cost of their own unequal wealth. It doesn't much matter if it was intentional because that has been the effect of it. They certainly set poor-whites against their natural allies in seeking equality through lies and targeted meager privileges.
The earliest and worst sins of America may have been racism and the murder which always comes of racism. But along with that is the sin of lying, both of which are enshrined explicitly and implicitly in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Not least of all they are embedded into the fabric of the country but in the scheme of government set up under it. Even if lies can be overcome for a majority of the voters, the Electoral College and the usurping Supreme Court can overcome that to empower an effective minority of those who buy the lie and enslave us all. The Roberts Court is making that worse than it was after the Voting Rights Act was passed, nothing will ever be fixed until an even more powerful Voting Rights Act is adopted and protected from future John Roberts and his gangster "justice" cronies. But that won't even be enough until the "right to lie" is removed from the mass media and the idiotic idea removed from the collective lore of the lie-protecting lawyers.
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