I DON'T NECESSARILY AGREE WITH EVERYTHING that Tad Stoermer says in every video he issues but his understanding of American history as "resistance history" is enormously valuable. Instead of the typical "which side of the aristocrats are you on" view of history, he says to introduce this topic, "Yes, both groups are bastard covered bastards with bastard filling. I get it. But we don't et to study just the history of People we like." The sides in this case are the Federalists, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, etc. who tried to freeze out others from ever governing, on one side, and the Democratic-Republicans, Jefferson, Madison, etc. on the other side (the so-called Jeffersonian revolution of 1800). Ultimately the side I'm on are the People of that period who were left out of both the Federalist fascists and the Jefferson-Madison side, those held in slavery, those without property, Women, other minority groups who were living under subjugation under the Constitution, even with that alleged Bill of Rights which, it should never be forgotten, even Madison wasn't all that hot on.* Even as I admit that the Jeffersonian revolution made some progress for dispossessed white men, it was entirely short of what needed to happen to the original Constitution that the goddamned "originalists" want to bring us back to. I'm no more happy with us going back to 1801 than I am going back to 1789. I'm not happy to go back to any minute in American history, not even the day before the last presidential election. All that gets you is going back to where things went wrong with the conditions that produced that wrong.
The only legitimate history of the United States to be proud of in any way was the resistance to that Federalist establishment's Constitution as it was written then and as the aristocrats and thugs and the Supreme Court (to risk tautology) and the struggle for equality and, so democracy, most of all by those suffering under that subjugation and secondly to those more affluent, formally educated and almost uniformly religious enfranchised white men whose conscience was stronger than their sense of entitlement and greed. If you want to call that "resistance history" I'd suggest that it's only really valuable to instruct us in those instances when it was successful. BUT NEVER FORGETTING THAT THE SUPREME COURT, THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA, ENTERTAINMENT INCLUDED, WAS ALWAYS READY TO TRY TO TURN BACK THAT HARD-WON PROGRESS. If you want a recent example, it occurs to me that you could look at Susan Faludi's book from the 1990s, Backlash: The undeclared War Against american Women, something which the Dobbs decision is a product of.
But here's the video:
His reading of the
* Paul Finkleman's essay James Madison And The Bill of Rights: A Reluctant Paternity is one of the best things I've ever seen on the topic. Though I would note this reference to it from an article earlier this year by John B. Vile
Madison pivoted in favor of Bill of Rights
The chapters by Paul Finkelman and Howard Schweber deal most closely with the First Amendment. Describing Madison as the “Stepfather” of the Bill of Rights, Finkelman notes that Madison was both a “reluctant and unenthusiastic,” albeit nonetheless effective, advocate for the Bill of Rights. He primarily viewed it as a relatively harmless way of avoiding a second constitutional convention that might undo the work of the first. It is commonly believed that Madison may have changed his mind about the value of the bill of rights as a result of his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, who strong favored such guarantees. Finkelman demonstrates that Madison had pivoted in favor of this bill even before he had received Jefferson’s letters.
Finkelman does not, however, note that, speaking before Congress on June 8, 1789, Madison argued that if individual rights were incorporated into the Constitution, “independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights” and “will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.” This is very close to the argument that Jefferson presented to him in a letter of March 15, 1789, where Jefferson lauded “the legal check” that a bill of rights would put “into the hands of the judiciary.”
Anyone who knows the history of the "Bill of Rights" in the hands of the Supreme Court without having their blood run cold can't realize how wrong those luminaries were. That's especially true of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, but also courts going back sixy-one years distorting the First Amendment to do exactly the opposite of what Madison and Jefferson expected would be the results of putting such matters into the hands of the courts, that that would guarantee a the protection of rights and the prevention of such usurpations of power as they faced in the run up to the election of 1800. For anyone unfamilar with me on that topic, I hold the Warren Court's absurd expansions of the meaning of "speech" in many of its most celebrated rulings to have opened the door that the Republican-fascists forced us into so as to do after 1976 what Adams and Hamilton tried to do, this time through "free speech" as distorted by the courts, starting with Buckley v Valeo.
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