In fact, I had not known, as I was writing that piece about the catastrophic results of placing "liberty" over the only guarantee for that not being dangerous, EQUALITY, that Orlando Patterson seems to have been thinking somewhat along the same lines. I was answering a complaint about a piece I started two days before, a complaint that reaches back to the one I wrote criticizing the naivete of George Soros' belief that an "open society" was sufficient to prevent the kind of depravity that we are seeing all over Europe, North America and elsewhere where the naive faith was that democracy had been secured securely. So, no, I was not merely copying what I'd seen on Lawrence O'Donnell's program without attribution.* I don't do that as anyone who has read much of what I write would know, I don't crib, I ALWAYS give an attribution where I borrow, if for no other reason than that I hope the ideas I want to promote will gain persuasive power by having a more distinguished adherent than I am.
What we are seeing in these crises, these serious and damaging, perhaps fatal attacks on egalitarian democracy are the full failure of the framing of modernism. Failing - as all human framings always do fail - due to the stupid and cowardly refusal to admit what is obvious, without elevating moral limits above "liberty" then equality won't only never be achieved, it will be stamped out. When the law, the judicial system, the legal system insists on a "level playing field" as if democracy were a fucking football game, it refuses to acknowledge that the powerful will always accrue power and more power and all of the power, all of the privileges, all of the liberty to itself when that is allowed to happen through judges - mostly drawn from the privileged class - refusing to make judgments that deliver equal justice, when they refuse to raise the truth above lies, when they privilege lies and hate speech and speech calculated to gull and seduce people into evil using their moral weaknesses as tools to do that.
That has been happening for our entire history as the lofty words in the first part of the Declaration of Independence were soon forgotten and replaced with the calculations of the slave-holders - many of whom were in the Northern states, slavery being legal just about everywhere as the Constitution was written and adopted - and the wealthy founders whose fortunes were based in banking and mercantile interests made common cause to ensure that "equal justice" unhampered by a monarch was something they got to hoard for themselves. The subsequent history of the United States is a constant struggle against that, the high point of which was reached with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts which the present Republican-fascists in elected offices and on the Supreme Court, those who are in charge of the media, have been trying to reverse since Nixon took office.
There is a reason Trump is returning to slogans from some of the most racist and vicious figures of the Civil Rights era, why the Roberts court is nullifying the Voting Rights Act and crippling the Civil Rights Acts using slogans of "liberty" and "The First Amendment" to do that, it is because this is the history of the United States under the Constitution. I do not remember who said it during the Civil War, a war which was a direct result of the slave-holder privileging Constitutional system that we are still under, but he pointed out that Black People had been slaves under the Constitution for the entire period it, with the Bill or Rights, with all of the lofty language of it, for the entire time. He, of course, didn't know that as soon as Rutherford Hayes made a corrupt deal with the unrehabilitated Confederate Traitors so he could become president, that they would reimpose a form of the same system on a de facto instead of a strictly de jure basis which the Supreme Court would codify in the disgusting Plessy v Ferguson decision. That was made possible due to the Electoral College, due to the anti-democratically structured Senate, due to the corruptions intentionally put into the Constitution and which are still there.
No, I didn't copy that from something I heard on TV the other night, it's been a long time learning that real history of the United States, overcoming the slogan and bromide based view of history which I, too, had been blinded by for most of my life. It's not a popular idea but I think it's true. I don't think this will be over under the present Constitutional system, including the absurdist poetry of the Bill of Rights which is unspecific enough to have encompassed the Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Sullivan Decision, Buckley v Valeo, Citizens United, . . . and the non-decision that made corporations "persons" to have put the privileges of the wealthy and privileged above equal justice under law. The Bill of Rights should be a legal contract specifying moral positions essential for a decent, equal democracy to result come over the liberty of the rich and powerful to lord it over us and dupe us into the miserable system we have.
I don't think Orlando Patterson would go as far as I have and if he did I'm pretty sure Lawrence O'Donnell wouldn't have him on to say it. He'd probably get fired from Harvard and become a non-person. I'm already one, so I am free to say it.
* I haven't been able to find a reliable Youtube pirating of O'Donnell's show and those for Rachel Maddow have been more hard to find so I haven't watched much of them and O'Donnell's is on after my normal bed time. I suspect Republican-fascists or their ally, Putin, are trying to prevent a wider audience hearing them.
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