Marilynne Robinson concludes her preface with two questions, one obviously true, the other one true but which needs considerable discussion.
What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy? After all these things rose together. The air is thick now with "the people," a phrase that is meant to give authority to the claims and the grievances of those who use it. That it is often invoked in good faith one may doubt, but the fact that resort is had to it so insistently means that we are still good enough democrats to feel that ultimately authority and reason do and should lie with the people. Then the old impulse that lay behind the dissemination of information and learning, the will to ensure that the public will be competent to make the weightiest decisions and so conform society to its best sense of the possible should be as powerful as it has ever been, and more powerful because of the fragility of the contemporary world. Instead we have slack and underfinanced journalism and the ebbing away of resources from our universities, libraries and schools. The liberation of the human individual as a social value required optimism which is also amply justified. This loyalty to democracy is the American value I fear we are gravely in danger of losing.
It is inescapable that when you use the word "democracy" you have to define what you mean by that or you will end up talking about radically different things. It is absolutely different if you put the emphasis on "freedom" instead of the equality that will make that freedom available to everyone and of value to everyone. The history of America is tellable in the freedoms which those with money and power have given themselves in reality, perhaps giving the least among us the theoretical possession of those same freedoms but which they will never get to enjoy. The crucial point isn't "freedom" the rich and always the richest have always enjoyed the lions share of freedom.
Equality is and has been lacking in American democracy from the beginning of it up till at least 1965 when the most decisive steps taken towards real, meaningful equality were taken in the Johnson administration. Steps that were immediately attacked by white supremacists and the Republican Party as they sought to benefit from the disaffected racists who had been traditionally members of the Democratic Party leaving because they opposed equality. They had nearly a hundred seventy years of precedent of life under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to fuel their resentment. As that reaction took hold, as the likes of Lewis Powell set out an anti-democratic blueprint to create the oligarchy that the courts he was a member of clearly worked towards and which is reaching its lowest point in the Neronian style decadence of Trump II the target was always equalty, making sure that all the freedom was as concentrated in the same places that the framers placed it, in affluent white men of an acceptable kind.
It is all well and good to talk about democracy but, as my posts on The Trial of Socrates demonstrated, "democracy" as a man-made, artificial thing can be had by a favored, restricted class of those deemed in ancient Athens to be "free men" or "citizens" who hold large numbers in slavery, Women and who exclude even wealthy men who are not part of that traditional group. Why would anyone not in that group care about such a democracy? Why would anyone who was excluded from participation care about America's democracy as, in fact, most adult citizens of the country were excluded from even the vote, not to mention the just access to the necessities and, as importantly, the goods of life?
The times we live in provide, instead of equality and the right to a decent life free from the fear of homelessness, an inability to access healthcare, food, and any number of other things, provids The People with entertainment that is like what was provided in Orwell's 1984 but with better production values, one of the greatest pleasures cultivated by it, hating other People, feeling resentments, and stoking greed after status symbol possessions. The ersatz religion of the TV style ministires and the variety-show-nightclub churches turn something referred to as "The Bible" into an inversion of the Gospel, the Epistles, The Law, the Prophets hardly mentioned except in their fortune telling games.
If relgion, if Christianity, especially, among if not the most egalitarian religion if Jesus is to mean anything to it, has to make equality the central moral aspect of it or it will continue to decline. The United States may well be lost to despotism because it never has been allowed to be pushed to equality despite that struggle having been engaged in since before the Constitution was drafted. That struggle for equality, NOT THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTARIAN "FREEDOM" is literally the best thing about the United States and it is continually thwarted on the basis of the Constitution or something as illegitimate as the "common law tradition" under the practices of the legal profession, the courts and, especially the Supreme Court.
Marilynne Robinson correctly notes that democracy and prosperity would seem to have something of a direct relationship, as the Biden presidency shows, as the Johnson presidency showed, as the New Deal showed, and the opposite has been demonstrated, as well, in the string of Republican administrations that have thwarted equality all have a record of producing economic hardship going back more than a century Governing of, by and for the millionaries and billionaires produces bad economic results, especially as you go down the economic scale. Yet our "free press" lies about that because bad times for the many have the possibility of temporarily being good for the rich.
I think the first question in this last paragraph from Marilynne Robinson's Preface is self evident. Of course good institutions come from good intentions. Like religion, like scripture, all of that is a product of human thought, of human intentionality, of pursuing purposes. If an institution goes from bad to good, it is a product of human intention. I doubt the change and reform of any bad institution has ever just happened on to the good by accident. The opposite happening by chance has somewhat better odds, especially if "civil libertarian" lawyers or "institutionalists" are making those choices. The fact that the common good, the general prosperity, what the familiar preamble to the U.s. Constitution states as its intentions in a way that a non-lawyer would certainly take to be a promise made by those who frame it and would be an integral part of the document, since that is what was promised in the document that they got The Peoples' representatives to sign on to in the beginning. Here is the lawyerly loophole to that as found at that most august of American institutions, the secular delphic oracle of our idolatry, the United States Courts:
The preamble sets the stage for the Constitution (Archives.gov). It clearly communicates the intentions of the framers and the purpose of the document. The preamble is an introduction to the highest law of the land; it is not the law. It does not define government powers or individual rights.
Establish Justice is the first of five objectives outlined in the 52-word paragraph that the Framers drafted in six weeks during the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787. They found a way to agree on the following basic principles:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Maybe those largely lawyers who framed it put "justice" first because they knew they needed lawyers to get out of the existing contract promising "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. so famously noted they had promised in the Declaration of Independence but which they never intended to pay up on. And they appointed such judges and "justices" as would never intend to make them pay, some things haven't changed much since then.
Of those five things promised under the Constitution, the only one that they can be said to have intended to deliver on was the protection of the country from foreign attacks and whatever domestic attacks as would put the wealth of the wealthy and the order that favored them at risk. It was the rebellions of those who felt duped by the revolutionary leaders, who, typical of revolutionaries who take control, once in power didn't keep their overtly made promises. That is what led to the drafting of the Constitution. But they certainly never did much of anything to quell violence against others under the rule of law, they institutionalized it under the Second Amendment, what the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have used to arm a Republican Klan in case egalitarian democracy threatens to become real. And now under Trump, they have failed even to quell the possibility of insurrection against the very government they instituted or, incredibly enough, an insurrectionist gaining the presidency by election. The Roberts Court, with some Democratic support, nullified the relevant section of the 14th Amendment to allow an insurrectionist to become president. YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A RADICAL EGALITARIAN DEMOCRAT TO NOTICE THAT THE CONSTITUTION HAS FAILED. Though you appear to need to be one to admit that obvious and terrible truth.
The slave holders and Indian murdering land grabbers in the Constitutional Convention certainly didn't have any intention at all to provide any of the others on an equal basis, certainly not to those they enslaved, the free Black People that the Supreme Court under "due process" said were allowed to be abducted into slavery as Trump's ICESTAPO are abducting People off the streets today, they had no intention of permitting those for most of the People living in the United States during slavery and genocide against the Native population, Women, to those who were denied the vote due to their propertyless state, and, in the beginning, even Catholic males who met all other requirements to vote in some states. The history of America is tellable with great accuracy, I'd say only told with any possible accuracy, as the struggle to achieve equality by all of those groups and others, such as those who were in bond to the wage slave system. It is incredible that those at the top of the "justice" system, the Courts, deny that those contractual promises are not only a contract BUT FORM THE BASIS OF THE CONTRACT THAT GIVES THEM AND ALL OF GOVERNMENT ANY LEGITIMACY with complete and self-granted impunity AND THAT A DUPED AND COWED PUBLIC WILL ALLOW THEM TO GET AWAY WITH IT BECAUSE THEY'RE THE BIGGEST FATTEST LAWYERS IN THE LAND.
Whatever good institutions we have had under the federal government are either being destroyed or have been turned bad and since the federal government is allowing that to happen, it has to be attributed to the Constitutional order it is happening under, John Adams three-branch theory has failed, the presidential system turns out to be as dangerous here as it has in other countries that have copied it, the First Amendment has been the engine of corruption under its interpretation by the Supreme Court which grabbed extra-Constitutional powers in the first such failure of the Constitution in 1803, the terrible assertions of Marbury v Madison.
By their fruits you will know them. Donald Trump is the fruit of the kind of democracy America has. As were George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Bush I and Richard Nixon. The fruits of the long struggle for equality, The Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, myriads of other rights, which apart from Roe v Wade, were the product of long and difficult and not infrequently deadly struggle which have been have been swept aside by five or six or nine unelected "justices" And that is because of what the Constitution is and always has been apart for a few brief years in a couple of periods in American history when Courts and Congresses and the majority of voters had better intentions.
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