. . . an aristocratic faction: a junto of unprincipled men, often distinguished for their wealth or abilities, who combine together and make their object their private interests and aggrandizement; the existence of this description is merely accidental, but particularly to be guarded against.
Federalist Farmer 7
THE CYNICISM OF JOHN ROBERTS goes unremarked on even though he is one of the most cynical officials in the government. His declaration in 2007 that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race" is certainly obliterated by his silence on his Republican-fascist colleagues giving the Supreme Court seal of approval to racial discrimination by the Trump regime's ICEstapo. While I think that he and his fellow Republicans on the Roberts Court's ultimate goal is the re-imposition of racial and other restrictions on voting - IT SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN THAT ROBERTS, KAVANAUGH AND CONEY-BARRETT ALL WORKED AS PARTISAN REPUBLICANS ON THE SUPREME COURT NULLIFICATION OF THE VOTER IN BUSH V GORE, not to mention that that cesspool of pathology, Clarence Thomas was all-in on that original ultimate Supreme Court power grab - I think that for Roberts there is also a whiff of the aristocratic style of white supremacy to it. I get the feeling, looking over his record in regard to such matters, that he didn't especially like seeing Black and Brown faces at Harvard when he went there. Though I'm sure he didn't use the "N" word or make that overtly apparent. He's certainly got something about that stuck in his aristocratic craw, thus his hypocritical evocation of "colorblindness."
For the rest of it, he is an anti-democrat in the same vein as all aristocrats eventually prove themselves to be because they know that their privileges are most endangered by majority rule - eventually the majority will always tend towards the diminution of privilege in favor of the common good, as deferred as that is under the media promotion of racism and the privilege of the rich.
No matter what other ancillary aspects of inequality that contribute to their primary goal, racism, Constitutional "originalism" or "textualism" or the most overtly fascist academic theory currently fashionable among lying lawyers, the unitary executive, the first and greatest motive of what gets lumped together as "conservatism" is that protection of privilege, whether of great wealth or on behalf of it as in the case of the aristocratic grifters* of the Roberts Court or the billionaire syndicate that they are handing the country to or the merely middle-class who are foolish enough to believe those leeches will not take their little pile, using government policy to facilitate that - as so many Southern, MidWestern and other farm families are quickly finding out as J. D. Vance and his colleagues buy their foreclosed on farms for pennies on the dollar.**
The most glaring of defects in the Constitution though eyes which see by the light of the Golden Rule, the ultimate and simplest codification of the moral supremacy of equality, is that it nowhere promotes equality among human beings. You can do a reading of the original text before the Bill of Rights was inserted AND AFTER IT WAS and find no to precious little notion of the equality of human beings. There is a lot of talk of equality among states, among Electors and Senators - notably in all of these areas among the most anti-egalitarian features of the Constitution - but not of human beings or even citizens. About the closest to that comes in the entirely disregarded preface to it, the phrases "provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare" (note Welfare is capitalized, which something should be made of) which is belied immediately by the pro-slavery provisions in the body of it and which the structuring of the Senate and Electoral college all demolish any claim that the slave-holders, financiers and aristocratic lawyers who wrote it had any intention of treating most others as they would want to be treated. For anyone who claims that the ultimate law of the United States, The Constitution is a document in line with the Christian religion, it most certainly fails on that as so many other teachings of Jesus and Moses and the other Prophets.
As I said, I think , ultimately, the goal of the Republican-fascists is the protection, enhancement and enjoyment of their own wealth.
The fact is that all that is good in American history is the struggle to gain equality and that has always been a struggle against the Constitution as it was written and that means against the various ruses that the champions of privilege, white supremacy, aristocracy invent and put into academic legal double-talk. In that an enormous struggle with huge pain and sacrifice and blood, costing untold thousands and more of lives, a little progress made, such as through the Civil War Amendments will quickly be turned back by something such as the general amnesty given to the Confederate traitors by the white supremacist Confederacy sympathetic Andrew Johnson, the corrupt Electoral College deal of Rutherford Hayes and, ultimately, the Plessy ruling of the Supreme Court (not to mention how the Court turned the 14th Amendment on its head over and over again) the original sins of the framers as codified in the Constitution will always be there to let the likes of Taney or Roberts et al knock it back. That is the role of the Supreme Court in our history with the fewest of exceptions and those exceptions - such as were made by the Court under Earl Warren - can be nullified by the more typical of anti-egalitarian courts such as under Rehnquist and Roberts. You won't get that from high school civics and American history, you won't get that from Ken Burns on PBS but it is the actual history of the country and ESPECIALLY the Supreme Court under the Constitution.
It is the goal of Republican-fascists - the traditional Republicans of wealth, new and old allied with the traditionally Southern but now generally dangerous white supremacists, to do what the original framers did in the 3/5th deal made with the slavers, keep "those classes" from having "their centinels in the government" and, so be ruined. They have succeeded in gulling many a white person of modest means and even those with considerable means by middle-class standards through the media into voting against their own interest - which is what the Southern aristocracy started doing as soon as they realized they could harness poor whites by promoting racism and granting them a piddling status above Black People. That is one of the major themes of the true history of America not only as told in terms of equality but, also, in terms of freedom. Someone has to lose their freedom in order for that scheme to work, that is also one of the things that John Roberts and his colleagues are doing.
* With her huge advance for writing her book, Amy Coney-Barrett joins the overt grifters Alito and Thomas and the indirect grifting of Roberts (through his wife) known to sit on the Roberts Court. Either the publisher made that advance knowing that there was no way that it would be made back in honest sales of the book, so it was a bribe, or that they could depend on one of those phony NYT Bestsellers List mass buys financed by millionaire or billionaire money - so still a bribe. One thing is certain, the Roberts Court is the most overtly bought Supreme Court in our history, though "justices" on past courts have certainly ruled in their own financial self-interst, including the most revered of them all, the major slave-holder John Marshall.
** Federalist Farmer 7 has an interesting analysis of American society - at least the white male part of it. The very end of it carries an implicit warning from which the title of this is taken.
The third is the natural aristocracy; this term we use to designate a respectable order of men, the line between whom and the natural democracy is in some degree arbitrary; we may place men on one side of this line, which others may place on the other, and in all disputes between the few and the many, a considerable number are wavering and uncertain themselves on which side they are, or ought to be. In my idea of our natural aristocracy in the United States, I include about four or five thousand men; and among these I reckon those who have been placed in the offices of governors, of members of Congress, and state senators generally, in the principal officers of Congress, of the army and militia, the superior judges, the most eminent professional men, &c. and men of large property--the other persons and orders in the community form the natural democracy; this includes in general the yeomanry, the subordinate officers, civil and military, the fishermen, mechanics and traders, many of the merchants and professional men. It is easy to perceive that men of these two classes, the aristocratical, and democratical, with views equally honest, have sentiments widely different, especially respecting public and private expences, salaries, taxes, &c. Men of the first class associate more extensively, have a high sense of honor, possess abilities, ambition, and general knowledge; men of the second class are not so much used to combining great objects; they possess less ambition, and a larger share of honesty: their dependence is principally on middling and small estates, industrious pursuits, and hard labour, while that of the former is principally on the emoluments of large estates, and of the chief offices of government. Not only the efforts of these two great parties are to be balanced, but other interests and parties also, which do not always oppress each other merely for want of power, and for fear of the consequences; though they, in fact, mutually depend on each other; yet such are their general views, that the merchants alone would never fail to make laws favourable to themselves and oppressive to the farmers, &c. the farmers alone would act on like principles; the former would tax the land, the latter the trade. The manufacturers are often disposed to contend for monopolies, buyers make every exertion to lower prices, and sellers to raise them; men who live by fees and salaries endeavour to raise them, and the part of the people who pay them, endeavour to lower them; the public creditors to augment the taxes, and the people at large to lessen them. Thus, in every period of society, and in all the transactions of men, we see parties verifying the observation made by the Marquis; and those classes which have not their centinels in the government, in proportion to what they have to gain or lose, most infallibly be ruined.
