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Wednesday at midnight, the Supreme Court let stand the Texas Heartbeat Act which makes abortion illegal after the 6th week of pregnancy and enforces the law through civil suits brought against those who assist a woman receiving what the bill defines as an illegal abortion. The Wikipedia entry (in bold blue) explains the Texas Heartbeat Act pretty well:

The act allows any person to sue someone who provides abortion care once a signal of “cardiac motion” in an embryo can be detected via transvaginal ultrasound, which is usually possible beginning at around six weeks of pregnancy. Though patients may not be sued, anybody who provides support can be sued, including doctors, staff members at clinics, counselors, lawyers, financiers, and those who provide transportation to an abortion clinic, including taxi drivers. The act incentivizes this process by offering pay-outs of at least $10,000 in addition to court costs if a defendant is proven guilty, and shields those who sue but lose from paying court costs. Plaintiffs do not require any personal connection to a provider in order to bring forth a lawsuit. The law contains exceptions in the case of medical emergency, but not in the case of rape or incest.

In response to the Supreme Court decision, there has been a great deal of depression, anxiety, panic, and rage among the multiracial and socially liberal center-left which has worked hard to preserve the abortion rights laid out in the classic Roe v Wade decision (1973). In particular, feminist groups have been fighting to protect Roe as the Supreme Court has gotten more conservative and have been worried that this day would arrive since the 1980’s.

Well, that day has arrived.

At the same time, people on the center-left have started planning their own attacks on the Texas Bill and the Supreme Court. Justice Sotomayor wrote a scathing dissent, lawyers have been posting about possible legal arguments against the Texas Abortion Act, a national Women’s March has been planned for Oct. 2, and Elie Mystal has useful and creative suggestions about giving abortion providers qualified immunity as agents of the federal government. For its part, the Biden administration has condemned the Supreme Court decision as “constitutional chaos” and the Texas law as “so extreme it does not even allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest.” President Biden has also promised a “whole-of-government” effort to counter the decision.

Much more can be done though.

In terms of resistance to the Texas Law, people on the multiracial, socially liberal center-left can:

1. Create fund to support anyone losing a suit for aiding an abortion past six weeks in Texas.
2. Create an “Underground Women’s Railroad” to get women out of state for abortion care
3. Finance research for earlier detection of pregnancies.
4. Flood the state with “Morning After” abortion medications
5. Campaign hard on Texas GOP distraction from the disaster with the 2021 winter storm.

Democrats on the federal level can also do a lot to attack the Texas Abortion Law

1. Money. Pledge to spend federal money to repay anyone who loses a civil suit under the Texas Abortion Law.
2. Civil Rights. Investigate Texas abortion vigilantes for violating federal civil rights laws. Among other laws, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically protects the Civil Rights of all women. This and other laws should be scoured for clauses that render the enforcement of the Texas Abortion Law illegal.
3. Fire a Warning Shot. It would only take ONE Democratic Senator to file a bill calling for the number of Supreme Court Justices to be reduced from 9 to 6. That kind of UNPACK THE COURT bill could not pass over Manchin and Sinema but it would get everyone’s attention, including the Supreme Court itself.
4. Get Political. The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress need to get much more political about the Supreme Court. Specifically, they need to go after Court conservatives for their attack on abortion rights and voting rights as “Assaults on the “Fundamental Rights of Americans.” In the same way, the overturning of the rent moratorium is an “Assault on the Basic Functions of Government.” It shouldn’t be too hard. All the court conservatives (Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) are hacks who came up through the Republican Party and Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh are notable snowflakes who would respond in partisan and reckless ways.

The point is that Mitch McConnell and Trump made conservative dreams come true by stacking up a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Given the Court’s reactionary decisions on voting rights, immigration, and abortion rights, that majority has to be challenged at every turn. Needless to say, the Democrats should fire the Trump Three justices the first chance they get.

Top image from New York Times

We’re all in this together” used to be a cliché but has become a profound statement of civic patriotism now that white conservatives have rejected cooperation with the rest of American society. It’s difficult to over-estimate the venom with which white conservatives have come to reject any sense of common purpose, togetherness, sharing, or team effort with the rest of American society.

What Would I Care? The default position for white conservatives, has become “I don’t give a shit.” Caleb Wallace of Texas gave nihilistic view a “patriotic” spin with “I care about freedom more than I do your personal health.”

Translated: “I don’t want to wear a mask to prevent myself from being infected by or spreading Covid. And I could care less about you.”

That included his family. When Wallace came down with Covid, he fought against seeing a doctor despite having a pregnant wife and three children. He gave them no more thought than the rest of us. Perhaps even less.

All About Power. Losing the ability to imagine a common good, white conservatives think of public health measures like vaccines, mask wearing, and social distancing strictly in terms of “liberals” or “society” exercising power over them and insist on speaking of public health in terms of “control” and forcing “compliance.”

When speaking about masks, Tennessee pastor Greg Locke claims that “the federal government demands only” compliance, “not an improvement in public health, among Americans.” The same with Tucker Carlson:

This is about politics and social control. The Biden administration has decided it owns your body. The media agree with that. If the rest of us allow that grotesque claim to go unchallenged, we’re in deep trouble going forward, for generations, long after COVID recedes, and it will at some point.”

With no spirit of cooperation or common good, no idea of “We Are All in This Together,” Carlson can only view vaccine mandates as “politics and social control.”

An Insurrectionary Logic. Yesterday at a MAGA protest in Harrisburg, PA, Steve Lynch, a GOP candidate for Northampton County Executive advocated overthrowing local school boards. Lynch initially pitched his proposal in terms of “men’s advocacy”–Where are men. Men, wake up and smell the coffee! Let’s go!. Yeah, we want to make men great again. Make men men again.” That gets back to the main logic of white conservatism: Men need to be great again; heterosexuals need to be great again; Christians need to be great again; English speakers need to be great again; conservatives need to be great again; and above all “white people need to be great again.”

PA GOP Gov candidate Steve Lynch today: “Forget going into these school boards with freaking data. You go in to these school boards to remove them. I’m going in with 20 strong men and I’m gonna give them an option – they can leave or they can be removed.” pic.twitter.com/A0M6SsOldI

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 30, 2021

And according to the Steve Lynches and Tucker Carlsons of the world, men aren’t going to become “great again” through persuasion, politics, popular culture, the working of the free market, or any other peaceful mechanism. Increasingly, the only way white conservative men like Steve Lynch can imagine themselves regaining status is violence against local government institutions, the federal government, and American society at large.

Top picture by Gerald Herbert/AP

This is a talk I delivered at a campus forum at Morehead State University on Tuesday, August 29, 2017. It’s a succinct version of views I still mostly hold.

The Democratic Political Party in the U.S. is in the unique position of being both a radical reform party and a conservating party guarding fundamental structures of government against nihilistic assault. What I want to do is discuss the Democrats as a radical reform party while making some nods to the nihilistic opposition associated with white conservatism. Constituencies associated with the Democrats have transformed the dominant iconography of American history, brought the U.S. up to date with Western Europe on women’s equality and gay rights, and brought debates on economic redistribution into the core of party debate. Let me start with the Democrats and American mythology.

The Democratic Party is many things, among them, the Democratic Party organization, voting constituencies among white liberals, black people, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and gay people, and activist groups linked to these constituencies. Over the last 50 years, Democrats have re-imagined an American history in which the Black Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s became the “founding event” and the American Revolution, Civil War, industrialization, and popular culture were all interpreted through their relation to Civil Rights. When I was growing up in the early 1960’s, the founding event was the American Revolution and the central tragedy of American history was the defeat of the slave South in the Civil War. To the contrary, the central story of American history has become the struggle of black people against white racial oppression and Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech has become even more significant than the Declaration of Independence as founding events for the American republic. This has been an “organic process” as the Civil Rights universe has expanded to incorporate feminism, LGBT rights, immigrant advocacy, and recognition of the disabled in the U.S. as well as non-violent struggles all over the world. The civil rights story of striving against racial oppression became the symbolic core of the Democratic Party well before it became the dominant narrative for the U.S. in general. This is one of the reasons why the Democrats are now much more closely identified with the symbols of American history than the conservative opposition.

As the story of Civil Rights was becoming the story of America, the Democrats became a multicultural, socially liberal party. This is partly a matter of voting constituencies. In the 2012 election, about 55% of the vote for Barack Obama was white while the rest was African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, Jewish, Muslim, and LGBT. What I also mean by “multicultural” is that the various groups support each other politically, influence each other culturally, and identify themselves as having a common cause against “bigotry.” Loosely speaking, the Democratic coalition is a multicultural “us” in opposition to a bigoted “them.” This sense of multicultural group identity is reinforced by shared values of social liberalism that dominate most of the coalition. These include support for abortion and contraception rights, gay marriage, interracial heterosexual marriage, legal alcohol, and marijuana legalization, as well as more generalized values of diversity and difference. One largely ignored socially liberal value is “love” as sense of connection between highly individual people with diverse backgrounds. The symbolism of love is pervasive in contemporary popular culture and is an indication of the extent to which the social liberalism of Democratic constituencies is the dominant set of values in American society.

I’m going to wind up by briefly discussing the way in which the Democrats are the party of radical economic reform while being the only major political party committed to economic stability. Concerning economic redistribution, Occupy Wall Street has become the dominant frame of reference for discussion of economic policy-making. Bernie Sanders campaigned on increased taxes on the wealthy, breaking up the big banks, adding a financial transactions tax, and dramatically raising the minimum wage, but Hillary Clinton also argued for minimum wage hikes, increased taxes on the wealthy, tighter regulations on Wall Street, and redistributing the increased revenue to economic development and alternative energy. With Bernie and Hillary both proposing free college tuition schemes, the Democratic Party now has a commitment to wealth redistribution with the power of this kind of value orientation being illustrated by the developing taboo against chumminess with Wall Street among white Democrats.

Simultaneously, the Democrats have become the party that values economic stability. Beginning with the debt limit crisis of 2011, the most conservative Republicans have flirted annually with the idea of the American government refusing to make scheduled payments on the national debt and thus blowing up the American and world economies. This year, Donald Trump has already threatened a government shutdown if Congress doesn’t appropriate money for the wall Trump proposes to build between the U.S. and Mexico. Responding to the 2008 global financial crisis, the Obama administration prioritized economic stability over reform, but that really isn’t in the cards any more as Democratic activists have insisted on getting both. As I argued in a recent conference paper, the Democrats have become the party of both progress and order in American society while the Republicans have become a vehicle for nostalgia fantasies and nihilism.

Hillary got 48.2% of the popular vote in 2016, with Trump getting 46.2. There’s been much commentary on Hillary’s failures, but there’s not enough on the radical nature of her campaign. Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the first presidential campaign to explicitly organize itself around minority and feminist themes. Hillary conceded nothing to conservatives on abortion rights, transgender rights, Black Lives Matter, or a path to citizenship while still being a “center-left” or “moderate” Democrat rather than a leftist. This gets me to the core of the 2016 election. If Hillary had been elected, the Democrats would have rapidly advanced a dramatic transformation of American society and Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters were willing to blow up America’s traditional democratic political system to prevent that. In a way, American politics has become the Democratic Party vs organized political nihilism and nihilism won in 2016.

massdesigngroup.org

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama is a memorial to the more than 5,000 black people who have been lynched in the United States and places lynching within both the historical context of the Middle Passage, Slavery, and Segregation and black resistance to white supremacy and racial oppression. I believe I’ve visited the National Memorial three times since it opened in 2018 and have been haunted and sobered each time I entered what the Memorial defines and I accept as its “sacred space.”

Today in the FloridaPhoenix, there’s a great article by Diane Roberts on the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, combining references to incidents like the 1894 lynching of Jack Brownlee, contemporary racial violence, and the vote suppression politics of Mississippi and Texas governors Tate Reeves and Greg Abbott. Given police murders, on-going lynching cases (“There’ve been eight suspected lynchings of Black men and boys over the past two decades, the most recent in 2019)”, and the everyday discrimination and threats faced by Black-Americans, the legacy of lynching continues into the present.

At the same time, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a part of a culture of Civil Rights and Civil Rights commemoration that’s become a focal point of Official American Culture. Of course, the primary personalities and events being honored are associated with the Black Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s with the Martin Luther King’s Birthday federal holiday, the iconic status of Rosa Parks and John L. Lewis, and the observances for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, March on Selma, the Freedom Riders, and the Lunch Counter Sit-Ins. Of course, there’s been a number of Martin Luther King streets and boulevards while the city of Atlanta is awash in Civil Rights commemoration of Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, and others. Likewise, there’s Rosa Parks Highways, Avenues, Streets, and Boulevards in Montgomery Al, Nashville TN, Patterson NJ, Detroit, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and no doubt other places.

Civil Rights commemoration also reaches goes back in time. There are so many references to the 1852 Fourth of July Speech by Frederick Douglass that I’m not completely whether Douglass or Thomas Jefferson is the figure most associated with the Fourth of July. There are also more local commemorations like the statue to murdered black voting rights activist Octavius Catto at City Hall in Philadelphia.

Given the unique place of black people in the Civil Rights Movement and the traditions preceding the Civil Rights Movement, there can not be much surprise about Black Americans being front in center with Civil Rights Commemoration. At the same time, the Civil Rights framework now encompasses much of the feminist, gay rights, Native American, disability rights, and immigration rights movements. There are already commemorations of major events in feminism like the passage of the 19th amendment and LGBT rights like the Stonewall commemorations. Likewise, a number of factors like to an uptick in Native American recognition during the Trump years. Civil Rights provides a broad, inclusive, and increasingly important framework for national commemoration.

Red State Governors like Ron DeSantis (Florida), Greg Abbott (Texas), and Doug Ducey (Arizona) are signing executive orders that ban city governments and local school boards in Democratic cities from enacting mask or vaccination mandates. The always excellent Ron Brownstein breaks down of the power dynamics between conservative Republican Governors with power bases in stagnant rural areas and Democratic mayors and school boards representing multicultural and economically dynamic metro areas.

Now, the school officials of metro areas in Florida and Texas are rebelling against the ban on school mandates. School officials in the Miami and Tamp areas are going ahead with mask mandates despite an executive order by DeSantis; so are schools in Texas and Arizona

Some brief points:

Reinforcing the Democratic Super-Majority: As is the case with issues like gun control, abortion rights, gay marriage, trans rights and Biden’s infrastructure plans, support for mask and vaccination mandates is over 60%. As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post notes:

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll, for instance, finds large majorities of registered voters either strongly or somewhat support their local governments requiring masks for offices (64 percent), for indoor dining (61 percent), at gyms (62 percent) and at entertainment venues (65 percent).

Reporters and pollsters still pay more attention to white conservative contrariness, but much of the Democratic policy agenda now enjoys super-majority support.

Another Dimension of Instability: The United States has not been a stable society since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President in 2015. That instability is usually discussed in terms of the Jan. 6 Insurrection but the impasse between Red State governors and Blue Metros is also destabilizing. By refusing to allow metros like Miami and Tampa to govern themselves, Desantis undermines the well-being of cities. Still, executive orders have the force of law and metro officials defy the law by keeping their mask mandates. I’m on the side of the cities, but what they’re doing is destabilizing as well.

Blue instability. Sunday’s anti-vax riot in Los Angeles is a reminder that Blue metros areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Denver, and New York still contain large populations of white conservatives. So do most of the Blue States. A militia in Michigan planned a coup attempt against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the terrorism of rape threats, death threats, and attacks on the children of public officials is a constant in the lives of local and state officials in blue areas. Chronic instability is a thing.