Has the Uncivil War Begun

I’ve asked the question whether the United States is a representative democracy – see my recent Democracy, Anocracy or Plutocracy? blog – and empirically determined that we are not. Our system of government, particularly as applied in the modern era, places us somewhere between an anocracy (a hybrid between autocracy and democracy) and a plutocracy (rule by the privileged class). A twice impeached populist president has nonetheless appointed new justices to the US Supreme Court, creating a radical right-wing, activist majority hellbent on reversing well over half a century of civil and individual rights legislation and precedents.

With the exception of slavery – which would have died anyway in a mechanized world – the bulk of issues separating the Union from the Confederacy still define a significant part of the red/blue divide today. Add to this toxic mix the rise of the “me, me, me and only me” fast-track monied American aristocracy with more wealth, even corrected for inflation, than we have ever experienced before. The new celebrities. We are on the verge of generating the first trillionaire on earth. Money and guns talk, science and educated classes are disparaged, and extreme minority religious views are now shoved down the throats of all Americans. The Supreme Court has played an instrumental role in this destruction of true “equality-based” majority rule.

The trend? Recent decisions statistically favor white Christians over other classes. 81% of cases with material religious issues now favor exclusionary or discriminatory practices of minorities with extreme right-wing Christian views. The rural value of gun ownership seems to trump the rising death and destruction from the barely controlled proliferation of firearms, recently resulting in what the NRA says it at least 15 million semiautomatic assault weapons in civilian hands.

The Court began this recent downward trend towards reversal – effectively turning into an unappealable, unchallengeable, highly partisan legislature – before the Trump era. It started with the dramatically flawed 2008 Antonin Scalia opinion in Heller vs DC: the first Supreme Court ruling, ignoring the “well regulated militia” language and erroneously citing British law in the late 18th century, to declare ubiquitous gun ownership a fundamental American right. Since this ruling, gun violence in the United States has exploded, with mass shootings (almost 150 so far this year alone) redefining the modern era here.

In 2010, the Court ruled (in Citizens United vs FEC) that business and comparable structures had the same First Amendment rights as individuals to communicate via uncapped political contributions for candidates and causes they embraced. This decision resulted in a vastly more right-wing explosion of political cash, further resulting in the election of new kind of populist, right-wing candidate: the “we will never compromise” right-wing, often conspiracy theory-driven Republican in search of that biased cash. Traditional conservatives were literally driven out of the party (hence the marginalized “Lincoln Project”). Tax cuts and probusiness legislation proliferated across the country. Companies in disagreement with right-wing polices were now punished.

The 2013 Shelby County vs Holder decision literally repealed the salient provisions of Voting Rights Act of 1965 (most recently amended and reaffirmed in 2008), and those states once forbidden from imposing voting restrictions were now unleashed. Bolstered by the disproven mythology that the 2020 election was completely fraudulent (note that the Republicans elected on the same ballot they deem fraudulent are not giving up their elected offices), every state once directly governed by that voting statute (and virtually every other red state) immediately enacted the very voter suppression laws that the Voting Rights Act was intended to prevent or reverse.

In December, the Gorsuch Court – as my April 20th Accountability, Responsibility and the End of the Robert’s Supreme Court blog points out, Chief Justice John Roberts no longer truly helmed the Court once Amy Coney-Barrett joined – sustained most of those voting restrictions and refused to halt a de facto rejection of Roe vs Wade (1973), by a new Mississippi statute, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Interpreted widely that Roe would either be reversed completely or severely limited, those red states that had not already limited or banned abortions enacted laws to reverse the law as applied under Roe.

In January, the Supreme Court (in Biden vs Missouri) chipped away at the federal government’s ability to contain COVID; it issued a stay of the OSHA vaccine-or-test requirement on private businesses of 100 or more workers, dealing a setback to the Biden administration's effort to control the COVID pandemic. However, the Court did allow Biden to require healthcare workers and those working for the federal government to be tested or vaccinated, with right-wing Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett dissenting. Trump appointees were obviously against reasonable controls, even as necessary to contain COVID.

For example, in April, Trump-appointed Florida U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, describing the CDC’s mandate simply to ensure that public spaces are “sanitized” in Health Freedom Defense Fund, Inc., et al., v. Biden, et al., scrapped the CDC mask mandate from most public transportation. A surge in the Omicron variant, already under way, immediately accelerated. That decision is under appeal, but if affirmed, it would cripple the CDC’s current and future ability to deal with pandemics.

Additional battlelines were being drawn as fighting a red state “culture war,” limiting public school classroom to teach and public library rights or hold books which discussed “critical race theory” (including gender differences). Texas and Florida became leaders in passing statutes to ban these practices and create the right of private citizens to sue schools and teachers to enforce these bans. Such prohibitions now proliferate in red states. The Confederacy was still honored, including by Mississippi’s official one month celebration of that defeated, pro-slavery movement. Florida also got into high gear, after Disney opposed the state’s anti-CRT legislation, by stripping the Mouse House of their preferred-controlled status over the land in and around their Orlando Disney World theme park.

Not to be outdone, in April, Texas Governor Greg Abbott demanded that financial firms doing business in his state disclose their climate polices. Presiding over a major oil and gas producing state, Abbott has consistently opposed measures to reduce fossil fuel usage (which Abbott has called an illegal “boycott” of Texas firms). Abbott’s State Comptroller, Glenn Hegar, formally sent that demand to more than 140 financial firms, with a rather unambiguous underlying threat that maintaining such policies may well result in severe restrictions for such firms to do business in Texas. “The mounting pressure in Texas reflects a broader effort by Republicans nationwide to scrutinize companies that back policies championed by many Democrats, such as reducing carbon emissions, securing abortion rights or supporting LGBTQ teaching in schools.

“Republicans in states including West Virginia and Kansas have introduced legislation similar to that in Texas, which bans government agencies from investing with firms seen as cutting ties with the energy industry… ‘What it means practically is Texas doesn’t want to do business from a policy standpoint with those companies,’ Hegar told Bloomberg…” Bloomberg/AP, April 27th.

In the end, there are two Americas separated by irreconcilable differences, and even as younger demographics have profoundly different values, the polarization engendered by contemporary politics is only growing wider. Will the younger generation rise fast enough bring this country together… or are we inevitably becoming, as my, April 25th blog called it, The Separated States of America?

I’m Peter Dekom, and as any student of history who has drilled into the rise of dictatorships knows, what we never thought could happen here… is happening here.