Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times about the likely demise of the Voting Rights Act (signed into law 60 years ago yesterday by President Johnson) at the hands of Chief Justice "Balls and Strikes" Roberts, and of the four republics that America has transitioned through. This an extended excerpt:
... There are several American republics and at least two Constitutions, a first and a second founding. Our first republic began with ratification in 1788 and collapsed at Fort Sumter in 1861. Our second emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War and was dismantled, as the University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha argues, by Jim Crow at home and imperial ambition abroad. If the third American republic took shape under the unusual circumstances of the middle decades of the 20th century — what the Vanderbilt historian Jefferson Cowie calls “the great exception” of depression, war and a political system indelibly shaped by immigration restriction and the near-total exclusion of millions of American citizens from the political system — then the fourth began with the achievements of the civil rights movement, which included a newly open door to the world.
This was an American republic built on multiracial pluralism. A nation of natives and of immigrants from around the world. Of political parties that strove to represent a diverse cross-section of society. Of a Black president and a future “majority-minority” nation. There was an ugly side — it’s no coincidence that state retrenchment from public goods and services followed the crumbling of racial barriers. But for all its harsh notes and discord, this was the closest the country ever came to the “composite nation” of Frederick Douglass’s aspirations: a United States that served as home to all who might seek the shelter of the Declaration of Independence and its “principles of justice, liberty and perfect humanity equality.”
It’s this America that Donald Trump and his movement hope to condemn to the ash heap of history. It’s this America that they’re fighting to destroy with their attacks on immigration, civil rights laws, higher education and the very notion of a pluralistic society of equals.
The Supreme Court’s war on the Voting Rights Act precedes Trump but it is simpatico with his aims. The court’s steady effort to make the law an artifact of the past is of a piece with its broad expansion of executive power for the current president. Both work to undermine the basis for this more politically equal era of American democracy and clear the path to an American autocracy.
But while the Voting Rights Act may be heading to its demise as a functional piece of legislation, it can still stand as a symbol: of our collective capacity to expand the horizons of democratic life; of our creative intelligence in the task of making a more perfect union; and of our ability to confront and overcome the worst of this nation’s past and present.
The Voting Rights Act is quite likely dead. Long live the Voting Rights Act.
Bouie is quite right to be hopeful despite the darkness enveloping our country (and the world) today. The four republics he identifies weren't immutable. Each gave way to another America in time, some worse, some better. We're seeing the "worse" now, but Bouie (and we) believe there will be a "better" in time. But for that day to come sooner rather than later, we must "confront and overcome the worst of this nation's past and present" and never shirk from that responsibility. We can't let the legacy of our lives be the triumph of pure evil over an imperfect good.
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