Classic rock by Michael Bérubé
by digby
Scott Lemieux reminds us of this classic satire by a master:
Brown’s Birth, and Death
Justice Earl Warren did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Brown v. Board decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.
When Warren wrote the Brown decision, it took the segregation issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that’s always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn’t have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.
Instead, Warren and his colleagues invented a right to integration, overturning more than a half-century of established precedent, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.
Southern voters became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.
The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Earl Warren and his colleagues suppressed that democratic “integration” debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can’t stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Brown v. Board is overturned, politics will never get better.
No matter what, you can’t go wrong by blaming it on the liberals. If only those hippies didn’t provoke everyone into being assholes everything would be just fine.
It’s always better if we lose. As Bérubé remarked today on Lemieux’s blog:
I remember when we lost on the Equal Rights Amendment, and then because there was no backlash, the conservative movement totally abandoned its attempt to roll back women’s rights, and went home.
Lemieux’s post is about this popular idea that there is danger in the Supreme Court upholding gay marriage because it would create more of a backlash than the preferred legislative approach. He dismantles the argument surrounding Roe vs Wade that this is based upon and writes:
There’s no reason to believe that a broad opinion invalidating same-sex marriage would produce any more backlash than legislative repeals would. There would be more “backlash” only if you (plausibly) assume that absent Supreme Court decisions many states would maintain their bans on same-sex marriage for a long time. In other words, you can avoid backlash by just not winning, an argument I consider self-refuting.
This is also why I thought the president should have evoked universal human rights rather than states’ rights when he made his switch on gay marriage. In our culture, validating such rights under our constitution is about as good as it ever gets — and the only way to avoid backlash is by losing. There’s just no margin in it — and there’s a lot to be gained by stating the principles clearly.
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