This republic from its inception aspired to be a place where all are “created equal.” The United States has struggled for its entire history to live up to that vision. The founders envisioned a republic built on popular sovereignty, a rejection of vestigial feudalism still hanging on in Europe (and elsewhere). Of course, the phrase used at the time was “all men are created equal,” and that meant something. There were influential women such as Elizabeth Willing Powel at the founding of the republic, of course, but it was still a man’s world, a white man’s world.
Dark bargains surrounding the status of darker-skinned people enslaved to enrichen white men of the South were required to gain southern ratification of the 1787 constitution. As our quadrennial headaches over the Electoral College remind us, those artifacts are with us still. Struggles to throw off the legacy of slavery and to make those two words, created equal, more than florid prose are, in plainer language, about who counts.
Since 1787, one group of Americans after the next has had to fight to have fellow Americans and the government acknowledge that they count.
Indeed, this year began with the first sacking of the Capitol since The War of 1812. The violent insurrection was incited by a sitting president and carried out by a mob of supporters convinced that the 74 million Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump count more than the 81 million who voted for Joe Biden. In swing state after swing state, Trump and his Keystone Cops team of attorneys argued that the votes of millions of Americans should not count at all.
Virtually any struggle for power or recognition of unrealized equal-ness is at its core an argument over who counts and who does not. Even if never stated in terms so blunt. Although, the legal wrangling over the last year over whom to count in the decennial census was as blunt as it gets. In the census, count means count. Literally.
When Reconstruction failed after the Civil War, emancipated slaves faced another century of repression, lynching, and denial of basic protections that were theirs by rights. Even a half-century after the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, white America resists acknowledging that Black Americans count, or matter, not only as citizens but as human beings.
Suffragettes fought for over 70 years to have their voices count at the ballot box. The Nineteenth Amendment added to the Constitution in 1920 granted them the right to vote but full autonomy and equality in the workplace and on the street remains elusive.
Whether the issue is LGBTQ rights, womens’ rights, immigration, photo ID, gerrymandering and the myth of voter fraud, our conservative antagonists frame counter-arguments in terms that let them avoid publicly addressing this fundamental question: Who counts?
Digby on Sunday cited Jonathan Chait’s column about the indignant response on the right to President Biden’s inaugural “renunciation of racism and violent white-supremacist terrorism.” Figures such as Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson do not identify as white supremacists. But, Digby observed, their anger at Biden’s condemning white supremacy outs them as identifying with it. Because as Chait concludes, “Carlson, MacDonald and Paul heard Biden denounce white supremacy, and decided he was talking about them.”
Notice how often right-wing pundits and politicians name-check “Real Americans.” Native-born, straight white people who live in rural, red states and vote Republican are Real Americans. White blue-collar workers and farmers who vote Republican are Real Americans. White evangelical Christians who vote Republican are Real Americans. White Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and rifle-toting militia members are Real Americans. Scan the MAGA crowds at Trump rallies or the faces of the extremists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
What conservatives mean by Real Americans is this: city-dwellers, Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, liberals … anyone not falling under the general categories in the paragraph above Do Not Count. They are lessers, lower-caste, second-class citizens at best, and most definitely not “created equal.” To them.
Real Americans count. All others count less. Two-hundred forty-five years after the Declaration, this country still struggles to rise above ancient feudal impulses to become the country of equals its founders imagined. Joe Biden embraces that vision. His conservative critics reject it. They insist they count more.
They are prepared to overthrow the republic to keep it that way.