sto·chas·tic (stə-ˈka-stik) stō-
“[T]he actual threat to American freedom is coming from the states,” begins Jamelle Bouie’s NYT op-ed:
It is states that have stripped tens of millions of American women of their right to bodily autonomy, with disastrous consequences for their lives and health. It is states that have limited the right to travel freely if it means trying to obtain an abortion. It is states that have begun a crusade against the right to express one’s gender and sexuality, under the pretext of “protecting children.” It is states that are threatening to seize the children of parents who believe their kids need gender-affirming care. And it is states that have begun to renege on the promise of free and fair elections.
That it is states, and specifically state legislatures, that are the vanguard of a repressive turn in American life shouldn’t be a surprise. Americans have a long history with various forms of subnational authoritarianism: state and local tyrannies that sustained themselves through exclusion, violence and the political security provided by the federal structure of the American political system.
For anyone needing a refresher, Bouie means decades of pre-Civil War slavery and 100 years of post-Civil War Jim Crow among other national legacies.
For anyone needing a refresher, the struggle to “establish a universal and inviolable grant of political and civil rights, backed by the force of the national government” is ongoing. It’s summarized neatly in “in Order to form a more perfect Union,” etc.
The same people who resisted (successfully) that perfecting work for most of our country’s history are still resisting it even as they swear they love this country more than you do.
Viewed in this light, our time is one in which we face an organized political movement to undermine this grant of universal rights and elevate the rights of states over those of people, in order to protect and secure traditional patterns of domination and status. The only rights worth having, in this world, are those that serve this larger purpose of hierarchy.
The aspirations of our propertied, white-male framers to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” was, for some, always about securing their own class and privilege. “We the People,” like “freedom,” has been a contested idea since the founding of the republic.
Thus today, we see clockwork moral panics promoted by revanchists since the Civil Rights movement to divert attention from their treacherous — yes, treacherous — efforts to turn back the American clock and the work of perfection the framers envisioned to a time when universal rights were not universal, but closely proscribed by race, class, sex, and more.
Bouie concludes:
The plan, as we have seen with abortion, is to unspool and untether those rights from the Constitution. It is to shrink and degrade the very notion of national citizenship and to leave us, once again, at the total mercy of the states. It is to place fundamental questions of political freedom and bodily autonomy into the hands of our local bullies and petty tyrants, whose whims they call “freedom,” whose urge to dominate they call “liberty.”
What Bouie omits mentioning are the contemporary threats of and actual violence inspired and endorsed to “secure traditional patterns of domination and status.” Anything to distract public attention from authoritarian efforts to put “lessers” back in their places and to make freedom and liberty as exclusive they were when the U.S. Constitution went into effect.
The Wanda Sykes meme (above) references the calculated distraction. Mehdi Hasan retweets a few headlines from yesterday highlighting the predictable threats of violence: