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Christopher Caldwell: America’s two constitutions — since the ‘60s, competing visions of a more perfect union

Christopher Caldwell, author of the book ‘The Age of Entitlement,’ says Democrats and Republicans have two different conceptions of what the country is about. Fox News, 27 Jan 2020:

     

Not long after he left the White House, Bill Clinton gave what is still the best description of the fault lines that run through American politics. “If you look back on the ’60s and on balance you think there was more good than harm, you’re probably a Democrat,” he said. “If you think there was more harm than good, you’re probably a Republican.”

What could he have meant by that?

Though Americans are reluctant to admit it, the legacy of the 1960s that most divides the country has its roots in the civil rights legislation passed in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It was enacted in a rush of grief, anger and overconfidence — the same overconfidence that had driven Kennedy to propose landing a man on the moon and would drive Lyndon Johnson to wage war on Vietnam. Shored up and extended by various court rulings and executive orders, the legislation became the core of the most effective campaign of social transformation in American history.

This campaign was effective both for its typically American idealism and for its typically American ruthlessness. It authorized Washington to shape state elections, withhold school funds, scrutinize the hiring practices of private businesses and sue them. It placed Offices of Civil Rights in the major cabinet agencies, and these offices were soon issuing legally binding guidelines, quotas and targets. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, business and political life to direction from judges.

Americans assumed that solving the unique and extraordinary problem of segregation would require handing Washington powers never before granted in peacetime. In this they were correct.

But they were also confident that the use of these powers would be limited in time (to a few years at most), in place (to the South), and in purpose (to eliminating segregation). In this they misjudged, with fateful consequence for the country’s political system.

Civil rights law may have started off as a purpose-built tool to thwart the insidious legalism of Southern segregation and the violence of Southern sheriffs. It would end up a wide-ranging reinvention of government.

After the work of the civil rights movement in ending segregation was done, the civil rights model of executive orders, regulation-writing and court-ordered redress remained.

This was the so-called “rights revolution”: an entire new system of constantly churning political reform, bringing tremendous gains to certain Americans and — something that is mentioned less often — losses to many who had not necessarily been the beneficiaries of the injustices that civil rights was meant to correct.

The United States had not only acquired two codes of rules (two constitutions), as people rallied to one code or the other, they also sorted themselves into two sets of citizens (two countries). To each side, the other’s constitution might as well have been written in invisible ink.

Civil rights became an all-purpose constitutional shortcut for progressive judges and administrators. Over time it brought social changes in its wake that the leaders of the civil-rights movement had not envisioned and voters had not sanctioned: affirmative action, speech codes on college campuses, a set of bureaucratic procedures that made immigrants almost impossible to deport, gay marriage, transgender bathrooms.

In retrospect, the changes begun in the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the pre-1964 one would frequently prove incompatible — and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil-rights regime was built out.

Our present political impasse is the legacy of that clash of systems. Much of what we today call polarization” or “incivility” is something more grave. It is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the pre-1964 constitution, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators, and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation.

As long as the baby boom generation was in its working years, permitting the country to run large debts, Washington could afford to pay for two social orders at the same time. Conservatives could console themselves that they, too, were on the winning side of the revolution. They just stood against its “excesses.” A good civil rights movement led by the martyred Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been hijacked, starting in the 1970s, by a radical version that brought affirmative action and eventually political correctness.

But affirmative action and political correctness were not temporary. Over time they hardened into pillars of the second constitution, shoring it up where it was impotent or illogical, the way the invention of judicial review in Marbury v Madison (1803) shored up the first constitution.

Both affirmative action and political correctness were derived from the basic enforcement powers of civil rights law. And this was the only civil rights on offer. If you didn’t like affirmative action and political correctness, you didn’t like civil rights. By 2013, when Americans began arguing over whether a cake maker could be forced to confect a pro–gay marriage cake, this was clear.

The United States had not only acquired two codes of rules (two constitutions) —as people rallied to one code or the other — they also sorted themselves into two sets of citizens (two countries). To each side, the other’s constitution might as well have been written in invisible ink. Democrats were the party of rights, Republicans of bills. Democrats say, by 84 to 12 percent, that racism is a bigger problem than political correctness. Republicans, by 80 to 17 percent, think political correctness is a bigger problem than racism. The Tea Party uprising of 2009 and 2010, and its political mirror image, the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2015 and 2016, were symbols of that division.

Much happened this century to bring matters to the present boil. Barack Obama, both for his fans and his detractors, was the first president to understand civil rights law in the way described here: as a de facto constitution by which the de jure constitution could be overridden or bypassed. His second inaugural address, an explicitly Constitution-focused argument, invoked “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” — i.e., women’s rights, civil rights and gay rights — as constitutional milestones.

In this view, the old republic built on battlefield victories had been overthrown by a new one built on rights marches and Supreme Court jurisprudence. When Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote his decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 gay marriage case that was in many ways the culmination of this new rights-based constitution, he said as much.

The election of 2016 brought the change into focus. Today two nations look at each other in mutual incomprehension across an impeachment hearing room. It appears we are facing a constitutional problem of the profoundest kind.

The Late Great City of Miami

Derrick Anderson and Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, May 1994

City of Miami Seal

Two facts — just two — explain almost everything about Miami: In 1960, the city was 90 percent white; by 1990 it was only ten percent white. Virtually everything else about Miami today — crime, poverty, race riots, cultural decay, third-world squalor — follows from this astonishing change in population.

To be sure, it is important to understand the mix of people who displaced whites. Cubans, especially those who arrived first, have had a very different effect from that of Haitians or Nicaraguans. However, no city could show more clearly how dependent upon race and ethnicity are a city’s character and civility. No city could show more clearly that large-scale displacement of whites marks the end of everything commonly thought of as “American.”

Miami is one of the bellwethers for the nation that will result if the silent invasion from the third world continues. It is therefore important to know what has happened to the city and why.

First Came the Cubans

Cubans are now the dominant group in a city that is 63 percent Hispanic and 27 percent black. Even Dade County, which surrounds Miami, is about 50 percent Hispanic and 21 percent black, with whites making up no more than 29 percent of the population. Aside from a few quickly-shrinking enclaves of white influence, Cubans control business, politics and culture.

Related at Majorityrights

Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled to Miami after Fidel Castro’s victory in late 1958, but they did not come simply because it was near by. Florida and Cuba have connections that are centuries old, and the post-Castro migration was only part of a long history.

From the earliest times, imperial Spain had ruled Florida and Cuba under a single administration. There was no political border between the two territories until Andrew Jackson conquered Florida, and the United States annexed it in 1821.

Even before the city of Miami was founded in 1896, the area had long played a part in the ructions of Cuba’s tropical politics. The South Florida coast was an important supply route for Cubans fighting Spanish colonial rule, and the smugglers and gun runners were largely unmolested by Americans intent on building a vacation resort.

The Spanish-American war brought American-imposed stability to Cuba, but once the country tried governing itself, it reverted to opera buffa politics. In his 1917 essay, Gore in the Caribbees, H.L. Mencken describes the “Latin exuberance” of a failed revolution. “It was an exhilarating show,” he concludes, “but full of strangeness for a Nordic.”

Revolutions routinely deposited refugees and counter-revolutionaries in Miami, and former exiles would sail back to Cuba with the next violent change in government. In 1933, for example, Gerardo Machado was overthrown and Miami teemed with his henchmen. In 1952, Fulgencio Batista staged a coup and his predecessor, Carlos Prio, packed his bags for Miami. In 1958, it was Batista’s turn to move north. All three are buried in Miami, where residents got used to itinerant dictators and their hangers-on.

The immediate effect of the Castro take-over was to reduce the number of Cubans living in Miami. Many had been scheming against Batista and streamed home in the wake of Mr. Castro’s victory. They streamed back to Miami when Mr. Castro began to build the workers’ paradise.

The real exodus from Cuba did not start until a year or two after the revolution, but when it came, Miami was the obvious destination. During the Prio and Batista years, even middle-class Cubans took annual vacations in Miami, and after airplane service began it was fashionable for rich Cubans to take one-day shopping trips to Florida. The Cuban upper classes escaped to a familiar and comfortable refuge.

At first, Miami’s whites ignored the post-Castro rush, confident that like all previous waves of political casualties, it would wash out again with the next coup. Moreover, the first crop of Cubans was the wealthy, well-educated white elite who spoke English and slipped easily into Miami society. However, by 1965, 210,000 Cubans had come to Miami, and by 1973 another 340,000 had boarded the twice-daily “freedom flights” for Florida. The quality of immigrants steadily declined, though few Cuban blacks and mulattoes had yet to come north.

During this period the Miami Herald still reflected the views of whites, and its editorials echoed rising alarm over the alien invasion. However, Cubans fleeing from communism made first-rate cold-war propaganda, and the federal government flouted the wishes of whites by welcoming the Cubans as refugees. It was Mr. Castro who finally stopped the “freedom flights” in 1973, but Miami’s transformation was well under way. The first wave of Cubans came to plot counter-revolution in the hope of going back home; later waves expected to stay.

Cubans quickly established a distinct community. They came not only with a common nationality, but with a fierce anti-communism that set them apart from the soft liberalism of America. They employed and did business with each other, continuing relations that had been established for years. Some businesses simply moved across the Florida Straits. The Caballero Funeral Home, for example, advertises that it was founded in 1858, at a time when Miami did not exist. It was founded in Havana.

Many entrepreneurs had scant regard for American legalities or customs, and they brought with them a corner-cutting, under-the-table mentality that still characterizes Miami. However, Cubans were scrupulous in their relations with each other because a violation of trust meant exclusion from the community.

The fact that well-off businessmen had come first made things much easier for the later arrivals. Cane-cutters just off the plane were grateful for any kind of work, and were both loyal workers and customers for Cuban businesses. At the same time, perpetually rocky politics in Latin America sent north a steady flow of flight capital. Naturally, it went to Miami, where nervous Argentines and Colombians could count on fellow Hispanics to invest their nest eggs in solid American banks.

What was the effect of the Cuban presence on the Miami labor market? One of the few “respectable” criticisms of non-white immigration is that it displaces blacks, and it is widely maintained that this happened in Miami. In fact, it was whites who were replaced. The garment industry, for example, was 94 percent white in 1960, but by 1980, it was 83 percent Hispanic. Black participation in the industry held steady at 5-7 percent.

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Is France Having A Revolutionary Moment? ft. Richard Wolff (TMBS 120)

The concept of unionization needs to be wrested from Jewish/Marxist control/association (Wolff is not necessary to articulation of the concept).