Majorityrights News > Category: Neoliberalism

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.

Patriotic Weekly Review, Episode 32:

Mark Collett with special guest Secret Sources AKA Dionne Moller.

They discuss Tommy Robinson, viz., his disingenuous activities as controlled opposition.

Collett was prompted to this critique having been criticized, ridiculed and denounced explicitly by Tommy Robinson (including being publicly and harshly criticized by Robinson on the day of Collett’s daughter’s birth; and subsequently by Robinson in the video shown below, as one who didn’t but should be having babies; while in fact Collett is fathering).

Laura Towler weighs-in against Tommy Robinson, as well, addressed by him in the same diatribe as “some bird” who should be having sex and making babies rather than merely hating fecund migrants - particularly the Muslims, who Tommy Robinson’s controlled opposition wants to focus on, with minimal criticism of other non English migrants, and no criticism of Jewish peoples.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and the debate over Section 230:

A Youtuber going by the clever name Donald Netanyahu has put up the full 60 Minutes segment featuring Wojcicki, titling it:

Dec 10th is the end of YouTube says Susan Wojcicki on 60 Minutes:

Anti-Racism is Cartesian, it is not innocent, it is prejudice. It is prejudice against prejudice, far from innocent - it is hurting and it is killing people.

It is a YKW construct, a weaponization of the Cartesian prejudice against prejudice primarily directing its rational blindness to prohibit White/European defense and to make YKW speech and protection exceptional.

....as the Sacha Cohen speech to the ADL illustrates….

Among the week’s events, Heinrich Palmgren and Mark Collett discuss this censorship of White self defense by Youtube and the ADL.

Report: Sacklers using fake doctors, false marketing to sell OxyContin in China.

As Purdue files for bankruptcy, business in China is ramping up.

Beth Mole, for Ars Technica, 21 Nov 2019:

Consumer-sized bottles of prescription drugs sit on a shelf.

The mega-rich family behind the OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma is back to selling its highly addictive pain killer with underhanded tactics and deceptive advertising—this time in China, via its international company, Mundipharma. That’s all according to a searing new investigation by the Associated Press.

The Sackler family, which owns both Purdue and Mundipharma, is embroiled in litigation in the United States over its alleged role in sparking the country’s epidemic of opioid abuse and overdoses. Thousands of plaintiffs—many state and local governments—claim that Purdue and the Sacklers misled patients, doctors, and regulators on the addictiveness of their drugs, aggressively marketed them, and wooed doctors into over-prescribing them.

While Purdue has since declared bankruptcy and stopped promoting OxyContin in the US, the Sacklers seem to be employing the same detestable practices in China.

Based on documents and interviews with multiple Mundipharma representatives in China, the AP investigation found that reps were at times posing as doctors, providing debunked information that its long-acting opioids are safe and less addictive, and even illegally copying private medical records of patients to inform sales tactics.

When an AP reporter informed one of the Mundipharma reps that some of the marketing information was incorrect, she replied: “I’m shocked… Why after more than 10 years would they still do the same thing and go against the laws and regulations of society?”

In a response to the AP, Mundipharma said it promotes ethical behavior and legal compliance. It added: “We have detailed policies covering interactions with healthcare professionals, grants and donations, and sponsorships and incentives.”

The AP reported that China’s National Health Commission, National Medical Products Administration, State Administration for Market Regulation, and National Development and Reform Commission declined to comment. The Sackler family representatives did not respond to a request for comments.

Mundipharma, meanwhile, is still hiring in China.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/report-sacklers-using-fake-doctors-false-marketing-to-sell-oxycontin-in-china/

BETH MOLE

Beth is Ars Technica’s health reporter. She’s interested in biomedical research, infectious disease, health policy and law, and has a Ph.D. in microbiology.
EMAIL .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) // TWITTER @BethMarieMole

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