I've just finished listening to Dr. David Blight's lectures on "The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877" via Yale's Open University.
I couldn't afford to audit a class at Yale, and commuting to New Haven would not have been convenient. Yet this was free and easy. It's almost as though this elite Ivy League institution has forgotten its mission to be all snooty and exclusive. (I keep picturing Kelly Bishop as Emily Gilmore storming into an office and demanding an explanation for this egalitarian program — "Open University? What's the use of providing a top-notch education if we're going to give it away to just anyone?")
Blight's lectures are fascinating, informative, insightful, challenging, engaging and accessible. And the subject is, I think, timely, and very, very important. As William Faulkner wrote, "The past isn't dead. It's not even past."
In the last couple of weeks we've seen a host of stories scrutinizing Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan due to her association with the late Justice Thurgood Marshall. Marshall was, Kagan's critics say, an "activist judge" and a "liberal."
Those critics are Republicans. Republicans, as everyone knows, are opposed in principle to "judicial activism."
But what exactly do they mean by that? What they object to, specifically, is Marshall's contention that the federal government has both the authority and the responsibility to ensure that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution are enforced. That belief, Marshall's Republican critics say, leads to an intrusive, too-powerful federal government that threatens states' rights and private property rights.
The instructive spectacle of tea-party libertarian-ish Senate candidate Rand Paul arguing against anti-discrimination legislation provided another explicit case of this same conflict. Property rights, Paul insists, must outweigh intrusive, activist federal legislation against discrimination. And like his tea-party supporters, Rand Paul insists that his position is "constitutional" — that the Congress does not have power to enforce such laws.
The final sentence in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments is this: "The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." But that doesn't alter Paul's stance because he doesn't regard those amendments as wholly legitimate and he doesn't regard most any legislation as appropriate.
This belief that these radical, activist amendments don't really count can be seen, again, in current news from Arizona. Republicans there are weighing a proposal to declare that all persons born in the United States may not be citizens of the United States nor of the state wherein they reside. This seems like a particularly egregious direct contradiction of the 14th Amendment, but Arizona has already abridged the privileges or immunities of some citizens and mandated that some persons be deprived of liberty without due process of law, and denied to some persons within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. So at this point the matter of citizenship is about the only part of the 14th Amendment left for Arizona to attack.
None of these disputes are new, nor are the arguments on either side. States' rights, private property rights, federal intrusion — none of this is new. The same arguments were made with the same vocabulary in 1965 and in 1865.
But what's fascinating is that the parties have switched places. They have switched sides. This is, I believe, the key to everything you need to know about American politics in 2010: The Republican Party of 2010 is fiercely, adamantly opposed to the Republican Party of 1866.
The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were a Republican achievement. That "activist." "liberal" approach of Thurgood Marshall was invented by the Republican Party. The original Republicans fought relentlessly for these goals against a Democratic Party that was despicably racist, only occasionally bothering to cover that racism with flimsy fig leafs of "states' rights" and "private property rights" and opposition to an "intrusive federal government."
Today those Democratic fig leafs have become the pillars of Republican ideology. They formed the core of Ronald Reagan's campaign and of every Republican campaign since.
This is an astonishing thing — like the switching of the earth's magnetic poles. I'll leave it to historians like David Blight to explore and explain how this great reversal came about. I only want here to note that it has, in fact, come about — that the Republican Party of 2010 is anti-Lincoln, anti-Reconstruction, anti-13th, 14th and 15th Amendment.
If John Wilkes Booth were alive today he'd be running for national office as a Republican. And he might even win.
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