• The Dunning Kruger School. Eric Levitz on “The Authoritarian Right’s 1877 Project.”
Shorter version: The white right that rules today’s Republican Party hates the first Reconstruction — the brief spasm of actual constitutional democracy that existed for about a dozen years after the Civil War. The white right also hates the second Reconstruction, i.e., the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which led to the brief spasm of actual constitutional democracy that the Roberts Court has been aggressively dismantling ever since.
A 6-to-3 majority of Supreme Court justices wholly disregards the existence of the 15th Amendment. These lawless jurists claim this makes them “conservative,” but it merely makes them Confederate.
• The good news here is that a Methodist church in Boise, Idaho has removed a stained glass window honoring and depicting the traitor Robert E. Lee. The bad news here was that a Methodist church way up north in Boise, Idaho, had a stained glass window celebrating treason in defense of slavery and kept it there, in the sanctuary, until the year of two thousand and twenty one.
Idaho became a state in 1890. It’s statehood was a brazen exercise in partisan politics — an effort to add two more Republican votes in the Senate. This is why we added so many stars to the flag in the years following the Civil War, and it’s why we have two Dakotas even though one would obviously have been sufficient. Adding states in order to gain votes in the Senate was a tactic first embraced by the Radical Republicans — the actual Party of Lincoln — to ensure the ratification and enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments. By 1890, alas, the Republican Party had mostly abandoned Reconstruction, so the addition of Idaho’s senators didn’t help to make the 15th Amendment any more meaningful in 1890 than it is today.
I happen to believe that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution are, in fact, constitutional and ought to be enforced whether or not a majority of white senators agrees. So I’m supportive of efforts to revive this traditional tactic, adding two new senators each from Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Birmingham.
N.B.: That RNS piece linked above reports that the stained glass window was “deconsecrated” after it was removed from the Methodist sanctuary, thus suggesting that the Scalzi family church was probably also formally deconsecrated before it was sold to its new owners.
• Niebuhr-blogging: Moral Man and Immoral Society and vaccination mandates. This is John Fea applying a general statement from Niebuhr to a particular context:
It is the responsibility of the federal government, with all its resources and scientific experts, to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on American life. When the vaccine was released, the federal government (led by the CDC) tried to achieve “solidarity by a mutual accommodation of interests.” In other words, the government tried to convince people to take the vaccine. But when their efforts at “social cohesion” failed, and people placed their “liberty” over the common good, mandates became necessary.
Let’s add my other click-bait hobby horse into the mix here — subsidiarity. Yes, “it is the responsibility of the federal government … to convince people to take the vaccine,” but this is not solely or exclusively the responsibility of the federal government. Other agencies and actors — state and local governments, educational institutions, religious institutions, religious congregations, families, neighbors, voluntary associations, media, clubs, teams, guilds, bands, businesses, and all other facets of civil society — all share direct and indirect differentiated responsibility “to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on American life.”
And, like the federal government, all of these actors ought to avoid coercion until, in Niebuhr’s phrase, “efforts to achieve solidarity by a mutual accommodation of interests have been exhausted.” And once those efforts have been exhausted, all those other actors — in all of their various and differentiated direct and indirect capacities — are, just like the federal government, obliged to employ whatever more coercive means they have available.
You are an individual citizen in a nation state. You are also a child or parent, a sibling or cousin, a neighbor, a customer, an employee or employer, a congregant, a member, a fan, a subscriber, a correspondent — a resident of an inescapable network of mutuality. Do what you can, where you can.
• Dennis Quaid was extraordinary in The Rookie, and Zachary Levi was charming in Chuck and Shazam. That might be enough to persuade me to watch the two of them in a Kurt Warner biopic, but not when that movie is billed as “faith friendly” and “inspirational” and comes from the white evangelical world of “Christian cinema.” I trust the cast, but not the writers, directors, and producers. So thanks anyway. (But it is a pretty great story.)
• Congratulations to the “24 inmates awarded BA degree in pastoral ministry [who] will serve NC prisons as ministers.”
I have questions, concerns, and caveats here — many of which are similar to those I have regarding the program that trains brave inmates to become skilled firefighters who save lives and homes in California every year during wildfire season. But none of those concerns qualify my admiration for the men who have pursued the training and mission offered by either program.
• The title of this post comes from this classic Frank Loesser song, “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”
It’s a terrific song that has become a year-end holiday standard and a track that great singers love to include on Christmas albums. That wasn’t what Loesser had in mind. He was thinking of this question being blurted out by someone so love-struck that they were suddenly unable to imagine a future without their beloved. It’s one thing to ask someone to celebrate New Year’s Eve with you in late December. It’s quite a bit more than that if you say this on a first date in June.
In any case, I love this song, but I love it less this week. When you sing “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” on December 30 you seem to be taking the other person for granted in a way that’s almost disrespectful.
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