Revolution & Counter-Revolution

A Dark Era Dawns and a Red Era Beckons

Boston, MA, June 24, 2022

I. On Tyranny

Three days ago, I made the case that the vast majority of Americans—nearly 80%—oppose allowing more people to carry concealed weapons in public without a permit. They likewise opposed, by similar margins, overturning Roe v. Wade. In the days since, six unelected lawyers handed down decrees that swept the will of the people aside with the stroke of a pen. These are acts of judicial overreach without precedent, a final kick to the desiccated corpse of American conservatism and the pretext of constitutional restraint.

In a few pages of mental gymnastics, any and all regulations on concealed firearms in public were eviscerated, and the bodily autonomy of half of the population of the United States—for generations a beacon of civil liberties to the world—abolished. Combined with the strike against separation of church and state and the gutting of Miranda rights, these decisions amount to the most regressive judicial assault on self-government, the poor, and the vulnerable in the history of the United States—and that is saying a lot. Though we had warning with Roe, the news still falls like a hammer blow. As with death, you could not truly grasp it until it came. This week calls to mind the words of a lawyer in 1890: the Court is the grave of liberty. Its headstone has been built with the shattered foundation of the Republic.

Two of the SCOTUS lawyers at work here, Gorsuch and Barrett, were packed onto the tribunal through unconstitutional means by Sen. McConnell and the Republican Party. A third, Thomas, is a sexual predator whose wife organized the January 6 insurrection and destroyed the peaceful transfer of power. A fourth, Kavanaugh, testified under oath—like Gorsuch and Barrett—that Roe was precedent, and Casey “precedent on precedent.” Meaning that it was the stated law of the land, which he would honor. Given today’s vote, he knowingly misled Congress and the public at his hearing (about more than just his own sexual assault, that is).

The sign, the face.

All three were appointed by an authoritarian cult leader, the loser of the popular vote, who was twice impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. This week, we heard from the January 6 Committee that he told his Justice Department to declare the 2020 election corrupt and let him and the Republicans in Congress take it from there. Yet incredibly, the nationalistic forces he unleashed have overrun his party. They stand to take back Congress this fall and the White House in two years, with Gov. DeSantis at their head. DeSantis is even more dangerous than Trump—all the rage, yet ten times the discipline, follow-through, and smarts. Never have I been more grateful that my wife has Canadian and Irish citizenship than I am today. If you can at all obtain legal status in a country that actually protects human rights, workers, and the poor, do so now. Scandinavia looks better than ever. As a Tweet I saw yesterday put it, “Can’t mandate masks but can mandate birth. What a country.”

When a government denies the will of the people, as Jefferson said in the Declaration, it forsakes all pretense to authority. It must be overthrown, and a new one established in its place. One that will secure liberty, equality, and justice for today’s generation. Secure government of the people, by the people, for the people. Yesterday, the Supreme Court incinerated whatever shred of legitimacy was left to this rotten constitutional order. Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s Vice-President, said it well:

Of all the despotisms on earth, a judicial despotism is the worst. It is a life estate.

I always prided myself in being a contemplative, cool-headed philosopher—nuanced, careful, precise. I still am, and shall ever welcome dialogue with people of goodwill. But the days of moderation and appeasement are dead. The moment for a real democracy—political, economic, social—has come. To the barricades.

---

II. Death Cult

Family values

In his opinion in the New York gun case, Justice Thomas blew past the weak guardrails that his late bosom buddy Antonin Scalia erected in Heller. Scalia indicated in 2008 that there are many “sensitive” places where the state could regulate the public carrying of firearms. But Thomas, in a feat of “jiggery-pokery” as Scalia once said, limited those to a bare minimum. He then invented, whole-cloth, an impossible historical standard for any gun regulation, and (surprise!) declared that the New York statute—which was 108 years old—failed said test.

If the Second Amendment—which any reasonable person can see is about providing for the national security—meant to enumerate an individual right to carry a gun in public for self-defense, why did the authors of that Amendment not write any of those fateful words? They were intelligent men who knew the English language better than we. And if this is a right that’s been treated as “second class,” as Thomas asserts, why did it take Americans—including the people who wrote the damn thing—two and a half centuries to notice?

Furthermore, given that assault rifles and modern handguns did not exist in 1787, I am not sure what legal reason the state now has to ban civilians from possessing the following in public: flamethrowers, grenade launchers, mines, chemical weapons, tactical nukes, and more. All of these are arms. The Court claims this right is limited to arms in “common use,” but none of the guns we allow today could have been even conceivable two centuries ago. And if lots of people go out and obtain RPG-launchers, that automatically puts them in “common usage!”

And why not? You know what’s the ultimate “self-defense?” Riding down the street in a fucking tank, which is just a giant rifle on wheels. What legal principle now stops me from doing that? Why can I strut around with an assault rifle and not a shark with a laser beam attached to its head? Relative to a flint-lock musket, the difference between a tank and an AR-15 is small—a matter of degree, not kind. Which speaks to the fact that this ruling is a piece of arbitrary bullshit. If I were a gun manufacturer, I’d market your own personal howitzer tomorrow. Could make a killing, in multiple ways. Make no mistake: this ruling is the pernicious result of the gun lobby’s forty-year campaign of hijacking the Constitution for blood money.

The primary duty of any sovereign state is to establish peace in its realm. It does this by exercising a monopoly on violence. Fundamental to that social good is regulating weapons. As Prof. Akhil Amar of Yale wrote in The New Republic back in 1999, this is the express idea of the Second Amendment—that we, the people, can organize ourselves militarily through the armed forces and create domestic tranquility. But now we have the supreme irony of that very amendment being turned against us to hamstring our ability to ensure basic collective safety.

This is a prescription for a libertarian wasteland Ayn Rand couldn’t dream of—a Mad Max hellscape of vigilantism, anarchy, and shootouts. In its xenophobic zeal, the Right is screaming day and night for punitive border security to stop climate refugees seeking asylum in this country (the very one that helped break their governments and environment in the first place). Yet for citizens inside that wall, they insist they can wield any gun they want, any time, almost any place. As former Chief Justice Warren Burger—a conservative—took pains to point out, this is one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on the American people.

More Americans—almost 1.4 million—have died from gun violence in the past fifty years than drug overdoses. With this ruling, we will surely outstrip that pace. The only difference between a drug cartel and gun cartel is the means of death. Yet look how we reacted to the former versus the latter. Thousands of poor folks languish in prison for possession of marijuana, a plant that kills almost no one. But is a single merchant of firearms in jail? No—instead, we’ve given them legal immunity.

In his concurrence, Justice Alito mocked the dissenters in the New York case by pointing out that the state’s strict gun laws still didn’t stop the Buffalo shooter from procuring an assault rifle. What? By that infantile logic, we should drop any regulation about anything the moment someone circumvents its reach. Lots of people speed on the highway—should we just tell the police to stop ticketing, and let everyone drive as fast as fucking possible? Real recipe for social wellbeing. This is a classic conservative move: obstruct the state’s ability to provide a social good, like gun regulation. Then, when the state struggles to do it, use that as an excuse to further strip the people’s ability to self-govern.

Tragically, guns have so contaminated our environment that, as Alex Kinsbury argues, it may be too late and too difficult to eliminate them, even if we instituted a buyback. But the Second Amendment says nothing about a right to manufacture and sell a gun. We have 350 million of them out there to keep and bear. That’s enough. During World War II, FDR nationalized whole industries to address a security emergency. We’re in such an emergency now. President Biden should announce next week an Executive order to seize every gun manufacturer, distributor, and dealership in the country and convert them into baby formula factories. That would truly turn our swords into plowshares. What civilized, so-called Christian nation produces an excess of guns but not enough food for babies?

I grew up hunting, a sporting activity I still enjoy. But hunting is not about guns. And only 11 million Americans hunt. In contrast, over 104 million own a firearm. For many, guns are the point. They are a drug. The erotic kick you get from pulling a trigger at a human target enslaves the mind. There’s a pornography to gun violence, a fetishization of firearms that exercises a fearsome grip. It’s an idol, a sin, a literal death cult that poisons millions. To its devotees, it looks innocuous and natural. But as Hannah Arendt taught us, evil is often banal. Like all drugs, guns demand more and more of your soul to get a high: in response to Uvalde, the NRA is again calling for teachers to carry sidearms. When your mind’s warped that much, there’s little hope for you. Politicians, in bed with this devil, are sunk to his debt.

We are the only nation on Earth with such an affliction. The rest of the world’s peoples look aghast at this perverse “freedom.” At a bar in New York last month, I struck up a conversation with a young Argentinian. “Do you have this problem with guns in your country?” I asked him. He looked incredulous. “No,” he said. “What about your cowboys,” I pressed, “gauchos and all that?” He smiled. “They use a lasso.” 

III. Catholic Coup

The authoritarian counter-revolution perpetrated by Dobbs is the result of decades of dogmatic Catholic conservatives mainlining their twisted sexual morality into legal journals, law schools, and the courts. While white evangelicals have been the foot soldiers of the anti-abortion movement, the Catholic Church has provided its intellectual vanguard. Yesterday’s unprecedented attempt to revoke a natural, constitutional right—one affirmed in many subsequent rulings—was written by an archconservative Catholic, Justice Alito. It was endorsed by four more: Justices Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. (I recognize that Justice Gorsuch, who joined them, is an Episcopalian. But the Episcopal Church supports legal abortion.) Clearly, these ideologues have taken their talking points from the Catholic bishops—and not the good ones like the current Pope.

This is the culmination of a fundamentally misogynistic church's half-century crusade to repress American women and throw them back into the servile status they suffered under regimes like Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy—autocratic dictatorships, by the way, that were supported by the Catholic Church. If you think that’s hyperbole and want a preview of what's coming, look to Poland right now. The church has produced wonderful prophets for justice over the ages, like Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. But I'm afraid those voices for the poor are in retreat. They are overawed now by clericalist forces of anti-modernism and gender autocracy.

Indeed, Catholic integralists like Patrick Deneen, Andrian Vermeule, and Sohrab Ahmari, are on a mission to fuse the state with Catholicism in a nationalistic church the likes of which we see at work in Russia. The Court has just handed these theocrats a huge gift—a coup for the right-wing Catholic intelligentsia. Judge Thomas states in his concurrence that the judiciary should now target same-sex marriage, contraception, and even sexual intimacy between gay people. If that last statement doesn't give you chills, I don't know what will. Alito swears none of that will happen, but at this point only a fool would trust that bitter, resentful, cramped soul. And the whole idea of the rule of law is that is that we should not be subject to the fleeting whims of the Court’s personnel.

Really, what's next? Women thrown out of the workplace? No more divorce for abused women? Taking away personal property rights for women? The return of coverture, for God’s sake? This is the beginning of a dystopian nightmare right out of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I’ve seen that show, and it doesn’t go well. The most patriarchal religions in the country—including Mormons, Catholics, and white evangelicals—oppose abortion. Those that have opened up and have women in leadership roles support it. Might there be a connection there?

To my friends who are still in the Catholic Church, I beg you, if you have any shred of dignity or conscience left, walk out of this unaccountable, anti-democratic institution today. And take as many with you as you can. There is no hope anymore of reforming it. None. Certainly not before its unhinged elites decimate more of our diverse, pluralistic Republic. It will not change until it is brought to its knees. Its frightening influence at the highest levels of power won't cease unless we cripple it financially. And the only thing that will do that is a mass exodus of the faithful, along with the wallets that fund this toxic mess of a religion.

There’s no longer any justifiable reason to stay in such an ossified, secretive, backwards cabal of unmarried, homophobic, octogenarian chauvinists. Please, leave this church like an abusive relationship—which is what it is. I recognize that to do so would be to abandon it to its worst elements. For those in ministry, it would upend your lives substantially—though not as seismically as the lives of women have just changed overnight. But it's high time to let the church's leaders consume themselves in a pit of pharisaism.

You can always return to the Catholic Church after it's changed its ways. But I wouldn't hold your breath. And I think you'll find, like I did, that once you're free of its psychic hold, you'll be amazed you stayed as long as you did—and never want to go back. I cherish my education at Holy Cross and Boston College. I celebrate the work for justice that many in the Catholic Church engage in. I love the good Catholics I count as friends.

Yet every Sunday I see the women, married people, and openly gay and lesbian clergy leading Eucharist at my Episcopal parish, I feel at home. The Anglican Communion has its share of troubles, God knows, but they are mild compared to the factionalism in the Vatican. This is where Christ’s Beloved Community is to be found. Jesus was a radical feminist in his day, as was Paul of Tarsus (despite his ornery moments). Neither said a word about abortion. If this medical procedure is intrinsically evil—a hundred Holocausts in the eyes of its foes—then why did the Incarnate Word of God never even mention it?

Women presbyters preside at Eucharist in the Episcopal Church

---

IV. The Third American Revolution

Dred Scott

In 1857, the Supreme Court, like yesterday, usurped its authority and issued a decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford that intended to make it impossible for the American people to exercise their collective will. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that Congress, under the Constitution, had no capacity to ban human enslavement in the western territories or anywhere under Federal jurisdiction. He declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 invalid, laying the groundwork for pro-slavery forces to re-impose bondage in all the states that had already abolished it. He finished his tirade by stating that Black Americans—even free ones—were not citizens and in fact possessed no rights that "the white man is bound to respect."

That infamous fiat declared, in essence, the entire anti-slavery platform of the new Republican Party unconstitutional. Taney intended this. Since its birth two years prior, the stated goal of the GOP (which, at that time, was the progressive party) was to abolish slavery in the West and then choke off the Slave South until the institution collapsed there, too. Taney meant to stop this movement for human freedom, democracy, and equality in its tracks.

What happened? Did Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and thousands of abolitionists—Black and white, men and women—abide by the ruling? No. The Republicans knew, as we seem to have forgotten, that nowhere in the Constitution does it say the Supreme Court can make law, much less exercise judicial supremacy. The Court itself declared that it had this power, and not until the 1950s. Lincoln, as FDR did in the 1930s, decided to bring it to heel. He delivered a speech soon after Dred Scott declaring that the ruling was wrong and the Court's action illegitimate. The Republicans essentially took the decision and threw it in the toilet. In fact, it only galvanized them more. They fought. They struggled. They grew their ranks and built a biracial, democratic coalition of men and women.

Three years later, this progressive, solidaristic movement delivered Congress to the Republicans and the White House to Lincoln. When he took the oath of office on his inaugural day, the new President stared into the eyes of Justice Taney with resolute determination. As the war commenced, the Chief tried to thwart Lincoln's emancipation project. The President and Congress ignored him and kneecapped his tribunal. Four more years hence, Taney was dead and slavery lay in ruins. Four million souls tasted freedom. The largest aggregation of private property in the country was abrogated by Executive order, with no compensation for slaveholders. In the face of legions of proto-fascists, hundreds of thousands of Black and white Union soldiers gave their lives for liberty and justice—including Lincoln. Through their sacrifice, they achieved the greatest advance for equality in the history of Western civilization.

The Emancipation Proclamation

In one of his more important actions before he was assassinated by a white supremacist, the President appointed Salmon Chase to fill Taney's seat as Chief Justice. Chase, the subject of a major new biography, was the intellectual architect of the anti-slavery movement and a fierce advocate for Black equality. Under his watch, the Court became, for a brief moment, a bastion of civil rights and equality. With the radical Republicans leading Congress—and thousands of Black leaders in office in the South—the Reconstruction Era built the broadest social, political, and economic democracy our nation's has seen. Though the forces of terror soon rolled it back, a century later, Dr. King led the Second Reconstruction to finish the work.

Yesterday was another dark judicial day. It ranks with Dred Scott in ignominy. We must not accept it. We must fight as Lincoln, Douglass, and the others fought. Like them, we, the people, must declare this decision corrupt and the Court illegitimate. States and the Federal Executive must refuse to abide by this gross miscarriage of justice. We must all battle and build a movement to return this government to the people. Like the Republicans in 1857, we must use this setback to impel us to struggle every single day until we dismantle capitalist oligarchy, eradicate fascism, and build a real democracy in which all can flourish.

There is much that can be done even now. The Federal government can set up reproductive health clinics on federal land inside red states. Federal telehealth services can be scaled out for free abortion pills. Federal funds can be issued for health clinics and travel vouchers to nearby states. That’s just a start.

Like then, the struggle ahead will be long, hard, and demanding. We must be prepared to sacrifice all. Poor women will die, many more cowed, and their allies attacked before it's over. But I have faith. United, we can overthrow this oppressive regime and save the nation for our children and our children's children. Like Lincoln, like Douglass, we must be unyielding in our fight and prepared to give everything in this cause for freedom, justice, and equality. It cannot be a fight for a return to the status quo ante. It cannot be a fight for the Democratic Party—the Democratic Party is the problem. Given President Biden’s timid, stumbling speech yesterday, do not look to him or the Democrats for bold action. We must join Sen. Sanders, working men and women everywhere, and fight for democratic socialism at all levels of society.

It may take four years. It may take eight years. It may take the rest of our lives. I do not know. But even if we never live to see the sun of liberty shine again, our descendants will carry on the torch. One day—long after the members of this bankrupt Court are dead, Dobbs collecting dust in a vault with Dred Scott—American women will reclaim their freedom, and we will have a real democracy at last. As always, Orwell said it best:

By revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no question of stopping short, striking a compromise, ‘salvaging democracy’, standing still. Nothing ever stands still. We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or go backward. I believe in [America], and I believe that we shall go forward.