A few thoughts about why the shame and outrage created by the Trump administration does not mean that we should not celebrate the 4th of July or the 250th anniversary of the United States in our own ways …
In her concurring opinion in Trump v. Barbara, Justice Jackson references Frederick Douglass:
After the Civil War, Fredrick Douglass frequently reflected on the events of the time through the lens of biblical stories. In one speech, Douglass described how God leveled Sodom and Gomorrah on account of sin, and how, in the aftermath, Abraham stood atop a nearby mountain to survey what remained. “[T]he orator used the image of Abraham looking down upon the destroyed landscape to demand that Americans look down upon their own recent self-destruction, and all but unjustified survival, and remember.”57 Douglass declared that his own aim was to “‘show that nations should have memories.’” (Quoted from D. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom)
While I collect my thoughts for an Independence Day post, I thought I’d provide links to a few items that others might find interesting and that go to the point of our remembering broadly and forthrightly.
A critical voice for the spirit of ongoing revolution belongs, of course, to Douglass, and his “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” is an excellent example. Here’s the text. Or, if you prefer, here is a reading by the incomparable (U Michigan alum 🙂 James Earl Jones.
Susan B. Anthony’s “On Women’s Right to Vote” is another essential classic of the pursuit of equality and liberty.
As is Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman”: one version here, another here.
Another must-read, for our deeper national memory, is James Baldwin’s searing account of lynching and white supremacy — and its accompanying impotence — in “Going to Meet the Man.”
If you don’t know the eclectic chamber music group PubliQuartet, you’re missing out. Their work, like “What Is American,” are wonderfully complex meditations on, well, us.
There is much more that could be listed. Please give your ideas in the comments!
As you know, the Supreme Court has rejected Trump’s Executive Order seeking to end birthright citizenship. This is the good news. The bad news is that the decision was basically 5-1-3, or more accurately, from the standpoint of the basic constitutional principle, 5-4 — a much closer decision than it should have been. Thomas, Gorsuch and Alito voted to uphold the Executive Order and Kavanaugh rejected it only on statutory grounds rather than on grounds of the 14th Amendment. Still, the Court has by that slim majority upheld the constitutional guarantees of the 14th Amendment in its clearest and most obvious interpretation, and for that I am thankful.
The weaknesses of the dissent were readily pointed out by Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion and in the concurring opinion written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf). Virtually every SCOTUS expert I have seen agrees that the dissent opinions were weak, even incoherent, and clearly ran against a century-and-a-half of legal precedent, as well as centuries of common law understanding (as Roberts and Jackson point out). It is abundantly clear what the 14th Amendment means, and it was clear at the time of its writing and ratification.
I’d like to address two things here: (1) a way in which the difference between the majority and the dissenters maps onto the difference between the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary traditions that I posted about yesterday, and (2) the Right’s strategy of generating a bogeyman out of births of children to undocumented or unauthorized immigrants — the bogeyman underlying Trump’s order (and a bogeyman indirectly addressed by Jackson in her concurring opinion).
(1) Citizenship and the Declaration
Here is the relevant clause of the 14th Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
The primary issue between the majority and the dissent (and hence the Government) hinges on the interpretation of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The dissenters want us to believe that the phrase is dependent on domicile — i.e., being born in the United States is not enough, a person must have a permanent homein the United States. This is how allegiance is to be measured. Roberts and Jackson both point out how scant the evidence is for such an interpretation. The language is plain and has long been understood: if you are born within American borders, you are an American citizen, regardless of the circumstances of your birth. The Amendment constitutes a reaffirmation and extension of the Declaration’s promise of equality and unalienable rights.
In . . . Roberts’ . . . view, the Declaration of Independence established not only the importance of individual rights, but also the equality of all in holding those rights. Citizenship must be equal and open, defined as broadly as the Constitution allows, rather than narrow in its scope.
When the 14th Amendment expanded citizenship after the Civil War, it did so with universal language, addressing race but also something broader: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In the majority’s view, this must be read broadly to achieve the declaration’s insistence on rights and equality.
The dissenters believe that the declaration did something else: It established a new sovereign people who control their own definition of citizenship [emphasis added]. In this view, the Declaration of Independence established a distinct kind of equality — an equal share in control over the government through political representation and elections.
The phrase that I have italicized in this quote expresses the vision that I see linked to the forces of counterrevolution I posted about. As Marietta goes on to write, in this vision “current citizens must agree to offer an equal share in governance to any new members of society.” And, we can conclude, if such a people must “agree to offer” citizenship, they can also agree to reject, to exclude, to evict. This is the spirit behind Trump’s Executive Order, behind J.D. Vance’s rants about our being bound together not by principles but by ancestry, behind Justice Thomas’s perverse dissenting opinion arguing that the Amendment had in mind only freed African Americans who either had earned citizenship by fighting on the battlefield or who should be given it out of the goodness of our hearts because, having been enslaved, they had nowhere else to go.
On this view, America has not only been de facto an exclusionary nation — it was de jure so, designed to be so. That is a very counterrevolutionary notion.
(2) The bogeyman of unauthorized immigrant births
There was immediate panic in MAGA-world in reaction to the Court’s decision, and a pledge by a number of Republican lawmakers to address the matter, presumably following the guidelines for legislative action that Kavanaugh set out in his opinion. (As long as we have a 5-vote majority, any such legislative action would appear doomed; gods help us if we lose one of those votes and Trump makes another appointment.)
The picture painted by the Right is one of immigrants — mostly from “shithole countries” — flooding across the borders, aided and abetted by liberals and Democrats, for the sole purpose of giving birth to children whom we then can’t turn away. In its more virulent forms this is Great Replacement Theory — the idea that there is a war aiming to replace white Christian Americans (i.e., “real Americans”) with people of color, Jews, Muslims — geez, Klingons, for all I know.
Now, I do not deny that our immigration policies require reform; the nature of that reform will be for another day. (I will note that Trump has scuttled bipartisan efforts to enact reasonable reform, including as a candidate in order to keep the issue alive before the 2024 election.) But on this issue of immigrants giving birth, let’s look at some realities.
First, there is the particular bogeyman of “birth tourism” — i.e., the idea that a pregnant woman arranges to come here specifically to give birth and have her baby become a citizen. The Right’s mythology outlined above relies on a vague sense that this is widespread. It is a real phenomenon but, although difficult to estimate, clearly small. The Pew Research Center estimated that there were 9,000 such cases in 2023 — that is 0.25% of the total number of births in the country that year. And as the Pew study points out, most of those births were to women who entered the country on legal visas. Moreover, previous administrations (including Trump 1.0) addressed the problem through investigations of visa fraud, prosecution of so-called “birth hotels,” and similar law enforcement means, rather than through attacks on birthright citizenship.
Second, and more significantly, there is the matter of births where the parents are unauthorized. The numbers here are much larger. Pew estimates that in 2023, about 300,000 babies were born to mothers who were unauthorized and another 20,000 to women who had temporary legal status — so 320,000. That’s about 9% of the total number of births in that year: clearly significant, but hardly enough to justify the virulent, racist reaction of MAGA and the effort to remove a constitutional right. It’s worth noting that in 55,000 cases, the father of the child was a US citizen or green-card holder. And, this number has fluctuated, peaking in 2006:
Pew points out that some unknown number of these children have left the country. Morever, and this is important, assuming that unauthorized immigrants giving birth are representative of the overall unauthorized immigrant population, 80% have lived or will live in the country for at least five years, and 45% have lived or will live here for 20 years or more. These are people, in other words, who are embedded in American life — a situation that actually, if you think about it, comes close to what the 14th-Amendment revisionists mean by “domicile.” (Data from the Migration Policy Institute)
The upshot is this: we live in a nation that, as Lincoln said, “is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Citizenship in the capacious understanding of the 14th Amendment, now upheld by a slim majority, is the embodiment of that dedication. We’ve dodged a bullet — let’s continue to be vigilant against the bogeymen of the counterrevolutionaries.
Here is a well documented snapshot of how far-right young conservative men are thinking — Christian nationalism, ethno-racism, and deep misogyny. The author focuses on Young Republican chapters and Turning Point organizations on college campuses. Nick Fuentes is deeply admired, and many criticize Trump for breaking his white supremacist promises. It’s a grim picture of the future of the GOP. It’s hard to see any traditional democratic values in this profile.
We are, of course, about to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution of 1776. I say “commemorate” rather than “celebrate” because it is not clear what sort of celebration could be called for at this moment of American authoritarianism and reaction. Many commentators are discussing this fact, and some, like Robert Reich, will be wearing black armbands to mourn the assault on our long effort to achieve our fundamental ideals.
To be sure, there are signs of hope: Trump’s popularity ratings are abysmal, and the Democratic primaries in New York and Colorado indicate that the sleeping giant of American progressivism is waking and that a long-overdue generational turnover is afoot. The latter particularly is something to celebrate.
And it needs to be said that, while our current moment is truly unprecedented in many ways, it is not the first time that the forces of democratic progress have had to marshal themselves in the face of stasis, complacency, oligarchy, and reaction. American history is a history of revolution and counterrevolution, and the nation has stood on the edge of the abyss more than once — and at least once fallen off and had to claw its way back up.
Jamelle Bouie’s column today, “Five Words That Changed the World,” argues effectively that Jefferson’s stirring words in the Declaration — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — were not as revolutionary, as radical, as history has made them. Jefferson and the elite members of the Continental Congress, Bouie says, saw them primarily as a justification for rebellion, for change of government, “not a road map for emancipation.” There was nothing particularly inclusive about them. Nevertheless, there were those who were determined to read these words as what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would much later call “a promissory note.” Bouie writes:
But then there were those outside the circle of belonging: women, Natives, landless laborers and, most starkly, Black Americans, both free and enslaved. They did not read — or, most likely, hear — the Declaration as an abstract claim about a prelapsarian past. They understood it as a radical statement of principle for the present. And they wielded this principle against a society that would not extend the Revolutionary promise of freedom and self-government to those held in bondage.
It is to the excluded, the outsiders, that we owe the re-crafting of the Declaration into a tool for the advancement of its own stated democratic ideals. (I recommend this review article by David Waldstreicher in Boston Review for some related reflections.)
After the Revolutionary War, the Declaration was in many ways forgotten or downplayed in the halls of power in favor of a focus on the Constitution — and the series of compromises around that document’s greatest flaw, the establishment of slavery. But the revolutionary voices were there — in slaves’ petitions and uprisings, in Abolitionists’ actions, even in the inspirations that others around the world found in those very words about equality and liberty that America’s Establishment seemed afraid to recognize.
Finally, in the Civil War and Reconstruction, this revolutionary understanding of the Declaration was elevated and “enshrined,” as Bouie says, first by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, then by the Second Revolution of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and further by the policies of Reconstruction.
But counterrevolution remained. The KKK was founded in 1865 and has had resurgences to the present. With the death of Reconstruction at the hands of yet another ameliorating political compromise, numerous post-war democratic gains were wiped out and Jim Crow took sway in the South. In some ways, the Civil War has never ended, though for much of the 20th century it was waged on rhetorical grounds, such as the elevation of the “Lost Cause” mythology about the war, which changed an anti-humanity rebellion into a a quaint nostalgia for the supposed rural, anti-technological values of the antebellum era. Never mind that the cotton gin had transformed plantations into vast factories with human beings as the cogs in the machine.
Fortunately, revolution continued also: the emergence of the labor movement, the development of late-19th-century progressivism, women’s suffrage, the economic democracy of the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, and so on. All accomplished by the courage and hard work of the excluded — and their allies — in the face of stasis, complacency and worse.
And now we face the present Reaction. Perhaps never before have the Counterrevolutionaries exercised such power and worked so diligently to reverse the gains of revolution.
In commemoration of the Declaration, then, let’s remember that while the words were set to paper by Jefferson and his committee, their best meaning lies in our efforts to hear and see those who are excluded, to listen to their demands, and to champion their cause of true equality and liberty for all.
Surely this is a defining principle of our democracy … religious freedom and the strict separation of state and religion are fundamental components of our freedom as equal human beings. How dare these mullahs of Christian nationalism seek to impose their religious beliefs on our free citizenry! How dare they! Outrageous!
Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission takes aim at church-state separation
After all the hysterical charges against “saboteurs” and rogue bicycle riders and 300-foot long sharp knives, a much more credible theory emerges on the ruined reflecting pool. You guessed it — Trump’s irresistible ego and his desire for a photo op driving a full (and heavy) motorcade of presidential vehicles through the drained and resurfaced pool in an “inspection tour”.
Trump May Have Damaged Reflecting Pool by Having Motorcade Drive Over
This is truly appalling … most of these persons were entirely peaceful protesters, not very different from the millions who have attended the No Kings demonstrations. One individual brought a firearm, unknown to most or all the others. The idea of a massive “Antifa” conspiracy is — as the article suggests by referring to show trials — a sickening Stalinist charade. We must hope that even larger “No Kings” demonstrations and pro-democracy demonstrations, always non-violent, will follow between now and November.
The Prairieland Sentences Are a National Emergency
We discussed the growing disparities of life experience of men and women in our country at dinner tonight. Here is the article I mentioned about labor participation rates. There is an NBER research paper at the heart of it that I’ve downloaded — happy to share if you’re interested.
Why men keep dropping out of the labor force: It starts in childhood, when kids see how males around them struggle, economists say https://share.google/Mnh0N2pspOKLy8o8b
