CommentsTHE VIEW FROM HERE - Everyone is focusing on the balance of GOP vs Dem in the House and Senate without realizing that their obsession is actually a huge warning sign that the nation is rushing towards disaster.
When a couple votes one way or the other can determine the course of government, the nation is ungovernable. Effective governance comes from the center where the vast majority of people agree on important issues. When the two political parties, however, are focused on power for the sake of power, public policy deteriorates to gibberish – full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
We have the situation where each party kowtows to its most extreme element, but the extremes are the least tolerant and most ruthless. They are irrationally arrogant true believers that their way is the only holy way and the other party is doing Satan’s work. By definition, extremes can govern only by force and not by cooperation. Right now each party has an extreme element. We should call them “Wokers on the Left” and “Wokers on the Right” without a sane person among them. There is no substantive difference between Wokers and Trumpists. Thus, the nation is better off recognizing their similarity.
Both Left Wokers and Right Wokers Reject the Nation’s Founding Value
Our basic value is that each individual has identical inalienable rights including Life, Liberty and Pursuit of happiness and the function of government is to secure these rights in real life. (Second paragraph of Declaration of Independence) This core value had to be declared because in 1776 no society had such a basic principle. Great Britain had different classes and many people believed in the Divine Right of Kings or that their religion or group had more rights than others, and hence, they could run roughshod over them, e.g. Slavery.
After the Revolution, the nation operated under the Articles of Confederation, but they provided too weak to provide for the common welfare. Between May 25 to September 17, 1787, the constitutional convention was held to revise the Articles, but instead the delegates scraped them and wrote a new constitution creating a Republic. They expressly and emphatically rejected forming a democracy which they knew was a horrible type government. In a democracy, there are no inalienable rights as the vote of the majority is the supreme law. Thus, power mongers devote all their energies to winning elections so that they may vote away the rights of everyone else. All they need is one extra vote to seize power. Real life is not so simple because the losers have considerable physical force and can attack those who won the election in order to establish a different government by violence.
America Is Becoming a De Facto Democracy
The Constitution established a republic, where the rule of law is supreme and 100% of voters cannot pass a law which violates an individual’s inalienable rights. If they pass such a law, the Supreme Court will nullify the law. When the Supreme Court, however, throws out inalienable rights in favor of popular sovereignty (i.e. democracy), the nation is a couple steps from a violent civil war. The US has reached that stage and the prime cause has been the relentless attack on individual inalienable rights by Nancy Pelosi’s Identity Politics and Leftist Wokers.
Group Rights Are Lethal to Individual Inalienable Rights
When rights belong to a group, then an individual’s rights depend on the rights of the group to which he/she belongs. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) made group rights a hideously destructive force in America. The Court did not acknowledge that Blacks had any inalienable rights; rather, their rights rested on Equality of Outcome. If the Outcome for Blacks was not equal to that of Whites, racial discrimination had to be sole the cause. The case rested on some psycho-sociological opinions that Black children did worse academically in segregated schools, and thus, segregation was unconstitutional. The Menninger Clinic of Topeka Kansas was paying most if not all the legal bills and it wanted the case to be based on irrelevant opinions of sociologists and psychologists.
For example, Brown cited The Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation A Survey of Social Science Opinion, where the opinions of a majority of psychologists was that Black children performed poorly in segregated settings. (Brown fn 11) What are the Psychological Effects of Segregation Under Conditions of Equal Facilities?, admitted that facts cannot be established by consensus, but surveys of scientists' opinions can be useful. (Brown fn 11) Expert testimony is allowed only if their opinions survive a rigorous test. Their opinions must be based on sufficient facts or data and must be the product of reliable principles and methods. (FedRuleEvid 702) None of Brown’s studies passed this test.
Brown’s basic folly was admitting any evidence of the impact segregation had on any group. (The proper rule was obvious. “Because segregation violates the inalienable right of liberty, it is unconstitutional.”) When the law invents Equality of Outcome on a group vs group basis, then the law will shift as the outcomes shift. Put Asians in segregated schools and they out perform Blacks; put Asians in integrated schools and they out perform Blacks. What do we do when Asians, as a group, always out perform Blacks, as a group? The answer: discriminate against Asians who are higher achievers than Blacks. The logic, or illogic, of Brown resolves down to whichever group does the worst gets the most preferential treatment.
A fact specific solution to Asian over-achievement and Black under-achievement would be to prohibit Blacks from playing basketball and mandating 3 hours of homework each night and requiring all Asians to play basketball for 3 hours a day without any homework. Treating individuals on the basis of Group Outcomes is racist insanity.
Group Rights is Good for One Thing: Political Division
The genius of Pelosi’s Identity Politics is that it provides the Dems a guaranteed voting block. Since Blacks, however, are only 12.1% of the nation and Whites are 57.8% of the nation, demanding that Blacks must be admitted to schools and hired by employers to match their proportion in the population is a losing political plan. To rectify the mathematical myopia of Pelosi’s Identity Politics, she declared that as soon as all minority groups out number Whites, then the minorities will vote as a block to replace the Whites. Her goal is premised on the idiotic delusion that all minorities are carbon copies of Blacks and have no minds of their own. Nonetheless, Pelosi game plan poses an existential threat to the paranoid, extreme right groups, KKK, Nazi, white supremacists, etc.
Brown Perpetuated Racial Division, Pelosi Turned it into Polarization
By mandating that Blacks remain a separate group so that they could be counted, the Court thwarted integration. Dems’ demands for proportional representation promoted residential segregation by basing Black political power on voting districts where Blacks would be elected. In response, the GOP became the champion of Whites, especially the racially, ethnically and religiously prejudiced Evangelicals. Trump, ever the fool, alienated Mexicans whose votes could easily outweigh 100% of Blacks voting Dem.
There is no compromise between Right Wing Nazis, etc. and Left Wing Pelosi’s promise to replace Whites. Neither extreme has any use for the Republic where every individual is secure in his/her inalienable rights. Rather, each side is fighting to get majority control of government in order to vanquish the other.
The Worst is Yet to Come
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, No. 19-1392, 597 U.S. ___, is the first case, after Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), to vitiate individual inalienable rights. Dred Scott denied Blacks had inalienable rights since the Constitution did not expressly mention them and Dobbs denied that women had inalienable rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, since the Constitution did not mention them. Instead, according to Dred Scott and Dobbs, individual rights are up to the majority of voters in each state. Both Dred Scott and Dobbs invoked Popular Sovereignty to override inalienable rights. In other words, no matter what the Declaration of Independence declared, no one has inalienable rights unless a majority of the voters agree. We are rushing from the high ground of inalienable rights over the cliff into the chasm of democracy.
(Richard Lee Abrams has been an attorney, a Realtor and community relations consultant as well as a CityWatch contributor. You may email him at [email protected]. The opinions expressed by Mr. Abrams are solely his and not necessarily those of CityWatch.)
