invert / perversion
redumbdent premature belated?
merri ok
see rubber glue
see identity victim
see evil
see hypocrisy
bizzaro
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-right-wing/
"We're all victims," Donald Trump claimed at his first rally after the presidential election, on Dec. 5 in Georgia "We're all victims. Everybody here. All these thousands of people here tonight. They're all victims. Every one of you." That was quite a change from his 2016 election campaign, when he promised "So much winning you'll get bored." Liberals were supposed to be the "snowflakes," right? What happened? How did the once-proud party of masculine self-reliance and "personal responsibility" become such a bunch of whiny snowflakes?
There are lots of reasons one could point to, but in truth it's pretty much a blind-men-and-the-elephant situation. We have an abundance of particular insights, with different bits and pieces of the answer. But surprisingly little is known about the role of victimhood in politics in any organized sense, even though particular examples are well-known, some of them quite broad. A passage on white Southern victimhood in the conclusion of "The Long Southern Strategy" (author interview here) is a case in point, drawing together some of the major themes developed earlier in the book. But there is no shared empirical framework for comparing levels of Southern victimhood with victimhood levels elsewhere — unlike with other measures, such as modern sexism, which is used to great effect in that book. All kinds of political attitudes have been measured and studied over the years—enough to fill a whole volume, more than 20 years ago, but no one's ever studied victimhood with the same kind of rigorous scrutiny.
Until now, that is — in a new paper by Miles Armaly and Adam Enders, "'Why Me?' The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics" (forthcoming in the journal Political Behavior.) Given how much of a role victimhood plays in politics, it's remarkable that this appears to be the first attempt ever to develop a way to measure it, and thereby open up a whole new realm of inquiry. By measuring perceived victimhood, the authors show that it's "largely unrelated to political predispositions or sociodemographic characteristics," but is related to, but various views of government, society and the world (especially with regard to perceived corruption and conspiratorial thinking) and personality traits such as narcissism and a sense of entitlement.
While the authors didn't set out to explain how Republicans became the victim party, Armaly told me in a recent interview, that makes a lot of sense in terms of what they did find. "The idea of many Trump supporters being 'victims' is borne out in our work," he said. "Inasmuch as cueing from political elites is responsible for some of these feelings, victimhood is currently manifesting in Trump supporters in large part because of 'we are the victims' messages," such as Trump's speech in Georgia.
The combination of two processes — top-down elite cues and bottom-up pre-existing attitudes — is one of three major distinctions drawn in this paper that clarify our understanding of victimhood, and how it helps shape the political landscape. "It's bottom-up in the sense that many psychological traits are. It's top-down in that elites can cue feelings of victimhood," Armaly put it.Neither of those things by itself can explain how victimhood functions in politics; both need to involved.But even to begin we need the help of another distinction — between objectively-defined victimhood and a subjective sense of victimhood — in order to focus on the common psychological factors shared by differently situated political individuals and groups.
Finally, "Why Me" develops a highly-clarifying twofold construct of subjective victimhood: It is egocentric, involving a tendency to agree with statements like "I am the victim because I deserve more than I get," and it involves a sense of systemic unfairness, reflected in sentiments like, "I am the victim because the system is rigged against me." The two are strongly correlated but distinct, with egocentric victims more likely to be Trump supporters, for example, while systemic victims are less likely to be.
In an added wrinkle, the paper's conclusion suggests the existence of a third form of victimhood, "an other-oriented, or accusatory one," and goes on to note:
Modern right-wing rhetoric, for instance, decries liberal "snowflakes," "safe spaces," and political correctness culture. In each of these instances, victimhood is projected onto others. This mobilizes the projectors because the "victims" are illegitimate — they are not deserving of victim status in the eyes of those doing the projecting.
If every accusation is a confession, this third form of victimhood offers a very big clue as to how Trump's base has turned snowflake.
Each of these distinctions is worth considering in turn. But first let's note three key points from the paper's conclusion. First, the centrality of victimhood:
Victimhood is central to politics. If politics is, as Lasswell (1936) famously described, about "who gets what, when, how," there are going to be victims.Some will be perceived as victims when they are not, others just the opposite. Political communication is, in no trivial sense, tasked with making some feel like victims, and others look like victims.
Second, victimhood in politics isn't necessarily pernicious:
That victimhood plays such a central role in politics is not necessarily troubling.
It is intuitive that politicians would make their case to constituents in such a way that victimhood is cued. Indeed, we want representatives that work to realize our values, fill our pockets, and facilitate a happy and healthy life.
Third, what's troubling is when a sense of victimhood fuels extremism:
Rather than the mere appeal to victimhood, it is the lengths one is willing to go in order to mobilize victimhood that poses the greatest potential normative threat to a civilized democratic political system. Speaking historically, it is precisely a feeling of hypervictimization that has caused people to turn to authoritarian regimes for relief.
Subjective vs. objective
Let's turn to the three distinctions described above: The objective/subjective distinction comes first. One reason perceived victimhood hasn't been systematically studied, Armaly told me, is because "there are actual political victims." In the course of getting the paper published, he said, "People were talking about 'How are Black people different from white people? How are women different from men?' Because people were stuck in the idea of genuine victims of the political process. I think that's one of the reasons that we haven't had this direct focus on perceived victimhood in political science or similar fields."
In fact, the paper itself notes: "Men seem to be slightly higher in perceived victimhood across the board. … Such an observation underscores our claim that victimhood — as a self-perception — does not require relative disempowerment or subjection to injustices."
In conversation, Armaly was more blunt. "It doesn't matter what's true," he said. "It matters what people think and what they feel."
A broader public understanding of this could be helpful, he said: "If people understand that these are perceptions, that they can be made to feel this way — and that's a powerful source for political elites." Indeed, promoting this kind of awareness was the underlying insight behind the race-class narrative project developed by Ian Haney López, Anat Shenker-Osorio, and Demos, which I wrote about here in June 2018. I described it as a suite of narratives "that call out scapegoating by greedy, wealthy special interests, and that call on people to unify across racial lines for the common good."
Armaly expressed the promise he sees in more general terms. "If an individual can recognize that perhaps they are being told they're victims when indeed they're not, maybe there's something there that people can learn from: 'Hold on, I'm not really the victim here.''"
The race-class narratives didn't specifically discuss victimhood, but they did confront the dynamic. For example:
California's strength comes from our ability to work together – to knit together a landscape of people from different places and of different races into a whole. For this to be a place of freedom for all, we cannot let the greedy few and the politicians they pay for divide us against each other based on what someone looks like, where they come from or how much money they have. It's time to stand up for each other and come together. It is time for us to vote for leaders who see all of us as equal, whether we are white, black, or brown, who respect all of our families, and who will govern for all of us.
Armaly's work suggests that other elite manipulations of victimhood could be countered with similar kinds of messages. Recognizing victimhood as a subjective state is the first step toward breaking its spell.
Egocentric vs. systemic
This distinction is the most fully elaborated of the three. What both poles have in common is that victimhood is "attractive," Armaly explained, "because it's placing the blame for one's lot in life on somebody else: 'It's not my fault.' It's a psychologically pleasing thing. I don't have to be blamed, because somebody else is doing this." From there, the two types diverge. "With the systemic, people are placing the blame with specific higher entities if you will, and with egocentric, people feel this way, they have the internal feelings of victimhood, but again, it's not their fault. It's always nice to lay blame somewhere else. That's the way to eliminate psychological pressure on oneself."
The difference between the two might seem subtle, and only emerged gradually over time. "We were discussing how to measure victimhood, and we have these ideas central to what we thought victimhood entailed," Armaly explained. "At a certain point we realized these are kind of tapping different things. So if you look at the items we use, four of them refer to the self, or 'me' or 'I' or something like that, and the other four are referring to outward sources."
The paper itself puts it this way: "The major distinction between egocentric and systemic victimhood is blame attribution. Systemic victimhood is a manifestation of perceived victimhood whereby the self defined victim specifically attributes blame for their victim status on systemic issues and entities." By contrast, "Egocentric victimhood ... is less outwardly focused. Egocentric victims feel that they never get what they deserve in life, never get an extra break, and are always settling for less. Neither the 'oppressor,' nor the attribution of blame, are very specific."
Indeed, the difference is striking: As mentioned above, egocentric victims are more supportive of Trump, while systemic victims are less likely to be. This makes intuitive sense, in terms of Trump's vague, self-centered language way — about victimization and pretty much everything else. The lack of evidence of voter fraud or any irregularities in the 50-plus election-related lawsuits Trump and his allies have filed does not matter nearly as much to egocentric victims as it potentially would to systemic victims. But the differential support could also reflect the fact that Trump was president when the study was done, Armaly noted. On top of that, "Trump is the establishment, he's wealthy, he's been around forever. So people who see wealth and maybe other systemic issues as victimizing don't support Trump."
There was a similar difference with regard to a set of racial issues, including affirmative action. "Somebody who thinks that they're the victim, an egocentric victim [is] going to view something like affirmative action as taking away possibilities that they think they rightfully deserve," Armaly explained. "Whereas a systemic victim seemingly recognizes that there are systemic forces that need to be corrected, and affirmative action is a correction for that type of systemic racial issue."
A similar logic applies with respect to anti-political-correctness attitudes, Armaly said. "The egocentric victim sees it like, 'I'm being told what I can and can't say. This is an infringement of My First Amendment rights.' Of course it's not. It's not coming from the government. But they perceive society as censoring them."
By contrast, people with a high sense of systemic victimhood "would think you really shouldn't speak to each other the way we do sometimes. Maybe some of this political correctness language is a good thing, because it's more inclusive, It helps people not feel so bad about how other people speak about them," Armaly explained.
With this more detailed understanding of systemic and egocentric victimhood in hand, we are better able to appreciate the significance of the third distinction, between the top-down and bottom-up aspects of victimhood. The primary focus of the paper (and the discussion above) is on the latter: Bottom-up aspects provide the primary data. But top-down elite messaging is central to the political process. There's no way to understand victimhood's political significance (not just potential) without it.
Subjects were presented with identical victimhood narratives attributed to Trump or Joe Biden, according to their partisan identification. "One thing we know from decades of political science research is people only respond to cues from sources they trust," Armaly noted. "Republicans are going to support Trump, Democrats are going to support Biden. Let's see if they can cue victimhood in their followers." The message was simple:
You, the middle class and working people, have been the victims of so much. You never seem to catch a break, and always seem to pay the steepest price. It's sad, it really is. And I'm going to keep fighting for you no matter what.
The result, the paper noted, was that "both egocentric and systemic victimhood increase as a result of hearing Trump or Biden describe the average people's inability to catch a break." In short, Armaly said, "This is not a Trump phenomenon. This is not a Republican or conservative phenomenon. It cuts across ideological lines and partisan lines. But Trump is very effective at it. And it seems like he's weaponizing this victimhood to adhere people to him, to the party, to certain policies. This is a powerful force and it's a powerful feeling.If people feel like victims, it's unlikely that they're going to see the other party as a way to fix victimhood.
"So Republicans who agree with Trump that 'Hey, we are the victims,' they're never going to turn to Joe Biden for the remedy. They're only going to turn to Republicans in the future, maybe even continuing to support Trump. So one consequence of this, we think, is entrenching polarization, furthering extremity in beliefs about politics, and making people set up more in their existing camps."
Of course, Trump election loss and his subsequent behavior has further intensified feelings of victimhood: "That's precisely what the 'Stop the Steal' thing is about," Armaly said. "'We're the victims of fraudulent elections,' even though there's no evidence pointing there and they keep losing in court. But that is definitely a victimhood-cueing rallying cry."
In a way, this helps makes sense of the decades-long thrust of "The Long Southern Strategy." Threatened identities — first around race, and then gender and religion — were key to the whole enterprise. As co-author Angie Maxwell told me, "They didn't have infrastructure in a lot of places for the Republican Party. So they had to create this sense of urgency, and you do that by tapping into things that people feel are fragile and are being threatened." In short, they had to promote feelings of victimhood.
I asked Maxwell to comment on the theme of victimhood for this story. She responded:
In an effort to cut an electoral map path to victory, starting in the 1960s, Republican strategists pushed individualism against the collective — againstcollective bargaining, protest, organizing. Individualism creates blinders that can deny systemic racism, sexism and privilege. Simultaneously, these GOP strategists, in order to shake Southern whites lose from their long-term connection to the Democratic Party, manufactured a sense of urgency about everything from the "war on Christmas" to the welfare queen bankrupting the taxpayer. That combination creates a self-focused, faux victimhood, reminiscent of the Lost Cause in the South but with a national appeal.
This is how, under the "Stop the Steal" banner, we get a majority of House Republicans supporting an utterly frivolous lawsuit before the Supreme Court that flies in the face of decades of GOP "states' rights" rhetoric. Surprise! The Southern strategy was never about states' rights, any more than the Civil War was. (The Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act had already made a mockery of those Southern claims.)
On the role of narcissism
It's worth highlighting how significant Trump's narcissism is in this dynamic. He is utterly incapable of ever admitting he's been wrong. When finally forced to recant his support for birtherism, he double-falsely claimed, "Hillary Clinton started birtherism, and I ended it." Now, having lost an election by more than 7 million votes he claims the election is being stolen from him.
So even though narcissism is only related to victimhood statistically, it's still important to consider the role it plays. For this, I reached out to therapist Elizabeth Mika, whose chapter in "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" on "Tyranny as a Triumph of Narcissism" explained how tyranny is a "three-legged beast," encompassing the tyrant, his supporters and the society as a whole.
"A sense of victimhood — as opposed to real victimhood — is always based in narcissism: the erroneous, corrosive and inherently destructive belief that we are special — somehow better than others — and thus we deserve special treatment, perks and privileges," Mika said.
There's a logical connection, she continued. "Narcissists are eternal victims, as perpetual victimhood is the other side of the narcissistic coin. It can't be otherwise, because if you believe yourself to be special and the world does not reflect this back to you, as is always the case sooner or later, you are going to feel victimized by the lack of special treatment."
A similar logic applies to groups as well. "You can expect the members of historically privileged classes and groups to have a sense of specialness ingrained in them by the virtue of being part of that class," Mika said. "When their sense of privilege is threatened and/or eroded, by, for example, expanding the privilege to others, members of previously disenfranchised and thus 'inferior' groups, they react with anger and rage that seek suitable scapegoats, more often than not from among those who are seen as 'stealing' their privilege or otherwise responsible for its loss. For narcissists, the loss of privilege feels like oppression."
This description is a near-perfect fit for Trump's white, Christian nationalist base. That base easily delivered landslide re-election victories for Richard Nixon in the 70s and Ronald Reagan in the 80s, but has only managed one popular-vote victory since 1988. Its privileged position has been eroding for at least 30 years now, and has only survived this long because of multiple anti-democratic features of our politics: the Electoral College, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the Senate filibuster and ideologically-stacked courts. The longer that power has been sustained on such a fragile, illegitimate foundation, the more crushing its loss would seem. Hello, snowflakes!
A third kind of victimhood
As mentioned before, a third form of victimhood is proposed in the paper, an other-oriented or accusatory one typified by right-wing attacks on liberal "snowflakes" and political correctness in which victimhood is projected onto others. "This mobilizes the projectors because the 'victims' are illegitimate — they are not deserving of victim status in the eyes of those doing the projecting."
This is clearly more complicated than egocentric or systemic victimhood. But more than projection is likely going on. It may be a process known as "projective identification," discovered by British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, which I wrote about here in late 2015. It involves "introjection (imagining another — or aspects of another — inside oneself) as well as projection—or even both, simultaneously." The first example Klein gave was a specific form known as "envious reversal," in which the projector's unwanted inner states (thoughts, feelings, etc.) are projected (into what Klein called the "container") while the projector steals some desirable state of the "container."
If one is not a victim but claims to be, that's very likely an example of envious reversal. But if one is a snowflake and has spent years attacking others as snowflakes, that's also an example of envious reversal. So, too, if you believe that others are unfairly claiming victim status, when in fact that's been your go-to move ever since Brown v. Board of Education. So there's a potential for this kind of victimhood to lead into a hall-of-mirrors fantasy situation. But remember: This is still subjective victimhood. Questions about how subjective and objective realities align are incredibly important, but to fully address them we need to understand the subjective side as well as can.
The first step in studying "other-oriented victimhood," Armaly said, would be to examine whether the "correlates" are "similar to egocentric or systemic victimhood, or whether we are talking about a third, totally unique type?" His intuition is that such people "would reject the idea that they're victims, most of the time," but might also "reject the idea that others are victims. Other-oriented victimhood doesn't ever seem to be saying, 'Oh yeah, those people are victims of the political process,' It's usually used as a way to say they're not."
The notion of other-oriented victimhood can also have significance for the public as citizens in a democracy, helping us to see things more clearly. "The bleeding heart in me wants to talk about empathy," Armaly said. "Maybe let's not think about victimhood in terms of who is and isn't a victim. Maybe there's another way to approach it. Also, I think victimhood is not zero-sum. Multiple people can be victims — it's not mutually exclusive and not dichotomous in that way."
As a big-picture thought about victimhood as whole, Armaly raised a fundamental question. "We should be asking ourselves, 'Are we comfortable giving victims increased status to make social and political claims?'" he said. "And then, similarly, 'Are we comfortable judging the veracity of different claims?' We don't have a way to do this. Society isn't cohesive. We don't have the same mores and the same norms, necessarily, across all facets of society." He went on to note that, "Elevating some claims over others incentivizes these feelings of victimhood, and that's one of the reasons people are attracted to them. I think we have to consider whether incentivizing that feeling is a good thing."
Recalling the three points from the conclusion of "Why Me?" cited above, the answer may be that victimhood is inevitably central to politics and isn't necessarily pernicious, but that our capacity to deal with it without falling prey to hyper-victimization may be at a historically low ebb. That recognition could help orient us toward civic repair. Eliminating both actual victimhood and a sense of victimhood is not within our power. But continuing to be a victim of victimhood just might be. If, as Armaly argues, victimhood is not zero-sum, the best way to help any professed victims might be to help them all. Yes, even the snowflakes-in-denial who can't let go of their damaged and defeated president.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
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odd mirroring pattern? i am the true victim
an 920
As health experts continue to encourage mask-wearing across the country, some anti-maskers just won’t give up.
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aha: I try to stay away from pop psych, but trump seems to obviously be doing projection i know i am but what are you? so biden and hunter are corrppt etc etcv, massive voter fraid by dems poc...but triggering the libs means pushing their PC buttons, perhaps saying shit you don't mean/beleive; but here's the prjection part: conservative are hard-wired to be afraid, and fox stock in trade is to stoke fear and hatred of dems, but triggering wants to portray the DEMS as FEARFUL (or just naive?)
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aha: depressing that our best tool, name and shame gets perverted: "bad faith" the term can be weaponized / co-opted like "fake news" (one can use the charge in bad faith, in fact Barr did)
carter page calls for reparations for rw scotus v schumer price to pay
a kind of mirroring?
aha: grn blk death: see energy poverty
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==
Bream was out on Friday, but guest anchor Mike Emanuel still played host to more far-out, right-wing conspiracy theories. In a discussion about Attorney General Bill Barr’s ongoing attempts to discredit the previous investigations of the Trump campaign and Russian involvement in the 2016 election, criminal defense attorney David Bruno raised an allegation about Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor suspected of being a connection between the Russian government and former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos. (Mifsud’s current whereabouts are unknown.)
“Mifsud is the one that fed George Papadopoulos the original information that Russians had dirt,” Bruno stated. “Now, can you imagine if that came from the United States government internally? I don't know that speculation, but that is the most interesting part about the Italy connection is Joseph Mifsud.”
Video file
CitationFrom the October 25, 2019, edition of Fox News' Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream
There was no pushback from Emanuel against Bruno’s reference to a baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that the then-presidential candidate was somehow the victim of an elaborate frame-up by the U.S. government.
And as a special bonus to the “1 week challenge,” this past Monday night’s episode featured among other things a discussion with Trump-supporting Fox News contributor Robert Jeffress, an extremist religious right figure who has been criticized for religious bigotry, and estranged Democratic pollster Doug Schoen — both of whom agreed that Trump is not a racist.
“Look, I've known President Trump for four years, there's not one scintilla of evidence that he's a racist,” Jeffress said. “In fact, anybody who knows the president knows that if you support him, he embraces you, regardless of your race. And if you oppose him, he attacks you, regardless of your race. That's the essence of what it means to be colorblind."
Video file
CitationFrom the October 28, 2019, edition of Fox News' Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream
Jeffresscontinued: “But Shannon, I'm not sure the Democrats want to be the ones talking about racism, when in their history, they're the ones who supported the Ku Klux Klan,they opposed the abolition of slavery, and they continue to worship at the shrine of Planned Parenthood.”
In response, neither Bream not Schoen mentioned Trump’s documented history of racial discrimination in housing and hiring, [FRED WENT TO KKK RALLY?!] as well as the fact that he built his political following by spreading the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. There are plenty more examples.
As Media Matters previously documented, Bream has also been a reliable mouthpiece for anti-abortion talking points, such as repeating misinformation from the anti-choice group Center for Medical Progress, which engaged in a 2015 smear campaign against Planned Parenthood by releasing deceptive videos. In addition, she has frequently misgendered trans people or referred to them as a gender with which they do not identify. It is a stigmatizing form of harassment that goes against journalistic best practices.
Bottom line: You’re not going to find unfiltered news coverage on Fox News — not even from the “news” side, because there really isn’t a news side at all.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/republicans-fantasy-constitution-trumps-attack-on-the-constitution-is-nothing-new-for-the-right-which-has-long-tried-to-write-its-own-version/
no lnx
Republicans’ fantasy Constitution: Trump’s attack on the Constitution is nothing new for the right — which has long tried to write its own version
Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon October 28, 2019
Donald Trump’s recent criticism of the “phony emoluments clause,” used in defense of his since-abandoned G7 scam, was striking for its bluntness. But it’s part of a long history of conservatives flagrantly ignoring the actual Constitution and substituting an imaginary version in its place. At Vox, Ian Millhiser thoroughly debunked the notion that Trump wasn’t violating the Constitution by seeking to hold a summit meeting at his own hotel, including reference to work by Georgetown’s John Mikhail, whose examination of 40 different dictionaries made mincemeat of any “public meaning” argument to try to defend Trump.
Of course Trump doesn’t care about such arguments, and doesn’t rely on typical conservative legal arguments either. But he does rely on the underlying conservative impulse and assumption that the Constitution means whatever he wants it to mean, and that anyone who disagrees with him is subversive.
This view can be found in the so-called “constitutional sheriff’s” movement, which believes that county sheriffs get to pick and chose which laws to enforce and can keep federal law enforcement agents out of their counties. Tellingly, the word “sheriff” — like the word “God” — doesn’t even appear in the Constitution. Trump’s favorite convict sheriff, Joe Arpaio of Arizona, is a member of this movement. The far-right “Oathkeepers” movement has a similar fantasy-based view of the special constitutional status of anyone who’s sworn an oath to serve the government — and who then decides they’ve got a secret identity as a Supreme Court justice.
But don’t be fooled into thinking this is just a fringe conservative view. Dangerous and troubling as these views and that organization may be, it’s the conservative constitutional fantasies from the actual Supreme Court that have done far more damage to our democracy. Take, for example, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, which held that black people had no constitutional rights because when it was adopted, they were regarded as “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” What’s more, Taney claimed, “This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race.”
That was a lie, as I explained here, based on a fantasy past. In the real past, slavery was abolished in the Vermont Republic in 1777, well before the Constitution was drafted, and Quock Walker sued for and won his freedom under the Massachusetts Constitution in 1781 — again, before the Constitution was drafted.
Walker’s case deserves closer inspection to show specifically how wrong Taney was. Walker had been promised his freedom, but his master died before the promised date, and his widow married a man who not only refused to free Walker, but beat him as well. Walker won not one, but two civil jury trials, both of which affirmed his freedom and awarded monetary damages, after which the man who had abused him was convicted in criminal trial.
In his charge to the jury, Chief Justice William Cushing stated that, “slavery is … as effectively abolished as it can be by the granting of rights and privileges wholly incompatible and repugnant to its existence.” That unambiguous recognition of “the granting of rights and privileges” directly contradict Taney’s false premise in Dred Scott. The “fixed and universal” opinion he wrote about was a racist fantasy.
There was also a future fantasy involved in the Dred Scott decision — the fantasy that the decision would put an end to abolitionism,, and secure the institution of slavery once and for all. Instead, it only fueled the dynamic which eventually brought the Civil War, which was initiated by the South, based on yet another fantasy — the one about absolute states’ rights (except, of course, when it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves.)
The fantasy of corporate personhood
After that terrible struggle, we passed the Civil War amendments to firmly establish the full citizenship rights of black Americans, which in turn would become the subject of multiple conservative fantasies, primarily involving the 14th Amendment. First was the fantasy — still haunting us today — that the 14th Amendment established “corporate personhood” and was actually intended to protect corporations as much as freed slaves and their descendants. This fantasy, too, came to us from the Supreme Court, though in a remarkably muddled way, asUCLA law professor Adam Winkler describes here.
In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the court reporter (a former railroad president) inserted a headnote saying that justices agreed that corporations were people under the meaning of the 14th Amendment, even though the decision itself said nothing at all on the subject. To this day, that case is mistakenly cited as precedent establishing corporate personhood, despite its silence. One of the justices hearing the case, Stephen J. Field, got the ball rolling, as Winkler explains:
A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that “corporations are persons within the meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,” explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.
That’s only one facet of how muddled the story is, as Winkler explains. The idea was first advanced in 1882 by Roscoe Conkling, a lawyer for Southern Pacific who was the last living member of the drafting committee responsible for writing the 14th Amendment. Conkling told the Court that the drafters had altered the wording, replacing “citizens” with “persons” specifically to cover corporations as well. There’s no other evidence supporting this claim, and substantial reason to doubt it. An unpublished journal of the committee’s deliberations that Conklin offered in support was later found to completely contradict his claim: The language had never been changed. “So far as anyone can tell, the rights of corporations were not raised in the public debates over the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment or in any of the states’ ratifying conventions,” Winkler notes, nor had anyone else on the committee ever made such a claim.
Even at the time, Conkling’s account was suspect, according to Winkler. He made the argument in a case that languished for three years before Southern Pacific suddenly settled it, after which the railroad brought a nearly identical case to the Supreme Court, with the same legal team — except for Conklin. “Tellingly, Southern Pacific’s lawyers omitted any mention of Conkling’s drafting history or his journal,” Winkler notes. “Had those lawyers believed Conkling, it would have been malpractice to leave out his story.”
So everything else was premised on Conklin’s lie, which even his own colleagues didn’t believe. But there were so many other bad actors involved, it was like a Trump Cabinet meeting. In fact, Field sounded just like one of them, as Winkler describes:
Taxing the property of railroads differently, he said, was like allowing deductions for property “owned by white men or by old men, and not deducted if owned by black men or young men.”
In short, this was a collective fraud perpetrated by a whole collective of scoundrels, creating a fantasy version of the 14th Amendment that’s become deeply and profoundly embedded in American law. It was famously used, Winkler notes, to strike down numerous economic regulations, including federal child labor laws, zoning laws, and wage-and-hour laws,” at the same time that Plessy v. Ferguson (the next case on our list) refused to apply the 14th Amendment to protect the rights of African Americans:
Between 1868, when the amendment was ratified, and 1912, the Supreme Court would rule on 28 cases involving the rights of African Americans and an astonishing 312 cases on the rights of corporations.
More white supremacist fantasies
As we’ll see below, another strange wrinkle emerged in the modern era: for the Supreme Court’s hardcore conservatives, the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause exists almost solely to strike down affirmative action. But first, we need to turn to Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Court ruled that segregated facilities (supposedly “separate but equal”) did not deprive blacks of equal protection under law. It’s a much more ornate and convoluted lie than the one in Dred Scott, as I explained here, but to boil things down into basic fantasies, we need consider only three. First was the fantasy that the problem was all in black people’s heads:
We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.
Second came the exact opposite fantasy, that black inferiority was an immutable fact that human laws could do nothing to alter:
Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation.
Third was the fantasy that either nothing needed to be done, or that nothing could be done:
If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.
Of course, this last was pure sophistry. The civil and political rights were obviously not equal, which was why the case had been brought in the first place. And that inequality perpetuated social inequality — specifically via segregation — as indeed was the whole point. It took decades of racist terror to get to the point where such an absurd concoction of fantasies could be propounded with such seriousness. The court pretended that black civil and political rights would still be protected, even after three decades of white racist violence proved otherwise, and that they could be neatly severed from “social rights” such as riding in an integrated railroad car — that being the issue at hand in Plessy.
The fantastical nature of the Plessy decision is thrown into sharp contrast by the bracing realism of John Marshall Harlan’s dissent. “The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution,” Harlan wrote. “It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.” The phrase “badge of servitude” comes directly from the 13th Amendment, underscoring the broader context that gave meaning to the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Next, fast forward a century to Bush v. Gore, the case that settled the 2000 presidential election. In that instance, conservative justices who had never applied the Equal Protection Clause to defend black voting rights suddenly discovered its overwhelming importance in protecting the rights of ballots to be counted equally — by paradoxically ensuring that no ballots were counted at all! There was never any thought of who the voters casting the ballots might be, much less whether they could possibly constitute a class, as Equal Protection jurisdiction normally requires. It was not just a fantasy, but a farce.
Rather than dig into the details of the case, I’ll merely draw on a big-picture observation made by Geoffrey R. Stone, an editor of the Supreme Court Review, whom I quoted from here in July. Stone noted that the three hardcore conservatives on the court at that time — William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—had cast 65 votes in non-unanimous decisions interpreting the Equal Protection Clause in the previous decade, 19 of which involved affirmative action. Collectively, they’d cast exactly two votes finding Equal Protection Clause violations in those cases — one less vote in an entire decade than they cast in the Bush v. Gore decision. Summing up, Stone wrote:
What does this tell us? It tells us that Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas have a rather distinctive view of the United States Constitution. Apparently, the Equal Protection Clause, which was enacted after the Civil War primarily to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, is to be used for two and only two purposes — to invalidate affirmative action and to invalidate the recount process in the 2000 presidential election.
Put simply, the Equal Protection Clause those justices recognized does not exist. It was a bad-faith fantasy of their own invention.
Fantasies of guns and God
Race is clearly a major driver of conservative constitutional fantasies. But it’s not the only one, as shown by the Court’s Heller decision, the first ever recognize an individual right to gun ownership in the Second Amendment — a position that former Chief Justice Warren Burger (a Republican appointee) once called “a fraud on the American public.” The decision by Antonin Scalia was so roundly criticized that Scalia co-authored a book in its defense, “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts,” which was ripped to shreds by then-appeals court judge Richard Posner, in a devastating review titled “The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia.” To be clear, both Burger and Posner were highly respected conservative jurists. But they were not fantasists when it came to the Second Amendment.
Posner has a great deal to say about Scalia more generally, but my point is simple: Scalia claimed to be a textualist, but he completely ignored the following italicized text of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
That text clearly articulates a collective need, thereby justifying a collective right. This is how the Second Amendment had always been understood, until, as Michael Waldman explained, the National Rifle Association embarked on a multi-decade propaganda campaign to brainwash the American public. Brainwashing can effectively spread a fantasy. But it is powerless to transform it into truth.
Just as the NRA waged a decades-long propaganda war to push their constitutional fantasy through the Supreme Court, many on the religious right are organizing to do the same with the First Amendment now. They’d like to use their fantasy version of “religious freedom” as a license to discriminate, and ultimately create a two-tiered society, just like the one enshrined long ago by Plessy. They’ve at least gotten their foot in the door with decisions like Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop.
Progressive activists, both secular and religious, have been fighting back in recent years, particularly focused on reclaiming the true meaning of Religious Freedom Day, as I’ve written about here in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. I’ve also written repeatedly about Project Blitz (here, here, here and here), a state-level campaign employing this “religious freedom” fantasy to advance a three-stage, state-level theocratic agenda, first uncovered by researcher Frederick Clarkson last year. All this is embodied in a more sweeping fantasy of America as a Christian nation, a fantasy thoroughly debunked by Andrew Seidel in “The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American” (Salon interview here), and challenged on the ground by a new initiative, Christians Against Christian Nationalism (Salon story here). Directly confronting the constitutional fantasy aspect, the third part of Seidel’s book is entitled “The Ten Commandments versus the Constitution,” and it shows how each has elements opposed to principles of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has yet to write this fantasy into law, but shown by the examples above, it would hardly be out of character for them to do so.
Beyond the examples cited — and others like them — there’s another way in which conservative constitutional fantasies lead us astray, not at the level of individual decisions, but at the level of judicial philosophy. I already mentioned Posner’s refutation of Scalia’s version of textual originalism, but that’s only one version of the broader originalist approach, which Georgia State law professor Eric Segall dismantled in his 2018 book “Originalism as Faith,” which I wrote about here. In Segall’s view, originalism meets a lot of psychological needs, not just for judges, but for the broader public as well:
When the justices connect us to our past by supporting their decisions with persuasive evidence of prior agreements, they cultivate and maintain a distinctively American approach to hard public policy questions.
In addition, judicial appeals to original meaning might suggest that the justices are following the decisions of the founders, not imposing their own personal values. The justices want the American people to have faith that their decisions are grounded in prior law, not personal predilection, and references to originalist sources make that goal easier.
It’s a soothing “just-so story,” in other words. But it utterly fails in practice, as Segall told me in our interview:
Virtually every constitutional law case [decided by the Supreme Court] involves text that is imprecise, unclear, vague — equal protection, due process, establishment, unreasonable search and seizure, whatever. And as applied to the facts of any modern case, the history behind that is going to be extremely contested, even if we assume its relevance, which I don’t necessarily assume.
Thus, originalism is worthless at best. At worst, it’s a smokescreen for bad decisions:
The main argument in my book is that originalism doesn’t do anything. It’s never done anything. Forget about it. We should stop pretending text, history and precedent dictate Supreme Court decisions, and we should make [the justices] explain exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing — for transparency purposes.
But transparency is the last thing that the conservative peddlers of constitutional fantasies want. They didn’t want it in Dred Scott, nor in Plessy, Santa Clara, Heller or Bush v. Gore. At bottom, President Trump’s “phony emoluments clause” was nothing new for conservatives. In fact, it was part of a very long tradition. You might even say it was evidence that he’s a true conservative after all!
Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg.
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