How They Used Roe vs. Wade To Overthrow the Constitution
Where is this coming from? people are asking, these days. How did all this anti-democracy, pro-authoritarian movement - most ironically found in people running the government - come out of nowhere? What crazies are these, running the ship of state into the iceberg, trying to overthrow the judiciary and ram anti-constitutional laws through with no shame?
Well, they're only crazy like foxes. And they've been planning this, and working towards it, for a long, long time.
And they talked about it openly, in print.
In 1996.
At that time, Monica Lewinski was still an unknown intern making the most of her time in the White House, and Linda Tripp hadn't been approached by Jonah Goldberg's mother, Nixon hatchetwoman Lucianne, to engage in a little private wiretapping.
At that time, I was still working in conservative Catholic media, and familiar with the magazine First Things, in that we subscribed to it at the office and I occasionally flipped through it, and sometimes read an entire article, with increasingly frown lines and discontent. But I have to confess, I was bored by it: it lacked both the sensationalism of our usual conservative Christian fare, and the interest of real scholarly publications. I tended to bounce off that, and the University Bookman founded by Russell Kirk, finding them great masses of words like cotton wool with no clear thoughts or arguments or ideas in them - though I never admitted it, because I would have sounded dumb, or worse yet, disloyal...because the things I did gather, I didn't think I agreed with.
I was very insecure, in a lot of ways.
At that point I was also deeply in a very long-lasting clinical depression - it may very well have been the time that I was carrying a shotgun shell in my pocket to remind myself that there was a Way Out, so that I could stop thinking of suicide and the mortal sin of that, all the time. (As a displacement mechanism, I can't fully explain it, but it worked. For a while.)
So I didn't actually recall this issue until I read about it yesterday, by chance, "dowsing" through links on TNR (why, again, is it supposed to be a liberal publication?) and in an article talking (inaccurately imo) about the neocon-theocon split [sic] here, this "Symposium" was mentioned.
For those not from the Christian academic background, symposium is a loaded word. It refers to Socrates' dinner parties with his friends and students, a meeting of minds in a cultured setting - with the added savour of civil disobedience or rather obedience to a higher authority - The Truth. That's the resonance of the word. Not an accidental choice. If they had meant something less activist, they would have used "Colloquium" or the mundane "an issue devoted to the topic of X" - right there's a subtle warning.
But it's the names and titles on the cover that ought to give everyone the heeby-jeebies.
* The Taming of the Church, etc., Richard John Neuhaus
- Our Judicial Oligarchy, Robert H. Bork
- A Crisis of Legitimacy, Russell Hittinger
- A Culture Corrupted, Hadley Arkes
- Kingdoms in Conflict, Charles W. Colson
- The Tyrant State, Robert P. George
- The End of Ideology?, James Neuchterlein
- Rights Without Right, David Walsh
- Flags, Traditions, and Charity, Alan Jacobs
- The Politics of Architecture, Peter Kreeft
- Protestant Principle, Catholic Substance, A. J. Conyers
Notice that last article particularly. All you guys confident because "Evangelicals hate Catholics, they'll never worked together" you missed what Hitchens long ago called "reverse ecumenism," the union of political expedience by those who share enough of an overlapping ideology of "godliness" to ally and defeat the common foes of "secular humanism", "modernism," and "socialism." Many of these guys are converts to Catholicism from various Protestant denominations that had gone "liberal" - like the editor, Neuhaus himself. (Who was at the Al Smith dinner with the "I call you my base" joke, btw.)
Like I said, I didn't read it, or at least I don't remember reading it. I was bitterly disillusioned with politics by then, because I was already slowly beginning to realize that we prolifers had been had, and to see that the "difference" between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" wasn't very far, all of them corporate types, and I was even beginning to wonder if there mightn't have been something to what the Communists had been going on about (heresy!) but mostly I was troubled by the fact that conservatives seemed to want the world to be a wreck, a disaster, while moderates and liberals seemed to be the ones actually accomplishing good in the world, instead of just talking about it in think tanks.
But - I did remember the meme, because it trickled into conservative Catholic academic consciousness, and so it came up being argued elsewhere, in other publications that I can't remmber - and at the dinnertable. The idea that the Founding Fathers were right to withold the vote from anyone but property owning males, since they would naturally be the most responsible - I first heard that 10, 15 years ago.
Peter Kreeft's another big, big, bigwig in the conservative meme-generation business. If you want to know where memes are coming from, btw, go read the books he wrote ten, fifteen years ago. It's Russell Kirk repackaged for modern consumption. And Russell Kirk seems good at first bite, but his conservatism is filled with poison: turgidity, inequality, worship of the Status Quo, fearmongering of the dire consequences of change, laced with historical fiction parables. You see the debased version of it, when you get a freeper telling you that Rome fell because they allowed gays...
I know people have called me alarmist, for saying a year ago that They are planning to ban contraception, that they have no regard for the judiciary, that they want to destroy public education, mandate prayer in school, that they've been systematically undermining the Unions and Soc Sec and the rule of law and none of this is coming out of nowhere.
But I was there, on the other side, I saw it all going down, before I defected. and to this effect I put together The Matrix, a rough and incomplete chart of the spiderwebs of power ($$$$ and personalities) that have tied the theocons and the meocons (anti-tax types) together all these years, that I called "Foundations & Empire," showing how the aims of the military industrial complex are served by rolling back civil rights and gender rights and how it all ties into nativism and bigotry, it all makes sense if you're a Robber Baron, or a Robber Baron's Minion--
Look at the articles. Read them carefully. I know they're boring, doublespeak, written in code - this is why I had such a hard time understanding them back then, and why I recognize the Code when it's used now openly - but this is important. The whole idea is that the government, because it has abandoned traditional moral valuesTM has lost its legitimacy. That due to judicial arrogance, due to those evil "activist judges," democracy has become a failed experiment - and thinking Americans of good will have a duty even, to disregard the law of the land, to uphold the true purpose of laws which is to ensure justice for all.
It's all very Orwellian, indeed. (Notice the inclusion of quotes by liberal theologians and social activists like Bonhoeffer and MLK, frex.)
An example, grabbed at random from the "Symposium" Issue:
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court made abortion the benchmark of its own legitimacy, and indeed the token of the American political covenant. To those who cannot agree with the proposition that individuals have a moral or constitutional right to kill the unborn, or that such a right defines the trans-generational covenant of the American political order, the Court urged acceptance out of respect for the rule of law. "If the Court's legitimacy should be undermined," the Court declared, "then so would the country be in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals."
If the Court does not claim to act merely in its own name, but for the common good and the rule of law, how then should citizens regard the effort to link abortion with the legitimacy of the Court itself and thus, it would seem, with the legitimacy of our current political regime? We could put this in a different way by asking whether the Court-in laying down rules without authority to do so and then asking for obedience in the name of the common good-has acted ultra vires, beyond its constitutionally assigned powers. If so, its commands are not legitimate. The rule of law prohibits reallocation of shares of authority without the consent of the governed. Since the political common good depends on no branch of government taking more than its share of authority, obedience should not be given to an act that violates the foundation of the rule of law.
This has been the real utility of making abortion the sole moral issue for Christians, these past years, (with euthanasia a lower-ranking subset of "prolife" causes - they're often mentioned in one breath.) Of tying it in with Dred Scott and the Holocaust, in a carefully-filtered a-historical narrative that makes it a simple morality tale of selfish, foolish, lewd women and Evil Doctors. (In the old days, because many doctors were Jewish, anti-semitism is part of the anti-abortion campaigns, in literature from the 20s and 30s. I never knew how to process this before.)
Nativism - and natalism. We will be outbred by the brown folk! The Yellow Peril! and this fear is not truly a fear of the peasants, but of the masters. Folks like Samuel Huntingdon, that blue blood who writes with fear of the unassmilated new immigrants, so different from all past generations, and the VDARE types, and the Regneries with their educated racism and pandering to "Ethnic Christians."
--Left to themselves, ordinary workers will have ethnic rivalries and resentments. But left alone, like in my state, we will slowly intermarry and turn interesting shades and combinations of features, peaceably - even people whose ancestors used to fight each other a hundred years ago. Over twenty different languages were spoken by the united workers in the grassroots effort of the great women-led Textile Strike of 1912! And it was because plutocrats were trying to get around the evil of "activist judges" forcing them to stop making people work unpaid overtime.
No wonder they fear feminism, labor, multiculturalism and activist judges!
It is only when there is a strong vested interest - or strong encouragement from above - that you get the sort of hatred that the Czars deliberately provoked, or the SSSR - or that the miscegenators here did, and still do.
The masters want us pitted against each other - and by God they've succeeded. Half of you here are afraid of 3% of the population - the weakest, least able segment - instead of the < 10% who's been robbing you blind, and your parents, and grandparents - and theirs too, both here as they exploit them to keep your cheesburgers cheap and back home, as we sent our armies these past hundred years to break the back of resistance for oil and cheap bananas and sugar--!
But everyone's afraid to attack the masters, so they beat up on serfs weaker than themselves. And so the masters win, generation after generation after generation: it wasn't the Scaifes and the Coors and the Bushes and the Cabots and the Fords who went broke in the Great Depression, was it?
The Institute on Religion and Democracy, which publishes Crisis (or subsidizes it rather, it's not an advertising-based magazine at all) is a think tank subsidized by Scaife and the rest of the Hegemony, the Four Sisters and all. Crisis itself gets a lot of funds from Olin, the arms and pesticide makers, among other tings, who funded the infamous John Lott/Mary Roche, expert on gun rights. They've welded the old Americanist heresy with a generic "Traditional Christianity" to form what I call the Church of Tashlan.
Neuhaus is in tight with the White House, just like Deal Hudson of Crisis Magazine, whose editors have included AEI types like Michael Novak, was until his old sex scandal came to haunt him. (Which proved again that what was wrong for Bill and Monica, is OKIYAR.)
And you know what? Back when, I've read recently, TNR missed the plutocracy involvement in fascist trends in America just at the time that they were growing stronger, dismissed them as impossible, a priori, because of their naive faith that fascism was at heart a grassroots movement.
They did not see that it was also a top-down movement, simultaneously, that it exploited human weaknesses as all such power grabs must, exploited exant social conditions and prejudices more systematically than your rabble-rousing Lord Gordon - the superficial cause of the riots being anti-Catholicism, but the root causes being the unpopularity of the government due to an unpopular war and resulting austerity and security measures, the climate of fear and paranoia resulting, the massive amounts of unemployed people due to the industrial revolution, all it took was a retired military demagogue bigot to start a week of uncontrolled destruction, starting with someone weaker than they were, but quickly spreading to symbols of the state, like prisons - but it's the same principle: that popular revolutions, the French or the American or the Russian or the Reichs, always have manipulators up at the top, articulating and disseminating the Messages.
At the same time, Upton Sinclair was taking the opposite point of view, and telling the story of a "folksy" former lawyer and (literal) con-artist turned politician, playing off Americans' fear, insecurity, militaristic pride, greed, and resentment of the imagined Other who has more, while all the while claiming to be anti-Fascist, against Big Business even as he winks at them, and to have a Plan that will alleviate poverty by magic.
Even though he's a smirking little worm who plays the down-home clown wearing cowboy hats and talking like a hick in public, he's worshipped and promoted by religious leaders and military men and all the nice decent middle class people who agree that the country is going to hell in a handbasket, that women belong in the home and blacks doing manual labor, and that we should kick all those disrespectful foreigners' butts, if they deny us our rightful interests in China and elsewhere.
Oh, and he's guided by a shadowy ex-Leftist turned public relations man, who manages all his public image, writes his speeches and handles his appearances and comes up with all the "Buzz-words" of the campaign.
And Americans eat it up, hook, line and sinker.
If you think It Can't Happen Here, - think again.
It already has.
Oh and you know what else? The "decent conservatives" in the book and the radical communists join forces, when the new president's "Minute Men" - clean-cut youths wearing good old American khaki - start beating people up.
They're all taken away by the police together, for disturbing the peace. By that point, it's too late.
Liberals! Sane conservatives! They told you they were going to do it, at PNAC and AEI and National Review and elsewhere, all these years, and they've done it. --Now what are you going to do about it?