Tag Archives: American history

(Some Of) We The People

Constitution, ,

I’ve been reading The Words That Made Us, a magisterial history of the origins of the Constitution, written  by Yale Constitutional Law professor Akil Amar. Amar’s previous books include The Bill of Rights and America’s Constitution: A Biography, both of which I read and found enlightening. (For example, in the latter book, Amar documents the extent to which the Amendments passed after the Civil War–especially the 14th–represented a significant reconstruction of the nation’s legal framework.)

This new book is also copiously and carefully documented, and as a consequence, it can be a bit of a slog; on the other hand, I’m encountering a number of heretofore unknown (by me, at least) details about the process that produced our Constitution, and the personal characteristics of the men who fought over it, theorized about it, and negotiated it.

Which brings me to a point on which most of those Founders apparently agreed–sovereignty in the U.S. rests with “We the People.” Not with the individual states, certainly not with Kings or Presidents–but with the people. We can now be critical of the worldview that confined definition of “the people” to free White males, and we should celebrate the later expansion of “the people” to include women and people of color–but we shouldn’t minimize the importance of what was then a truly revolutionary concept of sovereignty.

Interestingly, Amar points out that after the “constitutional conversation” over ratification took place, most colonies eliminated property ownership requirements for voting on the new charter. (Something else I’d previously not known.)

“The people” was–for that time–an inclusive concept.

America today faces a very dangerous tipping point–brought to us by a party, really a cult or cabal–that wants to change the concept of sovereignty and the definition of “people.”

We talk and write a lot about democracy, but what we mean by that term varies. As a number of pundits have pointed out, autocrats around the globe often claim to be “democratically” empowered, because their countries hold “elections.” (Note quotation marks.)

The men who crafted America’s Constitution broadened the then-definition of People, and saw democracy as the authority of those people. Today, faux patriots are engaged in narrowing it.

Gerrymandering carves out particular “people,” whose votes will outnumber and void the voices of others. The Electoral College–which Amar reminds us was an unwise concession to the slave states–operates to nullify the votes of a majority of the people who cast Presidential ballots. And as the Committee investigating  the January 6th insurrection is discovering, a not-insignificant number of elected and appointed Republicans–including Trump– fully intended to mount a coup and overturn an election decided by the people that numerous investigations (and Trump’s own dishonorable Attorney General) confirmed was free and fair.

The introduction to the U.S. Constitution doesn’t say “We (some of) the People.” It doesn’t say–as far too many of today’s faux patriots evidently believe– “We the (White Christian) People.” It says “We the People.”

If sovereignty is to be vested in We the People, all people’s votes must be counted and all people’s voices must be heard. That isn’t happening. (Okay, it’s never really happened, but we have previously moved in that direction.) To the contrary, we’re moving backward, thanks to a well-organized effort to subvert democratic equality and the very idea of “one person, one vote.”

As Barton Gellman reports in the linked article,

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

It is past time to reassert the sovereignty of ALL of We the People, and take back the country we thought we inhabited.

We’re Far From Number One

Random Blogging, ,

These days, in the aftermath of the “former guy’s” administration, Americans seem intent upon tearing the country apart. It has become impossible to ignore the reality that approximately a third of our fellow Americans are–excuse the language–bat-shit crazy, and that the people they vote for range from self-interested panderers (Indiana’s Todd Young just announced he will run again) to delusional fellow-travelers.

On the other hand, the rest of us are (slowly and reluctantly) coming to terms with realities we have previously ignored or downplayed. It is no longer possible to evade recognition of the extent to which racism has infected our politics and dictated our policies, for example. And our naive belief in “American exceptionalism” turns out to be our very own version of The Emperor Has No Clothes.

Last September’s release of the Social Progress Index reported that– out of 163 countries– the United States, Brazil and Hungary were the only ones in which people were worse off than when the index began measuring such things in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.

As Nicholas Kristof noted in the New York Times,  the United States, despite our immense wealth, military power and cultural influence, ranked a sad 28th — having slipped from a not-exactly-impressive 19th in 2011. The index now puts the United States behind significantly poorer countries, including Estonia, Czech Republic, Cyprus and Greece.

The United States ranks No. 1 in the world in quality of universities, but No. 91 in access to quality basic education. The U.S. leads the world in medical technology, yet we are No. 97 in access to quality health care.

The Social Progress Index finds that Americans have health statistics similar to those of people in Chile, Jordan and Albania, while kids in the United States get an education roughly on par with what children get in Uzbekistan and Mongolia. A majority of countries have lower homicide rates, and most other advanced countries have lower traffic fatality rates and better sanitation and internet access.

We lag in sharing political power equally among all citizens, and we rank a shameful number 100 in discrimination against minorities. (Note: that isn’t 100th in eradicating discrimination; that’s a rank of 100 among the most discriminatory.)

And those metrics were before COVID.  Since social scientists tell us that inclusive, tolerant and better educated societies are better able to manage pandemics, that doesn’t bode well for upcoming rankings. Kristof concludes by saying

We Americans like to say “We’re No. 1.” But the new data suggest that we should be chanting, “We’re No. 28! And dropping!”

Let’s wake up, for we are no longer the country we think we are.

Permit me a quibble: I’ve been reading a lot of American history lately, and it has become painfully clear that we never were the country so many of us (me included!) thought we were.

From Jill Lepore’s magisterial These Truths, to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, to Isabel Wilkerson’s searing Caste, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, and Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us,  these unadorned, un-falsified, meticulously documented accounts explain–as McGhee puts it–“why we can’t have nice things.”

Thanks to America’s long history of tribalism and “zero sum” thinking (if “those people” get X then that must mean I will lose X), we can’t even have the public goods that other countries take for granted, let alone a social infrastructure that supports and values all  citizens.

A full third of America wants to keep it that way. To them, that was the American “greatness” they wanted the former guy to restore.

The rest of us have our work cut out for us.

 

 

 

Repudiating Reality

Random Blogging, ,

Speaking of misinformation…

Can America be “built back better” in the (much-anticipated) wake of the Trump Administration? Or did the disasters of the last four years simply make the fact of the country’s decline over a much longer period impossible to ignore?

I don’t claim to know the answer to that question. (I’m actually not sure I want to know the answer.) But we are absolutely awash in blogs, books and essays on the subject. One of those explorations was in the Guardian, a couple of weeks after the election, in a book review titled “Can American Democracy Survive Donald Trump?” It began by setting out the core problem we face:

I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.

The author points out that lying, paranoia and conspiracy have long been seen as the defining features of totalitarian societies, and that the prevalence of those behaviors in contemporary America is increasingly being cited as evidence that we are becoming such a society.

As Federico Finchelstein maintained in his recent A Brief History of Fascist Lies: “As facts are presented as ‘fake news’ and ideas originating among those who deny the facts become government policy, we must remember that current talk about ‘post-truth’ has a political and intellectual lineage: the history of fascist lying.” Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, two of history’s most acute observers of totalitarianism, situated lying squarely at the heart of the totalitarian project.

With less than three weeks until President Biden is sworn in,  America’s current president is still refusing to concede, still  insisting that the results of an election that was found by international observers and state election officials alike as “transparently fair” was somehow rigged. Worse still, much of what passes for Republican leadership these days is passively or actively encouraging that belief.

An acknowledgement of the legitimacy of one’s political opponents is absolutely necessary for democracy to function. Increasingly, the GOP is refusing to admit to the legitimacy of either the Democratic Party or electoral outcomes unfavorable to the party.

As the New York Times reported last year: “At Christian nationalist gatherings and strategy meetings, the Democratic party and its supporters are routinely described as ‘demonic’ and associated with ‘rulers of the darkness’.” Republicans no longer oppose Democrats politically: they are opposing them existentially.

At the end of the day, American citizens are faced with a different–and far more significant– existential decision: what is true and what is not?

If Trump is symptomatic of America’s diseases of power, then his compulsive dishonesty might be the most revealing pathology of all. The US is a chronically untruthful country, deceit written into its very framework. The constitution contains explicit protections of slavery but never uses the word “slavery”, a deeply mendacious deception that eventually became a collective self-deception. The declaration “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” was written by a man who enslaved men he did not consider his equal, and became the foundation of a country that incessantly declared its belief in truth and justice while enslaving and oppressing much of its population.

Like many Americans, I have spent four years struggling against a pathological liar in the White House, only to realise, belatedly, that American culture fetishises the truth for a reason. “We hold these truths”, “truth, justice, and the American way”, the fable of the boy George Washington insisting he cannot tell a lie, “Honest Abe” Lincoln: this is a society protesting too much. American history is riddled with lies: that we talk about truth so much is just a tell.

In order to tell truth from falsehood, however, citizens need at the very least a baseline of accurate information about their government and the philosophy that animates it–something approximately 70 million of us evidently lack.

Unless we can somehow rescue fact from fiction, American democracy is unlikely to survive.

 

 

Relearning History

Public Policy and Governance, Racial Equality, , , ,

Remember that sarcastic insult–born too soon, smart too late, or something along those lines? I think I plead guilty.

I took the usual number of American history courses in high school and college, and thought I was at least superficially acquainted with the arc of American experience. But over the years, I began to realize that my knowledge of history was more superficial than informed. Visits to museums added uncomfortable details to the story of how European “settlers” and their progeny dispossessed Native Americans, and how administration after administration refused to honor treaties. Perhaps it’s the faulty memory of an older woman, but I don’t remember ever being taught about the Trail of Tears.

I was already teaching at the university level before I learned about  the deliberate American housing policies that are largely responsible for the continuing disparities between White and Black household wealth. I was serving on the dissertation committee of a social work student who was researching housing policy, and I was appalled to learn that redlining was official FHA policy for more years than we might imagine, effectively preventing Black Americans from building equity and security.

A recent book by Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law examines the local, state and federal housing policies that didn’t just allow, but actually mandated segregation. The Federal Housing Administration not only refused to insure mortgages in (or even near) African-American neighborhoods, it subsidized builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions–if those builders would ensure that none of the homes would be sold to African-Americans.

In a recent issue of The Atlantic, a scholar described both the results of those policies and White Americans’ ignorance of those results. 

For the past several years, I, along with my Yale colleague Michael W. Kraus and our students, have been examining perceptions of racial economic inequality—its extent and persistence, decade by decade. In a 2019 study, using a dozen specific moments between 1963 and 2016, we compared perceptions of racial wealth inequality over time with actual data on racial wealth inequality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the respondents in our study significantly overestimated the wealth of Black families relative to that of white families. In 1963, the median Black family had about 5 percent as much wealth as the median white family. Respondents said close to 50 percent. For 2016, the respondents estimated Black wealth to be 90 percent that of whites. The correct answer for that year was about 10 percent.

Trump’s recent tweets warning suburban dwellers that Biden and Harris will “wage war on the suburbs” is rooted in that history of American housing policy. As Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times,

Now, as the Trump campaign desperately searches for political avenues of attack, we’re hearing a lot about the “war on the suburbs.”

It’s probably not a line that will play well outside the G.O.P.’s hard-core base; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t exactly come across as rabble-rousers who will lead raging antifa hordes as they pillage America’s subdivisions.

Yet it is true that a Biden-Harris administration would resume and probably expand on Obama-era efforts to finally make the Fair Housing Act of 1968 effective, seeking in particular to redress some of the injustices created by America’s ugly history of using political power to create and reinforce racial inequality.

Fred Trump was one of the developers who profited from the segregationist policies of the FHA and VA, and his son Donald clearly believes that the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream is basically a walled village that the government built for whites, whose gates were slammed shut when others tried to enter.”

If facing these and other previously. unrecognized aspects of American history wasn’t unsettling enough, the pandemic quarantine has given me time to read. From Jill Lepore’s magisterial These Truths to Ron Chernow’s turgid Hamilton to Isabel Wilkerson’s lyrical and unsettling Caste, my last few months have been eye-opening, to say the least.

I remember when Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States was dismissed as “anti-American.” But genuine patriotism needs to be based on an accurate understanding of our country’s flaws as well as its strengths. If we are ever going to create the America I used to think I inhabited, we need to know what we need to know.

But I am drinking a lot more these days….

 

 

American Polarization

Academic Papers, ,

I have been attending a conference on American Political History, for which I prepared a paper. The following is my (abbreviated) presentation of that paper–still considerably longer than my daily posts, so be forewarned….

_____________________________________

America’s first motto was e pluribus unum, “out of the many, one.” That motto has always been more aspirational than descriptive, but thanks to a number of factors– from residential sorting to the hardening of racial and religious attitudes– America now faces fissures in the body politic that call even the aspiration into question.

Humans are hard-wired to be tribal—to prefer those we see as our “own kind” to members of groups that register as “other.” Recognition of this aspect of human nature is hardly new; multiple studies deal with aspects of human tribalism, and there’s an equally large number detailing the various mechanisms through which humans express, reinforce and justify tribal prejudices. History records the frequently horrifying consequences of dehumanizing people deemed to be “other” during wars and other conflicts, and the equally appalling behaviors that stem from the demonizing of targeted minority populations by dominant majorities within a single country.

The term tribalism is shorthand for this human predisposition to divide the world into in-groups and out-groups. There is considerable evidence that some degree of in-group favoritism is an inescapable attribute of group membership. It is the favoritism that is problematic; the human need to be part of a family, clan or tribe is not in itself a negative. Just as our families and more extended clans provide us with emotional and material support, membership in a larger group with which one identifies has its benefits. The presence of what sociologists call bonding social capital provides people within the relevant groups with cultural norms, and (at least within one’s group) supports increased levels of interpersonal trust and reciprocity, assets that facilitate collaborative action.

It’s when identification with a tribe operates to exclude and demean anyone who isn’t a member—when it creates a world peopled by “us” (good) and “them” (bad)—that it becomes destructive. It becomes especially dangerous when the definition of “us” is narrow, dependent upon immutable characteristics or upon rigid adherence to a particular ideology or religious belief that excludes and distrusts others. When negative stereotypes of an out-group are endorsed by celebrities or political authority figures, the damage can be substantial; for example,  researchers have linked Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets to spikes in anti-Muslim hate crimes.

Identity
Although the terms “identity” or “identity politics” can mean different things depending on the context, for purposes of this analysis, the terms reference an individual’s group affiliation, or social identity. As noted, identification with others in a particular group or category can confer feelings of acceptance and provide role models: this is how “we” behave. When individuals conclude that “I am like the other people in this group” and I am unlike “those people in other groups,” that recognition can lead to a sense of belonging and a recognition of interdependence with others in the relevant “tribe.” That said, membership in a tribe is usually accompanied by some degree of suspicion of those who fall outside that tribe. Trouble starts when that suspicion is heightened, and members of other groups are seen as competitors, enemies, or threats that must be subdued or eliminated. When “we” are God’s chosen, and “they” are by definition abominations, tolerance of difference is simply not possible.

The United States has not been immune from tribal conflicts, and today’s citizens continue to struggle with their legacies. America may have abolished slavery, but racism has proved much harder to eradicate. Religious conflicts and anti-Semitism have been—and remain—a constant. Women continue to struggle against an attitudinal “glass ceiling” that works against genuine equality in both the home and workplace. It wasn’t until the 1960s that LGBTQ citizens began emerging from the closet in significant numbers, and homophobia, like racism, continues to characterize much of American culture. And the country is experiencing yet another eruption of the hostility with which we have repeatedly greeted successive waves of immigrants.

In much of America’s admittedly contentious past, except for individuals who were automatically categorized as “other” by virtue of an immutable characteristic like race or gender, American affiliations have tended to be cross-cutting, meaning that people often identified as a member of several different communities having limited overlap. Individuals with such heterogeneous affiliations are likely to interact on a regular basis with fellow citizens holding views contrary to their own, and less likely to stereotype and malign people with whom they disagree as a result. In his seminal study The Social Requisites of Democracy, Seymour Martin Lipset concluded that that democratic stability is enhanced when individuals and groups have a number of cross-cutting, politically relevant affiliations. As a 2018 article in The Guardian noted, “[R]esearch has lined cross-cutting cleavages with toleration, moderation and conflict prevention.”

For a number of reasons, America’s “tribes” have become far more overlapping, meaning that people’s various identities have coalesced in ways that reinforce each other. As a result, and thanks also to the residential “sorting” documented by Bill Bishop in The Big Sort, most Americans have much less interaction with people who have opinions different from those of their tribes, and are less likely to engage with ideas and beliefs different from their own.

Historically, American tribal conflicts have centered upon identities and affiliations that were difficult or impossible to change: the ethnic, racial and religious differences that have been a source of human conflict for centuries. Those differences remain potent today. Racism, in particular, has re-emerged with a vengeance, and it isn’t limited to the White Nationalist movements that have become active across much of Europe and the United States. Longstanding racial and religious fault-lines have been deepened by the emergence of newer ideological and cultural cleavages, many of which are exacerbated by geography: in today’s U.S., for example, the worldviews of urban and rural inhabitants are frequently incommensurate. Research has documented deep differences in values and outlook between Americans who are well-to-do (or at least economically comfortable) and the poor, and between white people with a college education and white people without. Americans’ affiliations have become increasingly reinforcing rather than cross-cutting, enabling the growth of a toxic partisanship that sees the world in stark terms of black and white and right versus wrong. These world-views demand winners and losers.

Thanks to a variety of factors, significant numbers of Americans currently occupy “bubbles” populated largely by people who share and fortify their preferred worldviews. Even a cursory examination of the 21st Century media and policy environment allows  identification of several of those worldviews, as well as the environments that created and nurture them.  A caveat: the following list is not exhaustive—and due to time constraints, the categories are described in far more depth in the paper.

  • Cosmopolitan and Parochial.  Cosmopolitanism challenges the primacy citizens place onattachments to the nation-state and other parochial shared cultures. The cosmopolitan/parochial divide shares many attributes with classism.
  • Richer and Poorer.The economic divide between America’s rich and poor is now as damaging as it was during the Gilded Age.  This dangerous and growing gap between struggling Americans and the well-to-do means they have increasingly disparate life experiences and live increasingly segregated lives.
  • College Educated and Not. In the 2016 election, white voters divided sharply based upon their levels of education. Clinton carried counties with high numbers of educated voters, and even high income low education counties voted for Trump.
  • Urban versus Rural.Urban Americans are more than three times more likely than their rural counterparts to say that religion isn’t particularly important to them, and attitudes on social issues reflect that difference. They are also far more likely to be Republican.
  • Republican versus Democrat, Liberal versus Conservative.An individual’s self-identification as Republican or Democrat has come to signify a wide range of attitudes and beliefs not necessarily limited to support for a political party. Lilliana Mason notes that “A single vote can now indicate a person’s partisan preferences as well as his or her religion, race, ethnicity, gender, neighborhood and favorite grocery store.”  Partisan identity has become a shorthand encompassing racial, professional and religious identities. Party identification now outweighs ideological commitments, as can be seen by the acquiescence of Republican lawmakers to Trump’s tariffs that are wildly at odds with longtime Republican positions.
  • Black, White, Brown. It is impossible to talk about tribalism, of course, without addressing the stubborn persistence of racism. Age-old racial hatreds have been fed by economic anxieties and by demographic changes that threaten white Christian Americans with loss of their long-time social dominance and privilege. The  election of America’s first African-American President exacerbated long-simmering racial resentments, giving rise to the so-called “birther” movement, while Donald Trump’s overt appeals to racist sentiments have unleashed a sharp increase in racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant assaults.

America’s cultural and political polarization has been facilitated by the Internet and the reduced reach of so-called “legacy” media that previously provided the country with (relatively homogenized) information. The current media landscape allows Americans to consult a multitude of news and opinion sites of widely varying credibility and to choose the “news” that accords with their partisan preferences. Social media has encouraged the sharing of dubious assertions and unfounded accusations. One result has been a widespread loss of confidence in our ability to know what is factual and what is not—to distinguish between journalism and propaganda. The widespread availability of disinformation is especially troubling because the American public has abysmally low levels of civic literacy.

Economic insecurity, the threatened loss of jobs to global trade and especially automation, and the rapidity of social and technological change have contributed to widespread fear and uncertainty. Too many political figures have appealed to those fears rather than trying to ameliorate them. There is also the increasing complexity of the national and international issues we face, and the failure to reform antiquated government structures that are increasingly inadequate to meet the challenges posed by changes in where and how today’s Americans live.

All of these developments and many others have been consequential. That said, it is impossible to analyze the ways in which these changes have been experienced and various tribes have been formed without recognizing the degree to which America’s historic struggle with racism has exacerbated the salience of all of them.

Whatever our beliefs about “American exceptionalism” today, it behooves us to recognize that the founding of this country was genuinely exceptional—defined as dramatically different from what had gone before—in one incredibly important respect: for the first time, citizenship was made dependent upon behavior rather than identity. In the Old World, the rights of individuals were largely dependent upon their identities, the status of their particular “tribes” in the relevant political order. (Jews, for example, rarely enjoyed the same rights as Christians, even in countries that refrained from oppressing them.) Your rights vis a vis your government depended largely upon who you were—your religion, your race, your social class, your status as conqueror or conquered.

The new United States took a different approach to citizenship. Whatever the social realities, whatever the disabilities imposed by the laws of the various states, any white male born or naturalized here was equally a citizen. We look back now at the exclusion of blacks and women and our treatment of Native Americans as shameful departures from that approach, and they were, but we sometimes fail to appreciate how novel the approach itself was at that time in history. All of what we think of as core American values—individual rights, civic equality, due process of law—flow from the principle that government must not treat people differently based solely upon their identity. Eventually (and for many people, very reluctantly) America extended that founding principle to gender, skin color and sexual orientation. Racism is thus a rejection of a civic equality that is integral to genuinely American identity.

When the nation’s leaders have understood the foundations of American citizenship, when they have reminded us that what makes us Americans is allegiance to core American values—not the color of our skin, not the prayers we say, not who we love—we emerge stronger from these periods of unrest. The political divisions that are so stark in our polarized time represent, at least in part, a clash between those who fear we are departing from that essential (if imperfectly recognized) commitment to equality and those who want to “return” to an imagined White Christian America.

Religious Liberty?

As America becomes more diverse, and White Christians face the loss of cultural hegemony, they have increasingly turned to the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause to make arguments about their right to an expansive and ahistorical “religious liberty.”

A bit of history for this history conference: What the phrase “Religious liberty” meant to the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock was the “liberty” to impose the correct religion on their neighbors. The idea that Church and State could even be separated would have been incomprehensible to the Puritans; the liberty they wanted was freedom to “establish” the True Religion, and to live under a government that would impose that religion on their neighbors.

The Puritans defined liberty as “freedom to do the right thing,” to impose the correct religion.

A hundred and fifty years later, however, the men who crafted our Constitution had a very different understanding of liberty. The philosophical movement we call the Enlightenment had given birth to science and empiricism, privileged reason over superstition, and caused philosophers to reconsider the purpose and proper role of government.

Liberty had come to mean the individual’s right to self-government, the right to decide for oneself what beliefs to embrace. Liberty now meant the right of individuals to live their lives in accordance with their own consciences, free of both state coercion and what the founders called “the passions of the majority,” so long as they did not harm others, and the Bill of Rights limited what government could require even when a majority of citizens approved.

The problem is that, although America’s Constitution and legal framework were products of the Enlightenment, many American citizens remain philosophical Puritans.

Many of the fundamentalist Christians fearing loss of cultural hegemony are deeply Puritan: anti-science, anti-reason, anti-diversity. They are absolutely convinced of their own possession of the Truth, and like the original Puritans, absolutely convinced that a proper understanding of “religious liberty” should give them the right to make rules for everyone else.

Under the Constitution, Americans have the right to believe anything they want. They do not have an absolute right to act on those beliefs. (You can sincerely believe God wants you to sacrifice your first-born, but the law doesn’t let you do that.) Many people have trouble understanding that distinction.

Opponents of civil rights for LGBTQ citizens argue that rules preventing businesses from refusing to hire employees who offend their religious beliefs, or from firing or otherwise discriminating against such individuals, denies them religious liberty. (This is a variant of the argument that anti-bullying legislation infringes the “free speech rights” of those doing the bullying.) They argue that they should be able to discriminate against gay people—or black people, or women, or Muslims–if they claim a religious motivation. Of course, an exemption for discrimination based upon “religious motivation” would eviscerate civil rights laws.

This is the same argument that erupted when Congress enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Opponents argued that being forced to hire or do business with women or people of color violated their liberty to act upon a “sincere religious belief” that God wanted women to be subordinate and the races to be separate. And it did limit their liberty. In a civilized society, the right to do whatever one wants is constrained in all sorts of ways: I don’t have the liberty to play loud music next to your house at 2:00 a.m., or drive my car 100 miles per hour down city streets. And so on.

Civil rights laws are an outgrowth of the social contract. The citizen who opens a bakery– or a shoe store or a bank or any other business–- expects local police and fire departments to protect her store, expects local government to maintain the streets and sidewalks that enable people to get there, expects state and federal agencies to protect the country, to issue and back the currency used to pay for his products, and to ensure that other businesses and institutions are playing by the rules and not engaging in predatory behaviors that would put him out of business. People of all races, religions, genders and sexualities pay the taxes that support those government responsibilities, and in return, have a right to expect those who are “open for business” to provide cakes or shoes or other goods to any member of the public willing and able to pay for them.

The religion clauses of the First Amendment give religious folks the right to exclude those they consider “sinners” from their churches, their private clubs and their living rooms. That right does not extend to their hardware stores.

Today’s Americans live with over 330 million others, many of whom have political opinions, backgrounds, holy books, and perspectives that differ significantly from their own. The only way such a society can work–the only “social contract” that allows diverse Americans to coexist in reasonable harmony–is within a legal system and culture that respects those differences to the greatest extent possible. That means laws that require treating everyone equally within the public/civic sphere, while respecting the right of individuals to embrace different values and pursue different ends in their private lives. Only a legal system that refuses to take sides in America’s ongoing religious wars is able to safeguard anyone’s religious liberty.

History teaches us that social change that threatens the privileged status of dominant groups will be ferociously opposed by those groups. Throughout American history, when previously subordinated populations have demanded a seat at the civic table, those whose hegemony was threatened have resisted. That resistance may not completely explain today’s polarization, but it has massively contributed to  it.

As Mark Twain is said to have observed, history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

We live in rhyme time.