What do Americans mean when they describe themselves as “conservative”? To approximate an answer, I want to look at some examples of “conservative” thought.
An important example is the insistence that the “War Between the States” (their name for it) was never about race or about slavery. 160 years after the guns went silent, there are Americans who still insist that the Civil War was really about states’ rights. But those same voices enthusiastically support sending US marines to California and Texas National Guard troops to Illinois, in both cases against the vehement objections of those states’ governors. What happened to states' rights?
Then there is conservative judicial doctrine. Since the 1980’s, the Supreme Court’s written decisions have increasingly been informed by a legal theory called “originalism.” It claims that the Constitution must be understood by the way its writers understood it in 1788. Four of the nine current justices proudly call themselves “originalists” and two more frequently use “originalist” arguments. I will point out that the theory was first articulated in 1970 by Robert Bork, who famously fired the Watergate special prosecutor after both the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General refused. He also famously insisted that Civil Rights laws were unconstitutional, or he did until the moment in 1987 when he suddenly reversed himself in front of a Senate committee interviewing him for a position on the Supreme Court.
“Originalism” has been used to undermine voting rights on the grounds that the Voting Rights Act only required scrutiny of states with a history of suppressing voting and that such suppression was old news so scrutiny was no longer needed. That argument was instantly exposed as a falsehood by the states that began suppressing the vote before the ink was dry on the Court’s decision. It has been used to overturn common-sense gun laws, including New York’s ability to regulate concealed carry by visitors from out of state. It has been used to overturn a Constitutional right to abortion, on the grounds that the framers couldn’t possibly have intended this.
But these same “originalists” have now discovered that the President is above the law: That he is allowed to usurp the Legislative branch’s control over taxation and expenditure. That he can engage in extrajudicial murder against private citizens of another country by declaring that there is a “war,” without any Congressional declaration of war. That he can conspire with terrorist organizations to overturn an election and invade the Capitol... with impunity from prosecution.
“Conservatives” used to be know for their insistence on the free operation of the Market (just forcapital and goods, of course, not for workers and their wages.) Today we see them applauding bizarre tariffs, imposed one week and dismissed the next at the momentary whim of the President and without any input by the Congress, which has the only Constitutional power to tax us. Similarly, conservatives used to insist on a cautious approach to expanding the money supply, matching it to the overall growth of the economy. Now they support money issued by private speculators for their personal profit, which doubles as a means of exchange and a Ponzi scheme, and which is aptly called (by its own sponsors!) crypto or secret currency.
I suppose that there are people who genuinely subscribe to ideas like states’ rights, and Constitutional originalism, and free trade, and monetarism. I don’t think that all the people who say that they do are lying or hypocritical, even when they abandon those ideas the instant they conflict with some other need, like keeping their party in power or satisfying the powerful gun lobby. No, I think they just shy away from publicly acknowledging their more fundamental motives, motives that are more essential to them than a legal or fiscal philosophy.
The history of the United States shows us again and again the power of anti-Black racism. Its advocates keep asking us, “Why do you make everything about racism?” The simple answer is: “We don’t; you do.”
Regarding the first example above: Eleven states seceded from the United States in 1861 and fought a four-year war, costing a million lives, to preserve their right to own Black people as their private property. The claim that this was about states’ rights is transparently false: in 1861 the federal government wasn’t threatening any states’ rights, even the ownership of Black people. To the contrary, the owners of those people had passed a federal law requiring states without slavery to act as slave catchers, capturing Black people and sending them South to be either re-enslaved or - in many cases - enslaved for the first time. So much for allowing each state to determine its own laws. Arguing that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery and racism is pretense. And as I noted above, where are the states’ righters when it comes to sending the Texas Guard to Chicago?
The same is true of voting rights. Between 1870 and 1900 the Black vote was mostly suppressed not by law, but by extrajudicial violence. In 1876, for example, white supremacists who wanted to win the South Carolina elections planned a statewide campaign of massacres to discourage Black voting. They made no secret of their goal, saying they “intended to carry the election if they had to wade in blood up to their saddle girths." In Aiken County, local white supremacists organized as “Red Shirts” and were joined by hundreds more from neighboring counties and Georgia. They murdered at least a hundred Black people. In another incident, they attacked 30 South Carolina National Guardsmen, mostly Black, disarming them, torturing them, and murdering six of them. No Red Shirts were ever prosecuted because they did steal the election. White supremacists took power the election violence and murders throughout the former Confederacy, not just South Carolina. In North Carolina, in 1898, white supremacists - again organized as “Red Shirts” - staged a coup d’etat in the city of Wilmington. In this case they massacred several hundred Black residents after an election to put a white-only government in place. They also forced over 2,000 Black people out of the city, especially business and property owners, and professional people.
Many readers will be familiar with some of the laws these white-supremacist governments subsequently passed in order to legalize their control and make white power less immediately dependent on murder, beatings, arson, and theft. You will have heard of the selectively-enforced poll taxes. You will have heard of literacy tests that required prospective voters to explain sections of the state constitution to the satisfaction of white supremacist registrars. You may have heard of white-only primary elections and of eight-box laws making it possible to throw out ballots during counting. It is probably necessary, though, for me to explain that neither the violence nor the discriminatory laws were intended to disfranchise a minority. No, they were intended to disfranchise a Black majority. Look it up yourself. The entire state of Mississippi had more Black people than white through the 1930’s. So did South Carolina. Other southern states had large areas where Black people were the majority and where white supremacists suppressed the Black vote so that they could remain in control of the government, including police and courts.
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1865 to address this long history of denying the vote to Black people and the Supreme Court quickly upheld it as a Constitutional necessity to enforce the 15th Amendment. As I noted above, an ideologically-changed Court threw it out in 2013, claiming that it was based on forty-year old facts which were no longer true. But the same states that had suppressed the Black vote before 1865 moved immediately to pass new laws to reduce Black voting. So why would anyone entertain the Court's claim that this is about Constitutional originalism?
Tying money policy to race may seem to be a harder case to make. I will start by noting that many of the same “conservatives” who argued that our money supply should be backed by gold in the 1990’s have become ardent advocates of crypto - backed by nothing - in the 2020’s. This begs the question of what could have changed for them to reverse a deeply-held belief in gold. I might entertain the explanation that both positions - regardless of how diametrically opposed they appear to be - could be characterized as libertarian mistrust of the government. Well, I might entertain that libertarian explanation if those people didn’t also support the military invasion of American cities and the dictatorial powers that are being given to the President.
But there is another thread of continuity, and that is their belief in white superiority. This is evident in their writings, yes. But it is most evident in their support for illegal roundups of migrants from Latin America, incarcerating them without due process, and shipping them to dungeons in third countries they have never even visited. Please note, this is precisely what was done to people accused of supporting Al Qaeda - with or without judicial hearings or, indeed, any credible evidence - when they were held indefinitely at Guantanamo. Now it is being done to working Americans: some citizens, some with green cards, some without.
This is the nature of racial capitalism. It takes away the rights of some designated group, and then it expands that oppression to others. And not only oppression, but exploitation. In 1857 the Supreme Court said that the Constitution recognized Black people as a group “with no rights a white man was bound to respect.” The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 to reverse that.
Now our President and his supporters are loudly boasting their intention to rid the Constitution of that Amendment. Trump, being Trump, claims that he can amend the US Constitution by executive order. But that doesn’t make it a joke. His party is exploring the possibility of replacing America’s deported workers with incarcerated people. I will note here that the minimum wage in New York State is $15 an hour $13.20 an hour., except for farm workers for whom it is $13.20. New York State prisoners, on the other hand, earn between 10 cents and $1.30 an hour. Considering the fact that it costs us $115,000 a year to incarcerate our neighbors, that looks to me like a substantial subsidy to employers… and a substantial incentive to incarcerate as many people as possible.
I turn to conservative support for so-called gun rights last. I say “so-called” because it has become apparent that when we use that phrase we are talking less about people’s right to guns and more about the rights of the guns themselves and their manufacturers. We are talking about the right of the guns to take our lives and the lives of our children. We are talking about the right of manufacturers to continue profiting even now when we have more guns in the country than we have people. It has long been clear that the Second Amendment established a right to bear arms in order to provide for a well-regulated militia, ie the National Guard. Even the Supreme Court used to acknowledge that, even if it has forgotten.
I am not original in asking whether it's weird that the same people who insisted yesterday that they needed guns to protect themselves from a tyrannical government have no objection today to the President sending troops to occupy our cities. It’s a rhetorical question, though. I know that those people regard our cities as dangerous havens of Black and brown people. Whether they are going armed to see a Broadway show or whether Army Rangers patrol theater row is just a pragmatic difference. And it’s a rhetorical question because I know that their fear of “crime” - and the faith that their guns will protect them from that crime - is actually a fear of Black and brown people.
I’ll close with a thought from the character Ezekiel Payne in my novel of the early 20th century, “Though An Army Come Against Us.” He reflects on the way white people projected their own hatred and fear - along with their own racist violence - onto the Black subjects of that violence:
Lynchings were always followed by panicked reports in the white press of armed Black men on the way to exact vengeance. Back in ’07 the whites of Henryetta had nearly fled the town because they feared that the 1300 rounds of ammunition they had stockpiled would not be enough to stop the 35 armed Black men they heard were coming for them: more than seven 5-round magazines for each imaginary invader! In the case of Okemah, they said it was the entire town of Boley, ten miles away, that was supposedly coming to kill the white people, and – Ezekiel supposed – outrage their women. Sheriff Dunnegan armed every white man in Okemah, prepared for an attack that – like the one expected in Henryetta – never came. From that day on, Okemah was a sundown town.
And:
What if white folks were so filled with guilt and shame for their own crimes that they imagined an army of Black people retaliating against them because it would have to be so in any just universe? What if white folks had to bar Negroes from their towns because they couldn’t look them in the eye after the atrocities they had committed against them? What if white folks imagined that colored folks were impervious to bullets because they knew their own actions were demonic and thought God himself was sending avenging Black angels to destroy them? And – finally – what if those loathsome postcards of their victims that they all kept as souvenirs were meant to reassure them that these Black angels were, in fact, mortal?
So what exactly is “conservatism” in the United States. I think I have answered that question
