Equality and Justice Would Be Nice

By SAM URETSKY

Joseph Biden is probably the president we needed. There may have been better candidates, even better people, but his greatest strength was, and is, his ability to understand the nation’s and the world’s problems, and try to do something about them. President John F. Kennedy once said “”Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in periods of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.” (Actually, Dante never said it, but Kennedy did and it’s a great line.)

Biden realized the growing polarization of the United States and much of the world. He understood the impact of having a predecessor whose first act in office was withdrawal from the Paris Accord, a weak, and voluntary agreement that, if nothing else symbolized an awareness of global warming, which later became known as climate change, and now is described as extreme weather. President Biden is imperfect, as we all are – but he still understands poverty, racism, and replacement theory, and a host of other problems that face this nation and the entire planet.

This is nothing new. Consider Thomas Jefferson, one of our most eloquent presidents, who wrote of slavery “ as an “execrable commerce … this assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties.” That was before he discovered the economic benefits of raising and selling slaves was far more profitable than the cotton trade. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Except native Americans, African slaves, women, and persons with no property.

George Washington wrote to the Jews of Touro Synagogue ““For happily the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” More recently a President said of the Charlottesville marchers who were espousing replacement theory “you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides...”

And there is the famous story about Benjamin Franklin: As the story was told and retold on the House floor, Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin supposedly responded, with a rejoinder at once witty and ominous: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Note that Franklin said “a republic,” not “a democracy.” At some level we think of this as a democracy, but it never was. Consider that Wyoming, population 581,075, has the same number of senators as California, population 39,613,493. In 2018, The Economist magazine wrote: “In some states voters have been ‘purged’ from the rolls in overzealous clean-up efforts. Other states demand ever more documentary proof that people are eligible to vote.

“Well-off homeowners who drive cars and have passports barely notice such hurdles. But young, poor and ethnic-minority voters are more likely to crash into them. Often, this is not just an unfortunate side-effect of tighter voting rules; it is their intent. In Tennessee and Texas student ID cards are not acceptable forms of identification—though gun permits are fine.”

But perhaps, just perhaps, the red states have gone too far. On Sept 3, the New York Times published a guest essay “Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It.” The Wall Street Journal, on the same day, had a report “Support for Legalized Abortion Grows Since Dobbs Ruling, WSJ Poll Shows.” In a year which, by tradition, would have led to a red wave, with inflation as the most important factor in voting choice, the people polled said that the abortion issue was the single issue that made them most likely to vote.

The coming election is perhaps a fight for the American Dream. While the phrase has been variously interpreted, it is commonly thought of as a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation. Led by Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party has politicized the judiciary branch of government, resulting in the loss of the constitutionally guaranteed right, first to abortion, and perhaps, as Justice Clarence Thomas has said, to other rights that are not explicitly noted in the Constitution. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is not simply a matter of women’s reproductive rights, but a refutation of the American Dream of equality and justice for everyone – an ideal long aspired to but never quite reached.

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2022

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