The motto on the Supreme Court building is a big fat lie.
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| Equal Justice Under Law |
Wilhoit's Law:“There must be in-groups the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups the law binds but does not protect.
Francis Wilhoit, America political scientist, 1920-2010.
There is a reason liberals don't understand Trump-supporting conservatives. We are talking past each other. Liberals don't quite realize that conservatives have a different idea about the real structure of society and the purpose of government. Liberals think Trump contradicts conservative values; in fact, he expresses them. The Declaration of Independence isn't conservative. Conservative is a philosophy that believes there is a natural hierarchy within society, and that political power should be used to resist the demands for equality from oppressed groups. John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator, said that the notion of all men being equal "is the most dangerous of all political errors."
Liberals think human equality is fair and just. Abraham Lincoln said we are a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments put it into the Constitution. Liberals think that everyone pretty much agrees with that, including conservatives.
Liberals are wrong.
Conservatives have in the back of their minds, and sometimes the front, that some people are entitled to power and status and some people are not. This caste of privilege is usually color-coded, Whites above "Colored," but not always. It can be capital over labor, the majority religion over the minority one, native-born over immigrant, or high-status job over low-status job. Still, this is America, and over the centuries race has been central to our politics, and there is a region of the country -- the South -- where hierarchical thinking has been most prevalent.
In America, going back centuries, the law has worked to protect White, native-born Americans and to bind enslaved Blacks, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and the law is now binding immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Muslim countries. The law ignores or has a light touch when the offense involves the powerful injuring the weak. Trump pardons white-collar criminals who defrauded customers. White-collar crime generally is sentenced leniently. Wall Street bankers crashed the economy with fraudulent mortgage bonds, but they received bonuses, not jail. White-on-Black crime is prosecuted and sentenced more leniently than the reverse.
During the decades starting with the rights-agitation of the mid-twentieth century, when federal law attempted to enforce equality, conservative Americans adopted a libertarian, small-government policy. That has changed. Liberals are confused by the apparent reversal in position by conservatives who now support Trump's statism, including state involvement in women's reproduction and heavy-handed ICE enforcement. Liberals misunderstand conservatives. There is no contradiction, because conservatism was not about protecting liberty. It was about the direction of the bite of the law. When Big Government worked to enforce equality, conservatives resisted it. Now that Big Government enforces hierarchy, they are OK with it.
Liberals' "No Kings" demonstrations seemed silly and hyperbolic to conservatives. Kings! For goodness sake, Trump doesn't want to be a king. But a monarchy is the expression of patriarchal hierarchy, where the king has no constraints of law because he is the law, yet also immune from its bind. That is the constitutional structure under Trump as clarified by the Supreme Court. Liberals' visceral reaction is that this is profoundly wrong. Conservative voters see it and accept it, so long as the president is Trump. He is the leader, and the laws he enforces protect the right people and bind the others.
[Note; For further reading on this subject, I recommend this Substack post by Ben Wheeler:
https://benwheeler.substack.com/p/liberals-dont-understand-conservatives]
3 comments:
White woman who stole $500,000 from the Girl Scouts by fraud got a 2 year sentence and was in a halfway house in 6 months. At the same time a black man who robbed a seven 11 with a toy gun and got $200 got 6 years in jail with no halfway house placement until he was 3 months short of serving his sentence. If you’re going to be a thief, think big and do it with paper.
"Liberals think human equality is fair and just".
Sure, but with an important tweak. Liberals think human equality of OUTCOME is fair and just, with its very absence constituting operative proof that group-based oppression is at fault. Liberal social justice thus lies at the stultifying lowest common denominator.
Conservatives believe that equality of opportunity for the individual should be the continuous goal. Meanwhile, liberal cries of group Oppression are more strident and sweeping today than ever. As always, it's about defining terms and points of departure.
Concerning those two featured rich supposed scofflaws? Rick Scott is Republican, but Jamie Dimon is a Democrat. Trump may be a Republican (as of ten to fifteen years ago, anyway), but he's no conservative. He was no more thoughtful as a Democrat.
LD overstates both liberals and conservatives, in my opinion. I think the "equity" similarity of outcome was a very brief fad of a very few who tried to teach this utterly unworkable idea. It is gone. Some people will still advance that idea but they are total fringe. Democrats needed a kick in the pants in 2022 and 2024 to wake up and they did. Behavior has consequences and Democrats understand that. It is Republican scofflaws who have forgotten it. And as for Republicans, I would say that equality of opportuni9ty is probably what they would say and it is a shining ideal, but their policies fall far short of that. If they really wanted equality of opportunity they would fund K-12 and public universities better. It would notice and care that the children in poor neighborhoods have worse schools. They would care that we don't have health care available for everyone up to at least age 26. They would notice that dental care and braces are not available to poor kids. The idea that everyone has a equal place at the starting line is so profoundly false that it is very instructive that LD, who is most certainly not an idiot, would still write that conservatives want equal opportunity.. They don't. Not if they have to pay one penny to achieve it. Not if it takes away from the privileged people. It is a shining ideal observed in the breach.
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