Before the rise of the post-war civil rights movement and its legal and political arm, the scope of your rights varied from state to state. This was most acute for black Americans, who became second-class citizens when entering the states of the former Confederacy, but it was true for a large number of Americans for a myriad of problems. The extent of your voting rights, of your privacy rights, of whether you could marry or have an abortion, or whether you were counted equally for the purposes of representation varied depending on where you lived in the country.
To the extent that this was ‘freedom’, it was the freedom to dominate, exercised by people at the top of our various overlapping hierarchies. And, in fact, the ability to delineate rights for certain groups of Americans itself determined that hierarchical power. The decentralization of rights gave local bullies room to thrive.
The rights revolution has weakened and unraveled this state of affairs. The effect of the Voting Rights Act, for example, was twofold. It democratized political power in the South, and it undermined Jim Crow’s hierarchical social relationships. The introduction of something like political equality – instituted and secured by the federal government – helped lay the foundation for greater social equality and a more egalitarian society.
With that in mind, one way to understand the agenda of much of the modern Republican Party—from its crusade against Roe v. Wade and its attacks on the Voting Rights Act to the frantic efforts of some Republican-controlled states to stigmatizing sexual minorities – is that it is an attempt to make rights conditional again.
If successful, Republicans would effectively cuff the federal government’s ability, either through legislation or through the courts, to establish and enforce that universal foundation for civil and political rights. And it would be a return to the world as it was when the standard-bearers of the hierarchy—whether race, sex, or class—had much more free rein to dominate as they saw fit.
As it stands, as Ron Brownstein wrote in The Atlantic last year, there is already a “great divergence” between “Americans’ freedoms in blue states and those in red states.” And as Republican-led states ban abortion, ban books, restrict teaching America’s racial history in schools, and trample on transgender rights, things will only get worse.
Senator Braun’s fault was not that he misunderstood the question; it is that he understood it all too well. The world he and his colleagues are working towards is one in which the national government transfers the issue of civil and political rights to the states. And it’s in the states, free from federal oversight, where people like Braun can exert real control over what you could do, how you could live, and who you would love. It is freedom for some and obedience for the rest.
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