A Constitutional crisis they say. Is it here already? Will it come soon? I think what they mean is will Trump defy a court order to not carry out one of his draconian plans? Of course, all or many of the lower court orders putting temporary holds on things will wend their way to the Supreme Court, that may well find in his favor.
None of us can predict just what is going to happen, but there are several important points we should think on in the meantime. One is the nature of the Constitution itself. Is it a document we should worship, as is the usual practice, as the guarantor of democracy, of all things good? Then what do we do if court decisions don’t go our way, and multitudes lose their jobs, their services, their nutrition, their health care, their residence, here and abroad? Do we just say we lost, wait for the next election, the next justices to be appointed? Do we forget that Biden paid for genocide and threw kids out of school for protesting it and tossed out immigrants? Or do we magnify the struggle, fight for something really better? Good thing that thousands have started marching in the streets.
That Constitution
As to the Constitution, I always had my doubts. It does guarantee certain civil protections, like the privacy of your home, which doesn’t matter too much if you don’t have a home. It did tolerate slavery. It does give a right to vote, but originally only to white men with property. It also set up the electoral college, to make sure the votes from slave states would have extra pull and common folks wouldn’t get a direct say in who wins the Presidency. Of course, all these limitations, save the electoral college, have been modified by amendments, but there’s some very important stuff that the Constitution never touches upon. Nowhere in the Constitution is anyone guaranteed the right to survive, to have work or an income, to have an education, health care or shelter. And hardly anyone even talk about this. William Barber for one, head of The Poor Peoples’ Campaign, did say “an amendment to guarantee the right to decent living conditions is needed today.”1
What does all this have to do with democracy? Well, what it has to do with is that our sacred document is a blueprint for capitalist democracy. Those who own property were the first to get the vote, but when the rest of us got it, it essentially allowed us to pick which capitalists would govern us. After all, it takes lots of money and connections to get on the ballot and run a campaign, a problem that has only magnified with time, now that corporations are people. We cannot elect a change in the capitalist system, a change from one where ownership means the right, the need, to pay workers as little as possible in order to make a profit. And don’t try and be a nice boss and pay more, limit your profits, because competition for loans or investors will put you out of business. And of course, many exploited workers don’t do too well in terms of health, housing, schooling, or happiness. Many must be kept unemployed to keep wages down – about 4% is considered optimal. All those services working people need for a guaranteed good quality of life are expensive, and that too comes out of the capitalists’ profits.
Now you don’t want a whole unhappy population, so some working folks have to have a pretty good standard of living, but only some. Here’s where slavery left an opportune and lasting legacy of racism. Keep black, Latin, immigrant workers on the bottom and the white ones won’t care. Keep everyone living apart and blaming each other for their misfortunes. It’s worked pretty well. When it hasn’t and people have unified, we’ve won some pretty good things, like health insurance (for some), social security, and a shorter workday. But chasms of separation remain. So all in all, the Constitution left out a lot of stuff us working folks need, most of it in fact.
The Courts
Now who sits on the courts? Most all judges are appointed by the very people we are allowed to elect. And the higher up in the system you go, the more that is true. The President, the one chosen by the electoral college, gets to pick the Supreme Court judges, who somehow always agree with his outlook, and get to lie to Congress all they like on their way to the bench. Read these two articles to review all the racist decisions of the court as it went along with whatever the current political climate (https://multiracialunity.org/2020/10/16/the-racist-history-of-the-u-s-supreme-court-part-1/ and https://multiracialunity.org/2020/11/07/the-racist-history-of-the-u-s-supreme-court-part-2/). So now we have no right to abortion, unlimited corporate support for candidates, an end to affirmative action, to name a few recent decisions. Thus is it likely that this court, with a majority who follow Trump’s way of thinking, will guarantee our well being? I wouldn’t count on it.
The Alternative?
The conclusion, I guess, is that a system that guarantees most of us nothing we need for a good quality of life is not a good one for most of us to keep. Much effort is spent in our education, our media and our popular culture convincing us that we have the most rights and governmental goodness of any place on earth. But when the going gets tough for the top guys, when more resources from all over the world are needed, when other countries are getting more competitive or passing us by, when we start losing every war we start, then it’s hard to keep the illusions together. Trump and company are openly just taking everything back and justifying it with super racism and xenophobia, and too many folks still fall for that. But when farmers and school teachers and federal workers and transportation workers and firemen, to name a few, all start losing income; when epidemics of old and new illnesses rage again; when more planes fall out of the sky; when foods that need picking disappear, more people, even racists, might begin to wonder.
So I’m thinking, along with many others I hope, that we need to constitute something new. We need to be the ones on top, the ones with power to scuttle this whole rule of the rich and run it ourselves. Our founding documents will say our needs and our happiness come first, all of us, equally. We can be of whatever color, culture, sex, but our needs are first. It’s been tried before and didn’t quite work out, but we must try and do it better. Because the world these bosses now have in store for us is just plain unlivable, whether we burn or flood to death or starve to death or get a disease or fry under a nuclear bomb, it’s no good. Time to get ready, dis that Constitution, talk about what we can create, think about big actions that threaten those rich guys, get ready to revolt, millions of us.
Ellen Isaacs is a retired physician, anti-racist and anti-capitalist activist, and co-editor of multiracialunity.org. She can be reached at [email protected]
