The people will decide
The right wing has kicked our ass by rigging the game. But they don't get to decide how long that works.
My most chilling and inspiring epiphany in 2024 is that MAGA is already America’s national religion… until we say it isn’t.
The backstory:
Having a daughter in preschool has driven me to consider what sort of religious training she should have. Depriving her of a Bat Mitzvah and the gifts and attention that would redound feels like a minor father wound. Also, steering her into a Bat Mitzvah with the arcane and baffling training I was required to undergo at a Conservative temple feels like a bit of a father wound. So, like all parents, I had decide between which wound I would will my child.
But after speaking to the great Madiba K. Dennie in the interview above about her necessary new book The Originalism Trap, I realized that I had been both overestimating and underestimating my role in shaping my child’s religious life.
Two thoughts overwhelmed :
I have no say in my daughter’s religion; six Republicans on the Supreme Court do.
We don’t have to let them.
Originalism is now our national religion. In short, that means, “Whatever rich white men who claim Christianity want” is our religion. The MAGA majority on the Supreme Court decides who my daughter can marry when she gives birth and the medication she will be able to use. And they’ll do it by using a planchette designed to always land on the Christian Nationalist objectives of the Republican Party, enforced by a 6-3 “Originalist” supermajority.
There are issues where actual jurisprudence still occurs, but not when it comes to my daughter’s ability to act as a citizen with full agency over her body and life. And their opinions are enforced by the promise of violence. Hebrew school was bad, but not that bad.
This is bleak.
It’s the result of the fundamentalist right of America cannily and steadily kicking our ass for generations, even as they’ve lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, sealed by the con of a frothing monster whom they want to make my daughter’s king. And Project 2025, especially as described by Andra Watkins, is their plan to make sure they rule her for the rest of her life through him.
That’s the bad news.
The good news comes from Dennie’s view of the law and where the power resides in the United States of America.
We discussed her recent piece, “Lawyers Are Already Working On Trump’s Next Coup Attempt,” and I was surprised by how optimistic the piece made me. She didn’t seem to think the Originalists on the Supreme Court would be successful in doing what they’ve been trying to do for the last year, handing the presidency to Donald Trump:
I think that the Courts have been taking for granted that they have the last word, and I don't think that's actually true. I think that people always have the last word because they decide what to do with the Court's rulings. It's possible for people to make the Court's rulings just words on paper that don't actually mean anything in practice. I think at the end of the day it's the public response that matters.
It’s odd how hard that hit me.
Of course, we decide. We decide how many there are, pay their salaries, and decide how much security and power they have. We decide if they have term limits or an ethics code.
We’ve been acting as if the opposite is true.
Bush v. Gore and the compliance we awarded them after that abomination taught them entirely the wrong message, which has been reinforced in our reaction to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act under the thinnest most “Originalist” pretenses imaginable to the recent mild “harumph” at John Roberts awarding Donald Trump kingly powers and doing so by quoting George Washington’s goddamn Farewell Address.
We don’t have to take this. Of course, how the people decide is a matter of imagination and determination. It’s a new concept to me, yet it already permeates everything we do. It’s just something that has been purposely obscured from us.
When the people unite, we are the supermajority.
I needed this today. We ARE the majority. We CAN beat them.
We all (and minorities & women even more so) are taught from an early age to respect our elders, to respect authority and to follow the rules if we want to move ahead to the next grade or opportunity. No Child Left Behind has reduced our educational standards to the lowest possible common denominator of memorization and limited understanding so that many do not even have the ability or sufficient context in which to analyze their choices and make rational decisions. As a result we have a dumbed down lower wage workforce trained to view any question of the power of government or law enforcement as a rebellion rather than our a civic right, even duty, as citizens of a democracy. We must change people's perception to one of empowerment, which is exactly where your thought process led you. Now that our eyes are open, we must continue to educate others and help them find that sense of empowerment, that spark of ownership, in themselves and act on it. When we get to the tipping point, there will be no stopping us.