Tuesday, August 31

Obama's desire to use the fruits of your labor to increase his political power should come as no surprise

In 2001, the future president confused protecting the rights of the individual with stealing your property.  Notice his regret over the Supreme Court's not "break[ing] free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution," restrictions put in place to protect us from government.

Notice also his use of the mob ("political and community organizing and activities on the ground [. . .] the actual coalition of powers") to "bring about redistributive change."  If one gang in black robes doesn't get us, the other gang in street clothes will. Tyrants dress up their malice and greed as "serving the people," but they're really only serving themselves.

Watch out for socialists' ideas of "political and social justice."  It's anything but "just":
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be OK.

But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.

And that hasn't shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.