Latimer on Law

Philadelphia: An American "Tale Of Two Cities"

                                                     Philadelphia:  An American "Tale Of Two Cities"

                   It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was  the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it  was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it  was the winter  of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,  we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short,  the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted  on its being received,  for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

                                                               -Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities."

            Dickens' novel, A Tale of Two Cities, was written about Paris and London just before and during the French Revolution of 1789.  His description of that European epoch as being "so far like the present period",  is as true of our American revolution and our subsequent political and cultural history, as it was about Europe when Dickens wrote the iconic phrase, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

A.   The American Revolution, The French Revolution And Their Strange European Ideas.

            The French revolution, with the people rising up in the name of egalite' and liberte' against a repressive royal government, took its example from the American Revolution of the prior decade which, in its turn, was a revolt of Englishmen against their oppressive royal government based on the moral principles and political ideals of the Age of Enlightenment.  Those principles and ideals were literally, in the xenophobic worldview of right wing media hack Rush Limbaugh and former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, two of   America's noisiest conservative "authorities" today, strange European ideas.

            Those Enlightenment ideals were more than strange when they came to the fore in the late 18th Century, in both Europe and several haphazardly organized English colonies on the North American continent, as a radical challenge to the old, comfortable world order of established ecclesiastical authorities working hand in hand with authoritarian political rulers.  The very idea of "democracy," having been so long out of fashion since it first emerged in Europe as part of Poe's "glory that was Greece" in ancient Athens, was a very strange idea, indeed, and a threat to the established moral and political order of the times.

            Those Enlightenment ideals gave rise to the principles on which our American constitutional democracy is based, as incorporated into the Constitution of the United States in 1787, and they were decidedly European, having been formulated by people with French names like Voltaire, Rousseau and deTocqueville, as well as political philosophers with English names like John Locke, equally unfamiliar to many present-day Americans, usually GOP voters typified by the likes Ms. Palin and Mr. Joe the Plumber.

            All of those names and the strange European ideas they represented were,  fortunately for us,  very familiar to the Founding Fathers of our great nation, true patriots like Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington, Hamilton who led their fellow colonists in armed revolt against tyrannical British royal authority.  In terms of political philosophies, they were the "liberal" radicals of their time, overthrowing the oppressively "conservative" political regime of the British Crown.

             Those Enlightenment ideals, as embodied in our American Constitution, are under assault today by a combination of malevolent, anti-democratic ideologies from the extreme right, as exemplified by its "noisiest authorities" like Limbaugh and the GOP's vocal Congressional obstructionists , who identify themselves as "conservative."  The American saga today has indeed become a story of the best against the worst, contrasting our original, shining season of light against today's bleak season of darkness, our former spring of hope against the winter of despair that has today descended on America, due chiefly to the political ascendancy of ideological right wing extremism and the foolhardy "free market" policy of deregulation that the GOP was able to implement based on nothing more than its talent for gutter politics.

            The American saga is the story of a people who, by embracing those strange European ideas of the Enlightenment, truly had everything before them and now, after more than 200 years and having twice over a span of eight years elected a government based on the  anti-democratic, anti-constitutional ideology of the American right, stand precariously on the brink of an abyss of nothingness -no wealth, no equality, no real security, no hope, no future, no justice, and it is largely the result of becoming a people with no real understanding or appreciation of its past.

           This is a true story which, like Dickens' novel, also intimately involves two cities, two American cities both named Philadelphia but having diametrically opposed historical and political importance to our great American democratic experiment. One of them was the wellspring of our great secular constitutional democracy itself, while the other is the befouled sinkhole from which emerged, both symbolically and literally, the present day miasma of divisive, anti-constitutional neoconservative ideology that has brought America to its knees in today's economic, cultural and political crisis.

B.   Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,  In The Season Of Light And Our Spring Of Hope

          Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, William Penn's "City of Brotherly Love", was our first great city, as well as our first Capitol city, and it remains among our most important cities, both economically and historically.  It was where, in Independence Hall on July 4, 1776, our Declaration of Independence was signed.  The primary author of that seminal democratic document, Thomas Jefferson, later referred to it, modestly, as:

Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind.

From Gilbert Chinard, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism (1948), at 72.

           Thus, Jefferson's genius was to crystallize the prevailing "principle or sentiment" among his educated and politically aware fellow American colonists, as those characteristics of the "American mind" had been informed by Locke and other great thinkers of a distinctly European persuasion, a fact which Jefferson specifically acknowledged.  That was how a gathering of Americans in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from several different regions, having diverse religious beliefs from Deism through high-church Catholicism, and diverse economic expectations from Jefferson's free-holding agrarianism to Hamilton's corporate mercantilism, were able to meet and agree on creating a new American nation, based on the Enlightenment ideas of old Europe, expressly recognized as the intellectual foundation of our "American mind."

            Eleven years later,  in the Pennsylvania State House at Philadelphia over the summer of 1787, that diverse group united only by their dedication to European Enlightenment ideals and principles, met again, with George Washington presiding, to hammer out their regional differences and create the determinedly secular Constitution of the United States, the very foundation of our  constitutional American democracy, in order to form "a more perfect union."

                                           Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States

                                                                        -Howard Chandler Christie

This was the defining moment that solidified our rebellion against tyrannical British rule and it was the beginning of our great democratic experiment.

            That bold experiment has been sorely tested for more than two centuries, including a devastating "civil" war between the states, two world wars separated by a world wide economic depression, a mid-twentieth century "Red Scare" combined with a nuclear arms race to mutually assured destruction, a politically divisive neo-colonial war in Southeast Asia in which we ignored the democratic ideals on which we based our own rebellion against colonial exploitation and tyranny, increasing acts of domestic terrorism like random shootings and the Oklahoma City bombing and even a first ever foreign terrorist attack on New York City.

               Optimists on the political right, oblivious to or in denial of the root causes of today's economic, political and constitutional crises, may be tempted to look at that history and say, oh, we've been through worse before and we'll survive this time too just because we're Americans.  But that is a false optimism. It is based on a failure to recognize the different cultural and political assumptions that have profoundly affected the "American mind" over the past forty years, pernicious, anti-democratic assumptions that are antithetical to the  European Enlightenment ideals on which our constitutional democracy was established in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1787.

                 Those anti-democratic cultural and political assumptions have always been with us, of course, but they gained the critical momentum and political ascendancy which has so profoundly affected the American mind in that other American Philadelphia, fueled by events there in 1964 and then blasting off, to cause far more damage to our democratic ideals than any Soviet missile ever could have, on August 3, 1980.  That city was Philadelphia, Mississippi.

C.  Philadelphia, Mississippi, In The Season Of Darkness And Our Winter of Despair.

            I use the term "city" loosely to describe Philadelphia, Mississippi.  It is the seat of Neshoba County, but it is really a scurvy little backwater, both part of and emblematic of the old Jim Crow South that has been suppressed but never completely killed off, like so much political Kudzu that keeps coming back and coming back in the name of "states rights." 

            Before the summer of 1964, Philadelphia, Mississippi, had absolutely no historic, cultural or political significance, but that all changed in one of the most disgraceful and cowardly affronts to our democratic ideals and principles America has ever witnessed. I am of course referring to the murder of three brave young Americans, as brave and as patriotic as any who have ever been given a gun and a tin hat by Uncle Sam to fight in one overseas war or another.  Their story is told in the Hollywood movie "Mississippi Burning."

           http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmAqrMtB-Qg 

It's a true story, and it's a disgraceful indictment of the perversion of our democratic Constitutional principles that was carried out throughout the Old South  for most of 1oo years after the Civil War in the name of "states rights."

1.   Civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, were genuinely brave and patriotic young Americans who understood the importance of defending our secular constitutional democracy against the virulently anti-democratic rule of Southern Jim Crow laws over the prior hundred years after the Civil War and lost their lives in a valiant and principled attempt to do so.

           Those principled and brave young men were: James Chaney, a 21 year old, from Meridian, Mississippi;  Andrew Goodman, 20, an anthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, 24, a CORE organizer and former social worker from New York.  Not that it really mattered to them working together in their common cause, but Chaney was black while both Goodman and Schwerner were Jewish. 

          They joined up in Philadelphia in the "Freedom Summer" movement of 1964, to help local black citizens, disenfranchised by Jim Crow laws for almost a century after the end of the Civil War, to register as voters. This was unquestionably a decent and patriotic calling for such fine young men, certainly no less than the call to arms that sent so many other decent young Americans of that era off to die in the jungles of Southeast Asia.  Unlike our invasion of Vietnam, however, this calling to help register systematically excluded black voters was fully in keeping with the principles, based on European ideals as to equality and liberty, that are the foundation of our Constitutional democracy.

          They were brave young men because they were working in a social, cultural and political milieu as hostile to our American constitutional ideals as any overseas enemy, real or as imagined by right wing jingoists, and equally violent and dangerous in its hostility to our basic civil rights. This was the "strange fruit" land of racial lynchings, enabled by Jim Crow laws for more than a century in the American South:

                                    Southern trees bear strange fruit,
                                    Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
                                    Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
                                    Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

 From "Strange Fruit", as sung by Billie Holliday.  

                                     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4UTc5Mr7ZY&feature=related

These three brave young American patriots, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, were fully aware of this violent, toxic history when they volunteered to go into enemy territory to help salvage our American democracy from the ravages of the prior 100 years of Southern Jim Crow racist politics.  They did so because they truly understood how our Constitutional democracy was supposed to work, and it was the right thing to do, and it cost them their lives.

2.         The so-called "legal principle" of states rights is an anti-constitutional legal absurdity that has always served the very worst extremes of anti-democratic bigotry and ideology, and racism in particular.

          America is a Constitutional democracy, a self-governing people bound by, and only by the authority of the law.  In Article VI, the Constitution expressly states:

This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof. . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

In  Article III, Sect. 1, it states that the judicial power of the United States "shall be vested in one supreme Court" and in such  inferior federal courts that Congress may establish. In Article III, Sect. 2, it states that: "The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution."  In Article IV, Sect. 2, the Constitution states that "the citizens of each state shall be entitled all privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states."   In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the Court in McCulloch v. Maryland, ruled  decisively that the Constitution means exactly what it says, that the laws adopted by the federal government, when duly exercising its constitutional powers, are  paramount over any conflicting laws adopted by state governments.

            The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 just after the Civil War, expressly provides in Section 1:

 All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person or life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

It provides further, in Section 5, that Congress has the power to enforce such provisions by appropriate legislation, e.g. the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

            Such express language in the 14^th Amendment notwithstanding, the Old South got away with simply ignoring it for almost one hundred years, using the legal nonsense of "states rights" to defend the Jim Crow laws that denied basic rights and liberties to persons of color, including the right to equal educational opportunity in the public schools and colleges, as in Little Rock and the University of Alabama, based on the claim that racial segregation was simply their traditional "way of life" and therefore not subject to federal law which was somehow trumped by their ersatz legal theory of  "states rights." 

           This issue came to the fore politically after the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, that the City of Little Rock, Arkansas, had to begin integrating its public schools.  When the state authorities refused to comply with this, and denied enrollment to a small group of black children, President Eisenhower, began applying political pressure on Arkansas Democratic Governor Orville Faubus, even inviting him to the White House to suggest that the state comply with the law.  Faubus stonewalled Ike, returning to Arkansas and declaring his belief in the principle of "states rights" in support of continuing the South's good ol' "traditional way of life" based on racial segregation and inequality.

            Eisenhower personally disagreed with what he considered precipitous racial integration, which is why he later remarked that appointing Earl Warren as Chief Justice was one of the biggest mistakes he ever made.  But despite such political disagreement with the ruling in Brown, Ike  was fully aware of and fully committed to his responsibility to enforce the rulings of the Supreme Court as the "supreme law of the land" under the Constitutional principles stated above.  Therefore, when push came to shove in Little Rock, he sent federal troops there to uphold the rule of law -not because he wanted to but because he knew that it was required by the Constitution. 

           JFK did much the same thing in 1963, when Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace defied a federal court order to admit two qualified black students to the University of Alabama. 

           http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF_3LW8lGP4 

Wallace had declared in his inaugural address: "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" but later remarked that what he meant to say was "States' rights now! States' rights tomorrow! States' rights forever!"   

            While standing in the doorway to block Vivian Malone and James Hood from entering to register at ‘Bama, Wallace declared:

 It is important that the people of this State and nation understand that this action is in violation of rights reserved to the State by the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Alabama.

Here, Wallace cited the only legal basis on which the "states rights" argument purports to stand as being the Tenth Amendment, which states only that powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, "are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people."

             The same issue of equal access to public education had played out earlier in Mississippi as well, when Governor Ross Barnett railed against the Supreme Court's 1962 ruling in Meredith v. Fair that the state had to permit James Meredith to enroll at ‘Ol Miss. Like Wallace did later, Barnett ranted against this incursion on "states rights" citing the Tenth Amendment.  Despite that vocal resistance, however, Barnett finally made a deal with Atty. General Robert Kennedy to permit Meredith to register.  Barnett was apparently more knowledgable as a lawyer than Wallace was, or more honest, and despite his political demagoguery he surely knew he was wrong about states rights as a matter of constitutonal law.  But then the angry white Mississippi mob took over.

             Meredith was escorted by deputy federal marshals onto the campus, with additional deputies and other federal law enforcements stationed on the campus.  A mob of two thousand angry, violent whites overran the campus, practicing that good ol' genteel  Southern way of life" they held so dear, with their guns, of course, but with their "traditional" bricks, Molotov cocktails and broken bottles as well.  Finally, JFK had no choice but to send in federal troops as Ike had done in Little Rock to beat back the white mob. When the smoke had cleared, two people were dead, 28 had been shot and another 160 injured.

             Of course, Mississippi, along with all the other states of the Old Confederacy, found ways to sustain their cherished traditional Southern way of life politically, the segregated schools, segregated public drinking fountains, segregated restrooms, buses, restaurants and, of course, the mob lynching of any uppity "nigra" who might have looked at a white girl cross-eyed -or maybe not but she thought he did so that was reason enough. They made damned sure that most blacks never got an opportunity to elect state legislators who might change things under state law, in the exercise of the state's right and constitutional obligation to actually conform to federal law on such matters.

            The right to vote in a constitutional democracy is the most basic Constitutional right after life and liberty, and the states of the old Confederacy found many ways to prevent their black citizens from exercising that right. One of those schemes was to impose literacy tests on the right to vote, while depriving segregated black public schools of the means to effectively teach literacy to their students.  There were many illiterate whites in these states, too, but that problem was solved by the "grandfather clause," which typically read something like, "provided that any citizen whose male ancestors voted in Hogswallow County before 1865 shall not be disqualified from voting on the basis of illiteracy", or some such sleasy legalism.

            And that's precisely why the white mob in Philadelphia, Mississippi, brutally murdered Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in 1964, and why the all-white local authorities just looked the other way and let the mob get away with it.  Those brave, patriotic young Americans were there, in Philadelphia, for the sole purpose of helping that town's black citizens comply with the restrictive voter registration requirements, in the exercise of their Constitutional right to do so.  So, when it looked like Jim Crow legislation couldn't get the job done, those good ol' boys in the white robes, good Christian men too don't you know,  just had to fall back on the old reliable method of taking things into their own hands, things like guns, knives, robes, bats et cetera. Pretty neat "tradition," huh?

            The states rights argument in support of that whole Jim Crow tradition, based on the Tenth Amendment, is of course just so much legal nonsense.  The Fourteenth Amendment expressly provides that a state cannot deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, or enforce any law which abridges the privileges of citizens of the United States.  The authority to segregate public schools by law, thereby depriving blacks of the privilege of obtaining a public education on equal footing with whites, is therefore expressly prohibited to the states under the Constitution, and it therefore cannot be "reserved" to the states by the Tenth Amendment, as opposed to the federal courts' authority to determine issues of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment as "the supreme law of the land."

3.   Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, giving a rousing but ultimately cynical and manipulative speech that declared his undying belief in "states rights" as against the power of the federal government.

          On August 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan gave his first speech as the GOP's official presidential candidate at the Neshoba County Fair, Philadelphia, Mississippi.  He was invited  to speak there by then GOP Congressman Trent Lott.  By this time all those traditional Southern Democratic districts had begun turning to the Republican party, following the footsteps of the former "Dixiecrat" Strom Thurmond.  The reason for the change was, of course, that the Democratic party refused to buy into the "states rights" nonsense in support of racial segregation so the conservative wing of the GOP was more than willing to take up the cause for them.

         States rights had been only a part of Nixon's overall "southern strategy" as devised by Pat Buchanan, which began pitching the GOP primarily to southern "values" voters, not necessarily racists, based on their fundamentalist religious opposition to abortion, teaching evolution, banning school prayer, et cetera.  It was also in keeping with Kevin Phillips' 1969 blueprint for  The Emerging Republican Majority, but not the main focus.   

        As lucidly outlined in Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won The Heart Of America, that strategy, or blueprint was based on appealing to Southern voters on social and religious "values" issues, to  get a sufficient national majority to control the federal government, and thereby assume the authority to deregulate the economy in the interests of the corporate elite that has always been the mainstay of the GOP.  It's like Reagan said later, "Government isn't the solution to our problem, government is the problem."  The trick, though, is to understand exactly who he meant by the term "our" problem, and that clearly meant the corporate elite in industry and finance who stood to gain the most from the GOP's policyof deregulation.

              Reagan however, took this strategy down in its inevitable anti-democratic slide into racist politics. Thus, he began his presidential campaign in 1980, not in his home state of California, or even a genteel southern state like Virginia, the home state of Washington and Jefferson. Reagan started off  instead in one of the worst cesspools of Jim Crow bigotry in the South, Philadelphia, Mississippi, where just sixteen years earlier several  good, "god-fearing" white stalwarts got away with murdering three principled, patriotic young Americans who had been there attempting to register black voters, and it was there that Reagan declared his commitment to the principles of "states rights." Some people quibble over whether this means that Reagan himself was a "racist," but that's irrelevant. 

            Maybe Reagan was a racist, maybe not.  Nobody will ever know because he was in reality just a seasoned Hollywood actor playing the role of his life.  Reagan clearly was, however, also playing the role of a race baiter in service of the American corporate elite, as proven by his choice of Philadelphia, Mississippi, preaching "states rights," to make his first major campaign appearance as the GOP's presidential candidate.   And the most important point for every American to realize today is that he was stooping into the gutter of racist politics primarily to advance the corporatist economic agenda of the GOP, not any personal racist agenda.

           Buchanan and Phillips had both focused primarily on the "values" issues important to intolerant, closed minded religious fundamentalists, and how this had in fact worked for the GOP in Kansas is the subject of Frank's book.  But, apparently, Reagan, Lott and the other leaders of the "Reagan Revolution" were concerned that such appeal to honest but misguided religious voters might not be enough, so they played the race card directly from the bottom of the deck by talking up states rights at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi.

           To understand how this worked, pay close attention to Reagan's talking points all around his statement that "I believe in states rights."

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX_eTDP-CSg

First, there's "welfare" and then "bureaucracy" and "taxes", of course.  He mentions states rights and then declares that Americans should be doing as much as possible for themselves on the community level and on the "private level."  Finally, he promises to "reorder" our priorities, to change those wicked "federal regulations" and that evil "tax structure" in order to restore America as an "industrial giant".  Here, all the code words for the neoconservative political and economic agenda are woven, almost seemlessly, into that blatant term for racial bigotry and anti-constitutional defiance of federal law "states rights."  Just a coincidence, you say?

           So, okay, if Reagan was really just interested in eliminating welfare, bureaucracy and taxes in order to restore our "once great" industrial economy, why not make a pitch on that basis to begin his campaign in Detroit or Pittsburgh, or even a major Southern industrial city for that matter?  Why even mention states rights at all?  Would he have done that if he were speaking in Chicago or L.A. or, indeed, Philadelphia, PA?

           Of course not, and the reason he wasn't speaking in any of those other more important places about economic issues, but was talking about "states rights" in a foulsmelling backwater like Philadelphia, Mississippi, is precisely because of that town's special significance to the infamy of Jim Crow, while the GOP's political blueprint ever since 1980, starting right then and there, has been based on an unprincipled, cynical appeal to the still virulent strain of racism that remains to this day in the American South, as much as or more than any genune appeal to the more decent "values" concerns of the religious right.  This in fact played out once again in 2008 when McCain's GOP handlers picked Mrs. Redneck Sarah Palin, with her gun in one hand and her bible in the other, to run with him instead of that Jew Joe Lieberman who he preferred, against that uppity Democrat house nigra Barak Obama. 

        Obama's electoral victory in 2008, despite surprising wins in a few Southern states, didn't really change any of this -not when up to twenty percent of white Democrats in Southern state primaries  like West Virginia and Kentucky, states that Obama lost in the general election, admitted in exit polls that they voted against him solely because he was black.  Things clearly haven't changed much at all, when we consider the fact that the conservative 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court just  this past March in Bartlett v. Strickland,  upheld a North Carolina challenge to the federal Voting Rights Act as to voter redistricting based on census data as to race.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as one of  those jaded, European French philosophers might say about our present American politics.

         That is the stark reality of the "Reagan Revolution" that began in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and the inevitable consequences of that reality are just now beginning to sink in with many Americans after the past eight years of  GOP misgovernance under Bush and three GOP Congressional majorities, busily carrying out with a vengeance all of Reagan's promises of slashing social benefits, of deregulation, of lower taxes, of privatization.  The only part they didn't get to happen is restoring America as the "industrial giant" Reagan conjured for all those Southern rubes who actually believed he was sincere about promoting their sacred "values" along with a strong economy that works for everyone.

D.   Washington, D.C.,  And Main Street, U.S.A. In Our Season Of  Doubt And  Uncertainty.

           As Dickens observed about his era, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," but now the question is where do we go from here?  We really can't go back to the Philadelphia of 1776, the "Cradle of Liberty" to forge an entirely new society based on any strange, new European ideas.  We've come too far since then, and lost way too much of our national innocence, both political and cultural.

          I'd suggest we try getting  back as close as we can to those same old European ideas, the ideas that our Founding Fathers actually believed in and wrote into our Constitution. Those European ideas once actually made America into a great industrial nation, under both the Democrats and the pre-Reagan Republican party, under real leaders like Ike and JFK, who never shirked their Constitutional responsibilities to uphold our right to equal protection of laws and due process of law, or to implement regulations, impose taxes, fund publicly owned facilities, etc., all as expressly provided for in the Constitution in order to promote our general "welfare." That just might still work for us again if we can just manage to all pull together and make it happen.   

         On the other hand, unless you're the most craven, unprincipled neoconservative cynic, or a racist or a single-issue "values" zealot, you surely don't want to return to Reagan's Philadelphia , a place where all those poplar trees grew bearing that strange American fruit that Billie Holiday lamented.  Just listen to JFK's direct and sincere address to the American people, i.e. to all Americans, in his 1963 televised speech about the constitutional crisis he dealt with by sending federal troops into Alabama.  Then compare that with Reagan's cynical and  manipulative appeal in 1980 to that same narrow Jim Crow mentality that created the constitutional crisis  that JFK had to deal with, just as Ike had done less than ten years earlier at Little Rock.

          Pay close attention to what they're saying, JFK and Reagan, and who they're really speaking to, not to their equally skilled rhetorical delivery, and then ask yourself why they said what they did and whose interests were they really serving when they spoke.  Put yourself in Jefferson's shoes, or Franklin's, or Washington's, and ask which one of these two men, JFK or Reagan, seems to have the more realistic and honest understanding of what you were saying about how our democratic government must work back in the Philadelphia of 1787.

          Get past the specific factual context of segregation and Reagan's demagogic rhetoric about taxes, regulation and other such specific policy tools which the Constitution you drafted actually gives to the federal government, and consider what these two 20^th Century presidents were actually saying about how the Constitution you ratified in 1787  is designed to work, i.e. the democratic constitutional process itself.  Which one really spoke more to a democracy based on equality under the Constitution and the law, i.e. your basic democratic ideals, and which one  of them in fact spoke directly to a mobocracy of Jim Crow defiance of the law?

          When you wrote about federal law being the supreme law of the land, to be determined in specific cases under the Constitution by the federal judiciary, did you mean what you expressly said or did you mean that it was the supreme law of the land only if it's not inconvenient or distasteful to any special interest group or political faction within a given state?  You know, on things like "you can't vote if you can't read, unless your equally illiterate white granddaddy used to vote before the Civil War and, by the way, we're gonna keep your dumbass black kids out of the public schools where the white kids actually learn how to read," and lots of other stuff like that.  Is that what you meant when you wrote that the Constitution and the federal law are the supreme law of the land? 

         We must ask ourselves these questions today because that is exactly what Reagan meant, a meaning which came through clearly and emphatically to his white Jim Crow audience, when he spoke about "states rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980.  And he spoke those words, not necessarily believing in them in principle, but primarily as a cynical, political expedient to get the votes his Republican party needed to get control of the federal government and then minimize the federal government's regulatory and taxation powers in order to best serve the interests of the corporate industrial and financial elites.  That is exactly what the Reaganista Bush administration did  beginning in the year 2000, with a GOP majority in both houses of Congress for three terms, and continuing until it all came crashing down in 2008, the last year of the Bush presidency.

          So now it's crunch time in Washington, D.C., and here on Main Street, U.S.A.  We as a nation, our government and our people, have to dig out of the most perilous economic and constitutional crisis since the Great Depression of 1929.  Like that earlier crisis, this one was brought on by reckless government inattention, with both deregulation and irresponsible tax cutting.  Should we now listen to the same "free market" capitalist ideologues who control today's GOP,  letting them step up to the plate to swing "freely" and miss one more time for strike three?  Or do we give our patriotic support to the efforts of the guy in the Oval Office now, the one who talks a lot more like JFK, or even like Ike, than Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush ever would or could.

          Believe me, I'm not sure Obama can do it,  just hopeful.  To succeed, he's going to need more than JFK's smooth style and Lincoln's imposing intellect and physical presence, which he clearly has.  He's going to need Eisenhower's Constitutional integrity, as shown in 1954, and LBJ's consummate political acumen as displayed in pushing the Civil Rights Act through Congress, with the primary opposition coming from within his own party, i.e. all those Southern "Dixiecrats" whose districts have  turned en masse to the GOP based primarily on Reagan's racist appeal to states rights in 1980.

         More than anything, though, Obama must somehow channel the leadership of  FDR during our last great national crisis.  He must do so in a way that makes the American people understand, once and for all, the basic difference between FDR's principled leadership and the kind of TV commercial salesmanship that was the only real talent and the only real political objective of that "Great Communicator" Ronald Wilson Reagan. 

         I hope  my words  may give some readers an insight into this difference, but Obama must make this plain for the American people as a whole, not by words, but by example.  It is our responsibility, as informed citizens who already understand  the difference between genuine leadership and the demagogic hucksterism of GOP hacks like Reagan, to give Obama all the support he will need to lead us out of our present crisis.

          As an old Cockney street vendor might say back in Dickens' day, "You pays your money, dearie, and you takes your choice."  But that choice is gonna depend ultimately on whether you've got any real money left when you makes up your mind.   If you think I mean only literal cash-money here, and not huge gobs of both moral and political capital, then you really are just a craven, unprincipled neoconservative cynic who, in the words of Oscar Wilde, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing -least of all how precious was our once-great American Constitutional democracy based on those European ideas from the Enlightenment, and how much of that real value we have lost over the past forty years of Reaganomic GOP political ascendancy.

        Just like Dickens said, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times, but now we have to make the right choices to determine whether our American epoch will get better, get worse or even continue to exist.