Still Morning

Reading Edge of Canaan coincides with the King holiday. The country has come a very long ways in the last forty years. The history is worth returning to, in part because we all often think of history as last year and not more.  Even forty or fifty years is rather short, and even so illuminating.  On race and sex, it is very different country, and for the better.  There are not lynchings, and no one is being shot for voting or trying to vote, and no one is beaten to death for walking into the wrong neighborhood.  Issues of race and sex are not gone, but they are quite different than they were forty years ago.  We are worse off in some respects, most importantly in terms of widening divides of wealth and hardening distaste for lower economic classes.  We should remember the remarkable accomplishments of the period. 

And I think we should remember what that older world was like. What would it be like now if originalists held the Supreme Court then?  Hard to see Gideon, or Loving, or any of the rest.  Racial covenants in property would have been left in place, bars on interracial marriage would have remained; no 'one man, one vote'.  Maybe the social world would have changed, but it is foolish to suppose that inevitable or that it would have been on the same time frame.  Decisions of the courts affect public attitudes -- do not dictate but do affect.  It was the Court's actions that gave some cover to the politics. Perhaps the same popular shifts would have come -- I am a bit doubtful -- California passed propositions against fair housing, after all.  

So two points: First, that we have a better country because of King and those who went before and with him pushing changes of civil rights.  It is an appropriate holiday.  Second, that it is a bit of sleight of hand to act as though the commitments of originalism are genuinely such as to lead us to the great social reforms of the 1960s and forward, that there is any intellectually consistent route from the original meaning or methods to where we are now. It is not the New Deal that is in danger.