From Dred Scott to Dobbs

 I think that the SCOTUS decision ending Roe v. Wade has had aftereffects in the States that haven't been fully understood, by which I mean the form of the SCOTUS decision - creating a cookie cutter country in which one's rights depend on the state one lives in - has formally brought us back not only to the days of Jim Crow, but, in many ways, to the days of the fugitive slave act. The Dred Scott decision essentially created a special Constitutionally protected group - slaveowners - and gave them rights exceeding the rights of non-slaveowners. It in effect made slavery Constitutional. Similarly, the Dobbs verdict created a special right for the anti-abortion states, thus preparing the way to Trump's occupation of LA and DC on the premise that certain states are subordinate to others. Dred Scott was rightly seen as a victory for the South - and in its wake, a para-Confederacy sprang up that the Whig party, the party of Northern liberals and merchants, did not have the tools to deal with. Compromise - which had been the great Whig policy - couldn't accomodate what was, in effect, surrender.

The opposition to Trump was in decline, of course, even before Trump. Among the many disappointments of the Obama regime was the prevailing sense of compromise, which sapped the energy of the Democratic party. Its freefall in the odd Biden interregnum signalled an inertia so deep and so widespread among the leadership of the Dems - from Manchin to Sanders - that they did not even recognize what Dobbs meant, or how to oppose it. Rather, the Dem/neo-lib notion that the machinery of the U.S. was in perfect order prevailed in the higher echelons of the party opposed to Trump. The Biden doctrine was, basically, the Buchanon doctrine of 1856: we should all operate normally under a SCOTUS ordered regime of privileging certain states. We should continue apply the tried and true methods of compromise and strike deals.

As a consequaence of the Fugitive Slave act, the Whigs quickly dissolved as a party and a moral center. Will the Dems alos dissolve? The odds for that look good. The stakes in the 2020 election, the pledges to reform SCOTUS, for instance, died due to Dem inertia and the belief that the system was inherently workable, even as it was showing that it was not. Now the unworkable system is at our throats. And the leader of the Dems in the House tells us: the occupation of D.C. is a "distraction". They don't get it at all.