THEY TOLD ME NEO-CONFEDERATES WERE ON THE RISE — AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Sean Wilentz Reviews Noah Feldman’s New Lincoln Book, “The Broken Constitution.” “Feldman is not alone with sidling up to confederate constitutionalism. The 1619 Project agrees with Chief Justice Taney’s interpretation of the Constitution in Dred Scott. So much of the modern progressive project depends on the original Constitution being a failed, sinful document. That argument must be accepted as a doctrine of faith to undermine originalism.”
“Critical Race Theory” is best understood as a revived form of slaveowner racial and constitutional thinking.
As I wrote about Justice Harlan a while back:
Harlan’s blistering dissent in Plessy was widely read in the pulpits of black churches around the nation and its focus on racial equality and the color-blind nature of the Fourteenth Amendment became the foundation for the winning argument in Brown v. Board of Education, which undid Plessy over a half-century later.
Harlan wrote: “In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case” (He was right about that). . . .
This ringing statement of racial and social equality was radical at the time, when it was taken for granted by many, if not most, that the races were too different to live together, and must have their relations closely managed by the hand of government.
If Harlan’s position was radical then, it went on to become conventional wisdom decades later. But it is increasingly radical now, at a time when, once again, many in positions of leadership in our universities, our corporations, and even in our governments seem to believe that the differences between the races are insoluble and can only be managed by the overweening hand of authority. To the extent that “woke” politics and Critical Race Theory lead us to the same view of racial relations as was held by 19th-century Jim Crow theorists, I, like Harlan, must register my dissent.
And I still do.