Last time we discussed Word on Fire’s efforts to undermine faith in American democracy, having already attacked democracy generally and subordinated it to the teachings of the Catholic Church. This time, the Word on Fire crew seek to justify subordination of women and people of color!
Now Barron & Co. repave the road to a politics of subordination by attacking the legitimacy of Federal power and by papering over this nation’s malingering racial disparities.
The first point can come across as innocuous. Several contributors emphasize the “limited” nature of the Federal government. Barron makes the point himself with Worner (36). Dr. Kody Cooper, writing primarily to rehabilitate Christian nationalism, makes the point in passing, “Our Constitution, which enacts a limited government of enumerated (not plenary) powers . . . .” (72). The primary argument, though, comes from Hillsdale College’s Dr. Larry Arnn. The dutiful student of Jaffa appropriately echoes the Declaration’s import and proclamation of man’s equality before turning to his thesis: “The Constitution describes a government that is limited” (83). He even imbues a sacral nature, “To invest human beings with the powers that only God properly exercises is dangerous” (85).
The ordinary reader might fairly wonder: who cares? Of course government is limited. No earthly power—though it perpetrate the most heinous punishment on my body—can force me to like Ravel any more than it can make a Pro Bowl tight end of me. The question when constitutional commentators throw around the descriptor “limited” is always the same: with respect to whom? Traditional American constitutional discourse holds the Federal government’s authority as limited to the various powers enumerated within the original Constitution, in contrast to the States’ generally topically-unbounded authority. Indeed, Arnn repeats just this dogma: “More things are left to the state governments than the federal, and most are reserved to the people” (83). It would be a cute story, were it not a lie perpetrated by liberal rubes and reactionaries.
Consider the dog that hasn’t barked. For a Catholic intellectual journal discussing democracy in the United States, which topic of constitutional import to American democracy has apparently warranted no discussion? Which topic barely warrants mention, let alone substantive grappling, in Dr. Geoff Bakewell’s glowing description of Athenian democracy (91)? Slavery. This is no mistake. Opposition to broad Federal authority, in practice, has always stemmed from a reactionary fear of Congressional abolition. To this day, most challenges to Federal legislation ask whether they narrowly enough fall within Congress’s Commerce and Spending Powers. Yet beyond hamstringing the natural development of Congressional authority under the original Constitution, the trope of “limited” Federal authority more importantly erases the Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery, the Fourteenth grants equal citizenship, and the Fifteenth guarantees equal voting rights. Each expressly grants Congress the power to enact implementing legislation, upending the original state-Federal divide decisively in Congressional favor in at least the realms of civil rights, racial equality, and voting. Simply put, even the most literal or original reading of the Reconstruction Amendments grants Congress plenary authority over the contours of free personhood and citizenship in this nation. Protestations of “limited” Federal authority, rolled out against every Federal policy of social, political, or economic equity, shackle us to an antebellum society with its gradations of free and, more importantly, unfree peoples.
Why, if Almighty God created all men of equal dignity, should American Catholics fear Congressional authority to root out racial animus and remedy the still unaddressed legacy of chattel enslavement—this nation’s racial disparities in wealth, education, and education? Because, Loyola Marymount’s Dr. Christopher Kaczor tells us, those disparities are not a moral wrong but rather a reflection of how the world works. “Consider the utopian fantasy of perfect equality . . . Unless 50 percent of coal miners are women and 50 percent of kindergarten teachers are men, then we have injustice that should be corrected by any means necessary.” Never mind that none on the left actually advocate perfect equality, let alone by any means, just an attempt to do as best we humanly can (or hell, just do better). Kaczor graciously admits that “[s]tatistical disparities are sometimes caused by unjust discrimination. But,” he promptly all but recants, “there are other explanations.” Undeniably true. Not all gender and race disparities are invidious. But in celebrating our diversity, we must eliminate disparities resulting from subordinative animus or that tend to subordinate in practice. So what natural and inoffensive basis does Kaczor find beneath the fact that “99 percent of those working in deep sea fishing are men?” None other than the classic gender stereotype of the meek, domestic woman: “[m]ore men than women are willing to take dirty and dangerous jobs” (46). Perhaps my privilege is showing, but Kaczor’s laughable (and oddly historicist, given the volume’s supposed focus on unchanging moral precepts) defense of slavery’s unremedied legacy—a $135,000 gap in white versus black household wealth as of 2019; black underrepresentation in higher education and professions (5% of lawyers despite 13% of the population); double the childhood lead levels; and four times the maternal mortality rate, among many others (SFFA v. Harvard, 143 S. Ct. 2141, 2270 (2023) (Jackson dissenting))—proves less offensive than embarrassing.
The consistently white supremacist opposition to Federal authority underlying Kaczor’s open defense of racial and gender disparities must inform our interpretation of a seeming throwaway line down the page. “[L]ocal communities should determine what is taught in schools” (46). Yet even without the immediate context, we should be able to discern Kaczor’s point. Who most famously preached local authority over matters both large and small but Senator Stephen A. Douglas, whose version of localized popular sovereignty vested individual communities with the authority to enslave their fellow humans? And what marked the great intrusion of Federal authority upon local education policy? Brown v. Board of Education. With immediate context, the point cannot be missed. “[L]ocal communities should determine what is taught in schools.” And who may teach. And who is welcome. And who is not. Welcome back, Plessy v. Ferguson.
This segment Is aptly titled “Just the Way the World Works.” It refers to the idea that people will just naturally sort themselves into different job classifications, making any disparities the result of nature rather than discrimination. Conservatives have been making that argument since at least the 1970s. I remember reading it first in the National Review when I was in high school. And maybe that argument was worth indulging 50 years ago, when the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 were still relatively new. But today, 50 years later, it is beyond careless to think that Black people just somehow naturally prefer to work for less than whites. The “natural” presumption today has to be that racial disparities result more likely from discrimination than from free choices. The “way the world works” is how we, the white male majority, MADE it work. So we can remake it too. It’s honestly not all that hard.