For American liberals, the steady post-World War II march of success after success during the civil rights and women’s rights eras slowed significantly in the 1980s, when it first ran into a formidable coalition of centre-right Republicans, libertarians, conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians, whose explicit purpose was to change the national political landscape.
That coalition put Ronald Reagan in the White House, wrested control of a Congress the Democrats had had a lock on since the 1930s, and began to see to it that Supreme Court vacancies were filled by conservative jurists expected to reinterpret the Constitution rightwards.
The success the religious right, in particular, has had in redirecting political debate keeps liberals and even non-religious conservatives awake at night. Will the Supreme Court, under pressure from the right, overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark 1970s case establishing women’s right to abortion? Will it continue its fight to prevent embryonic stem cell research? Will it stifle gay rights? Will government school pupils be forced to recite the Lord’s Prayer in classrooms where the teaching of evolution is prohibited? Will Christmas trees and plaster copies of the Ten Commandments be installed in public spaces in the United States under the protection of the Constitution?
Interpreting the US Constitution has always been a high-stakes undertaking, and these were never higher than during the years preceding the American Civil War. Though the proximate cause of this most bloody of American conflicts was slavery, the specific dispute between the belligerents centred on the right of states to leave the Union.
The secessionist argument had what Geoffrey C Ward, author of The Civil War, called a “tempting symmetry”: “The sovereign states had created the Union for their mutual benefit, secessionists said, and they had freely granted to it all power. Therefore, if any state or section felt itself injured by the federal government it had helped create, it had a perfect right to withdraw rather than submit. The use of federal force to stop a state from seceding would be unconstitutional ‘coercion’, since such force could never be rightfully brought to bear on those who had tendered it to the central government in the first place.”
Or, to put it another way, if “We the People” created the Union, then “We the People” can dissolve it. And so the confederate states did, shredding the Constitution and writing a new one of their own.
Specifically religious assaults on the Constitution are nothing new, either. Remember Prohibition? And as recently as the 1950s, in the midst of the “Red Scare”, civil libertarians were alarmed when president Dwight Eisenhower added his prestige to the campaign to insert “one nation under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, where it remains to this day a cause of ongoing public controversy and legal contention.
Today, the symbolism of the conservative Red States contending with the liberally inclined Blue States has captured the imagination of the media, if not of the average voter. Harking back to Civil War days, this division of the nation into geographically and demographically recognisable sections seems to make sense of an electorate that has been divided roughly evenly between Republicans and Democrats since the early 1990s.
Big cities, the economically and demographically challenged Northeast and the upper Midwest and the West Coast from Los Angeles to Seattle are painted blue; the bourgeoning Sunbelt — which includes the states of the old Confederacy — bright red.
Such a picture might help explain voting patterns now and predict them for the future — but they do not.
Voters vote for the candidates run by the two dominant political parties. There are signs that, over the next few election cycles, the Republicans may not field candidates pleasing to the religious right, whose influence may be waning.
One of those likely candidates is former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the “mayor of 9/11”, now garnering strong numbers among potential Republican voters in his run for nomination as the party’s 2008 presidential candidate.
In Giuliani, the religious right meets its own nightmare, a thrice-married, pro-choice, pro-gay rights cross-dresser who said that he would appoint conservative jurists to the Supreme Court only if pressed to respond to such concerns.
Giuliani is liberal on social issues and conservative on economic issues, characteristics that got Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton elected to two terms each, the former by landslides.
Another Republican in the Reagan mode is former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, undeclared as a presidential candidate but making an impression with his drive to make government work again after its abject failure post-Hurricane Katrina.
Though right-leaning, his ideas are not so illiberal that they were dismissed out of hand by former New York Governor Mario Cuomo when the two met in debate recently at Cooper Union in Manhattan.
Gingrich, who represented a district in Georgia, is a professor of history who has written a best-selling fictional trilogy set during the Civil War. He knows politics runs in cycles and he seems to be betting that the recent cycle, so dominated by the religious right, is giving way to one dominated by the conviction that government institutions need a major overhaul.
Finally, to return to the courts, where the battle over the Constitution is bloodiest. Conservative jurists do not always — or even often — vote in ways that please the religious right.
Writing in First Things, the premier organ of the thinking religious right, Hadley Arkes, the Ney Professor of American Institutions at Amherst College, strikes a note that should hearten liberals: “The unending disappointments in the courts cannot be laid entirely on the conservative judges, for they do what conservative judges ever do.”
Arkes’s tone is surprising in its resignation. An era may be passing — indeed, may have already passed.
Bové is a contributing editor at New English Review in the United States