I don’t want to overstate this, but yesterday’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe reminds me in many ways of the Dred Scot decision of 1857. That’s the decision in which a bunch of Supreme Court justices from slave states, and deeply tied to the Slave Power, decided that black people “"had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." And, not incidentally, it played a not-trivial role in driving the nation into Civil War.
Alito’s opinion has much of the same aggressive, dismissive, hostile spirit as the Dred Scot decision. He didn’t come right out and say, “Women have no rights which we theocrats are bound to respect.” But with his apparent indifference to the realities of women’s lives, with his contempt for all that previous Supreme Court justices have concluded when dealing with the same issues, with his making no exceptions for victims of rape, incest, etc., Alito might as well have.
The Dred Scot decision — along with the Fugitive Slave Act — kindled in the North a fury that hadn’t been there. (It has always been the South, with its hotheads, with its determination to ban disagreements on slavery, that had been the more combative side.)
Both of those actions — Dred Scot and Fugitive Slave Act — represented a kind of invasion of the North, an insistence on subordinating the anti-Slavery side to their will. The Fugitive Slave Act invaded the North by requiring people in free states to help slaveowners reclaim their “property” even if those human beings had escaped to free states. Dred Scot swept away the rights that this escaped slave asserted that he had because he had been brought into free territory.
Similarly, the door that Alito and his radical allies has opened threatens to unleash vigilantism against women who escape states that have banned abortion to get their needs taken care of in states where women still have the right to choose.
The Slave Power was fighting to erase all the bans against slavery throughout the nation, claiming that their property rights were infringed if they could move their slaves around as they pleased. And the anti-abortion power, armed with Alito’s decision, are apparently planning to work toward a national ban on abortion.
What strikes me most in all this is less the particular position being asserted (anti-abortion over pro-choice) than the snarling spirit, the naked assertion of power, the insistence on domination, that yesterday’s decision seems to express.
It is that spirit that makes visible the potential destructiveness of the wider political battle being waged. (It is the same spirit that the 1/6 Committee is exposing, as that same Republican Power can be seen insisting that their Fascistic insistence on domination Trump our constitutional order.)
As Dred Scot kindled fury in the North, so also did we see and hear such fury in the marches and words in the streets of America’s cities yesterday. There’s a “mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore” fire that’s been kindled in the side opposed to this Republican Instrument that the Supreme Court has become.
The spirit of the Slave Power brought us to Civil War. If the division of Blue and Red in America followed a geographic division as fully as was the case in when Blue vs. Grey fought that terrible war, I could easily imagine the nation breaking apart again on such a fault line.
That same geographical division still obtains to a degree — the map of states where abortion is now banned corresponds more than a little with the borders of the Confederacy — but the divisions in our nation now are not so geographically coordinated.
Which means it is less easily envisioned how we could have a Civil War. But, Civil War or not — as I wrote back in 2014 in an article published on Huffington Post — “The Spirit that Drove Us to Civil War Is Back.”
And this “Dred Scot Decision for Our Times” — and the rising fury it has provoked — tell us that we again have some very rough times ahead.