Thomas Zimmer1d ago

No Right Is Ever Safe – but Progress Is Possible

The outrageous assault on birthright citizenship should prompt us to reflect on the fragility of democratic progress - and our own responsibility to defend it.

Some thoughts from my new piece:

https://steady.page/en/democracyamericana/posts/0999474f-9069-4edc-8afa-14ba857741fa

No Right Is Ever Safe – but Progress Is Possible

The outrageous assault on birthright citizenship should prompt us to reflect on the fragility of democratic progress - and our own responsibility to defend it

Steady
Show threadThomas Zimmer1d ago

“We shall repeal the twentieth century”: That is how self-identified “radical reactionary” Murray Rothbard described the Right’s vision in 1992.

That really is the core of Trumpism as a political project: Roll back whatever racial and social progress has been achieved over the past century and a half.

Show threadThomas Zimmer1d ago
That’s also the context for the outlandish assault on birthright citizenship: No measure of social, political, and legal advancement of the past one hundred and fifty years – nothing the mainstream would broadly consider “progress” – is safe.
Show threadThomas Zimmer1d ago
It’s not like we needed another reminder that all the rights and civil liberties that turned the United States into anything approaching a pluralistic democracy are at risk – or that taking refuge in the idea that “they wouldn’t go *that* far” is utterly foolish.
Show threadThomas Zimmer1d ago
In 2022, the Roberts Court stripped roughly half the population of reproductive freedom and the right to bodily self-determination; and the Right has been massively successful at hollowing out both the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Show threadThomas Zimmer1d ago
The reactionary political project seeks to turn the clock back to *before* the Reconstruction Amendments – to re-orient government towards privileging the rights of those already at the top, to deprive government of any tool that could serve to level discriminatory hierarchies.
Show threadThomas Zimmer1d ago
No measure of progress is safe. This is also how RFK’s crusade against the public health infrastructure ties into the Right’s broader project: “Make America Healthy Again” is an assault on modern medicine, modern science – on some of the pillars of modern society itself.
Show threadThomas Zimmer1d ago

The realization of how fragile democratizing progress is should make us appreciate and celebrate it more, not less.

Only if we value the progress that has been achieved do we understand what we must defend.

Show threadThomas Zimmer1d ago

The lesson from U.S. history, if there is one, is not that progress is impossible. There has been tremendous progress at times!

But we must not assume directionality in history. There is no arc, there is no linear progression, no utopian end goal we are somehow destined to reach.

Show threadThomas Zimmer1d ago
That is why Reconstruction is such a key historical reference. America’s first attempt at biracial democracy was quickly drowned in ostensibly “race-neutral” laws and escalating white supremacist violence. It took a century to get the country back to that level of democracy.
Show threadbaconandcoconut1d ago
@tzimmer_history At this scope of roll back, it feels like the Middle Ages might be a relevant historical reference.
Show threadKevin Morgan
@tzimmer_history @baconandcoconut rolling back the enlightenment!
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