It’s always struck me that America (that is, the US) stands defiantly independent against the rest of the world, secure in its self-righteousness and uncaring or even contemptuous of what other countries think about it. After all, they’re not the US, and the US is the best. Just ask most USians.
My favorite print magazine (as I’ve said) is The Week, a sort of Reader’s Digest of other magazines, consolidating news on a wide variety of topics, and including opinions from a variety of perspectives. (Though one flaw is that the entire content of the magazine is not on the website; subscribers can access the entire content, but only in un-linkable PDF form.)
One interesting feature in each issue is a half-page called “How they see us,” which excerpts reactions from other countries about what’s happening in the US. I suspect many USians don’t realize how closely the rest of the world follows our news.
The Week, July 8/July 15 issue. “How they see us: U.S. rolls back women’s human rights.”
The ruling is further evidence of American’s “democratic collapse,” said Le Monde (France). The extremist Catholic majority on the court is the product of “the tyranny of a minority permitted by an electoral system outrageously favorable to the most conservative states.” Donald Trump was defeated in the popular vote, yet became president anyway. He then nominated three ultraconservative justices who were confirmed by a Senate whose makeup is permanently skewed to favor rural voters at the expense of the Democratic majority. President Biden often talks of a world at war “between democracies and autocracies,” said Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán in El País (Spain), but we can no longer be sure the U.S. is in the former camp. The repeat of Roe is just the latest example of Republican “obstinacy,” from the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol to the “dying rage over firearms” and efforts to restrict the Black vote. And like the other examples, the abortion ruling will surely hurt America’s standing in the world. How can the U.S. pose as the beacon of freedom, against the authoritarian darkness of Russia or China, when it denies its own female citizens their basic human rights?
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Thomas Jefferson, on originalism. Part of this is inscribed in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC. (This is going around as a Facebook meme — e.g. here — though a Google search turns up pieces of this from other sources.)
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country.
I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects.
Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
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Washington Post, Paul Waldman, 4 July 2022: This July 4, let’s declare our independence from the Founding Fathers
Two hundred and forty-six years ago, Americans did something extraordinary, declaring their independence from a colonial rule enforced from a great distance with the cruel and arbitrary hand of oppression. And now it’s time for us to declare our own independence, from Founding Father fetishism.
This is not a call to repudiate the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and crafted the Constitution. We don’t have to tear down every statue of them (though frankly the statues don’t do anyone much good), or cast them only as villains in our national story.
But we need to liberate ourselves from the toxic belief that those men were perfect in all things, vessels of sacred wisdom that must bind our society today no matter how much damage it might cause.
[…]
Originalism was a scam from the start, a foolproof methodology for conservatives to arrive at whatever judicial result matches their policy preferences: Cherry-pick a few quotes from the Federalist Papers, cite an obscure 1740 ordinance from the Virginia colony one of your clerks dug up, then claim that scripture leads us inexorably to only one outcome.
By happy coincidence, that outcome is always the one Republicans seek. Anyone who disagrees, or who shows how absurd the right’s historical analysis is even on its own terms, simply isn’t respecting the divine will of the framers.
[…]
That’s the thing about America: It’s all about change, and always has been. At its best, it’s about imagination, and dynamism, and progress. That’s what it was in 1776, and that’s what it is now.
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It seems to be conservatives and not liberals who, like religious fundamentalists, claim an unerring meaning in foundational documents. And my provisional conclusion about why this is so: conservatives think in terms of absolutes, black and white, things that never change or should never change. It makes life so much simpler, not to have to ever rethink.
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Meanwhile, there’s been another mass-shooting today.
