Anand Giridharadas reminds us that “We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.”
While I was traveling out of the country the Supreme Court was back in the news. The court’s ruling gutting the last of the landmark Voting Rights Act was not surprising. In many ways this has been the Chief Justice’s mission since his appointment. He began this work in earnest shortly after Congress reauthorized the landmark legislation with overwhelming bipartisan majorities earlier this century. I grew up in the South as the region and the nation were working to overthrow the legacy of Jim Crow (see here and here). I recognize what has changed for the better and the importance of this moment in America where we can change our narrative and our future. Anand Giridharadas reminds us that “We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.”
There has been and will continue to be plenty of commentary on the deviousness of the Chief Justice, the arrogance of Justice Alito’s opinion, the impact of the ruling, and the ongoing building of the case for major court reform.
One of the best of those commentaries came the night I returned home, via Heather Cox Richardson’s May 13th Letters from an American. After an extensive look at all that’s happened in the two weeks since the ruling came down to recreate a one-party South, she ends with a quote by Georgia Senate minority leader Harold Jones II as reported by Joyce White Vance’s in Civil Discourse:
“If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities.
June will be our third redistricting since 2021. Republicans need to undo their last gerrymander because it wasn’t good enough to keep their waffling political party in power. Most parties would try out some new ideas. Republicans choose to strip political power from Black people and undo the progress the South made in the last 60 years.
Let’s sum it up for everybody. The biggest bloc of middle and working class voters are Black people. When Republicans strip Black people’s political power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations. That’s what redistricting means for you.”
Georgia Senate minority leader Harold Jones II
Over the past few years I’ve read several books on the lost legitimacy of our top court, and I’ll simply point you to those pieces now.
- Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America (2020) by Adam Cohen is a devastating and damning argument against today’s Supreme Court and the Republican party’s fifty-year plan to circumvent the Constitution, overturn the gains of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras, and cement inequality into American law and life.
- Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes (2025) by Leah Litman describes in fresh and accessible language how the combination of the court’s power and a poor understanding of its work by the public makes it a dangerous entity in today’s America. If you are among those convinced that Republicans, and especially white male Republicans, are treated unfairly by an increasingly diverse society that no longer shares their views, then the move to make decisions based on conservative grievance, fringe theories, and bad vibes is an easy step to take.
I will also point you to two articles that made the case against the Roberts Court’s claim to legitimacy.
- In September of 2024, New York Times investigative and Supreme Court reporters Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak released a major story entitled How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak. It is devastating in showcasing how Chief Justice Roberts and the conservative supermajority have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.
- The president of the Brennan Center for Justice, Michael Waldman, built off that reporting in New Supreme Court Revelations Push the Case for Term Limits.
KNOWING THE PAST SUGGESTS WAYS FORWARD FOR OUR FUTURE
Many historians, law professors, and journalists have written about this work to cement inequality into American life. I’ve covered some of them in these MTC posts:
- The capacity for change (2025)—Jon Grinspan demonstrates how we have seen both extreme ugliness and bold reform through the years when it comes to our democracy.
- How to live—and think—through the challenges of our era of moral cynicism (2025)—A compelling biography of Hannah Arendt that is also a primer for how to think if we want to be free.
- Rewriting the past to control the future (2025)—Jason Stanley’s Erasing History makes the case that those who fight for the past can save the future.
- Systemic change only occurs after acknowledging a systemic problem (2025)—Tech leaders, writes Marietje Schaake, do not have the mandate or the ethics necessary to govern so much of our societies.
- With fear for our democracy (2023)—includes historian Kevin Kruse’s argument that the Supreme Court is asserting power it does not have.
- The continuing fight for the soul of America (2022)—Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s searing, provocative, and masterful How the South Won the Civil War reminds us that the struggle to provide equal opportunity for all is never finished.
- Belief in a common purpose (2021)—The New Deal mattered in 1933, writes historian Eric Rauchway, because “it gave Americans permission to believe in a common purpose that was not war.” Although conservatives have fought against the ideals of the New Deal, neither before nor since have Americans so rallied around an essentially peaceable form of patriotism.
- The abandonment of democracy (2020)—I was reading Nancy MacLean’s compelling Democracy in Chains at the end of 2020 while watching the attempted coup that took the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance to its logical conclusion. Utterly chilling.
- Towards a more perfect union (2020)—Historian Eric Foner’s work on the “second founding” of the country examines why “key issues confronting American society today are in some ways Reconstruction questions.”
- History is a teacher (2019)—Historian Joanne B. Freeman’s The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War is the riveting tale of mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests…and that’s just on the floor of Congress! Only when we stand up to those who would divide us and push for a true reckoning will we break through the polarization.
- Telling the full story (2017)—The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by historian Edward E. Baptist demonstrates that slavery was not some pre-modern institution on the verge of extinction but was, instead, essential to American development and, indeed, “to the violent construction of the capitalist world in which we live.”
The fight for democracy and justice never ends.
More to come . . .
DJB
MORE TO COME... 