[[link removed]]

WHEN DOES POWER CONCEDE? THWARTING MAGA WILL TAKE MORE THAN PROTEST
AND SYMBOLIC RESISTANCE.  
[[link removed]]


 

Van Gosse
November 19, 2024
The Nation
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ If we want to deploy actual power to block Trump’s vicious agenda
once he takes control of the federal government, we will have to look
to the states. _

J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, during the Democratic National
Convention (DNC) at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, US, on
August 20., Photo: Bloomberg

 

_“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, opportunity,
and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is
still a warrior. You come for my people—you come through me.”_
_—Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker_

This remark at Governor Pritzker’s postelection press conference was
the sole heartening thing I have heard since the debacle of November
5. Why?

Frederick Douglass famously asserted
[[link removed]], “Power concedes
nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will.” This
maxim is usually invoked to stress the need for tenacity, as in the
United Farm Workers’ “_¡Sí, se puede!_” (“Yes, we can!”),
or the motto of African revolutionaries in the Portuguese colonies,
“_A luta continua_” (“the struggle continues”), or the Wobbly
martyr Joe Hill’s “Don’t mourn, organize.” But Douglass’s
insight goes deeper. He understood that oppressive power will concede
nothing except when confronted by a countervailing power; that moral
righteousness and steadfast commitment avail little unless the
oppressed grasp the necessary tools. The arc of justice does not bend
by itself; it is bent—or not.

Certainly, resistance to MAGA will brew, but we need to be strategic
about how to make that resistance effective. Progressives cannot
afford to be like the proverbial French generals, always fighting the
last war. In this case, the “last war” is the mass Women’s
Marches of January 2017, the largest protests in US history—until
the Black Lives Matter mobilizations in 2020! But today, when Trump
has targeted dissenters and is itching to use federal and paramilitary
forces against his opponents, those kinds of protests cannot be our
only way to resist.

The question now is how to deploy actual power to block the vicious
MAGA agenda once it takes control of the federal government.

In my view, we should take up one of the most effective forms of
resistance to unjust authority in US history—fighting at the level
of individual states and municipalities, where governors and
legislatures, mayors and city councils act to protect their own
citizens. Yes, I am talking about “states’ rights.”

Here we face a problem of historical memory. Throughout the 20th
century, the term “states’ rights” meant the right of a state to
disfranchise, segregate, exclude from public services, and deny basic
physical safety to some of its own citizens. That was the
constitutional rationale underlying Jim Crow from Virginia to Texas,
how Chicanos were treated in the Southwest, and Native American
peoples virtually everywhere. In 1948, South Carolina Governor Strom
Thurmond led a walkout from the Democratic convention when the party
finally endorsed civil rights. He convened a States’ Rights
Democratic Party
[[link removed]] and
swept four states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama) as
the only “Democrat” on the ballot.

Eight years later, 101 Southern Members of Congress issued
the Southern Manifesto
[[link removed]],
damning the _Brown v. Board of Education _decision as a “clear
abuse of judicial power” that would “encroach upon the reserved
rights of the states and the people.” And Ronald Reagan sounded a
loud dog-whistle on August 3, 1980, telling whites at the Neshoba
County fair
[[link removed]] in
Philadelphia, Mississippi—where the KKK had murdered civil rights
workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in
1964—that “I believe in states’ rights…. And if I do get the
job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to
reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local
communities those functions which properly belong there.”

But there is also a powerful history of state and local resistance to
injustice that we can draw on. As Kate Masur’s _Until Justice Be
Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to
Reconstruction_ [[link removed]] and
my _The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the
Revolution to the Civil War_
[[link removed]] document,
in the half-century preceding Lincoln’s election, governors,
legislatures, towns, and cities in much of the North resisted the
legal claims of the slaveholding states, defending the rights of their
citizens against “the Slave Power”—meaning the South’s
domination of national politics. As this defiance spread in the 1850s,
it effectively nullified the federal government’s ability to enforce
the claims of slave-owners.

There is a further implication for our own time, when Republicans
controlling red states seek to abrogate the citizenship of those
deemed “other,’”whether immigrants, trans persons, or anyone not
white. In the antebellum era, “states’ rights” meant that when a
state granted citizenship to African Americans by enfranchising them
if male, authorizing them to testify against whites in court, issuing
passports to them (as Massachusetts did in the 1850s), and protecting
them against slave-catchers via “personal liberty” laws
[[link removed]],
that state’s governor, legislature, and courts were deliberately
confronting those states that refused citizenship to Black people.

Up until 1850, the central issue was the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act
[[link removed].],
which required states to comply with the Constitution’s
specification that any “person held to Service or Labour in one
State,” if escaping to another, must be returned. In the 1810s,
legislators above the Mason-Dixon responded viscerally to
well-organized kidnapping rings in the Chesapeake, which regularly
abducted persons of color (especially children). In 1820, Pennsylvania
passed the first “personal liberty” law, further strengthened by
an 1826 act making it extremely difficult for a slave-owner to to
reclaim his human chattels.

By the 1830s, an anti-slavery constituency formed among Northern Whigs
led by the congressman (and former president) John Quincy Adams. It
became popular to defy the South by refusing to extradite fugitives or
persons charged with aiding escapes. A pattern was set in 1837–38
when Whig and then Democratic governors in Maine denied Georgia’s
demand for the rendition of an enslaved stowaway and the captain of
the ship on which he escaped.

The most famous instance of this de facto nullification was the
“Virginia Controversy
[[link removed]]”
of 1839–42, during which New York Governor William H. Seward
resisted five Virginia governors demanding the extradition of three
Black seamen, New York citizens, who helped an enslaved person to
escape from Norfolk. Seward’s rationale here bears special notice
for our time. He wrote one governor that extradition was valid in his
state only if the supposed crime was “treasonable, felonious or
criminal,” and it was “not a felony nor a crime” in New York to
help someone escape from bondage, adding that “it is absurd in this
State to speak of property in immortal beings, and consequently of
stealing them, as it would be to discourse of a division of property
in the common atmosphere.” Not only that. In 1840, he signed a bill
mandating jury trials for alleged fugitives from slavery, and in 1841
approved legislation revoking the “nine months law” which
permitted slaveholders to bring their chattels into the state.

Seward and his Ohio ally (later governor) Salmon P. Chase took the
doctrine of a state’s right to guarantee liberty to the Supreme
Court in 1842 and lost in _Prigg v. Pennsylvania_
[[link removed]], when the court
voided the conviction of a professional slavecatcher. But
the _Prigg_ decision also removed the requirement that state
authorities cooperate in recapture. As a consequence, individual
states and localities continued to turn a blind eye to “rescues”
of captured fugitives, often by free Black folk.

Matters came to a head after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850
[[link removed]].
That draconian legislation repealed habeas corpus for all persons of
African descent in the “free” states. The reaction across much of
the North was violent outrage. In 1852, the Ohio congressman Joshua
Giddings told a mass meeting, “I would sooner see every slave holder
of the nation hanged then to witness the subjugation of northern
freemen to such a humiliating condition. If this law continues to be
enforced, Civil War is inevitable.”

Spectacular rescues ensued, from Christiana
[[link removed]] just
above Pennsylvania’s border with Maryland (where a slaveholder was
killed) to Syracuse’s “Jerry Rescue
[[link removed]]” and
multiple confrontations in Boston
[[link removed]].
Powerful political figures like Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner
and Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens defended the men
arrested during these actions, whom juries proved singularly unwilling
to convict.

Beginning in 1854, as the new Republican Party coalesced, eight
Northern states passed stringent personal liberty laws. The resolution
by Vermont’s General Assembly in 1858, following the _Dred Scott v.
Sandford_ decision, gives their flavor: “That all laws of Congress
which recognize the right of property in man, or deprive any person of
liberty without due process of law and a jury trial…are
unconstitutional, void, and of no effect…. That these extra-judicial
opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States are a dangerous
usurpation of power, and have no binding authority upon Vermont, or
the people of the United States.”

_Dred Scott_ was the final straw, as it guaranteed slaveholders the
right to take their human property anywhere in the United States and
erased any possibility of Black citizenship. The Wisconsin legislature
nullified it, and Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court followed suit when
queried by the legislature whether Black Mainers could still vote as
they had since the state’s founding. It was a short route from there
to Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and then secession, when four
of the slaveholding states cited the refusal to return fugitives as a
central reason for leaving the Union. They had been met with power,
and retreated.

What is the lesson of this history from our seemingly distant past?
Constitutional scholars will likely declare it irrelevant, given more
recent precedents, and no one can imagine that this Supreme
Court—any more than the court led by Chief Justice Roger Taney that
issued _Dred Scott_—will support states and cities that defy Trump.
This is not a legal strategy, in any case—no more than resistance by
New York or Ohio to the slave power’s domination was.

It is as political as could be: putting up a wall against oppression,
securing a border for freedom, creating sanctuaries for the oppressed,
refusing to cooperate with a government that validates cruelty via
mass deportations of the undocumented and persecution of anyone
involved in abortion or gender-affirming care.

That was the implication of what Governor Pritzker said: Now we must
expand the zone of freedom state by state—by any means necessary.
The fighting words of Vermont’s legislature in 1858 seem fresh:
“Whenever the government or judiciary of the United States refuses
or neglects to protect the citizens of each State in their lives and
liberty, when in another State or territory, it becomes the duty of
the sovereign and independent States of this Union to protect their
own citizens, at whatever hazard or cost.”

_Van Gosse is Professor of History emeritus at Franklin and Marshall
College and cochair of Historians for Peace and Democracy
[[link removed]]._

_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without__ permission_
[[link removed]]_.
Distributed by__ _PARS International Corp
[[link removed]].

Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
[[link removed]]
to _The Nation_ for just $24.95!   

* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* resistance
[[link removed]]
* states' rights
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]