There's always been this thing for me that democracy isn't quite so deeply rooted in America as it claims. And that the constitution of the US doesn't fully and properly channel the culture, so that there are fetid swamps in the collective American imagination that have never been drained as they ought to be.
Yes, its framers wrote a constitution claiming to provide a means to express the will of the people. And some Americans laughably claim that writing these things down means America is the world's oldest democracy.
But actually, the hard yards had already been won in Western Europe. The idea of personal liberty and of the rule of law were revealed via the common law and won on the field of battle. The notion that a person should be free to worship in different ways was at first an argument with the Catholic church, and the instruments of freedom were the secular state, translations of the Bible and the revelations of science. The idea that a person should be free to write nearly everything they wish to (but within certain agreed limitations) was another inheritance. This wasn't improved by the pretence that there should be no such limitations. It's a good idea to have laws preventing the incitement of violence or corrupting minors, for instance.
So those things became embedded in the legal and constitutional edifices of various Northern European polities and some southern city states too. It took centuries and even millenia to get from A to B. The framers of the US constitution tried to put that in an eighteenth century pickle jar. It reflected what they understood to be a framework that would ensure that America would remain a republic, and that this republic would express the will of the people.
Unfortunately, it was a construction made in paper based upon a snapshot of the ideas that seemed to make sense then, rather than a structure that flexed according to changing experience. Indeed, its structure in words crystallised an understanding that was anathema to those mutating constitutions which had produced democratic ideas in the first place. They were flexible in the ways they needed to be. The US constitution was not. It was designed to be hard to change, almost like a stone tablet: a major decision; a fundamental flaw.
And so the culture of the US evolves. And it turns out the autocratic tendencies of the Puritan religions are still present. And the notion that America is a white man's country remains within the GOP's spider's web. And now, it turns out, the idea that Republican ideas are more important than democratic ones is also there.
And this US culture isn't capable of expressing and curing itself via the parliamentary, administrative and legal structures the constitution created. The swamps produce fevers and the fevers flarings of violence.
And this is why I think the US will fracture. The document isn't designed to comport with the country's cultural evolution. And so bad ideas don't get exposed and rooted out over short periods of time. They accrue.
America in 2020 is a toxic stew which SCOTUS will not make sweet, whatever herbs it throws in, whatever decisions it takes.
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