When I was reading this article at the Library of Law and Liberty on the challenges that income inequality poses for our constitutional system, this passage leapt out at me:
Early in The Federalist, for example, John Jay argued that the then existing homogeneity of the US suggested “one connected country†fitted to “one united peopleâ€: “[A] people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs . . . To all general purposes we have uniformly been one people . . .â€
My ancestors—mostly Irish, Swiss, and Germans Catholics—certainly didn’t fit into that “one united people”. Different religions denominations, different languages, different customs, manners, and expectations. How was “one people” preserved?
The answer is that my ancestors adopted English, changed the way they dressed, ate, and behaved, and abandoned traditional religious practices in favor of those of the people who had preceded them here. My ancestors arrived here mostly from 1820 to 1840 with the latest immigrating in 1865.
Their children spoke only English, were largely irreligious, and were as American as the WASPs they lived among if not more so.
Can we have income equality with millions of low-skilled immigrants with very different “manners and customs” from the bulk of the population, who speak little English and don’t feel as much pressure to adopt it as my ancestors did? Can our constitutional order be preserved in the absence of a high degree of social cohesion? We’re conducting a vast real world experiment to find out.
President Trump says NO.
Consult Miss Manners. Gentle conduct between people is conducive to meaningful exchange.
1. John Jay seems to have overlooked two ethnic groups: Blacks and Indians. Try and convince me this was an innocent mistake.
2. I was born in 1946, so it wasn’t quite as big an issue as it was for say my father’s generation or my grandfathers’, but there was a time when “white” was essentially a synonym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”, and such folks as Irish (Micks), Poles (Polacks), Spaniards (Dagos), Italians (Guineas), Scandinavians (Squareheads), Germans (Krauts), Jews (Heebs, Yids, etc.), other middle Europeans, Indians, Northern Africans, and so on, were conspicuously not part of the club. Now of course, they are, as long as there’s money in their pockets, and very few people would wish to resuscitate 1930’s style social distinctions.
Things do change. I dunno about “income inequality” — I think we’re stuck with that till the country falls — but we can probably come to terms with quite a few immigrants who start off with different languages, different religions, different cultural traditions, etc.
Example: I was at a Walgreens picking up prescriptions a few weeks back. The fellow behind me in line was a turbaned Sikh, the pharmacist was a bald black guy, one of the people filling orders was a white kid with purple-dyed hair. Who exactly was the oddball?
John Jay used the noun “people”. Indians were not human in a legal sense until the Standing Bear trial of 1879, you were white or black before then, you could literally shoot them for fun. Some people might frown, but there was no law. And as for blacks, they were chattel.
Can you identify a legal case, particularly one that went to the Supreme Court, that found that killing Indians was licit on the grounds that they weren’t people?
Lemme guess, Mike. The oddball was you.
Janice: +1 (!)
Dave: Not a legal case, but I was leafing through a book on California history about a dozen years back, and came across an account of a prominent Los Angeles businessman who come to California with the Gold Rush and died about 1890. He was apparently very fond of reminiscing about shooting down squaws to get the local Indians to move away from places he wanted to prospect and no one contested the tales.
So either it was perfectly all right to murder Indians back in the mid 19th Century or well to do Californians fifty years later took pleasure in imagining such murders. Either way …
All that proves is that there are people who do things that are against the law. Not that the law supports what they’re doing.