The dismantlement of Roe vs Wade has extinguished the light on the hill
As if the depth of division within US society wasn’t deep enough, this decision by a Trump-infused conservative Supreme Court may be the final straw that causes the liberty train to derail
The overturning of Roe vs Wade in the United States has ended an era of social freedom that has defined it for half a century, almost irreversibly setting it back as a leading nation of the world and all but ensuring the degeneration of the loose union that holds the states united in America. In a single week the US Supreme Court has enforced concealed gun carry rights on states who reasonably enforce them, while deliberating in favour of the abandonment of nationally protecting the choice of women over their reproductive rights.
The Clean Air Act (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972) were signed into law by President Richard Nixon, quickly followed by the Endangered Species Act (1973). Some of the last progressive acts of legislation ever passed in the United States were made in this period and Nixon was the Republican president in power during the codification of Roe vs Wade. His focus on environmental reform was guided by the dire revelations of the first World Climate Conference in 1972, and a cohesive social movement fighting for societal equality and choice for women and minorities informed his eventual concessions towards a universal right to contraception. As a result, the right to access clean water and the assurance of reproductive rights for women were awarded to the people.
Although he personally thought abortion “breaks the family", he identified the wider needs of Americans. Nixon harboured troubling and archaic notions of abortion even for the seventies, only seeing it as a viable option in the instance of "a black and a white… or a rape", but he understood that there were many who disagreed. He may have had some personal conflicts with clean water and women’s rights, but he understood that a large majority of people didn’t, and he could reconcile with that. This Republican president was set into place by a social undercurrent of the hard-fought movements of progressive change that demanded representation from its political representatives, so there were occasions that politicians gave it to them. The arc of progress demanded it.
Fifty years after Nixon, the minimum wages have not grown with productivity, there is now lead in the drinking water of Michigan, AR-15s rip up children in schools and public places, and now Roe vs Wade lies dismantled by a new hard-fought movement of change, set into place by a social undercurrent of manufactured regressiveness and anti-progressivism. A humanitarian assault is now brazenly carried out in the halls of Congress and the benches of the courts by charlatans on both sides of the political isle who have captivated the mechanisms of change in the republic. The democratically elected no longer govern for the needs, health and safety of the majority, and the highest court in the land no longer supports a vital modern keystone of American society, overwhelmingly supported by over seventy percent of the population.
Since Nixon, every US president has worked with a rapacious private merchant class to dismantle the security and cohesion of its society, from Reaganomics all the way to Clinton’s NAFTA. The soldering of American venture capitalism onto the circuit boards of China also coincided with the jimmying-off of the identity of the American working class, destroying the job security of millions and replacing it with Walmarts, cheap fast food and payday loans.
Abandoned by their government between the spectrum of bad intentions from modern Pentecostal church groups to offensively expensive pharmaceutical companies, the desperation of the American people is now only eclipsed by their zealotry toward the mythology of the unachievable. Without guidance from a geriatric president who fundamentally designed the modern neo-liberal architecture that strangles his country, now the three Supreme Court appointments from the prototypical narcissist that came before him wreak havoc on the stability of American life, oblivious to the troubles they inflict upon this damaged society.
Mirages of mythologies from founding fathers are whipped into the lather of hyper-consumption. The American people are strewn across the reemerging battlegrounds along the Dixie line, in the rust belts and beyond the opioid crisis that sweeps from the Appalachians to the streets of San Francisco. An ideologically driven elite wishes to reshape American society via local governments, the judiciary, and local media companies. Now with the blessing of a captive Supreme Court, it manufactures consent in the domain of the unfathomable and takes the culture wars into the wombs of American women.
America has detached from the projection that it self wants to see. That new Netflix series with the 80s pastiche about friends in New York is in a place that has had over 200 mass shootings this year. The new Top Gun is funded by the military-industrial complex who push compromised politicians to fund proxy wars over pandemic relief and baby formula. And that new happy-go-lucky Spiderman film is set in a country that has just outlawed abortion in the Supreme Court.
The Met galas have resorted to writing slogans on the back of Instagram-politicians, the Hollywood people are punching each other at the Academy Awards, Marjorie Taylor-Greene is a household name, and Dr Oz is selling his snake powder in the Philadelphia primaries. All-the-while Uvalde drifts away with Buffalo and the rest of them, along with the tumbleweed echoes of Matthew McConaughey’s drawl. And the place looks more confused than it has ever been.
The President has failed to use his executive to take even the most basic measures on the civilian use of battle-weapons and seems unlikely he will act as is required on this Supreme Court decision as well. Biden, just like Nixon, has expressed his own personal views on abortion, but this time, unlike then, the political class of America is running its own race entirely, floating away with the ideas of legacy and courage, completely unmoored from the best interests of its population.
Chris Hedges speaks of “American Anomie”, a pathological state of despair that has infiltrated the American population caused by the breakdown of social bonds. The disempowerment of American society, the rise of the oligarchy guided by its symbiosis with a political elite, and the open mockery of the meritocracy, has driven many in the US towards a state of desperation. As citizen’s personal rights are now being stripped further in the overturning of Roe by an ideologically driven Supreme Court, the capture of American democracy is all but complete.
The children of unwanted pregnancies will not replenish white America and save it from the “great replacement” as some might hope, just like the wars it has fought abroad did not bring democracy to the world, or bring down the price of gas, or topple Vladimir Putin. The American legacy is no longer at the crossroads, for some time now it has been walking down a path of self-destruction. The only hope that remains is for the American people to talk once again with a united voice on issues that define their fate
We watch a wounded leviathan thrash around from sea to sea, breaking under the strain of an imposed inequality, splintering the great country into enclaves of selfish ideology, motivated by collective grief and depression. The destruction of Roe adds to the unmitigated gun violence and the predatory opioid crisis, the wanton environmental degradation, the destructive book banning, the sadistic healthcare costs, the neo-Christian fundamentalism, and the ghettoization of swathes of once great countryside. These factors combine to create a failed state. The dismantlement of Roe has extinguished the light on the hill.