The U.S. Constitution, not Marxism, is the law of the land

Progressive politicians in Congress spin out the notion that a minority of Americans are growing too rich and the rest of Americans are therefore getting poorer. Their solution for this economic disparity is to tax the rich heavily and have the government redistribute the money to poorer Americans. The objective is ostensibly to equalize all Americans economically.

The progressive theory behind this uniformity proposal is contained in critical race theory, which itself is rooted in Marxist ideas, such as material determinism.

For racially oriented historians, the American experiment has been unfair from the very beginnings of the settlement of the coastline in Virginia in 1619, because that is where the first African slaves were brought. But it was Carolina that saw the arrival, in 1670, of Barbados-style  slave plantations, and the concomitant leisure-gentry class, which cemented the cancer of Black slavery in the Confederacy.

That was one strand in American development. The other strand, which stood opposed to this Southern development, was epitomized by Massachusetts – and especially the English Puritans, led by John Winthrop, who settled in and around Boston in the 1630s. Winthrop saw America as the New Jerusalem, and created a Christian Old Testament theocracy in Massachusetts.

What came out of Massachusetts was the basis for the characteristics of the North – an ethic of hard work, frugality, idealism and religion that would strongly oppose the gentry-plantation class that lived off the work of millions of Black slaves.

What the progressives of today do not realize is that the development of the U.S. was due to the impact of laws, specifically our Constitution, and the legal inheritance from English law, as well as Americans’ religious roots. It was not due to Marxist economic theory, which postulated a Black proletariat that has still not found freedom.

The quest for uniformity to coerce economic equality means impairment of our free-market system. In Federalist 10, James Madison profoundly disagrees with this quest, writing, “The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government ….”

In the 1800s, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall supported the Constitution as the supreme law of the land (Marbury v. Madison, 1803), and strongly supported market capitalism as the proper economic structure for U.S. and its development. Furthermore, in 1819, in McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice Marshall upheld the power of Congress to incorporate the Second Bank of the United States, while denying the right of a state to tax the bank.

In contrast to Marshall’s compelling arguments for the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the preeminent slave state, authored the Nullification Doctrine (1828), a complex theoretical work with three principal points: that the states had agreed to the U.S. Constitution as sovereign entities; that they could therefore nullify federal laws; and that since the states were sovereign, they could secede from the U.S.

Calhoun was a strong supporter of slavery, and his state, and the 10 other Confederate states, adopted his philosophical justification for secession. This was a completely false theory. James Madison, the fourth President of the United States and one of the major writers of the Constitution, was from the Virginia planter class and was very sensitive to states’ rights. He was appalled by Calhoun’s idea of state sovereignty, and sharply rebuked it.

However, the South’s slave culture was so strong that they thought they could successfully make war against their Northern brethren, and the new Republican Party, led by President Abraham Lincoln. This was a grievous decision. Some 400,000 Union soldiers died fighting against slavery, and hundreds of thousands were wounded.

Progressives’ support of critical race theory, which uses Marxist ideas, blames the cancer of slavery for racial economic disparities today. This is a questionable view.

The Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln quoted in the Gettysburg Address, envisions “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Liberty posits a differentiation of talents and achievements, but equality of spirit before the Divine.

MOSES MORDECAI TWERSKY of Providence has a master’s degree in American history from Providence College. He is a scion of the Chernobyl Belz Makarov Hasidic rabbinical dynasty. His novel “Love Story in Greenwich Village: New York Iranian Adventure,” was published in January 2021 by Omniscriptum and is available on Amazon.