Chapter 2
“These Are the Times That Try Men’s Souls”

The phrase, “These are the times that try men’s souls” is the opening line from the first pamphlet in a series written by Thomas Paine and published in December of 1776.

When the pamphlet was published, the Continental Army had just been defeated. Enlistments were running out. Paine’s pamphlet was a rallying cry intended to persuade and encourage the colonists to keep fighting the war.

In 1967, political scientist Murray Edelman said, “All times are ‘the times that try men’s souls.’ The age one lives in is always in crisis, and especially so since newspaper reading became common.”

According to Edelman, newspaper reading changed everything because suddenly people were informed of events outside their immediate experience. Edelman argues that because most political events are outside the immediate experience of most citizens, almost all political events are presented by means of symbols or abstractions.

To illustrate Edelman’s idea, let’s take the example of the dwindling interest in the Revolutionary War at the end of 1776. Most Americans at the time were subsistence farmers or laborers. Historian John Ferling, author of A Leap in the Dark, tells us that one of the main drivers in the Revolutionary War was the heavy-handed manner that the British exerted control over the colonies, including finding ways to extract money from the colonists. In other words, colonists didn’t like being taxed by a faraway government, which is why the Tea Party was a defining moment.

Much of the Continental Army’s rank and file soldiers were landless laborers and men from the lower social strata who were drawn to enlist by bounties, pay, or land promises, but it also included a significant number of subsistence farmers. We can assume, therefore, that the price of tea did not affect their daily lives. Moreover, the colonists were not simply fighting against a faraway king. They were challenging the dominant global superpower of the eighteenth century, which meant there was a good chance they would be killed. Subsistence farmers probably didn’t want to leave the fields that fed their families and risk their lives in a war just so someone they voted for would have a say in their tax bills, particularly if there was no guarantee that their taxes would go down.

The farmer needed a reason worth dying for, and those reasons were given as abstractions like Independence! and Liberty!

Edelman explains that “all times are the times that try men’s souls” because every political act terrifies someone while reassuring someone else. The McCarthy period of anti-communist campaigns in the early 1950s was terrifying to those who saw the government seeking out and punishing people for their political views as an abhorrent violation of civil liberties and the First Amendment. On the other hand, it was reassuring to those who were terrified of a Stalinist-style communist revolution and believed that aggressive action was necessary to prevent the spread of communism. They saw what happened in Russia after the Russian Revolution, and they were afraid the same thing would happen in the United States.

To some, the McCarthy era was the worst of times. To others, McCarthy’s supporters, it was the best of times because someone was aggressively rooting out the danger of communism.

Let’s take, as another example, the campus protests of the 1960s when protest movements broke out on high school and college campuses across the United States. Student activists demanded, among other things, civil rights for all Americans, women’s rights, and an end to the United States military involvement in Vietnam. They wanted to abolish ROTC programs on college campuses, and they protested police brutality. Protesters organized sit-ins and strikes.

The protests were terrifying to those who viewed them as chaotic, lawless, and endangering what had been the American way of life for centuries. For such people, everything was topsy-turvy. White students marched with Black students. Women wore pants. Men grew their hair long. The birth control pill threatened to disrupt what people thought of as the stability of the American family. Young people were experimenting with drugs. The music was different and unsettling.

For others, the protests of the 1960s were part of a thrilling and liberating period of about twenty-six years that witnessed the end of legalized racial segregation and the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration Act of 1965.

Let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the long-term effects, because it is creating some of the division we see today. The Act, among other things, abolished national-origin quota systems, which had previously favored white immigrants. As a result, over the coming decades, there was a profound shift in the nation’s demographics because of increased immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

What that means is these pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Immigration Act, transformed America from mostly white to a more multicultural nation.

That twenty-six-year period from the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education—the case that ended legalized racial segregation—until the election of Ronald Reagan was a time of rapid change that some found exhilarating and others found terrifying. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but not because good and bad existed together. It was the best of times and the worst of times because for some, it was the best of times. For others, it was the most unsettling of times.

The Founding Conditions

Recall that regressives, or far-right extremists, pine for a bygone era. To understand regressives in a democratic government, we have to understand what Hungarian political scientist and former Minister of Human Capacities of Hungary Bálint Magyar called the founding conditions and the Democratic Big Bang, the event or series of events that established a democratic government. Magyar says that the founding conditions preceding the Democratic Big Bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system.

The American Democratic Big Bang is, of course, the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. The Russian Democratic Big Bang, in contrast, occurred in the early 1990s when the former Soviet Union broke up. Preceding the Russian Democratic Big Bang was a communist dictatorship in which the Communist Party controlled everything, including all the nation’s industries and resources. After the Democratic Big Bang, when the Russians tried to create a democracy but before democracy was firmly established, the people we now call the ruling oligarchs seized the nation’s resources and control of the central government. By 2012, Russia was once more a dictatorship.

In other words, within a few decades, Russian regressives pushed the nation all the way back to the founding conditions. Masha Gessen, in The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, argues that this was possible because, during the lengthy period of Soviet dictatorship, Russians developed habits and psychological states that conditioned them to authoritarianism. The founding conditions set the baseline.

In contrast to the Russian founding conditions, here are the conditions that preceded the American Democratic Big Bang:

• The colonies that formed the United States had functioning democratic institutions such as jury trials, local elected governments that managed the day-to-day business of the colonies, and constitutions that protected the rights of the colonists. The hitch was that the democratic institutions protected only the rights of white men, but there were democratic institutions with a long history.  The Zenger trial illustrates how deeply freedom of the press was entrenched in the founding conditions.
• There was a strict social hierarchy with white men at the top and Black women at the bottom. Slavery was part of that hierarchy. The assumption was later articulated by James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina Senator and wealthy enslaver, who said that every society has a hierarchy, and those at the bottom serve as “mudsills” to create the foundation or support. In other words, those at the bottom of the hierarchy labor for the benefit of those at the top.
• Women who were not enslaved had minimal rights.
• Most American colonists and early Americans were Protestant.
• The nation was almost entirely rural. According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of the US population in 1790 living in a city of 2,500 or more was 5.1 percent. At the time of the Revolutionary War, less than 4 percent of colonists lived in cities.
• Most power resided locally. The result was that there were very few restrictions on what white men could do.
• Gun ownership was part of everyday life for white men in colonial and early America. This was particularly true where there were fears of attacks by Native Americans or uprisings among the enslaved population. Gun laws restricted the rights of non-whites to carry guns. The colonists and early Americans didn’t want the Native Americans or those enslaved getting their hands on guns. Some areas had laws mandating that white men carry guns.

In other words, the founding conditions were that white men ruled a mostly rural nation that was almost entirely governed locally with very few restrictions on white men.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times—depending on who you were. Thomas Jefferson had it pretty good.

Now compare the conditions today.

• Our Constitution states in the Fourteenth Amendment that democratic institutions protect all people equally.
• Women have the full rights of citizenship and are in positions of leadership.
• The nation is no longer rural. As of 2022, approximately 80 percent of Americans lived in areas considered urban, which is now defined as a city with more than 5,000 people.
• Protestants are no longer the majority. As of 2024, only 40 percent of Americans described themselves as Protestant.
• In 2024, white voters made up 71% of the electorate. This is down from 95% during the 1950s. The percentage of white voters has been steadily dropping.
• We have gun control laws (well, a few).

The thing to remember about these changes is that almost all of them happened since the 1950s. That means there are Americans alive today who remember a nation ruled by white Protestant men.

When the most extreme American regressives want to take us back to a bygone era, the conditions they yearn for are those that preceded and immediately followed the Democratic Big Bang. Consider this definition of Christian nationalism, as described in Christianity Today:

Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. America is defined by its ‘Anglo-Protestant’ past, and we will lose our identity and our freedom if we do not preserve our cultural identity.

Anglo, of course, means white. Notice the use of the words “freedom” and “we.”

When the Bill of Rights was drafted, at least six states had government-supported churches. The state governments of each of the thirteen states promoted the religion of their choice. Eleven of the thirteen states had religious qualifications for holding an office.

South Carolina, for example, had a provision in its Constitution about religion. The first sentence of the provision says this:

All persons and religious societies who acknowledge that there is one God, and a future state of rewards and punishments, and that God is publicly to be worshiped, shall be freely tolerated.

In other words, you will not be tolerated if you don’t agree that God is to be publicly worshiped. The next sentences say this:

The Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed, and is hereby constituted and declared to be, the established religion of this state. That all denominations of Christian Protestants in this State, demeaning themselves peaceably and faithfully, shall enjoy equal religious and civil privileges.

So, the founding conditions included a requirement that people worship in the approved manner.

The First Amendment opens with the Establishment Clause:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

It was understood in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, that “Congress shall make no law” referred to the US Congress. The Establishment Clause stated that the federal government did not have the power to impose a religion on the nation. State governments, however, could do as they wished. It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that the United States Supreme Court held that the Establishment Clause applied to the states as well as the federal government. The decision was controversial and stirred a considerable amount of anger among some Christian groups.

When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2004 that the Establishment Clause was not intended to protect individual rights, it was intended to protect states’ rights, he was not wrong. The counterargument is that a lot has changed in 200 years—including the Fourteenth Amendment that was ratified after the Civil War and requires states to respect the rights of individuals. Moreover, a great many Americans simply do not want to live in the eighteenth century.

The regressive view of American history is that something vital is being lost or destroyed. Regressives see history as a gradual downward slope, something that started off good and pure and has been sliding downhill.

The progressive view, in contrast, is that American history has been a gradual upward slope. The progressive view is that the Founders had some pretty good ideas: The idea of a government based on rule of law instead of the whim of a king, the idea of an independent judiciary, and a government that represents “we the people.” The problem, for progressives, is that the Founders left out a lot of people. Most progressive forward pushes in American history have been attempts to include more people.

Here’s the catch: Each push forward triggered a backlash. The more dramatic the changes, the stronger the backlash. Progressives who expect the upward slope to continue, or conservatives who expect things to remain the same, can experience extreme shock when that does not happen.

Race and the Law

Now let’s look at how, in the United States, the reactionary desire to return to the founding conditions comes into constant conflict with a progressive yearning for a better tomorrow. The place to start is with the history of race and the law.

At the start of the Civil War, the South removed its representatives from Congress because they intended to leave the Union. When the war ended, Congress refused to readmit the former Confederates until they agreed to a few conditions. Among the conditions was that the former Confederate states must ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—the Amendments known as the Civil War Amendments or Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery or involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed (among other things) equal protection and equal rights for all people. The Fifteenth Amendment removed race as a barrier to voting.

The important point here is that the former Confederates did not agree willingly to these Amendments. The Amendments were literally forced on them.

For a brief time after the Civil War before the South regrouped and regained power, Black Americans enjoyed civil rights. Black men were even elected to local offices. Then came the massive pushback, culminating in 1896, when the United States Supreme Court, which was largely sympathetic to the former Confederacy, ruled that racial segregation was legal under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That ushered in the era of legalized racial segregation and widespread voter suppression. The goal was to keep white men in control.

Former Confederates also found ways to exploit the exception in the Thirteenth Amendment that allows forced servitude if the person was convicted in court. Law enforcement at the time was local with minimal constitutional restrictions, so Black men were charged with crimes and convicted on scant or nonexistent evidence by all-white juries. Sometimes the police, after arresting a Black man, would beat a confession out of him. Other times they bypassed the judicial process altogether, and the Black person was lynched. Those who were convicted were put into chain gangs and forced to work.

Then, in the 1930s, Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and their team of lawyers organized and spent decades formulating and carrying out a legal strategy to end legalized racial segregation, protect voting rights, and secure rights for people accused of crimes. Their many achievements included the following:

• Chambers v. Florida (1940) addressed the problem of police officers beating confessions out of defendants.
• Smith v. Allwright (1944) secured important voting rights for Black Americans.
• Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ended legalized racial segregation in the United States.

These decisions, particularly Brown v. Board of Education, paved the way for the modern Civil Rights Movement, which in turn made possible the modern women’s movement.

So, for 200 years, change was gradual. In the 1950s, racial segregation was still legal. There were places in the United States where Black Americans were entirely cut off from white America. Job discrimination meant that Black Americans were mostly confined to menial labor. Housing options were limited due to widespread discriminatory practices. Segregated schools meant that Black children often received an inferior education.

Then, over a period of about twenty-five years beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, rapid changes created new opportunities for people who had previously been denied many of the rights and privileges of citizenship.

The face of America was changing.

Changing Laws Governing
Women’s Dependence on Men

Understanding how the founding conditions regarding women have changed is essential for understanding the goal of some of today’s extremist movements.

At the time the United States was founded, there was a legal doctrine known as the doctrine of coverture. Under this doctrine, a woman had no legal identity apart from her husband. That meant, among other things, that a married woman could not be sued, could not enter into contracts, could not borrow money, and could not own property in her own name.

Then, after the Civil War, came the Fourteenth Amendment, which said, “nor shall any state … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Women read the Fourteenth Amendment, saw the words any person and thought they should be included.

One such woman was Myra Colby Bradwell, who was born in 1831. She wanted to be a lawyer, and submitted her application for a law license as required by law in Illinois. Her application contained the required court certificate attesting to her good character and the results of her examination, showing that she was qualified to practice law.

The Illinois Supreme Court denied her request for a law license because her status as a married woman would prevent her from practicing law. How, for example, could she sign legal agreements with her clients if she needed her husband’s permission each time she wanted to enter into a contract?

Bradwell challenged the decision. The Illinois Supreme Court issued its final response, relying on the fallback position that the Illinois legislature did not intend women to practice law, so the court had no authority to grant a law license to a woman.

Bradwell brought her case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her argument was a simple one. The Fourteenth Amendment plainly decreed that no state may deny any person equal protection of the laws. She was a person. The Illinois law deprived her of equal protection by refusing to allow her to practice law on the basis of her gender. Therefore, the Illinois law violated the Constitution, and she must be permitted a law license.

The United States Supreme Court ruled against her, saying, “That God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply, and execute the laws, was regarded as an almost axiomatic truth.” This is from Justice Bradley’s widely quoted concurrence:

Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy that belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The Constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interest and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.

Justice Bradley concluded:

The paramount destiny and mission of a woman is to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based upon exceptional cases.

Because women were prevented from entering most professions and had limited means of earning a living, most women had to get married. Because divorce was almost impossible to obtain, and wife-beating was generally not considered a crime (see, for example, State v. A. B. Rhodes, 1886), women were effectively trapped. To borrow Susan B. Anthony’s words, “Woman’s sustenance is in the hands of men, and arbitrarily and unjustly he exercises his power over her.”

In her attempt to bring about equal rights for women, Anthony knocked on doors and tried to talk to women about their rights. Many told her they had all the rights they wanted. Some said they didn’t want equal rights and slammed doors in her face. In her words, she’d “embarked on an unpopular case and must be content to row upstream.” How did she keep going? She told herself she was working, not for her contemporaries, many of whom would never appreciate her work, but for “future generations we must labor.”

For 200 years, change was slow and there were setbacks. Women in the 1950s, for example, had fewer job opportunities than women in the 1940s because, with so many men off fighting World War II, women were needed to keep the economy moving. When the men returned from the war, women were expected to return to the home. The 1950s, therefore, were more repressive than the 1940s.

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women could be discriminated against in the job market based on their gender.

Before 1974, banks and credit card companies could—and often did—refuse credit cards to women, especially married women, unless they had a male co-signer. Then, in 1974, President Gerald Ford signed into law the Equal Credit Opportunity Act that prohibited banks and credit card companies from discriminating against applicants based on gender or marital status. Even then, discrimination continued due to loopholes.

Thus, from the nation’s founding until the mid-twentieth century, not much changed for women. They had to marry. They had trouble finding employment because they were expected to be housewives. Before the birth control pill was widely available, the only real option for most women was to marry and have children.

Then, over the past seventy years, everything changed. Women now can freely enter the workforce and hold positions of power. They can take out loans, borrow money, and buy their own houses. They can say no to marriage and children.

Laws Governing Rape

The history of rape laws helps us understand the rise of such movements as the incels.

Throughout most of Western history, rape was a property crime. An unmarried woman was her father’s property. A married woman was her husband’s property. If a virgin was raped, the property damage was to her father. If she was married, the damage was to her husband. If she wasn’t a virgin and wasn’t married, there was no crime because the property was already damaged. A man couldn’t rape his wife, his own property, and the rape of enslaved women wasn’t a crime. Attempted rape wasn’t a crime because there was no property damage.

Rape laws were generally intended to protect (white) men from false accusations. They were not intended to protect a woman from attack.

The social hierarchy determined how rape was treated. Black men were often convicted or lynched if accused of rape by a white woman. White men were protected from rape prosecutions because, until the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, women were often not considered competent to testify in court. If the only witness to the crime was the victim, and the victim was a woman, and the accused was a white man, it could be difficult to find admissible evidence. Obviously, given the nature of the crime, the woman and the perpetrator were often the only people present.

Rape was seen as the natural result of human nature: Men were viewed as natural aggressors (“boys will be boys”). Because rape was seen as human nature, a woman was responsible for guarding the goods. If she was raped, it meant she failed. Her behavior was therefore taken into account. How was she dressed? Was she out alone? Did she scream or call for help? Did she put up enough resistance—even though most women cannot overpower a male attacker, and generally not without sustaining other injuries.

Susan Brownmiller, in her book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, sent shock waves when she argued that rape was not a natural result of human nature. She said that rape is the means by which all men keep all women in fear. She made the startling claim that rape is a means of exerting patriarchal power. She said that all men, even those who would never rape a woman, benefit from the fact that there are rapists because the fear of rapists means that women need male protection.

As late as the 1970s, a defendant in a rape trial could present evidence that the woman had engaged in sexual behavior in the past. This was called the “sexual history” defense, and was based on these assumptions:

• She previously failed to guard the goods.
• The goods were already “damaged.”
• She was unchaste or immoral, which meant her word could not be trusted.

It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s, under pressure from women’s activists, that states enacted what are called “rape shield laws.” These laws protect victims and prevent their sexual history from being used as a defense. Nonetheless, the “unchaste victim” exception, which was based on the idea that if the woman was unchaste, the rape did no “damage,” survived in some states into the 1990s. Mississippi was the last state to remove the unchaste victim exception in 1998.

As with the laws governing racial relations, for most of our history, things didn’t change much. Then, from the 1960s until now, women have steadily gained rights and autonomy.

The Supreme Court Slowed Things Down

One reason progress was slow for 200 years in the United States is that, for most of our history, we have had a conservative Supreme Court. Then, for a brief period beginning in the 1950s, we had a liberal Supreme Court.

For most of our history, the Supreme Court has been extremely conservative, perhaps even reactionary. Consider Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857). The majority held that “a Negro, whose ancestors were imported and sold as slaves,” whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and therefore did not have standing to sue in federal court. In addition, the Court held that “the special rights and immunities guaranteed to citizens do not apply to them.” The Court also added that enslaved persons were property under the Fifth Amendment and that any law that would deprive a slave owner of that property was unconstitutional.

It took a Civil War to undo that one.

In 1883, the Supreme Court effectively overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants, and transportation. The Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision, held that Congress could not regulate private businesses.

In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court held that separate facilities do not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby legalizing segregation on public transportation.

In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Supreme Court said that a law limiting bakery work to ten hours per day was unconstitutional. The Court found an implied liberty of contract in the Due Process Clause. In other words, the Court held that under the freedom to enter contracts, if people were willing to work for a few pennies per day, the government had no authority to step in.

There was also the time the Supreme Court said that the federal income tax was unconstitutional. We needed a constitutional amendment to undo that one. And there was the time the Supreme Court upheld the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the time the Supreme Court held that Georgia had the right to criminalize sexually active gay and lesbian relationships.

The list goes on.

There have been a few exceptions, most notably the Warren Court of the 1950s and the 1960s that gave us such cases as Brown v. Board of Education. The early Burger Court gave us Roe v. Wade, where the Court found that the Constitution included an implied right to privacy, and that right included the right to an abortion (with exceptions). The backlash from Roe v. Wade was fierce, and, because the religious right was galvanized to action, it helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Before taking her place on the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent her career as an activist lawyer working to change the law to help women gain autonomy. Ginsburg, who wasn’t yet on the Court when Roe v. Wade was decided, agreed with the conclusion. However, she was highly critical of the Court’s reasoning. She said the Court should have decided the case under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment instead of the idea that the Constitution contains an implied right to privacy. The first rule of statutory interpretation is that you cannot add words that are not there. She also believed the decision was broader than it needed to be. Across the nation, states were changing their laws to make abortion more accessible. She believed the trend would continue.

Ginsburg was an incrementalist who believed that change is better in small increments to allow people a chance to adjust. As an incrementalist, she also believed that Supreme Court decisions should go no farther than necessary to adjudicate the issues before it. She worried that Roe v. Wade was too abrupt and sweeping. She accurately predicted that the sweeping nature of the ruling would create a powerful backlash.

The chief complaint of social conservatives is that the ruling in Roe v. Wade rests on a precarious constitutional argument. They accused the Supreme Court of making law instead of interpreting the law. They similarly argued that the Constitution says nothing at all about abortion or privacy rights, so how can the Constitution protect those rights?

The Rise of the Incel Movement

For women who enjoy bodily autonomy, the women’s movement ushered in the best of times. For a group that calls itself incels, it was the worst of times.

Incels began as a benign online community in 1997 for people who had difficulty forming romantic relationships. The term involuntary celibate was first abbreviated to invcel and then incel.

The founder of the website went by the name Alana. After a few years, she became comfortable with her own bisexuality and gave up control of the website. Over the next fourteen years, the users radicalized into a group of vocal and angry men who resented the fact that women can—and often do—say no.

Today, incel describes men who seek to undo gender equality. They complain loudly about their frustration that women are not available to them. Many members advocate coercion and rape.

A 2022 study, “Involuntary Celibacy: A Review of Incel Ideology and Experiences with Dating, Rejection, and Associated Mental Health and Emotional Sequelae,” published in Current Psychiatry Reports, outlines some ideologies that tie incel communities together. Among other things, incels believe that women are too sexually selective and use their privilege (they get to decide) for social advancement.

Changes will always feel to some people like something vital has been lost. In a sense, men have lost something. It was the prerogative, for example, of a wealthy man to have access to beautiful women. That was what Trump was alluding to in the famous Access Hollywood tape when he said the following:

Yeah, that’s her with the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful…I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.

When the recording became public shortly before the 2016 presidential election, many people expected it to derail Trump’s campaign. Just over a month later, Trump won the election. I suspect that enough people, both men and women, saw nothing wrong with what Trump said. The incels were probably cheering.

And now, for an amusing aside. When I taught college English, I received a memorable course evaluation from an angry student. The student accused me of “ruining a perfectly innocent fairy tale” because I told the class that Little Red Riding Hood is a rape allegory. I said the story is a warning to girls not to wander off into the woods alone because they might not be lucky enough to be rescued by a good huntsman. I explained that the story is a warning to girls about how they should behave and a reminder that they need a male protector.

The student evidently thought I was just a dirty-minded English instructor, but I stand by the rape-allegory interpretation. I mean, for goodness’ sake, when the big bad wolf attacks Red Riding Hood, he’s in Grandma’s bed. The wolf is obviously a metaphorical wolf and not a real wolf because a real wolf can’t say, “The better to see you with, my dear.” And tell me again the color of the girl’s hood.

Listen to Sam the Sham sing “Little Red Riding Hood,” and I think you’ll see that Sam the Sham agreed with me. His song includes lyrics such as these:

Hey there, Little Red Riding Hood,
You sure are lookin’ good,
You’re everything a big, bad wolf could want.

If you’ve never heard the song click here:

(Sam the Sham’s recording is available on YouTube. You can find it by searching for “Little Red Riding Hood, Sam the Sham” or by clicking here. ) If Little Red Riding Hood was a perfectly innocent fairy tale, I wasn’t the first to ruin it.

Originalism and the Rise of the Modern Militia Movement

In response to the liberal Supreme Court of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and the resulting changes, a new constitutional interpretation emerged called originalism. Originalism holds that a law or legal text should be interpreted as it was intended by the original drafters. That makes sense for law enforcement officers, who should always try to figure out the lawmaker’s intention, because under the separation of powers doctrine, the job of an enforcement officer is to carry out the legislative intent. However, interpreting the Constitution as originally intended enables regression because the Constitution was originally written by white Protestant men who deliberately left out everyone else.

To illustrate how the theory of originalism has been used as a means for taking us backward, I will offer the example of the Second Amendment and the rise of extremist modern militia movements.

The Second Amendment was drafted by enslavers who were afraid that a strong federal government would disarm or outlaw local militias. That was important to them because local militias were necessary to enforce the plantation system. The discussion about the need for the Second Amendment began in the Virginia State House when Virginian leaders were debating whether to ratify the Constitution.

George Mason, who was worried that the new Constitution gave the federal government control over armies and militias, said, “The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practiced in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless by disarming them.” Without armed militias to control the enslaved population, these men knew just what would happen.

Patrick Henry noted that locally controlled militias were their “ultimate safety.” He then reminded the group that slavery was “detested elsewhere” and suggested that the federal government’s power to call up militias could be used to end slavery. He pointed out that the federal government could abolish slavery anytime by simply calling the states’ Black men into military service and then setting them free. Others agreed.

The Second Amendment was drafted by James Madison, who attended that meeting in the Virginia State House. Here is the final form, as ratified:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

For most of our history, the phrase “a well regulated Militia” was interpreted literally to mean that the states and local governments could organize militias.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded in 1871 by Union Army General George Wingate and Colonel William C. Church, a journalist who volunteered to serve in the Union Army. They formed the NRA because they were appalled by the terrible marksmanship of Union soldiers. At the time, there was very little training for soldiers. They were expected to bring their own guns and come prepared to fight. Wingate and Church saw themselves as training and preparing future American soldiers. The NRA was thus founded as a gun safety and marksmanship training organization. For the first century of the NRA’s existence, the organization was politically neutral, supporting both gun rights and certain gun safety regulations.

Then, in the 1970s, as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, the NRA underwent a significant ideological shift prompted by the changes. In 1977, a power struggle between the “old guard” and a more radical faction erupted in what has been called the ‘Cincinnati Revolt.’ The NRA leadership was taken over by a group that advocated for unrestricted access to firearms. They advanced the idea that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to own guns, not just a collective right tied to militia service.

The modern militia movement was born in the early 1990s as a response to President Bill Clinton’s gun control laws and the fatal shootouts at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. The movement embraces what has been called the insurrection theory of the Second Amendment, which says that the Second Amendment protects the unconditional right to bear arms for self-defense—and that includes defense against a tyrannical government. According to this theory, when a government turns oppressive, private citizens have a duty to take up arms against the government. They point to the American Revolution to support the idea that citizens have the right to rebel against a tyrannical government. Thomas Jefferson, after all, once said that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.”

Modern militias believe the federal government has become tyrannical. They look at the hundreds of alphabet-soup agencies generating volumes of rules and regulations limiting what they can do, and they look at the changing demographics, and conclude that the federal government no longer represents their interests. Instead, they believe the federal government is protecting outsiders or “others” at their expense.

White power militias put forward a theory called the “great replacement” or “white genocide theory,” which holds that there is a deliberate plot to replace or diminish the power of white people in Western countries through non-white immigration. These militias are determined to fight against what they call white genocide.

In the words of Harvard political science professor Steven Levitsky:

Republican extremism is fueled by powerful pressure from below. The party’s core constituents are white and Christian, and live in exurbs, small towns, and rural areas. Not only are white Christians in decline as a percentage of the electorate but growing diversity and progress toward racial equality have also undermined their relative social status.

According to a 2018 survey, nearly 60 percent of Republicans say they “feel like a stranger in their own country.” Many Republican voters think the country of their childhood is being taken away from them.

Levitsky cited a 2021 survey sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute showing that an astonishing 56 percent of Republicans believe the “traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that force may be necessary to save it.”

That, too, is a response to the changes.