No Right Is Ever Safe – but Progress Is Possible

The outrageous assault on birthright citizenship should prompt us to reflect on the fragility of democratic progress - and our own responsibility to defend it

credit: iStock / zimmytws

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“We shall repeal the twentieth century.”

In January 1992, libertarian economist Murray Rothbard delivered a rousing speech before a group of prominent rightwingers gathered in a hotel near Washington, DC. It was a momentous occasion. Something was brewing on the far right. The radical wing of the Republican Party was uniting behind self-identifying “paleoconservative” Pat Buchanan and gearing up for a revolt against the establishment. Buchanan had just announced he was challenging President George H.W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in the upcoming GOP primaries. He was the guest of honor and the keynote speaker for the event. But that night near DC, this was Rothbard’s crowd.

Murray Rothbard was a fairly obscure figure for most of his life. He was too extreme for institutions that had any ambition to reach the mainstream, and so he lingered on the fringes. But as the paleo-revolt gained momentum, Rothbard rose with it as one of its intellectual mentors and one of Buchanan’s close advisors.

Rothbard often described himself as a “paleo-libertarian” – but most importantly, he was not a “conservative.” That label he rejected. In fact, he despised the conservative establishment and the formerly liberal neo-conservatives almost as much as he hated what he called the “loony left.” Rothbard was a man of the “radical right,” he insisted, a “radical reactionary.”

In the speech he delivered that night – later published in essay form under the title “A Strategy for the Right” – Rothbard outlined his truly radical vision and what he imagined as the pathway to implement it. The problem, as Rothbard saw it, was that the “loony left” (the liberals, social-democrats, socialists, Marxists, Communists… they were basically all the same to him) had taken over America and destroyed everything that was worth conserving. To undo the damage, Rothbard demanded the “total abolition of the New Deal state”; he also wanted to abolish modern democracy and the civil rights order – which he considered an outrageous federal overreach in service of an ideology of “victimology.”

The problem, Rothbard explained, was that the leftists and liberals had completely taken over all elite institutions, and those liberal elites were now controlling the masses with the help of intellectuals and professors. In response, the Right needed to unite behind a “charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly.” Once such a leader was found, anything was possible. Rothbard felt inspired by the fall of the Soviet Union which had officially dissolved mere weeks before he gave his speech: It seemed to indicate that even the evilest systems could indeed be brought down. As Rothbard’s speech reached its crescendo, he revealed his vision of counter-revolutionary change: “We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the twentieth century.”

It is not a coincidence that Rothbard, who passed away in 1996 at the age of 69, had a revival on the alt-right and among far-right thinkers just when Donald Trump rose to be the Right’s standard-bearer. What Rothbard outlined thirty-five years ago succinctly captures both the strategy of “rightwing populism” as well as the animating vision of the Trumpist Right. “We shall repeal the twentieth century.” It sounds outlandish. To most people who aren’t professionally obligated to analyze the extreme Right, it must seem bizarre that anyone would really be devoted to such a brutally retrograde idea. But the forces that elevated Donald Trump to political power are indeed committed to precisely this project. As they currently control the government of the United States, one of the two major parties, and about half the states, no measure of social, political, and legal advancement of the past one hundred and fifty years – nothing the mainstream would broadly consider “progress” – is safe.

The assault on birthright citizenship

I kept thinking about this as the Trumpist regime’s outrageous attempt to change the constitution and nullify a core element of the 14th amendment was debated before the nation’s highest court this week. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, considering an executive order Trump issued on his first day back in the White House that excludes the children of undocumented immigrants from birthright citizenship.

The good news is that this seems a bit much even for this Roberts Court. Four of the six rightwing justices seemed rather skeptical of the preposterous arguments the Trump administration was presenting (while Thomas and Alito appear, of course, open to run with whatever Trump puts before them).

We’ll take whatever win we can get. But the fact that this is now a debate at all is bizarre. The whole thing is obscene: Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional order, his attempt to rewrite the Constitution via presidential decree, as well as any attempt to launder this white nationalist assault on pluralism and equality into respectability.

The assault on birthright citizenship is obviously part of the Right’s much broader attempt to redefine citizenship and national identity in service of an exclusionary white nationalist vision.

It is, at its core, not merely a policy dispute or a disagreement over constitutional interpretation. It is a battleground in the struggle over what this nation should be, what its identity, its defining aspiration should be going forward.

In a narrow sense, the birthright citizenship clause – the first sentence in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment – was intended to guarantee citizenship for freed slaves. But those who amended the Constitution knew exactly that its implications went far beyond that. It constituted a repudiation of the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dredd Scott that Black people couldn’t be citizens because they were inferior and they didn’t have the necessary hereditary connection – and, more generally, a profound rejection of the notion that some people, because of heritage and blood, had more of a claim to being “American” than others.

The Trumpist assault is so preposterous not only because the text of the Amendment is clear – but also because the framers explicitly debated the fact that this clause would bestow guaranteed citizenship not just upon freed slaves, but to lots of other groups as well. No tiered citizenship in America: That is what the 14th Amendment declares. But a polity that excludes anyone who doesn’t fit certain ethno-religious criteria or relegates them to lesser status is exactly the vision that animates the Trumpist Right.

Even if it looks like the white nationalist assault will, for now, fail: Birthright citizenship is no longer safe. Something that was – and should have remained! – entirely removed from the realm of contestation, unchallenged as the fundamental law of the land, is now very much contested. And that is an urgent warning: No right is safe.

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Rolling back progress

It’s not like we needed another reminder that all the hard-fought rights and civil liberties that turned the United States into anything approaching a pluralistic democracy are at risk – or that taking refuge in the idea that “they wouldn’t go *that* far” is utterly foolish.

Right until the Roberts Court stripped roughly half the population of reproductive freedom and the right to bodily self-determination in the Dobbs decision in the summer of 2022, “they won’t go *that* far” was the reflexive position an industry of self-described Very Serious People had taken for literally decades. With Dobbs, America joined the very short list of countries that have restricted existing abortion rights since the 1990s, when the overall trend internationally certainly had been towards a liberalization of abortion laws. It was a basically unique development in U.S. history: While the Supreme Court had often upheld and codified a discriminatory status quo, it had never actively and officially abolished what had previously been recognized as a constitutionally guaranteed right.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. It constituted the culmination of half a century of conservative legal activism, and rejecting Roe had been a key element of conservative political identity for decades. But so much time had passed: The matter seemed not only settled legally but had come to define lived reality. Would they really dare to upend that? We got our answer.

Dobbs was part of a comprehensive countermobilization against the drive towards multiracial, pluralistic democracy. The Right is targeting the post-1960s civil rights order and the legislation it was built on. And they have been massively successful at hollowing out both the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Since the minute it was passed, the modern Right has searched for ways to undermine the Voting Rights Act – with the Supreme Court often acting as the spearhead of those attempts. In Shelby County v Holder in 2013, finally, the Roberts Court threw out much of Section 5 of the VRA, which required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to acquire pre-clearance from the federal government for any change in voting laws. Even though the 15^th amendment clearly instructs Congress to pass legislation to prevent racial discrimination in voting, Roberts simply declared that the legislation Congress had passed – and had just extended for another 25 years by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate in 2006! – exceeded the powers of Congress. Just like that. In response, Republican-led states have since passed hundreds of discriminatory voting laws.

And the Roberts Court isn’t done yet. We will get a decision in Callais v Louisiana before the summer. Based on how the oral arguments in October went, we can expect the Court to throw out what’s left of the VRA, the prohibition of racial gerrymandering to dilute the Black vote. The Voting Rights Act will be functionally nullified.

Meanwhile, the MAGA government is hard at work nullifying the 1964 Civil Rights Act – by simply no longer enforcing it. In fact, this government now considers any attempt to enforce it a form of illegal discrimination against white people. They are not merely targeting any specific nondiscrimination measures or regulations. They are systematically demolishing the whole apparatus created to implement the Civil Rights Act. Across the federal government, offices tasked with enforcing civil rights and anti-discrimination laws are being dismantled. Anything that could serve as an instrument to level discriminatory hierarchies must be destroyed. With the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, the federal government assumed the role of an engine of democratization, often in direct conflict with the states. But no more: The federal government is now in the hands of the reaction.

Where will this end? “We shall repeal the twentieth century.” Activists, influencers, and pundits on the Right are more and more openly demanding the 19^th amendment be repealed: Their project of subjugating women and entrenching patriarchal dominance won’t be complete until women have lost the right to vote. The modern state and all its attempts to shield the people from the worst excesses of the modern capitalist economy: That also needs to go. On the state level, Republicans are hellbent on rolling back child labor laws and regulations – the majority of Republican-led states have already enacted such “deregulations.”

The goal, ultimately, is to undo the very foundations of the social and political progress America has experienced over the past century and a half. That is why the Right is assaulting the 14^th amendment, in particular. They want to turn the clock back to *before* the Reconstruction Amendments. That doesn’t mean re-instituting slavery, exactly. But it means re-orienting the government towards privileging the rights and powers of certain (white, Christian, patriarchal) groups, of those who are already at the top – and away from acting (very broadly speaking) as an engine of racial and social progress and egalitarianism, which was only possible on the basis of the amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War.

No right, no measure of progress is safe. And here we need to widen our focus even more, beyond civil rights and civil liberties: This is also how Robert Kennedy Jr.’s bizarre crusade against America’s public health infrastructure ties into the broader project of the Right. At its core, “Make America Healthy Again” is an assault on modern medicine, modern science – on some of the pillars of modern society itself.

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Why no measure of progress is ever safe

The anti-democratic, anti-modern forces on the Right have been able to advance much further, and much more rapidly, than even most critical observers would have expected. That should prompt us to reconsider certain pillars of the liberal understanding of America’s history and society – and I am using the term “liberal” in the broadest sense here to include anyone who has subscribed to a certain mainstream perspective on America’s past and present.

First of all, we need to adjust what you might describe as a progress-liberal theory of change. It is imperative we grapple with the fact that the democratizing achievements since the 1960s have not been manifestations of a broad societal consensus. They didn’t follow “organically” from successful efforts to persuade all but the fringe. They had to be imposed against massive reactionary resistance.

The question of whether or not the nation should even aspire to be a pluralistic democracy has continued to define the political conflict since the 1960s, and those who rejected that vision have not been confined to the fringes. The Civil Rights Act *not* as the culmination of noble egalitarian ambitions but as a fateful turn in the wrong direction: That is the defining position on today’s political Right far beyond the rabid MAGA base. Versions of this are articulated constantly by rightwing activists and politicians. It has become dogma in the reactionary intellectual sphere as well, where it has been quite in vogue to write whole books about why the Civil Rights Act is bad and needs to be rolled back. The Trumpists didn’t depart from a previously stable democratic consensus. They represent the radical wing of a rightwing coalition that was never on board with egalitarian principles and democratic pluralism.

Secondly, mainstream America has long underestimated the strength of anti-modern beliefs and resentments. In a much-cited essay titled “The Problem of American Conservatism,” historian Alan Brinkley warned in the mid-1990s that a liberal perspective assuming America to be a consensually “modern” nation had significant blind spots. A fundamentally anti-modern worldview as well as a social reality and political culture defined by anti-modern sentiment, Brinkley argued, was much more prevalent than most people cared to acknowledge. These weren’t just the “losers” on the fringes either, those merely slow to adapt or simply frustrated because they felt left behind socio-economically. There was a whole segmented part of society that was truly and authentically not on board with “modern” society and all its many progressive achievements – a different America “so profoundly at odds with what many Americans have come to believe are the uncontested assumptions of modern Western society.”

We should always remember that these forces of reaction do not have the support of the majority. They may claim to be representing the “will of the people” all they want, but they are ultimately pursuing a minoritarian project. Abortion bans, for instance, are not popular at all. At the time of the Dobbs decision, for instance, about two thirds of the population wanted to keep Roe and believed abortion should be legal at least in some cases; a clear majority supports a law legalizing abortion nationally. Meanwhile, a complete ban – a position many Republican-led states are taking – is favored by less than ten percent of Americans, and that has basically not changed since at least the 1990s. Alas, the Right cares little about the lack of majority support and has proven quite adept at using the counter-majoritarian structural features of America’s political system plus the deep-seated ideas of a white Christian norm (manifesting in all the “heartland” talk, for instance) to its advantage.

Progress is possible

Do not mistake any of this to mean that progress is impossible. There has been tremendous progress in certain areas and certain eras of American history!

The Reconstruction period immediately after the Civil War through the mid- to late 1870s, for instance, was an unprecedented experiment in biracial democracy – brief, but breathtaking in its impact. Amongst white Americans, there was a widespread expectation that formerly enslaved people would probably not know what to do with their newly acquired rights, that it would take time. But in reality, voter turnout among Black people was extremely high. About 2,000 Black men were elected to public office on all levels – Mississippi even sent two Black senators to Congress. South Carolina, the heart of the former Confederacy, elected a majority Black state legislature in 1868. And beyond just politics in a narrow sense, African American social and cultural life soared in those years. Here was the glimpse of what an actually democratic society might look like.

It did not last, however. America’s first attempt at biracial democracy was quickly drowned in ostensibly “race-neutral” laws and almost unimaginable levels of white reactionary violence.

However, the constitutional amendments on which that democratization was built had a more lasting impact, no matter how hard the white nationalist reaction tried to ignore them. As the historian Eric Foner put it, the Reconstruction amendments “transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to substantive freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government.” Foner convincingly argues that this transformation was so profound that it amounted to what he calls the “Second Founding.”

The civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s was built on those amendments. It certainly did not magically turn the country into a democratic paradise overnight. But it both represented and sparked a serious, prolonged effort to extend the democratic promise beyond just white America.

If you want to consider a less precise, but in many ways tangible measurement of racial and social progress: Watch movies and TV shows from the 1980s and 90s. There are exceptions, of course. But the base level of casual homophobia, sexism, and racism that permeated cultural production and all spheres of American life even just a few decades ago was stark.

You know who understands that racial and social progress has been real? The American Right. Their radicalization has been fueled by a pervasive sense of being under siege. That’s the paradox at the heart of the current political situation: Yes, democracy is in grave danger because reactionary forces are on the offensive. But they are not attacking out of a sense of strength, but because they are feeling their backs against the wall. And they are reacting to something real. America has indeed become less white, less Christian, more pluralistic – it had, in many ways, moved closer to fulfilling the promise of multiracial, pluralistic democracy. That is precisely why the leaders of the Right are obsessed with the idea that they have so little time left to save the nation from the leftist assault – and why there is no line they don’t feel justified to cross.

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Rethinking progress

Let us rethink our idea of progress in history so that we will be better equipped to defend it. The realization of how fragile democratizing progress is should make us appreciate and celebrate it more, not less. Only if we value the progress that has been achieved do we understand what we must defend. But nothing is ever guaranteed, there is no linear progression, no end goal we are somehow destined to reach.

You may object that in the long run, things do certainly get better, do they not? Well, even that is a matter of perspective and timeframe. If you compare the 1890s or even 1950s to today (or to pre-January 2025, at least), then yes, absolutely, America is a much more democratic, fairer society. But what if we set the temporal parameters differently: What if we compare the situation of anyone who was not white in 1930, 1940, or even 1950 to the height of Reconstruction? Tens of millions of people lived their entire lives in those decades. The America they experienced was not a democracy; it wasn’t getting better. In fact, they would have been told stories of that brief but marvelous moment, right after the Civil War, when “We” experienced democracy (a very different “We” then the exceptionalist “We” that speaks of America’s glorious democratic tradition going back hundreds of years).

Let us also grapple properly with the fact that no progress is irrevocable. There is a pervasive idea of history unfolding in “breakthroughs” – that once society has reached a certain line, it has passed a point of no return. In the dominant mainstream narrative about U.S. history, the civil rights revolution of 1964/65 is generally framed as such a moment. Wasn’t this, finally, when the country came to a conclusive decision to go full steam ahead towards true democracy? But, again, there is something to be learned from those who rejected that progress. The staunchly anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, anti-pluralistic forces didn’t vanish into thin air or meekly accept defeat. They mobilized.

The actual takeaway here is that we must not assume directionality in history at all. There is no arc, and there definitely is no ironclad law of the universe that says “We” can’t slide back – or slide forward into a new kind of authoritarianism.

Courageous people have achieved marvelous things, often at incredible risk and devastating personal cost. But we must accept that things can change – in either direction: It really could get much, much worse. But it could also get better. There is nothing inevitable about either doom or progress. We are neither fated nor guaranteed to experience the status quo for all eternity. There is something deeply unsettling about this realization: There is no moral arc of the universe, progress can always be reversed, victories are never guaranteed to last. But it should also be empowering and, at the very least, create the sense of urgency that is needed to defend democracy and propel America forward.

No “end of history”

At the end of the Cold War, just when Murray Rothbard proclaimed that the time was ripe for the radical Right to “repeal the twentieth century,” the political establishment bought into a complacent sense of liberal democracy’s inevitability.

Whatever else there is to say about Francis Fukuyama famously (or infamously) diagnosing the “end of history” as the Berlin Wall was about to fall, he captured something crucial about this particular moment in the “West”: It was hard for mainstream observers to imagine anything but a liberal democratic future, a perpetuated status quo; most contemporaries quickly discounted the upheavals of the early 1990s as just a blip. The political center eagerly bought into the posthistorical framework, the center-left parties that rose to power on either side of the Atlantic in the first post-Cold War decade certainly acted and governed as if the grand ideological struggles for a better world were a thing of the past, and all that was left to do was to manage efficiently, with the right kind of expertise – a non-ideological, non-political politics.

The biggest blind spot of the pervasive post-historical thinking was that it vastly overestimated the extent to which liberal democracy, in the form it existed across the “West,” was actually satisfying every individual’s desire to be recognized as equal. In the early nineteenth century, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel had defined history as a series of conflicts or contradictions over what idea, what societal and political order would best satisfy this human desire for recognition. In his 1989 essay (and three years later in a book), Fukuyama argued that this struggle was over, as humanity had found the answer in liberal democracy, and no serious competitor remained that could reasonably claim to have any sort of comparably universal appeal for humankind. Therefore, with the end of the Cold War, humanity was witnessing the “end of history.”

But this diagnosis underestimated the severity of the conflict surrounding the claims for true equality, and how much resistance, “backlash,” and counter-mobilization the idea of equality engendered once it was extended beyond straight white men and beyond a formalistic understanding of equality to all spheres of life: the family, the public square, gender relations. It is not an external authoritarian foe, but the internal conflict over whether or not all human beings – regardless of race, gender, religion, and wealth – should indeed have a right to be recognized as equal that is threatening the democratic project itself. A sizeable portion of the electorate in most “Western” countries is evidently not on board with that vision, drawn to illiberal ideas that maintain certain hierarchies: between white people and people who are not white; between men and women; between Christians and people who are not Christian, between those who adhere to a binary understanding of gender and those who don’t.

Far from enshrining liberal democracy forever, the end of the Cold War actually created the conditions for a more open, more explicit anti-democratic politics to (re-) gain mainstream credibility. For the assembled paleo-conservatives who were enthusiastically cheering on Murray Rothbard’s speech in 1992 just as for the leaders of Trumpism today, democracy – any attempt of leveling what they insisted were “natural” hierarchies – was and is the real enemy. To them, liberal democracy wasn’t the end of history, it was the end of the only version of America they were willing to accept.

And so, they resolved to fight it. Let us believe them when they say they want to “repeal the twentieth century.” Now it is up to those who abhor such a retrograde order to respond. The fate of democracy may well be decided by whether enough people can be convinced to defend the vision of democratic pluralism with equal ferocity and conviction.

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