State of Society

The other day in comments I was denouncing George Mason and the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1776 for the casuistry with which they declared that all men are equally free and endowed with rights except for those who happened to be enslaved: 

George Mason's Declaration of Rights of the State of Virginia, drafted May 1776, where the original smushing took place a few weeks before Jefferson adopted it, began by declaring "That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." 

That "enter into a state of society" clause was designed as an exemption for Virginians of African descent, who were deemed not "in a state of society". That was a diabolical piece of trickery (inherent for me but not for you, for reasons that are not intrinsic but historical), far worse than but very similar to the right to bear arms in the 1689 Bill, which was only for Protestants and not the Catholic allies of the ex-king.

Valued commenter Jeff Ryan took issue with that; surely I was overinterpreting what they meant by "state of society", and when I explained I'd gotten the interpretation from Wikipedia he wasn't too impressed with that either.

But the record of the deliberations makes it absolutely clear, as we learn from Self-evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War, by Richard D. Brown, 2017. Some delegates to the convention, led by Robert Nicholas, complained that the original language of Mason's proposed document, claiming natural freedom for all men without exception, was too radical for a society based on slavery: it could prompt the slaves to revolt, and delegate Edmund Pendleton came up with the hedge: 

Suburban Skies

Coffee Clatch, Park Forest, Illinois, 1954. Photo by Bob Sandberg, via National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

 Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, peering into his Kristol ball for a way to advance-explain the Republican victory in the 2024 presidential election (he takes their win in 2022 for granted) without mentioning the word "gerrymander" ("The Diminishing Democratic Majority") It's all about those suburbs:

I’ll call this, to be provocative, the “emerging Republican majority” scenario, in which it turns out that of the two big political migrations of the Trump era — affluent suburbanites turning more Democratic, working-class whites and then Latinos turning more Republican — the first one was temporary and provisional, and the second one permanent and accelerating.

Ross doesn't know, by the way, that there's a big intersection between "affluent suburbanites" and Latinos, because US suburbs are turning increasingly Latino, many neighborhoods resegregating as young whites seek to move into cities and old ones to exurbs; 54% of the Latino population lived in suburbs by 2016, by no means all of them very affluent of course, and that's growing, so you don't know what's going on. Also, not to repeat what I've said a million times, Latins are not a monolithic group and if you can't tell the differences in orientation between Venezuelans in the Houston area and Tejanos along the Mexican border, Puerto Ricans in Harlem and Dominicans in the Bronx, Cubans in New Jersey and Ecuadorans in Queens, you're going to be missing important parts of the picture. Moreover, that possibly "permanent and accelerating" swing toward Trump between 2016 and 2020 was from 18% the first time round to 27% in the second, not an emerging majority. 

Sorry

From my vantage point it took Most national Dems too long to express their support of Prof Vanessa Tyson. There was a “tidy” ending to Northam racist photo if a black man became VA governor. Now we must contend with whether violence against black women matters in our politics.

— Melissa Harris-Perry (@MHarrisPerry) February 9, 2019

I should have said something too, having left the story up in the air with the pious hope we'd be seeing Fairfax as governor soon, and I regret that. Don't feel qualified to say more than that at the moment.