The Never-Trumper Secret: MAGA’S Birth Certificate is the 1960 Sharon Statement
Non-MAGA Republicans have taken to denouncing Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans while claiming MAGA has nothing to do with true conservatism. Yet, we’ve seen long-standing “true conservatives” such as Senator Lindsey Graham and, at times, even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, follow Trump’s wishes like lemmings. A look at one of the founding documents of the pre-MAGA modern conservative movement offers clues as to why. The document is known as the “Sharon Statement.”
The Sharon Statement was put out in the fall of 1960 by the group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). This group met at the home of William F. Buckley and came about after Barry Goldwater failed in his first bid for the Republican nomination. It became the guiding light of the CPAC-led Conservative Movement up until Trump and his MAGA movement took it over, just as it has taken over the Republican Party.
However, there are only a couple of ways that MAGA highly differs from the tenets of the Sharon Statement. Trump’s embrace of tariffs is one of them. The second is his “love” for the communist leader of North Korea and his admiration of other authoritarians, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin. These things are contrary to the ideas put forth in the statement’s declarations.
Despite these deviations, the majority of what’s expressed in the Sharon Statement fits right in with the MAGA movement. This is because both MAGA and traditional U.S. conservatism are driven by the racist, sexist, and classist beliefs that trace back to those held by the Confederacy.
The Sharon Statement: What’s the Confederacy Got to Do With It?
According to YAF, the Sharon Statement is seen by most scholars and journalists as a “seminal document” of the U.S. Conservative Movement. This is true. What’s concerning is that the ideas it expresses are taken merely as a conservative counterpoint to liberal ideas. No one seems to acknowledge that it’s largely a modern take on the beliefs of the antebellum South, aka the Confederacy. This acceptance of the statement being a benign point of view shows that, despite the Union winning the Civil War, the ideas of the Confederate South around God, race, women, and class continued to be given legitimacy in America.
Let’s start with the Sharon Statement’s first tenet. It addresses the idea of freedom.
That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;
On its surface, this seems benign, right? Who would argue against the idea of having “God-given free will” and “the right to be free”? However, context is everything. Take, for example, this statement:
We demand the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of national self-determination.
This also seems to be non-controversial. However, it happens to be the first point given on Adolf Hitler’s 1920 25-point Nazi party platform. That knowledge changes everything because it places the statement in the context of German history. Once you have this information, the words take on a sinister meaning.
The same phenomenon occurs when you study U.S. history and see where the Sharon Statement is on that timeline. Doing so gives the seemingly innocuous conservative document meanings that are tied to the Confederate South. Specifically, if one takes the whole of the Sharon Statement and compares it to some of the reasons used to justify slavery, the idea being expressed in its opening salvo is part of that same viewpoint.
How the Antebellum South’s Culture Ties to Modern Conservatism
Conservatives would like us to believe that MAGA’s open embrace of Confederate thoughts—from the desire to shut down the federal government in favor of “states’ rights” to the rhetoric of white supremacy to the calls for “red state secession"—is somehow all because of Trump. The truth is, all Trump has done is amplify what Conservatives like Ronald Reagan, the 40th U.S. President, used to say via racist and sexist dog whistles. Those ideas, born in the Antebellum South, are now roared out loud by the MAGA crowd.
The pushback from all Conservatives on this idea will likely be that no one is talking about re-enslaving anyone—because Conservatives like taking an originalist approach to everything. In this case, what is being referred to is the Antebellum South’s world construct and the logic that was used to justify slavery, not the practice of slavery itself.
If you haven’t been in a U.S. history class in a while, some of the South’s reasoning as to why they wanted to continue with the practice of slavery may be fuzzy. Knowing that history is necessary to understand how the ideas presented in the Sharon Statement connect to the Confederate South — and thus also to MAGA. Perhaps that’s why MAGA supporters don’t want this history taught in schools?
In the South, Freedom for All Meant Freedom for a Few
When discussing the history of slavery in America, the main focus is naturally on the plight of the enslaved. However, slavery was only one part of the South’s social construct. That construct made the idea of freedom different from what we think of today. This can be seen in the historical documents of key Southern figures who made pro-slavery arguments.
Thomas Roderick Dew was a Virginian economist, professor of law, and president of the College of William and Mary. He was also a staunch advocate for slavery and argued for it to continue during the 1831–32 State Delegation debate on slavery. That debate occurred after the 1831 Nat Turner Slave Rebellion. There is also the former Vice President and later Senator, John C. Calhoun, who famously gave a pro-slavery speech on the Senate floor in 1837.
Then there was James Thorwell, a pro-slavery minister from South Carolina. He gave a sermon with such a thorough pro-slavery argument that it was published as a book. The sermon, done for a church dedication in 1850, is titled “The Rights and Duties of Masters.” His ideas in this weren’t new, but they are well explained so that they are impossible to misconstrue. From his words, it becomes simple to show how the Sharon Statement’s first tenet stems directly from Southern ideas.
Thorwell’s sermon heavily stressed the idea that the free will of man should not be suppressed—unless one was born into enslavement. The reason for this? He believed that not enslaving Black people was a disservice to both the master and the slave, as neither would benefit from the lessons God intended for them. This convoluted idea echoes that of earlier slavery proponents, but Thorwell’s writing does so the most explicitly. In doing so, he spells things out that should have given poor White Americans pause.
In Thorwell’s thoughts about the free will of man and Christianity, he claimed that some are born to be masters, others are to have limited autonomy, and others are meant to be slaves. Thus, despite the focus being on slavery, Thorwell’s hierarchical sense of justice and human rights was not only about slavery and race.
“The Providence of God marks out for the slave the precise services, in the lawful commands of the master, which it is the Divine will that he should render; the painful necessities of his case are often as stringent upon the free labourer, and determine, with as stern a mandate, what contracts he shall make. Neither can he be said to select his employments. God allots to each his portion — places one immediately under common — and leaves the other not infrequently a petitioner for a master” (p. 25).
In other words, his idea about God’s natural order didn’t just have Black people enslaved; he placed most white people in the position of being meant to be poor and under a “master’s” control. To shore up this idea, Thorwell rejected an often-used pro-slavery argument that claimed black people were not human.
“Science, falsely so called, may attempt to exclude him (Black people) from the brother-hood of humanity. Men may be seeking eminence and distinction by arguments which link them with the brute; but the instinctive impulses of our nature, combined with the plainest declarations of the word of God, lead us to recognize in his form and lineaments — in his moral, religious and intellectual nature — the same humanity in which we glory as the image of God. We are not ashamed to call him our brother.” (pg. 11)
By pointing out that Black people were as human as everyone else, Thorwell’s sermon encouraged poor White people to be content with their disempowered place in life, as it too was ordained by God. Although the lands were owned outright by plantation owners (as opposed to being bequeathed to them by a king in exchange for military aid when needed), Thorwell’s thinking about society is similar to the European feudal system and the Divine Rights of Kings. Ironically, one of the reasons the ancestors of European Americans came to the “New World” was to get away from these same systems.
Unfortunately, both then and now, the poison of racism blinds White people to how the system of racism, while giving them some privileges over people of color, hurts their well-being. This part of Thorwell’s passionate defense of slavery—the control given to the rich over the poor—amounts to the quote from George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
How the Antebellum South Connected Democracy and Communism
Recently, Trump and his MAGA supporters have stepped up some false rhetoric about President Joe Biden and Democrats being communists. It’s not a new tactic for the GOP to claim so based on total fiction. The most infamous use of it was by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Interestingly enough, the groundwork for McCarthy was laid for him by his party.
Because of his “New Deal” economic plan (which included Social Security), the GOP had been attacking President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a socialist and as a communist. (They aren’t the same thing, although the GOP will often treat them as such.) Then, for FDR’s final presidential race, the GOP opponent, Thomas Dewy, claimed there was ‘communist infiltration” in the Federal Government.
One might think that these tactics were a 20th-century phenomenon, but here is another Thorwell quote from “The Rights and Duties of Masters.”
“…the mad speculations of philosophers — the excesses of unchecked democracy — are working out some of the most difficult problems of political and social science; and when the tumult shall have subsided and reason resumed her ascendency, it will be found that the very principles upon which we have been accustomed to justify Southern slavery, are the principles of regulated liberty — that in defending this institution we have really been upholding the civil interests of mankind resisting alike the social anarchy of communism and the political anarchy of licentiousness — that we have been supporting representative, republican government against the despotism of masses on the one hand, and the supremacy of a single will on the other. “ (pg 19).
Given his beliefs about God having pre-ordained roles for everyone, it is unsurprising that Thorwell despised “the excesses of unchecked democracy.” He saw it as the reason for the abolitionist movement. He then goes a step further by suggesting that abolition and democracy could lead to the destruction of Western civilization. This, in his reasoning, positioned the slave-owning South as the group working to save “mankind.”
Today, the idea of slavery saving the Western world will strike most as ludicrous. Still, the how and why behind that idea is what needs to be considered. Why? Because, today, aside from the idea of slavery, there are Conservative institutions and White nationalist groups that spout the same rhetoric. These groups, including those in MAGA, will claim they are trying to save Western civilization and insist that Democrats and liberals are all communists.
The Many Meanings Behind the Word “Communism”
Thorwell’s focus on “unchecked democracy,” the “social anarchy of communism,” and the “political anarchy of licentiousness” links to another point made in the Sharon Statement.
“That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties;”
Today, there’s a reason the term communism has a negative connotation. Most associate communism with governments formed under the Marxist-Lenin model. These governments quickly devolve into authoritarian governments with monarch-like leaders. Examples of this include North Korea and Cuba.
However, in 1850, there had been no Bolshevik Revolution. Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin weren’t even born yet, and the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had come out a mere two years prior. So why was he so riled up about a philosophy in a paper? It had to do with the goings-on in France.
The Age of Enlightenment: America vs. France
Although both the American and French Revolutions came out of the Age of Enlightenment (also called the Age of Reason), France had taken the ideas of the Age further than some of the American Founding Fathers liked. The 1789–1799 French Revolution is known in popular culture for the beheading of Queen Marie Antoinette in 1793. The king, his son, and his sister were also beheaded.
Despite the horrible violence, what was most upsetting to those of Thorwell’s mindset was the idea of ordinary people having an equal place in society. He saw this as being against a society based on where people fit in “God’s plan.” In France, the 1789 August Decrees completely did away with the feudal system, which, as mentioned earlier, bore some resemblance to the plantation systems in the South.
The Decrees were quickly followed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and its Citizens, which would go on to become the Preamble to the French Constitution. This is Article IV from that document.
Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
This destabilization of France’s social order kept France in a state of upheaval. There would be two more revolutions after the bloody times of 1789–1799. The second French Revolution was in 1830, and the third was in 1848. That one allowed all men, regardless of socioeconomic status, to vote.
The French Revolution called for the end of class distinctions and the privileges that came with them. Thorwell and his pro-slavery friends could see how what was happening overseas could be applied to their similar plantation systems and overall culture. They did not want these ideas around social equality to take root in America. This is how social anarchy, Marxism, and “communism” became linked to “unchecked democracy.”
The Antebellum Dog-Whistle: being “Licentiousness”
Since licentiousness is one of those SAT words, here is a quick look at its definition. (Yes, there will be a quiz.) Today, the word means “1. lacking legal or moral restraints especially: disregarding sexual restraints” and “2. marked by disregard for strict rules of correctness order” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). However, in 18th- and 19th-century America, the word had come to be associated with the moral reform movements of abolition and women’s rights.
The issue of women’s rights was not only around voting. It included issues around women’s sexuality, safety, and having the same worth as men. For instance, although the French Revolution didn’t give women the right to vote, there were women actively involved in these revolutions who challenged the position of women in society. A year before Marie Antoinette was beheaded, Britain’s Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women. One of the themes of her book linked the ending of class distinctions with the need for women to be educated in the same way as men, for the good of society as a whole.
As this 1835 quote from the Boston Female Moral Reform Society shows, ideas around women’s rights did come over to America. During this time, there was a strong movement of women wanting to end the double standard around sexuality, where a “fallen woman” was scorned and ruined for life while the man involved got off scot-free.
“Woman has erected a standard, and laid down the principle, that man shall not trample her rights, and on the honor of her sex with impunity. She has undertaken to banish licentious men from all virtuous society.”
Then, in July of 1848 (it was a heck of a year), the Seneca Falls Convention was put together by the American feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. (Mott was also a well-known abolitionist.) Out of the Convention came the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on the American Declaration of Independence, it called out a list of injustices against women, including their lack of property rights, education, and the right to vote.
It is this idea of social roles and expectations being broken down by political movements that has Throwell going on about “social anarchy and “political licentiousness.” In a piece for The Age of Revolutions, the historian Tom Cutterham describes this fear as being present in the very founding of America.
“… anarchy seemed like a very real threat to the gentlemen who sought to lead America out of its revolution and into the sunlit uplands of a new, stable, republican society. It took the form not only of insurrection and potential dissolution of the union, but — more insidiously — of a breakdown in the relations of class and gender on which the status and power of such gentlemen relied.”
What makes the terms used by Thorwell particular to the Antebellum South is that by the time of his speech, the long-held ideas about race, class, and gender in Western culture were already breaking down elsewhere. It wasn’t just in France, which, on top of everything else, ended slavery in 1848. Denmark did also, albeit under some duress from the enslaved in the colony of St. Croix. Technically, Spain had ended slavery in both the country and its colonies in 1811, but their colony of Cuba had other ideas (which is a whole other story). Although Britain would remain behind America on voting rights, it had ended slavery on its mainland in 1807 and in its Caribbean territories by 1837. Yes, it was problematic in how it was done in these countries, but at least it was done.
In America, the Northern American states also abolished slavery in 1807. Likewise, the right of men to vote regardless of property ownership had begun popping up in various states in both the North and South. This was another sign of the fraying class distinctions occurring in the Western Enlightenment Era.
As mentioned earlier, the rights of women were also in flux. It was Wollstonecraft’s book that would fuel the first wave of feminism across Europe and America. Still, this feminism was again being seen only in the Northern States.
All of these things made most White people in the Antebellum South see themselves as the last bulwark against a rapidly changing world — one changing in ways they didn’t like. Their pushback against societal changes would eventually lead the U.S. to the Civil War. The outcome of that war would leave a permanent faction of America’s electorate against ideas that embraced equality. That same electorate would continue to link the principles of democracy to communism.
More About the Antebellum South, the Constitution, and the Sharon Statement
Disagreement around the idea of democracy has plagued America since its founding. An example of how complex it is to discern the will of the Founding Fathers is the different approaches of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton believed in a strong federal government yet feared “the masses” controlling it, while Jefferson, who wanted more power to go to the states, championed the idea of direct democracy.
Despite these differences, what was clear to both men was that the original document written to run America, the Articles of Confederation, was an absolute failure. It emphasized the power of the states so much that there was little the federal government could do in the way of governing. Things such as law enforcement and raising money were expressly the domain of each state, and the nation didn’t even have a military.
That first attempt at creating a functional nation is how we ended up with our U.S. Constitution. It gives much more authority and powers to the Federal Government, including the power to “provide for the common Defence and promote the general Welfare” of the American People. This power is first articulated in the Preamble.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The Preamble is a straightforward statement explaining exactly what results are expected from the document. Therefore, it is logical to assume that everything that comes after it is in the service of fulfilling the goals the Preamble lists. Still, just in case there was some doubt about it, the writers of the Constitution doubled down on those points of purpose. They are in the very first article.
Article 1, Section 8 of Clause 1 General Welfare
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
These rights, being the first thing discussed in the Constitution, suggest they were considered the most important of duties. However, the Antebellum South, the Confederates, the post-Confederates, and going straight up through to MAGA, have always focused on the 10th Amendment, which reads as follows:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
It is from this amendment that political minds in the Antebellum South came up with the idea of Nullification — the failed legal theory (at least until recently) that said a state could overturn a federal law. In 1828, then Vice President Calhoun (yes, the same person mentioned previously) championed this idea. In this case, what he wanted had to do with federal tariffs that benefited the Northern States but not the Southern ones, especially in the case of Calhoun’s state of South Carolina.
The tariff issue was solved by compromises made on both sides. However, the idea of Nullification soon became “a strategy for the South to preserve slavery” (Library of Congress). It later became a key part of the premise used by the Confederate States to leave the Union. However, some historians, most notably William W. Freehling in his book Prelude to Civil War, make compelling arguments that Calhoun’s concept was always about saving slavery.
Being that slavery itself entwines racism with profit, this is a reasonable argument. Tariffs were causing problems for plantations, and plantations were largely operated by enslaved Africans. Therefore, upholding slavery also upheld the profits of the plantation owners. It also kept a majority of White Southerners content with being poor—because it was still better than being a slave.
After the outcome of the Civil War, Nullification didn’t come up again until the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. The ending of school segregation was the first blow to the unraveling of the South’s racist Jim Crow system, and it led to fierce Southern resistance. The most infamous example of this occurred in the state of Arkansas. Known as “The Little Rock Crisis,” on September 4, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African-American teenagers from integrating Little Rock, Arkansas’s Central High School.
Little Rock, Arkansas, 1959. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus speaks in front of a crowd at the State Capitol to protest school integration. Photograph by John T. Bledsoe. Library of Congress, Public Domain,
President Dwight D. Eisenhower would eventually order the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine teenagers into the school, and it was integrated on September 25th, despite the continuing mobs of protest. However, that wasn’t the end of things.
“In February 1958, the Little Rock School District went to federal court to ask for a delay in the integration plan, and that June, a federal judge ruled in the school district’s favor. (…) Two months later, a federal appeals court reversed Judge Lemley’s decision and the case was sent directly to the Supreme Court.” (National Constitution Center.)
The case was Cooper v. Aaron, and its verdict was given on September 12, 1958 (the date is significant). Despite the number of times and various ways that Nullification has been rebuked in American history, Cooper v. Aaron was the first time that the Supreme Court flat-out said that a state cannot nullify a federal law that the Supreme Court says is constitutional. The decision was built on the precedent established by earlier cases, including the right of the Supreme Court to establish what was constitutional. That case, Marbury v. Madison had been decided back in 1803.
Why Do Conservatives Still Want to Nullify the Constitution?
A standard Republican claim is that they are strict Constitutionalists. The problem is that their ideas about the Constitution come from the aforementioned Confederate lineage. This is why the Sharon Statement proclaims that the most important part of the Constitution is the 10th Amendment.
“That the genius of the Constitution — the division of powers — is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people, in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government;”
Remember, this was written in the fall of 1960, two years after Cooper v. Aaron rebuked the state of Arkansas for trying to “thwart” the federal law requiring the desegregation of public schools. The state did this under the auspices of the 10th Amendment.
The writers of the Sharon Statement believed that the 10th Amendment was more important than everything else written in the Constitution prior. Given everything that was just explained about this Amendment, this tenet can not be seen as anything but a nod to the same failed Nullification idea that started the Civil War and had been used by the state of Arkansas to try blocking the implementation of Brown v. Board of Education
If the 10th Amendment intended to essentially be able to “nullify” the rights granted to the federal government by the Constitution, it would have been included in Article 1. That would have placed it as one of the guiding principles of the document. It also would have made the Constitution as useless as the Articles of Confederation it was replacing. Any doubts about the intention of who was to have the final say about those rights are put to rest by the Supremacy Clause in Article 6.
“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”
The reason these Conservatives saw the 10th Amendment as “genius” then is the same one that the Confederates did in their era. Each believed it would allow states and individuals to uphold the ideas about race, sex, and class that were a part of the Antebellum South. Those ideas were about upholding that culture, which in turn was about maintaining profits for plantation owners. Today, it’s about maintaining profits for corporations. This brings us to another point made in the Sharon Statement.
“When government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both;”
This part of the Sharon Statement is the basic argument the GOP uses to oppose everything from Affirmative Action to the Affordable Care Act. However, to truly see the ramifications of this tenet, you have to know what a “market economy” is.
“Market economies work using the forces of supply and demand to determine the appropriate prices and quantities for most goods and services in the economy. Entrepreneurs marshal factors of production (land, labor, and capital) and combine them in cooperation with workers and financial backers, to produce goods and services for consumers or other businesses to buy.” (investopedia.com)
If you take the meaning of a market economy and apply it to the 1850s, the problem with the Sharon Statement’s assertion becomes apparent. A key part of the market economy during Thorwell’s time was slavery. Applying this idea from the Sharon Statement would mean that ending slavery would require the slave owner to “bestow” freedom on the enslaved.
This is why those rich Southern gentlemen were always talking about “states’ rights.” They did not want the federal government to interfere with their market economy — which was the practice of slavery. Even though the practice was barbaric and caused Black people to be treated horrifically, it kept them rich, even as it hurt the overall economic well-being of most White Americans in the South (University of Houston).
So, when the Sharon Statement talks about interfering with the market economy and taking from one man to give to another, the roots of this thinking go right back to that antebellum mindset. Instead of it being about slavery, the GOP rails against anything that might cut into a corporation’s bottom line. Worker’s safety rights, climate change laws, affirmative action, and vaccine mandates during the middle of a pandemic are all deemed to be things that deny both individuals and corporations' “freedom.”
This thinking is aligned with the ideas in Thorwell — the idea of the divine haves and haves not. Remember, his theology (and that of the Southern Christians) states that “God” gives some people the right to be exploiters (“masters”) and that everyone else is a servant or slave. Yet, somehow, this “God-given” system of exploitation is really for the spiritual good of everyone, so the have-nots should be grateful to serve in their roles.
It’s Always About the Money
Today, the application of the 10th Amendment to keep the federal government from intervening on behalf of “The People” still hurts the overall economic well-being of most Americans, regardless of race. Here is a prime example of it. MAGA has had some big wins against affirmative action programs, but the old GOP has gone after them for decades. They have done this despite study after study showing that racism in education and businesses has cost the US economy trillions of dollars.
The highest estimate of loss is from a study at the Brookings Institute. It puts the loss at 51 trillion dollars over 30 years (1990–2020). Another study done by Citigroup puts the loss at $16 trillion over 20 years (2000–2020). Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) site, an institution that’s got its own baggage regarding institutional racism, has articles under its Finance & Development section that address the cost of racism to a country’s GDP. They clock America’s projected losses at a modest 1 trillion to $1.5 trillion between 2019 and 2028.
The Citigroup study notes that the loss starts with “four key racial gaps for Blacks — wages, education, housing, and investment.” This creates a large wealth gap between White and Black Americans. Many studies go in-depth on why this exists, but for starters, there is this well-sourced article from investopedia.com: What is the Racial Wealth Gap. If you’re into math, there’s also The Impact of Educational and Labor Market Discrimination on Wealth and Income Disparities.
However, how does this wealth inequality cause a decrease in America’s overall economy? Bernard Anderson, Ph.D., a Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave a succinct explanation during a 2021 interview.
“Income disparity reduces Black family consumer spending, and also reduces savings, which is the source of investment. Investment is the foundation for building wealth. Thus, the inability for Black people to participate fully in the economy reduces total national income.”
Here’s how the Sharon Statement weighs in on issues of race, money, and government without actually using the words.
That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering the government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power.
The problem hinges on the term “proper role.” Despite the clarity of purpose spelled out in the Constitution, defining the “proper role” of the Federal Government has caused much back and forth in American politics. When you look at the crux of these discussions, the real issue for the Conservative side becomes clear. They don’t agree with the idea that the federal government has a role in “promoting the general welfare” of the American People. Certainly, those who wanted to secede from the Union didn’t. When the Confederacy drew up its own Constitution, that idea was notably absent.
This lack in the Confederate Constitution falls in line with the ideas that underlie the Confederacy: some people are born to be exploited. As such, there’s no need to be concerned with their welfare. It is the concept of the government having the power to promote actions for and spend money on the general welfare of the United States and its people that made the Confederates adamant about states’ rights. They did not want the federal government to do anything for the general welfare of all people because they saw that doing so would open the door to the government being able to end slavery.
The History of the Attempts to Nullify Aspects of the Constitution
What follows the Preamble is how the U.S. government can achieve those goals. One way to do so was through the separation of powers. Creating this balance between what powers belong to the federal government and what powers belong to the states, or to “The People,” was important. There is no question about that. With such a large country, it is impossible to expect all federal laws to fit all states.
However, all laws must fall in line with the Constitution. Clarity around that was given in the 1819 case of McCulloch v. Maryland. This Supreme Court case’s verdict was a unanimous decision. It said that the Federal Government had powers not explicitly stated in the Constitution, so long as those powers were connected to powers that were stated within the Constitution. This includes the power to promote the general welfare of the American people.
To be clear, the fear that the government could interfere with a state’s sovereignty is a legitimate one, to a point. For instance, the legal driving age is different in various states because the circumstances around driving in each state are different. Driving in heavily populated states with major urban areas is not the same as driving in sparsely populated states with lots of rural farmland. This is why each state should be able to decide what age for driving is appropriate; we are a large and diverse country with different circumstances.
Yet, despite the differences in driving conditions nationwide, there is a federal law that requires every car to have seatbelts because all Americans should have access to safety when driving. They also offered incentives for states to enact laws requiring drivers and passengers to wear seatbelts. Both of these things “promote the general welfare” of the American people, because safety is important regardless of what state a person lives in.
The Sharon Statement Shows that Trump’s MAGA Movement is Just Louder Republicans
Once you see how the Sharon Statement would work during the times of slavery, it is easy to see how racist and undemocratic it is. Looking back at the history of the Confederacy also points out why the idea of Christian nationalism is such a part of the Republican Party and now a part of MAGA. Those who wanted to justify slavery created a twisted Christian ideology to defend themselves against the progressive ideas that were rising in the Western world. (Twisted Christianity is a discussion for another day!)
Today’s Conservatives, like yesterday’s Confederates, are still fighting that losing battle against the march of enlightenment and the issues of race, class, and gender it raised. We all see this clearly in the MAGA Movement. On the far-right MAGA Supreme Court, they’ve approved some states enacting Jim Crow 2.0 with voting discrimination, tanked the use of affirmative action for colleges, and put the lives of women in danger by overturning the precedent of Roe v. Wade. Meanwhile, MAGA politicians and groups continue a state-by-state attack against the LGBTQIA+ community. However, none of these started with Trump and his MAGA movement.
Remember that promised quiz about the word licentious? Think about how it was used then and these culture war attacks being made by MAGA. The MAGA culture wars and legislative actions are very much in the same vein as the attacks against licentious movements and behaviors in the antebellum South. However, these things can’t all be blamed on MAGA.
The ideas driving the political and social MAGA movement have been core principles for the Republican party that gave us Ronald Reagan. Those who are hoping to get back to having “normal” Republican, pre-Trump politics need to realize that it’s “normal” Republican politics and ideas that seeded the ground to grow Trump’s MAGA Movement. Assuming America gets out of this current Trump crisis, people need to understand that going back to a Republican normal will just pave the way for another Trump-like candidate who will try to topple America’s Democratic Republic. We need a second Reconstruction Period for America, only this time, we have to make the changes stick.
