A day after the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act, the Senate advanced the Gang of Eight’s “comprehensive immigration reform” bill. The work of the Court’s narrow majority looks more likely to endure than the Senate’s lopsided one, but momentum is cutting against conservatives in both cases.
These two seemingly unrelated issues remind us that the most difficult word in politics is “no.” When a large group of Americans wants something, even views the attainment of that thing as important to their identity, they will get it eventually. Their political opponents will come to find denying them exhausting.
This is not always a bad thing. Justice has often been done only after victimized groups have worked long and hard to pursue it. Neither the demolition of Jim Crow nor women’s suffrage would have come about absent such efforts. “We shall overcome.”
Nevertheless, this tendency does become problematic when it makes it difficult to defend the interests of society as a whole against the interests of particular individuals or groups, evoking James Madison’s concerns about factions. Just as for neoconservatives every tin pot dictator is always Hitler in 1938, for liberals every social issue is always Selma.
If you oppose whatever war the neoconservatives wish to fight, you are enabling a new Hitler. If you disagree with whatever social cause the liberal champions, you are the new Hitler, or at least the new Bull Connor.
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