56. “Liberty and coercion -the paradox of American government” by Gary Gerstle

13 maart 2021

In this book Gerstle succesfully explains major constraints in American politics which enable us to understand current explosive tensions between Democrats and Republicans and sometimes tensions within both parties.

From independance on there existed a major contrast between the Central State and the different states. As described by Gerstle, it seems as if the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (1791) had as its purpose to ensure that the Central State would not interfere too much in the domains of the individual states. The Bill of Rights only impacted the Central State. The different states were not at all impacted by that Bill and based on the so-called “police power” were free to impose whatever they considered on the private lifes of their citizens. That situation also did not change after the Civil War and nothwithstanding the introduction of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868). Eventually, only the Civil Rights Act (1964) was able to make clear that also states had to respect the Bill of Rights and had to respect a certain private sphere of each citizen, mostly related to sexual preference and reproduction.

The constant fight of the states to retain full powers, also to regulate things in a sometimes rather illiberal way, and this against a Central State which is inclined to defend right of the citizens, is a red line in Gerstle’s book.

Based on the reading of this book it remains clear to me that Constitutions, Bills and Acts are only scraps of paper, which on their own, have no impact whatsoever. And following that line of reasoning i’m not sure that Gerstle explains sufficiently clear why the Civil Rights Act succeeded where the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights had failed before. Yes, the Central Government had money available to force the states to do the good thing. But was that all ? Was that enough to change the culture in the South of the USA after 1964 ?