John Roberts Continues the Civil War

On 9 April 1865, the Confederacy fired its last and most effective bullet at the heart of our democracy. Most of us remember that date as the day Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, officially ending hostilities in the rebellion, even though fighting continued and other surrenders followed for months. We think of it as the day the South officially lost the Civil War. We are wrong. The Civil War has not ended. The struggle against our democracy continues with its greatest victories being delivered by the Supreme Court of the United States.

The mild-mannered, very serious, very formal, and universally well-liked John Roberts has done more to make blatant wanton open racism acceptable again than anyone since the Civil War. He’s the wind-up toy of the white nationalists wing of the Federalist Society. They wound him up and pointed him straight at the Voting Rights Act.

John Roberts’ Alleged Racist Tendencies

We don’t know where John Roberts’ racist tendencies came from, but we do know where they went and the route they took. First up in the hit parade of questionable racial beliefs is stanning for Daniel “Fugitive Slave Law” Webster when he wrote his classic award winning senior-year paper at Harvard, “The Utopian Conservative: A Study of Continuity and Change in the Thought of Daniel Webster,” in which he must’ve documented Webster’s transformation from a conservative politician standing up for his beliefs and convictions into a politically craven politician beholden to donors to support his lavish irresponsible spending and willingness to compromise with Southern insurrectionist, authoritarian, anti-democratic, slave owning, white supremacists in the vain hope of winning the 1852 presidential election. Who knew the Southern strategy started BEFORE the Civil War?

Next in this hit parade of racial oppression and animus is Roberts’ clerkship to Judge Henry Friendly. How dare you besmirch the Judge’s Judge, sir! Judge Friendly is widely viewed as being committed to enforcing the law equally for all citizens. Yes, but he was also a believe in slow incremental change with the judiciary not the primary driver of social change. While Judge Friendly, probably, wasn’t any more racist than the average upper middle class white person born in 1903, so he probably didn’t vibe with Roberts over overt racism — they were reputed to have bond. But, what social issue represents a major change in American society? Could it be racism? I’m just saying it gave Roberts a veneer of legitimacy and intellectual fairness.

Third, he clerked for Justice Rehnquist while he was on the Supreme Court but before being elevated to Chief Justice. It is important to note that during both of Rehnquist’s confirmation hearings, he was questioned aggressively about his behavior at Arizona polling places in the 1962 by elections challenging the legitimacy of some voters — Spoiler: Black and Hispanic voters. Eye witnesses testified in his confirmation hearings that he got physical with some voters going so far as to push them and he got in people’s faces. In 1964, Barry Goldwater took the practice and Rehnquist national with the aptly named, Operation Evil Eye, er, I mean, Operation Eagle Eye. In a nauseating affirmation of history not repeating itself so much as regurgitating itself, they claimed they were protecting the integrity of the vote.

The important part here is Rehnquist’s zealous challenging of the legitimacy of Black and Brown voters. Rehnquist was a full card-carrying, due-paying member the conservative Republican, um, are Black people really allowed full citizenship caucus. In other words, he was an out-of-the-closet racist. Whether Rehnquist infected Roberts with the racist virus, we’ll never know, but after that clerkship, Roberts was a vocal critic of racial equality.

And, the fourth stop on the white supremacist train was Roberts’ stint in Reagan’s White House Council’s office and Poppy’s DoJ as deputy solicitor general. In 1982 when the Voting Rights Act was up for renewal and was being amended to strengthen protections for voters, he wrote an infamous memo arguing that the intent to limit voting was more important than the actual results when evaluating voting legislation. He went further in other memos stating that protections against discrimination were no longer needed. And, distinctions based on race were universally detrimental even if used to address past discrimination and ensure equal protection. All of which have been encapsulated and retained and used to arrogantly tell Black people that their lived reality isn’t what they experienced in his Supreme Court decisions. You can’t get more overtly racist than that.

Linking Roberts to the Confederacy

What links Roberts’ post-race America views to the Confederacy? How did the Southern authoritarian oligarchical white supremacists capture John Roberts, especially considering that Roberts was brought up in northern Indiana. First, he lived on the shores of Lake Michigan in the fairly wealthy white enclave of Long Beach, where property deeds forbade the sale of homes to Black or Jewish people. Those deeds weren’t accidents, they didn’t write themselves. They are part of the way the South took Indiana without firing a shot.

In his book, American Nations, historian Colin Woodard documents how regional culture travels with its people — not just in their personal attitudes but through the institutions they build and the practices those institutions normalize. When Southerners, particularly from the Appalachian Uplands, flooded into Indiana’s industrial centers and farmland during Reconstruction and the Great Migration, they brought that culture with them. They brought it so thoroughly and so effectively that by the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan didn’t just operate in Indiana — it dominated state politics. Not fringe politics. Not county politics. State politics. Until the New Deal turned the kitchen light on and drove them under the refrigerator, where it waited until their next opportunity to emerge.

By the time a young John Roberts was riding his bicycle through the lily-white streets of Long Beach, there was ample air pollution left by the Klan a generation earlier for him to inhale. Those deed restrictions were its fingerprints. That’s not speculation — that’s how culture works, which is exactly what Woodard documents. The bullet fired at Appomattox was still traveling. It found a home in John Roberts’ heart in Long Beach, Indiana, and eventually onto the Supreme Court.

The Confederacy didn’t need to fire another shot after Appomattox. It needed patience, institutions, and lawyers. Roberts is what that patience looks like after a century and a half of cultivation — a man shaped by deed-restricted white neighborhoods, mentored by the suppressor of Black and B , seasoned in administrations hostile to civil rights, and installed on the nation’s highest court to finish what Lee couldn’t. The evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, expanding political gerrymandering, loosening campaign finance laws, and the slow erasure of precedent — these aren’t separate conservative legal victories. They are coordinated attacks on the country in a war most Americans think ended in 1865. It didn’t. It just put on a robe.

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