In an interview yesterday, Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana said out loud what too many Republicans believe. He told a reporter that the Supreme Court should have left the decision about the legality of interracial marriages up to the states. Too many Republicans want a return to a time that they see as the Golden Age of the United States, but that other people, especially minorities, remember as a time of gross discrimination.   

The GOP’s idealized world existed before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Stonewall Riots, before Roe v. Wade. In their minds, the world had clearer boundaries where people knew their place and station in life. The government didn’t interfere in hiring or housing or schooling. We were a country of Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best. 

Of course, that time was dominated by White men. We had no women or African Americans on the US Supreme Court and few held seats in Congress, or state legislatures, for that matter. Society was largely segregated and segregation was legally enforced in the South. Women were denied access to clubs and couldn’t get credit without the consent of their husbands or fathers. 

For women and minorities, the period following World War II was one of awakening, not prosperity. Corporate America was dominated by White men who did little to confront discrimination. State and local governments defended Jim Crow and Members of Congress from Southern states prevented federal intervention to end the racist laws. The Supreme Court offered protection and rights that elected officials would deny American citizens. 

Today, there’s a push to go back in time. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts has led the effort to neuter the Voting Rights Act and Republicans in states across the country have moved quickly to make voting more difficult for Black voters. The court is probably going to overturn Roe v. Wade or sharply curtail its protection of women’s health and choices. In North Carolina and other states, Republicans are re-segregating our public school system by cutting funding and encouraging home schools, charters, and voucher schemes. In questioning Ketanji Brown Jackson yesterday, Texas Senator John Cornyn seemed to signal that Republicans want to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that protects same-sex marriages. 

Katanji Brown Jackson’s nomination has highlighted the two competing views of America. On the right, conservatives see the laws and decisions that have protected the rights of minorities as burdensome government interference and have used questioning Jackson as a means of speaking to their base and illustrating their opinion of an America in cultural decline. Jackson seems to be the personal representation of the those affronts to people like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Lindsey Graham. 

Progressives hail the nomination as part of the realization of Martin Luther King’s Dream, and another step in the long road to equality. Yesterday, Pat Timmons-Goodson,  North Carolina’s first African American on the state Supreme Court, expressed sentiments of many minorities and progressives in an op-ed. “[T]his eminently qualified jurist should be confirmed because her presence would strengthen the institution — her legal qualifications are sterling, and the diversity of perspectives that she brings to the Court are incredibly important.”

That belief highlights the difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives do not seem to believe that perspectives or life experience matter. They believe that the Constitution is a document set in stone, written in a vacuum instead of a hotly debated political tome. Their approach to the Constitution resembles the narrow interpretation that fundamentalists have toward the Bible–that the authors were infallible. 

For people who spent the vast majority of the history of our country excluded from the rights afforded others, the Constitution must be a document that can change and become more inclusive and less exclusive. They look at the broad ideas and ideals incorporated into the founding of the country, that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights.  Conservatives have been using their interpretation of the Constitution to deny rights, not expand them. 

Jackson will most likely be confirmed to the Supreme Court despite the objections of conservatives. Her confirmation hearing lays bare the differences between conservatives and progressives. The latter believes perspectives matter, especially the experience of those who lived under systemic discrimination for centuries and feel its linger effects today. Conservatives who used their interpretation of the Constitution to codify this discrimination dismiss perspectives as frivolous. Fortunately, we’ll get Judge Jackson’s in the near future.