In downtown Baltimore we have a statue of one of the worst Americans in our collective history. That would be Roger B. Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. Everything about Taney screamed partisan hack. It was his life’s story. He was a white supremacist who firmly believed that “American Exceptionalism” was “White Exceptionalism”. It is a world view that still fuels the Romney campaign and the modern conservative movement.
The Dred Scott decision was infamous for many things. It overturned decades of settled law in an attempt to force a political solution in favor of the Southern Aristocrats that Taney sought to please. The ruling also sought to end any powers of the Federal government to limit the Galtian overlords of his day.
In his Dred Scott decision Taney defined the term “American citizen” in a manner that is still fully embraced by today’s conservative movement:
The words “people of the United States” and “citizens” are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the “sovereign people,” and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.
It was exclusionary. Only white people had rights in Taney’s America and some white folks–the elites–had more rights than “regular” citizens. In Taney’s America, folks had to bend the knee to their betters–especially the white elites of his time who ran an economic system based on the theft of labor. This notion that citizenship in America is a limited and restrictive “right” is a core belief that the conservative movement has been working to fully reestablish ever since they got their ass kicked in the Civil War. And now to their collective horror one of the “subordinate and inferior class of beings” that Taney identified in Dred Scott has become President of the United States. This, more than anything else, is the source of wingnut rage at Barack Obama.