The fundamental definition of a “right” is frequently misunderstood in modern political discourse. A right is not a service granted by the state, nor is it a privilege extended by a benevolent administration. If a human right is granted by a government, it is not a right. It is a policy. It can be legislated into existence and legislated out of existence. True rights are inherent to existence and cannot be revoked by any political shift, leader, or judicial decree.
States do not accidentally conflate rights with permissions. They purposefully mislabel them. It is a deliberate strategy to maintain control. By framing civil liberties as “grants” from the government, privileges extended by the state, the ruling class creates a dynamic where the government is the ultimate arbiter of freedom. This psychological reliance fosters a system where citizens wait for a “Good President” to bestow liberties and fear a “Bad President” who might retract them. It exposes the fragility of “rights” that exist only at the whim of the current administration.
The trajectory of American history provides a definitive example of how rights granted by the state can be systematically revoked. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 is often celebrated as the moment freedom began, yet it was a wartime measure that “freed” enslaved people only in areas currently in rebellion against the Union. It deliberately did not free enslaved people in border states loyal to the Union. This demonstrates that freedom was treated as a weapon of the Executive, not an inherent right of the human being.
The subsequent passage of the 13th Amendment to “grant” freedom further illustrates the point. If the 13th Amendment can grant freedom, the law can also take it away. The law that followed abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” immediately creating a loophole that the Southern states exploited through the Black Codes to essentially re-enslave Black Americans through the convict-leasing system.
Following the Civil War, the federal government attempted to secure civil liberties through the Reconstruction Amendments. However, these rights were not treated as inherent and inalienable. They were legal mechanisms subject to the political winds of the era.
The end of Reconstruction in 1877 marked the beginning of the rollback of these state-granted rights. The Supreme Court played a critical role in this erosion. In the Slaughter-House Cases and the Civil Rights Cases, the Court limited the scope of the 14th Amendment and ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional, arguing that the federal government could not regulate private discrimination. Because these rights were viewed as privileges granted by the government rather than inherent to humanity, they could be stripped away by legislation and judicial fiat.
The reality of “rights” as privileges was fully realized during the Jim Crow era. Southern states passed laws to suppress poor and racial minority voters that involved poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. These were legal obstacles designed to disenfranchise Black voters who had technically been granted the right to vote by the 15th Amendment. The fact that these rights could be nullified by state legislatures proves they were never truly inalienable.
This “right” to vote remained fragile until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which attempted to ban literacy tests and other tools of disenfranchisement. Yet, even this monumental legislation was not a permanent fix. In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that the formula for determining which jurisdictions needed federal oversight was unconstitutional.
The impact of that decision is immediate and ongoing. The “rights” that were protected by the VRA were contingent on a single court ruling. Once the court removed the protection, states across the country immediately began enacting new restrictions. Within hours of the decision, Texas and Alabama moved to implement strict voter ID laws that had previously been blocked.
Republican-led states have continued to pass voting restrictions that, in several cases, would have been subject to federal review had the court left the provision intact. States have purged voter rolls, attacked felon voter protections, and enacted gerrymandering to dilute the Black vote. In Alabama, a bill was proposed that would make it a crime to help a non-family member return an absentee ballot, a practice critics likened to Jim Crow-era hurdles like reciting the Constitution from memory to vote. The history of previous Jim Crow regulations affects voter suppression today because minorities often have their vote dismissed by the manipulation of voting regulations.
The American history of voting rights proves the thesis. If a “Bad President” or a “Bad Court” can take away your rights, and we are powerless to stop it, then we never had those rights to begin with.
We have privileges.
Conditional.
Revocable.
The Voting Rights Act was not a shield. It was a temporary policy decision that was rescinded by a simple majority vote of the Supreme Court.
The resurgence of these discriminatory tactics shows that rights granted by the state are never secure. They are tools of the majority, subject to the caprices of the political moment. To have actual rights that cannot be taken away by any politician, one must build a system in which no one has the power to take them away to begin with.
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