Edwin Eisendrath recently wrote a piece on his incredible Substack about the “Dual State,” a phrase coined by scholar and lawyer Ernst Fraenkel, who had survived the early days of the Nazi regime and later fled to America.
The idea — in ‘30s Germany — was that legal systems and government norms held out, by and large, but only for some people. Everyone else (and you can guess who) was subjected to what Frankel called the Prerogative State, in which a citizen was subject to the full force of the government but enjoyed none of the rights.
The Dual State: How Trump Is Using Ernst Fraenkel’s Playbook to Fracture the Law
Edwin Eisendrath is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Alderman who hosts It's The Democracy Stupid on Lincoln Square and a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. Subscribe to his Substack.
It sounds like a setup for Unholy Ground, doesn’t it?
The White Christian nationalists who now control our military, policing apparatus, and legislative processes believe that our Constitution was written to ensure their rights, and their rights alone. Personal liberty, in their eyes, means the freedom to do NOT what you want, but what you OUGHT to do.
And who decides what you ought to do? Well … they do. They are the conduits of God, whom they believe is the foundational creator of our nation.
Andra Watkins and Sam Osterhout invited Edwin onto the show — our first guest! — to talk about the dual state, the rights and privileges that our being destroyed every day by our WCN government and those who support it, and a path forward (yes, there is one).
