The Latest Buzz From the Hive: Kill the Constitution!
The latest buzz from The Hive has been “kill the U.S. Constitution–it’s dangerous!”
(H/T Powerlineblog.com)
In addition to the NYT’s buzzing, there is a long article in The Atlantic, and a new book from UC Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky making the same case. (He’s a piece of work, but that’s a topic for another day).
In reality, this isn’t a new thing. At all. Progressives have always detested the Constitution. Woodrow Wilson, Eternal Torment Be Upon Him, was particularly adamant that the 18th century creation was an atavism that obstructed progress–his vision of progress, anyways. Progressive historians Charles and Mary Beard wrote prolifically about the defects of the Constitution, focusing particularly on its allegedly tainted origins as a scheme of the rich to dominate the common folk. That theme has been updated–and not for the better–by the recent anti-Constitutionalist focus on the document’s illegitimacy due to its supposed purpose to entrench and enhance slavery. (Neither the Beards nor the modern day slavery obsessed had/have any clue of what they were/are ranting about).
Progressives have two basic underlying problems with the Constitution.
First, that it is a deliberately anti-national majoritarian document. This causes them particular chagrin today because the Republican Party has only won a national majority of the popular vote once in the last six presidential elections, yet has won the presidency three times. And especially because Donald Trump was one of those winners.
Second, that it (especially the Bill of Rights) is based on natural law principles, which are an anathema to progressives. They believe in positive rights granted by the government, not natural rights emanating from Our Creator (to quote the Declaration of Independence). FDR talked about the Four Freedoms–positive rights like “freedom from want.” Obama repeatedly denigrated natural rights and pushed positive ones. Kamala Harris is parroting that today–she is hostile to free speech but touts “freedoms” that are positive rights.
These objections overlap to some degree, because the constraints on majorities in the Constitution impede progressives’ ability to achieve their positive rights ambitions.
As the NYT headlines demonstrate, a good deal of progressive ire stems from immediate, short-term political frustrations, namely the existence of Donald Trump, the fact he was president once, and the mere possibility he may be again.
This focus on the here and now makes the anti-Constitutionalists like monkeys with matches and gasoline. They clearly have not thought through what a dismantling of the Founder’s construction would cause.
Eliminating the Electoral College and/or dramatically altering the Senate (the two primary anti-national majoritarian elements of the Constitution) would lead to changes that are utterly unpredictable, and unlikely to result in the achievement of progressive dreams.
Simplistically, they think–Democrats almost always win the national popular vote, so if we move to a system that decides elections on that basis Democrats will be in power forever. No Donald Trump will ever exist again.
Such projections are idiotic.
With an entirely changed system, everything will change. Parties will change. Platforms will change. Electoral strategies will change. Candidates will be different.
The Democratic popular majority+periodic Republican Electoral College victories (and Senate majorities) outcome is an equilibrium in the existing system where the parties roughly optimize with respect to that system. Change the system, all the actors will adjust and only fools believe that the outcome will be a permanent Democratic popular majority resulting in permanent Democratic rule. (Ironically, long periods of single party dominance occurred under the existing system).
Far more concerning is that secessionist and rebellious tendencies would be much stronger in a system without the Electoral College. That system provides an incentive for parties and politicians to pay attention to parts of the country they would almost certainly ignore absent the Electoral College.
One conceivable electoral strategy is to concentrate on urban areas and let the rest of the country go screw. But there will come a point where the ignored will want out.
Remember, without the anti-majoritarian elements in the Constitution, the United States would never have come into existence in the first place, precisely because smaller states feared being ignored, powerless, and exploited in a national majoritarian system. That is, without the Electoral College, most states would have wanted to come into a union: without it, many states in it will want to get out.
Further, the Founders recognized that majoritarian systems are inherently unstable. (Game theory supports their intuition). This instability would be manifested in the changes in electoral strategies, policies, platforms, etc. alluded to above. And instability increases the odds of rebellion or secession.
In sum, if the progressives get their way, be afraid. Be very afraid.
And that’s what this is really about: progressives desperately want to get their way. Right now. And that’s why it’s no coincidence that the anti-Constitution movement is happening now, in the wake of a major shift in the Supreme Court.
When the left controlled the Court it could grudgingly accept the anti-majoritarian elements of the Constitution because they could get their way on major matters by having the Court bend and twist the Constitution like a Gumby. That allowed them to outflank an executive and Congress chosen on non-national majoritarian grounds on matters important to them.
Now that route is blocked, at least for the time being. The short term “fix” the ever impatient progressives have come up with is court packing–which is what FDR tried to do when the Court stymied him. But why limit their ambitions to changing the Court? Why not just change the whole damn system?
They want change and they want it now. And they are only thinking about the now, damn the future.
A Constitutional system that has endured for almost than two-and-a-half centuries is under grave threat, event absent a jettisoning of the Constitution. The dominance of the security state, with its inveterate hostility to natural rights like free speech and a right to bear arms that threaten its control, is the immediate threat. Changing the Constitution along progressive lines–and perhaps replacing it altogether–would guarantee the dystopian future towards which we are already slouching all too rapidly.
Progressives want a slave state. With them in charge. That pretty much summarizes the whole deal. They yearn for it. They lust for it.
There’s no such thing as positive rights granted by the government. The phrase is an abuse of language.
Rights are not granted. Privileges are granted. Rights are inherent, intrinsic to the individual (which progressives also despise) and remain with the individual no matter whether honored or not. Privileges are withdrawn on whim.
Progressives, globalists, whatever one calls them, are the modern excrescence of the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment. They detest science and reason on the same grounds as they detest the Constitution: science, reason and principle all obstruct their political whimsy.
Progressives and globalists are the cohort of humans who are obligately collectivist; psychologically unfit to live in freedom. Freedom makes them uneasy. Negotiated law makes them uneasy. So they invent reasons why a free society must be a bad society. Cue their insistent (but unverifiable) demonizations of capitalism.
Democracy? Fat chance. It’d be Stalin’s democracy. Outcome controlled by those who count the votes, not those who vote.
Open the doors to it and the progressives in power will do what they’ve invariably done throughout the 20th century: murder and jail their political opponents; destroy speech; enslave the population. Progressives lust for all of that.
I’m quite sure that a passion to deal death against those hated individualists is central to their shared private conversations.
Comment by Pat Frank — September 7, 2024 @ 8:00 pm
To be fair, early American chatter about “natural rights” has always seemed to me to be mendacious. It’s quite obvious that they really mean something like “our traditional rights as free Britons”. They can’t say that, of course, so they come up with their specious drivel.
What’s more surprising is that subsequent generations of Americans haven’t twigged and have enjoyed being fooled.
Howsoever that may be I find the Constitution a distinctly impressive document. If people want to amend it, so be it. It would be very odd not to want to amend it from time to time.
The real problem with the Constitution is that, it seems to me, it is honoured routinely and then ignored when the stakes are high. An early example is the Louisiana Purchase: it was entirely unconstitutional. The President of the time, Jefferson, did a predictable drama-queen act about its unconstitutionality and then caved in and signed it.
Comment by dearieme — September 8, 2024 @ 4:07 am
I think our constitutional system has two features that make it the best on the planet:
1. THe anti-majoritarian nature of it that provides significant protections to individual freedoms. NO matter how many people in the United States wants to create a Bill of Attainder against Donald Trump, seizing his wealth and perhaps his life, the Constitution prohibits the government from this course.
2. The blending of federalism and nationalism allows individual liberty to thrive. We have options in our country, and the political system (including the electoral college which is a blend of nationalism and federalism in weighting the Presidential election) builds on this.
The Framers understood, unlike modern Progressives, that THE threat to liberty is the government and will always be the government. The government can enforce its will by the point of the bayonet. We have already created a federal government that is too powerful, and even state and local governments are too overbearing against individual rights (think about how it could be valuable for the Chinese to bribe a state aide to the governor of New York with millions of dollars).
IF the Democrats win this election cycle, by whatever means, I am not sure if this nation can go on.
Comment by MARK — September 8, 2024 @ 9:13 am
Nothing written be man is perfect. Hence the multiple amendments to the Constitution.
But this “specious drivel” (see above) has worked pretty well for over two centuries. And by and large has kept the flame of freedom burning and improved the lives of most Americans.
You’d have to be unbelievably wise or merely malignant to replace it with something else. Are democrats so wise? So we must conclude they are malignant.
Comment by philip — September 8, 2024 @ 3:23 pm
‘“specious drivel” (see above)”‘ Nah, read above, philip. It’s not the Constitution that’s specious drivel, it’s vacuous chatter about “natural rights”.
Comment by dearieme — September 8, 2024 @ 4:47 pm
@2&5 dearieme — Natural rights can be laid at the feet of John Locke, an Englishman. The idea itself has deeper roots in earlier generations of Enlightenment thinkers. See Locke and Natural Rights.
They were working toward a philosophical theory about human standing, after a long history of enslavement by divine right rulers. They were not lying. They were looking for a way out. Calling their thinking mendacious is a lazy dismissal, and stoops to character assassination.
If you aver that you own your body, you are claiming natural rights. If you decide that others may freely take legitimate ownership of you, then you have no ethical grounds to oppose your murder.
Natural rights stem immediately from possessing the standing of the self-conscious individual. The immediately derived duty is to honor that right. Dishonor the right, is to yield the right.
Reject them as you like. But then prepare to embrace a pathological chaos, where there is no restaint on a politics of power.
The contest of natural rights defines the present mortal struggle in the West.
Comment by Pat Frank — September 8, 2024 @ 11:02 pm
Streetwise Professor, is this what you really meant to say, or is the word “not” missing?
“That is, without the Electoral College, most states would have wanted to come into a union: without it, many states in it will want to get out.”
Comment by Carla — September 9, 2024 @ 6:47 am
“Natural rights can be laid at the feet of John Locke, an Englishman” Implausible as it may seem to an Irishman, the fact that Locke was English doesn’t make him right. But it does add plausibility to my claim that the chatter is about the real, or imagined, historical rights of an Englishman. The idea that the world would be a better place if all peoples had the same notion of their history and their present – a common view amongst, for example, 19th century Englishmen – doesn’t alter the fact that there is nothing “natural” at all about those rights – unless you happened to be English. As the Founding Fathers were, by and large.
Why not adopt the equivalent rights of a Chinese citizen – there are far more Chinese than Englishmen? Or a Hindu, ditto? Or, indeed, of the subject peoples of the Aztecs? At least they were Americans in the wider sense of that word.
Note that I’m not claiming that Locke was lying – he was merely wrong. But the notion that a smart fellow such as Ben Franklin didn’t know that patter about natural rights was merely a way of obscuring an embarrassing fact – pull the other one.
Comment by dearieme — September 9, 2024 @ 8:33 am
@Carla. Yes. Thanks. I’ll correct.
Comment by cpirrong — September 9, 2024 @ 5:01 pm
@8 dearieme — forgive me, I thought you were English.
Locke, however, was speaking of the rights of man, not restricted to Englishmen.
His political philosophy was grounded on all men being inherently free and equal. Locke’s biography has him “determining the limits of human understanding in respect to a wide spectrum of topics..”
Nothing about an exclusive focus on Englishmen.
That said, every human is born free. Every person owns their own body. Enslavement is mere human-imposed bondage. Individual freedom is a standing at birth — a birthright. No human has any inherent right to enslave a conspecific.
A birthright is a natural right, your denial notwithstanding.
The same consideration of free-at-birth pertains to every human, including every Chinese person. As such it rises above, and supervenes in application, ethnicity or national custom.
The Aztecs and their subject peoples were not American, as America did not exist as a state at that time. One may also observe that the Aztecs and their subjects were not natives of the land they occupied, as their society was preceded by 15000 years of warfare and conquest. The identity of the original occupiers is probably not known.
Also, there were people living in the Western continents before the Clovis people arrived. So, Native Americans (sic) are not even the first peoples.
Locke wasn’t wrong. You are dismissive.
You never addressed the point that if you abjure natural rights and decide that others may freely take legitimate ownership of you, then you have no ethical grounds to oppose your own murder.
Do you permit theft and murder on principle, but oppose them merely by convention?
Comment by Pat Frank — September 14, 2024 @ 4:20 pm