“The radicals intend to take down individual liberty and replace it with their illusion of collectivist equality.”
The radical left has a century-long history of taking a pick axe to the US Constitution. The virulent racist, first “progressive” president, and zealous anti-Constitutionalist, President Woodrow Wilson, launched the laborious work of their trade with his 1912 election.
As a professor and president of Princeton University and then New Jersey governor, Mr. Wilson was smitten by the German “social scientists” of the late 1800s who promoted the concept of government being professionally staffed by “experts.” The modern age, Mr. Wilson argued, should be run by an administrative staff of these experts, not constrained or limited by the democratic norms or the imposed limitations that the Constitution applied.
You could make the case that Woodrow Wilson was the original intellectual doner of the modern unelected fourth branch of government – the vast and now unaccountable administrative state. Not to mention its disreputable relatives in the “deep state.”
Regardless, the facts are plain enough. The attack on constitutional self-government and the Republic itself has been ongoing and, regrettably, increasingly successful.
Like the Maoists, whom they often publicly adore, the goal of the modern left is to eradicate the family unit, indoctrinate children, destroy history, remove religion, root out what remains of capitalism, and abolish functioning individualism. These goals require a continually determined attack on the Constitution and, most importantly, the Bill of Rights.
Over the years, the attacks have come steadily. Examples would be knotted-up elections where the Electoral College comes under attack as anti-democratic or the constant demeaning of free speech and calls for censorship, misinformation czars, and “hate speech” legislation.
We also have obviously coordinated attacks from supposed intellectuals in universities and the media that are popping up like ragweed. Recently a well-known Georgetown University law professor, Rosa Brooks, has been busy peddling the poison in articles and on TV. The Constitution, she alarming relates, is an “outdated” and “ancient” document that holds the nation in “bondage.” She suggested to Joy(less?) Reid on MSNBC (here) that it’s time to develop a “governing charter” that replaces the Constitution.
After Ms. Reid made the ludicrous comment that citizens now live at the mercy of whoever “purchases an AR-15” and decides to shoot “anyone available, Ms. Brooks couldn’t constrain herself. “[Americans are] essentially slaves to a document that was written more than 230 years ago by a tiny group of white slave-owning men.” [Note to Ms. Reid: Long guns of any type are a tiny fraction of homicides in the US, averaging between 340-400 per year in a nation of 330 million, compared to approximately 1700 knife and sharp-object homicides.]
Ms. Brooks ended with the bizarre statement that Americans should no longer have to “justify our politics by the Constitution.” Okay.
The New York Times, ever ready to trash America in general, recently featured an essay, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed (here),” written by Harvard law professors Ryan D. Doerfler and Yale’s Samuel Moyn. “The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism,” the two write. We can’t govern with “some centuries-old text,” they argue.
There is an increasing chant – the Constitution is bad because it’s old and it limits the government. Of course, that’s right.
I’m not a professor or an intellectual. But let me give this a try.
You either believe in human freedom, or you don’t. If you believe in liberty in thought and action – then the Constitution is hardly an out-of-date antiquated document that makes everyone miserable. Instead, this miraculous document – a thin piece of parchment – is all that stands between you and the thugs of history that want you to do as you are told. To live a life they see fit and useful to them. And most of all, to worship them, not some God they don’t know and can’t see.
Somewhere around my sophomore year in high school, sandwiched between thinking about fast cars, cute girls, and Pall Malls, I thought I ought to know what the great thinkers and philosophers of history had to say about it all and set about doing so. But in the end, it was the American Founding and Founders that caught not just my young mind but my imagination.
These men were the craftsmen, the finest artisans of history if you will. Virtually to a person, they were extraordinary minds, educated in the classics and the Enlightenment thinkers. They were skilled students of the Holy Scriptures and the covenants between God and man that they would emulate between the people and the government.
And they were accomplished in the practicality required for building a nation in the New World.
They were doers. They were fighters.
I became a “conservative” reading these men. They understood the intrinsic nature of man and the inevitable consequences of unchecked power. They grasped the limits of human ability, the immensity of God’s perspective, and the imperative of leaning into His wisdom. They believed Nature’s endowment of individual human liberty was a sacred gift and a self-evident truth.
(In a recent book, Last Call for Liberty (here), social critic and author Os Guinness makes a case for a national conversation, a specific discussion on the landscape of freedom. From whom do human rights and freedom come, and who defines them, God or man? In his words, “Will a covenantal and constitutional renewal take place in America as the century unfolds? Is there an American leader with the vision, the courage, and the knowledge of history to be the covenant restorer in the land?”)
The Founders saw the world as it was and created an ingenious method to keep the Republic from destroying either personal liberty or itself while at the same time providing a process for improvement beyond their lifetimes.
The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights stand as their witness against the tyranny of the mob rule through parliamentary “democracy” on one end and the oppression of the various authoritarians and totalitarianism on the other. Our Founders knew that one could be just as wicked and repressive as the other. And they believed successive generations would see the Republic’s value and fight to keep it.
Now, two hundred and fifty years later, the nation’s Founding and its intellectual argument are ground zero in America’s second civil war. A cold war, but a war nonetheless.
The organized hundred-year-old worldwide long march of socialism and Marxism “through the institutions” in Gramscian order has gained functioning control of this nation’s corporate media and entertainment complex; its educational establishment and universities, much of Mr. Wilson’s promised administrative state, a surprising number of transnational corporations, and, of course, the Democrat Party.
This radical cabal has launched a virtually unchallenged and vicious frontal attack against the moral legitimacy of the nation’s Founding, its institutions, and its faith. And they are ratcheting up the attack every day in every venue and forum possible. They are pretty open about it; they intend to take down individual liberty and replace it with their illusion of collectivist equality.
You only have to take them at their word.
While this is happening, the Republican Party seems paralyzed by a beguiling timidity and indifference that renders them virtually useless. While labeling themselves conservatives, a sizable chunk of Washington’s Republicans openly ridicules the very idea that the “transformation” of America that Woodrow Wilson, then Barack Obama, and now the Biden gang champion is anything more than political hyperbole or pushback against former President Trump and the “semi-fascist” Republicans. (So much for political comity, huh?)
Some of these “conservatives” also reject the very concept of going to political war to win the fight the Founders thought worth the sacrifice. These are pacifist conservatives; they won’t fight, not even for the “principles” they sanctimoniously preach about, and ironically, they won’t be able to practice when the nation is finally “transformed” into one nation among many.
The warriors are few. To test this statement, look no further than when Republicans had a majority. There were not enough of them to fit in a phone booth who stood up to fight for anything other than their big donor’s favorite boondoggles. Heck, this crowd wouldn’t even defund PBS when they held majorities! (Perhaps Caligula’s horse Incitatus would really be an improvement, one thinks in exasperation.)
If you are not prepared to defend the very principles that created the freest, most prosperous, and, yes, most “equal” society the world has ever known, then the vacuum that you create will be filled by barbarism and the rule of thugs.
Defending our Founding principles may very well involve actions that conservatives might not always like. However, when you read the personal letters and papers of the Founders, you realize that many of them were deeply troubled with both the compromises and the enormous personal sacrifice that was needed to create the new nation and then form the new Constitution. They wept and bled over these decisions.
Will we?
