This is a belated salute to an excellent post by the 2014 Ethics Alarms Blogger of the Year, Mark Draughn. I saw the same Salon post he so neatly and ethically eviscerated, and was too busy and too nauseated to flag it here as the piece of progressive fascism that it is. Fortunately. Mark did his duty, and well.
Andrew Burstein is a leftist professors of history at Louisiana State University, and gave Salon a slovenly-written and thought-out essay about what a new U.S. Constitution should look like. He doesn’t approach the topic seriously, but rather engages, as Mark perceptively puts it, in a long ““If I ruled the world” screed that asserts the need for a U.S. Constitution that includes policy micromanagement provisions like teaching foreign languages in first or second grade, eliminating SAT scores, adding counselors and school psychologists to school systems, and closing tax loopholes. His objective is to make progressive policies unalterable by edict. Either Burstein doesn’t know what a Constitution is supposed to do, or he doesn’t care: do NOT send your child to LSU.
Mark properly finds the essay’s most alarming qualities in its hostility to free speech and its endorsement of slavery, which is what Burstein’s call for a mandatory youth service program amounts to. Of course, it would be the government who would tell your child what kind of service was best for her and society. All the better to indoctrinate good little Leftists and ensure correct-thinking politicians win elections ad infinitum.
Burstein’s willingness to gut the First Amendment is illustrated with arguments like this:
And is there some way to free the airwaves from the pestilential noise generated by those ideologues who shout ignorantly about getting government off their backs?
Mark notes that “there’s more than just a tinge of fascism in all this.”
There sure is. Read his whole post, and while you are at it, wonder how many anti-free speech, anti-free will zealots are warping with our children’s minds in high school and college. Then consider who they would want you to vote for in the upcoming election, and vote for someone, anyone else.
Ethics Alarms 
I wish these people would stop calling themselves progressives, T.R. would not approve. And neither do I.
It depends which day you caught TR on.
And that last FDR inaugural address the professor is so enamored of—guaranteed jobs, food, clothing, housing, health care—it was pie in the sky pandering by FDR (who would have been happy to be elected dictator), but that’s the kind of “progressivism” a lot of the current breed supports. And what do we call the only forms of government that could accomplish this? That’s what progressives are now, unfortunately. They just don’t have the honesty to admit it.
Two years ago, my teenage son voted in his first election. But he was still a senior in high school. There was a hot;y-contested race for state school superintendent that ended up in an upset when the incumbent was defeated.
I knew that would happen ahead of time. The reason? A couple of weeks before the election, during a conversation about the same, my son revealed how “all the teachers hate [the current superintendent]”.
My first question was, “How would a student know what a teacher or teachers feel about their boss?”. Once I realized the obvious answer…political indoctrination… my second question was, “How much class time is being taken up by these types of conversations?”. (It turned out quite a bit as my son also knew all about his French teacher’s divorce, how much money she made and learned very little French in the meantime).
With students forced to attend school, those of voting age…at least in my opinion…are esentially a captive audience to teachers who wish to give marching orders to vote for a particular candidate. College students can at least debate the issue or walk out of class…a luxury high school students really don’t have…though most probably wouldn’t anyway.
Now, how much of those election results can be attributed to high school seniors and their parents? Unknown. Maybe none. But I shouldn’t have to consider that even one student was influenced that way.
I’d wager, though, that Burstein would find nothing wrong with that.
I had to have a conversation after my son came home and said they we can’t have an official language, because that would be discriminatory. I asked where this came from. He said his teachers told him. There was an official language bill coming up. All his teachers took time out of class to tell the students that you can’t have an official language in a country. Anyone who suggests it is racist.
I asked my son, “What if your teacher came in tomorrow and insisted on teaching in Chinese?. What if one of the other teachers would only teach in German?” He said, “They can’t do that, you are only allowed to speak in Spanish”.
Thanks for the kind words, Jack.
I didn’t say much about it in my post, because it would have seemed like petty sniping, but one of the things that disturbed me about Burstein’s writing was that for guy who holds a chaired professorship, he’s really bad at explanatory writing. He doesn’t seem to understand the basic structure of even an informal argument, such as that the conclusion is supposed to be supported by all that stuff you put in the middle.
Burstein followed up this piece with a second one a few days later, and I had been planning to respond to it as well, but when I read it, I came away feeling it was even more scattered than the first one. The conclusion had the promised list of changes to the Constitution, but they were vague and disconnected from the his earlier arguments. Some of them fixed problems he had never mentioned before, but he left other problems dangling without further mention.
It did make rebutting his piece easier than it might have been, I suppose. I wonder if he wasn’t just slumming—that’s the least damning explanation I felt the essay showed massive disrespect for the Salon reader and the web…or, in the alternative, he really isn’t very bright. Proposing to do better than Madison, Mason et al. requires both hubris and knowledge, broad and deep. For a supposed academic to take on such a challenge and do it so carelessly, unpersuasively and lamely is an indictment of him, his university and Salon.
Actually, his scattered writing made it harder to respond to, and the second part defeated me completely. He was all over the place.
One can only hope that the poor schmuck/post-grad ‘research assistant’, who most likely wrote the thing, isn’t treated too badly during his thesis defense presentation because of the backlash against ‘Burstein’s article’.
So, a Constitution, written by an educator, that contains almost nothing but educational constraints/powers. Booooooooring.
I guarantee if a businessman wrote a Constitution, containing nothing but business constraints and powers, the Left would immediately dismiss it as Fascist drivel. Too bad they’d be blinded by just how parallel the two pieces would be in creating a Constitution precisely for what a *good* constitution is not used for.