The subhead of the New York Times piece with that headline appearing yesterday is “Why the left can’t win without a new Constitution.” I read it yesterday and planned to post about the thing, but, as has been happening too often lately, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness intervened. Now I see that other sources are opining on it.

As regular readers here can guess, my initial reaction was “What a waste of time!” Here we are treated to Osita Nwanevu (above), a radical black Leftist (aka. “nascent totalitarian”) pushing his book, “The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.” Such a book can only appeal to other radical (and deluded) leftists, and it is also a waste of time. The author believes that a new Constitution is mandatory to save what he calls “democracy.” Even if he were right, Nwanevu might as well advocate mass surgery to graft wings onto all human beings, or the replacement of English in the U.S. with Esperanto. The chances of his “reforms” coming to pass are exactly zero. Not 5%, not 1%, but zero, unless one believes that a violent civil war is in the cards. The Constitution isn’t a perfect document, but no one can claim it hasn’t served the U.S. (and the world) extraordinarily well. The Founders, wisely or luckily, made the process of changing it difficult and burdensome, making radical alterations unlikely to the vanishing point.

To its credit, and you know how I hate to write that about the New York Times, the paper did put one of its token conservative pundits, Ross Douthat, in charge of interviewing the author. Douthat reveals himself as a weenie, however, and never challenges Nwanevu as forcefully as the extremist’s nonsense deserves. Observe this section, for example:

Douthat: All right, let’s do an excursion back in time to the American founding, because one of your arguments is that America was not actually intended to be a democracy.

 

Nwanevu: Right.

 

Douthat: That in fact, we should understand our founding almost in terms of a kind of oligarchic coup.Talk a little bit about your view of the founding.

 

Nwanevu: So when you raise some of the objections that I’ve raised about the nature of our system, conservatives will often say: well, we’re a republic, not a democracy. I think liberals, by habit, say: No, no, no, that’s not true — the founders actually intended democracy, but they messed up in 50 million different ways.

 

I think the conservatives have the better side of the argument when you actually look at the historical record. People should understand that the Constitution is forged in a particular political and economic context.

To all of which the required response is “Ya think?” Everyone literate knows that while the Founders were committed to democratic principles (as articulated by the nation’s mission statement, the Declaration of Independence), they were sufficiently educated, wise and practical to know that pure democracies don’t work, and come to disastrous ends. Nwanevu “thinks” the argument that the nation was founded as a republic is the better one? It was founded as a republic. The Constitution was “forged in a particular political and economic context”? What historical document in world history wasn’t forged in a particular political and economic context?

The real value of the Times feature is this: Nwanevu shows vividly how hostile the current American Left is not only to the Constitution but to the democratic processes created by it, as well as pluralism. His attitudes explain why Democrats think it is acceptable to cheat in order to hold power; his theories reek with the “it isn’t what it is” deception that has become the operating system of the Axis of Unethical Conduct.

He wants to abolish the Senate so the the large, knee-jerk Democratic states can dominate national policy forever. Tough: the Founders respected and protected the pluralistic ideal of individual states with their own unique cultures having the power to avoid tyranny of the majority, and as Baretta would say, “That’s the name of that tune, baby.” He wants the Electoral College to be abolished for the same reason (and because it was why the Obama un-making of America was stopped in its tracks despite the Democrats’ efforts to rig the 2016 election). Packing the Supreme Court would eliminate the Founders’ prescient plan to ensure that the Constitution isn’t shredded every time the same party rules Congress and the White House.

Here is how Nwanevu characterizes the last election:

I think many voters went to the polls in November understanding the election as being a referendum on democracy…I think the people thought that they were being asked to judge, on one hand, a set of abstract ideals that their civics teacher might have told them was important in high school or grade school; on the other, the price of groceries and the cost of living. I think a lot of Americans looked at that choice and they said: well, hell, I’m going to go with my own economic well-being — the hope, which I think was a misguided hope, that Donald Trump’s going to improve conditions within the economy. And so the abstractions that Democrats ran on, the conception of democracy that they put forward, wasn’t compelling for a lot of different reasons. Early last year, Gallup did a poll where they found that more than 70 percent of Americans didn’t believe that democratic institutions were functioning properly. So when Democrats came out and said that our democracy needs to be protected and saved, I think a lot of Americans doubted whether they had a functional democracy to save to begin with. So they invested their hopes in Donald Trump, partially because they believed that he could be somebody who would unstick the institutions, tear them down, reformulate them in some kind of way. And so, I think that this election can be read both as an indictment of the particular way Democrats talked about democracy in their pitch to American voters, and also as a culmination of, I think, basic antidemocratic deficits within the Constitution that have empowered Donald Trump and brought him to the White House yet again.

Wow. You have to be blind, an idiot or a con artist to characterize the election that way. A party that had engaged in flagrant unconstitutional conduct (like putting a demented POTUS in office to be manipulated by unelected ideologues) and attempted to tear down long-standing democratic guard rails (like not criminalizing politics and seeking to use prosecution of political opponents as a weapon) has the audacity to argue that the party seeking to hold it accountable for these dangerous practices was the real threat to democracy.

Trump won in great part because he was—correctly—seen as a leader who would oppose such calculated attacks on core American values as institutionalized rejection of merit for group bias, law enforcement, and legal immigration. Sure, the fact that the Biden Administration’s domestic and economic policies were disastrous flops didn’t hurt Trump’s cause, but saying, as Nwanevu does, that Trump was elected because the public chose their own “economic well-being” over democracy disqualifies the writer as a trustworthy analyst of anything.

Of course the public felt that democratic institutions were failing. They watched Biden’s paid liar gaslight the public daily: “Nah, the President is sharp as a tack, and those videos showing him wandering around like a zombie are ‘deepfakes.’” They had seen the intelligence community lie about Hunter Biden’s laptop to ensure Biden’s election in 2020. They heard Biden’s head of Homeland Security say that the border was secure; they had seen a Vice-President elevated to a Presidential nominee without going through any vetting or voting at all, based entirely on her gender and skin shade.

Perhaps most significant of all, hey had witnessed the complete corruption of the institution of journalism, from the Founders’ ideal of being an independent watchdog on the government to being a Soviet-style government propaganda organ. The 2024 election was the validation of the Founders’ vision, not a threat to it. The election proved that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

As conservative pundit Jim Geraghty of National Review said in his reaction to the article, “It is helpful to everyone for the modern American left to come out and openly acknowledge what has been obvious, but denied, for a long time: their objective is to repeal and replace the existing U.S. Constitution.” I’d replace “objective” with “fantasy” or “delusion” in that sentence, but otherwise it accurately describes why Nwanevu’s theories and the Times’ promotion of them have some value after all. This is what the American Left has become, and attention should be paid.