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.
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