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The Constitution: Restore or Replace?
By Max Borders
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It’s not my job to say whether the Constitution should remain and be restored after the fall. My goal is to consider various possibilities for flourishing in light of unavoidable change.
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Deliberate, therefore, on this new national government with coolness; analyze it with criticism; and reflect on it with candor: if you find that the influence of a powerful few, or the exercise of a standing army, will always be directed and exerted for your welfare alone, and not to the aggrandizement of themselves, and that it will secure to you and your posterity happiness at home, and national dignity and respect from abroad, adopt it; if it will not, reject it with indignation-better to be where you are for the present, than insecure forever afterwards.
—Cato I, Anti-Federalist
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In the throes of collapse, people will want to turn to something familiar. Though mortals designed the U.S. Constitution, the document is imbued with a sense of the eternal. Some argue it’s outdated. Others argue there is much to be found in the penumbra and that what’s there can save the republic. It’s not my job to say whether the Constitution should remain and be restored after the fall. My job is to consider the best possibilities for flourishing in light of unavoidable change, which might or might not include the Constitution.
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I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of […] elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. "High modernism" seems an appropriate term for this aspiration. As a faith, it was shared by many across a wide spectrum of political ideologies. Its main carriers and exponents were the avant-garde among engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists, and visionaries.
—James C. Scott
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High Minds—those who embrace what political scientist James C. Scott calls high modernism—have attacked it. We don’t need protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, they said from the right after 9/11. To keep us safe. We don’t need guns and militias anymore, they said from the left after the latest mass shooting. To keep us safe. In what remained, the Constitution became a document of political opportunism used to block one’s opposition.
Otherwise, the political class sought variously to circumvent or avoid it.
Packed courts and activist judges twisted the original meaning out of all proportions. The political class ignored whole amendments and continues to do so. Legislators raced to pass bills that would cause the Framers to scoff, tut, and turn in their graves. Who cares what a bunch of old powdered wigs thought? We have to evolve with the times, they said. Emergency after emergency awakened the urge to control, even though yesterday’s intervention beget today’s emergency, begetting tomorrow’s intervention.
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Read the rest of this article and others like it on our website.
Max Borders is a senior advisor to The Advocates. He also writes at Underthrow.
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