It’s The Inconvenient Document to statists, our Constitution. Some, like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, bluntly say it shouldn’t be considered a model for governance because, as she put it, it’s “a rather old constitution” (of course, she’s a rather old judge!). This is no surprise coming from people who believe there are no truths, eternal by definition, as it follows from this that there can be no enduring governing principles.
The reality is that the Left hates and fears the Constitution, writes journalist Matt Walsh, in a beautifully written American Greatness piece. Walsh begins by pointing out leftists’ only real standard, the double standard, writing, “To rational people, their collection of tics, neuroses, and phobias may seem at first to lack a certain consistency, other than a tendency to go from zero to obscenities on Twitter in no time flat. They can easily be against gay marriage (Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, et al.) before they were for it; against illegal immigration (Bill Clinton) before they were for it; and for the Russians (the entire Democratic Party) before they were against them.”
Of course, this helps explain why the Left insists the Constitution is a “living document”: Only such a document could allow for the legislation of ever-morphing preferences masquerading as principles.
Walsh then focuses on two recent leftist anti-constitutional spasms: the re-energized anti-Second Amendment movement and the hissing about the citizenship question on the 2020 census. Regarding the former he writes, “The Left — which is by turns both malevolent and cowardly, and therefore both tantalized by and fearful of firearms — has never made its hostility toward the Second Amendment a secret, but for decades it was able to keep it under wraps.”
Mostly, that is. Because the Constitution exists and still carries weight among flyover-country rubes, the Left often must appeal to it in the same way a Christophobic, closet anti-theist may appeal to the Bible to sway the God-fearing masses. The Left uses the Constitution as a philanderer does a woman. A man who loves a woman recognizes and respects what she is; a philanderer uses her for momentary gain.
The gain here is political victory in the now. Thus has the Left claimed, and conned many into believing, that the Constitution grants a “right” to faux (“same-sex”) marriage, prenatal infanticide, and to peddle porn but no right to religious exercise in your own business or to the private ownership of firearms, and no power to control what type of immigrants enter our country.
But the mask comes down during unguarded moments. Consider that an undercover sting operation caught Vassar College officials shredding the Constitution (video below).
Then there are the officials at North Carolina State, who banned the Constitution from dormitories (video below).
And the mask came down, a little more, when retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens recently proposed repealing the Second Amendment. We ought to thank him, actually, for being honest and doing things the right way: When you consider the Constitution lacking, you don’t misrepresent it and claim it “lives.” You propose a change via the amendment process and start an honest debate (in Steven’s suggestion’s case, it would be a short one).
As for the census citizenship question, leftists claim it’s “unconstitutional.” Never mind that it was first asked in 1820, when most of the Constitution’s framers were still alive, and they didn’t object (but, hey, what did they know about the Constitution?). Why, Walsh points out that Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder, living in an upside-down world, actually said that the question is “a direct attack on our representative democracy.”
What Holder really means is that it’s a direct attack on ill-acquired Democrat power. This brings us to the real reason the Left hates the Constitution and constitutionalism: The Constitution is a conservative document.
This doesn’t mean what most think, because conservatism isn’t what most suppose. Note that the terms “right” and “left,” as they relate to politics, originated with the French Revolution. Back then, a rightist was a monarchist and a leftist a republican (small r), referring to someone aiming to create a republic. Since then, what has happened with the terms’ definitions?
I wrote about this last year:
Noting that “right” and “left” correspond with “conservative” and “liberal,” also consider that while 1950s American conservatives were staunchly anti-communist, a conservative in the Soviet Union was a communist. And today, European “conservatives” are far more “liberal” than ours.
The explanation is that the only consistent definitions of “conservative” and “liberal” are, respectively, a “desire to maintain the status quo” and a “desire to change it”; thus, as the status quo varies from time to time and place to place, so do the actual beliefs represented by the two political terms.
Thus, more than ideologies, liberalism and conservatism are processes — respectively, that of continually trying to effect change and that of continually, as late author Bill Buckley put it, standing “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop.’”
This is why the Constitution is a “conservative” document: By providing limits and, in particular, by shackling government, it “stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop.’” This is intolerable to the go-go, leap-before-you-look, constant-change crew.
And in their more honest moments — virtually always on hidden camera — leftists admit as much. For example, Carol Lasser, professor of history and Oberlin’s director of gender, sexuality & feminist studies, complained to an undercover reporter in 2015, “The Constitution is an oppressive document. It makes change slow; it intends to make change slow.”
Yes, it does, and this is wise. For there’s a name for beings prone to rapid, undisciplined, continual change: children. Any civilization that worships change before Truth is a childish one — but one that, ironically, cannot look forward to a long life.
