OPINION: The Constitution stands in their way, so…

Published Sep 08, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  5 minute read

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump arrives for a campaign event at the Central Wisconsin Airport on September 07, 2024 in Mosinee, Wisconsin. Photo by Scott Olson /Getty Images

Ah, the Left. Ever ready to burn the foundations of America to the ground in pursuit of … progress.

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The latest example is a New York Times article by Jennifer Szalai titled, “The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” You can guess what her conclusion will be, but the subhead nevertheless provides an additional clue: “One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.”

Unsurprisingly, Szalai starts out by casting everything in terms of current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

He is not only a threat to the Constitution according to Szalai, but — more alarmingly — the Constitution is to blame for his political existence. “Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution,” she argues, “making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.”

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As proof, Szalai complains that Trump lost the “popular vote,” and that two of his three Supreme Court nominees were confirmed by a majority of the U.S. Senate that only represented 44% of the population. She points accusingly at the provisions of the Constitution containing the Electoral College (Article I), the composition of the U.S. Senate (Article II) and the method of selecting federal judges (Article III).

Szalai ignores that the United States is not, in fact, a democracy, but a constitutional republic. She repeats the trope that creation of the Electoral College was all about slavery — it was not — and she disregards that the Constitution was a treaty of sorts, between 13 independent states which agreed to cede some but by no means all of their sovereignty to a federal government of deliberately limited powers. It was intended by the founders that the larger populations of states like New York (which was not a slave state) and Virginia (which was) would not be able to simply outvote the citizens of smaller, less populated states like Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Just so, today, California and Illinois are not supposed to outvote Wyoming and Iowa. Our bicameral Congress was established with the composition of the House of Representatives based upon population, but states having equal representation in the Senate, for the same reason — giving less-populated states a meaningful voice in federal governance.

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Szalai sees the lack of raw majoritarianism as a flaw, and she quotes legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky for support. Chemerinsky writes, “It is important for Americans to see that these failures stem from the Constitution itself.” Szalai points out that Chemerinsky is not alone. “The argument that what ails the country’s politics isn’t simply the president, or Congress, or the Supreme Court, but the founding document that presides over all three, has been gaining traction,” she writes, “especially among liberals.”

But what Szalai praises as “mass democratic politics,” others would call mob rule.

This is how it starts: “Fringe” pieces are written and viewed as outliers. Then come the academics, whose role it is to give outrageous ideas “scholarly” credibility (even though a shocking amount of what gets published in the humanities and social sciences is unmitigated garbage, as scholars Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay revealed to academia’s great embarrassment in 2018).

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Then comes the normalization, via books and speaking engagements, repetition by paid mouthpieces in the press (remember the “extremely dangerous to our democracy” videos?) and bots on social media, followed by corporate compulsion through human resources policies.

Who thinks the Constitution is “dangerous”? Those whose power it limits. The First Amendment — guaranteeing freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of peaceable assembly and the right to petition the government — is a threat to them. One need only observe the attacks on free speech in France, Great Britain and Brazil to see what would — and will — happen in the U.S. if our Constitution is gutted.

The Fourth Amendment is a threat to those who would seize whatever property you own. The Fifth and 14th Amendments are threats to those who would toss political opponents in prison without due process. And the Second Amendment is the penultimate threat — an armed citizenry that can fight back against government oppression.

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Politicians and activists who agree with Szalai resent the Constitution and argue that its limits on their power are unjust because their aims are so benevolent. They only want to discriminate against you to remedy past discrimination. They only want to put pornography in schools. They only want to create gender and sexual confusion in your children without your knowledge or over your objection and to take your children away if you push back. They only want to force doctors to perform abortions and euthanasia against their will. They only want to ban extraction of natural gas, oil and coal, the use of air conditioners, stoves, refrigerators, automobiles and air travel, and nitrogen-based fertilizers. They only want to force you to take experimental injections. They only want to spray you with chemicals from the air. They only want to eliminate meat and dairy and force you to eat lab-grown “protein” and insects. They only want to release genetically modified mosquitoes into the ecosystem. They only want to tax you beyond your ability to support yourself and your family. They only want to regulate entire industries out of existence and collapse the entire economy.

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But it’s all for your own good.  For racial reparations. For sexual freedom. For reproductive justice. For public health. For dignity in dying. For civil rights. For the children. For the animals. For developing nations. For global citizens. For the climate. For the planet. For the dictatorship of the proletariat and the elimination of the bourgeoisie. For the emperor!

Here’s the thing: The Constitution does not just protect against human malevolence, of which there is plenty. It also protects against human stupidity, of which there is much more.

Relatively few oppressive regimes have existed for the sole purpose of gratifying a dictator’s arbitrary desire to inflict mass suffering. But hundreds of millions of people have suffered, starved and died because of the monstrous stupidity of people who simply had too much control.

Our Constitution is not dangerous. But the people who are threatened by it — all of them: politicians, academics, journalists, activists — are.

Laura Hollis is an attorney and professor where she teaches courses in business law and entrepreneurship.

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