Don't know if this has been discussed but here's a GREAT article:
How Can You Love the Constitution and Hate the Result? - Steve Klingaman - Open Salon
How Can You Love the Constitution and Hate the Result?
It is a simple question. As posed by Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of
The New Republic in an
OpEd feature in the December 27 Sunday
New York Times, the question stands as the central mystery of 2009’s political gestalt. It is a simple fact that after January the actions of the newbie Obama administration were far less in the news than the reaction against it. This is not to say the actions of the Obama administration were insufficiently newsworthy, or did not attract any coverage, only that the raw heat of anger captured the imagination of the most put-upon self-entitled nation on earth.
The question stands, stark and unresolved. How could so many wrap themselves, not just in the flag, that old stand-by, but also in the pages of the enabling document behind the republic, yet, in Wieseltier's words,
“hate the order it created.”
No matter where I turned in my research this year, on the topic of the financial stimulus plan, guns, or health care, I encountered legions of constitutional scholars, wielding legal jargon like jailhouse lawyers. You would think the Federalist Papers was number one on Amazon. Nowhere was this trend more noticeable than in the online stylings of the gun rights community. You would think the NRA was holding weekend constitutional law workshops attended by every gun owner in Pennsylvania.
The standard line they take is that disenfranchised patriots have been upended by a perversion of the political system that resulted in the somehow illegitimate Obama presidency and Democratic Congress. These patriots share one characteristic that transcends the political, religious, and sectarian disputes behind their united front: they all love the Constitution. They love the Constitution with the fervent prayerfulness of true believers. They love the Constitution only slightly less than the Bible, but see a definite sense of shared values between the two, despite the separation of church and state.
But they hate the result.
They hate the awkward messiness of a system that encapsulates mini-revolutions of a partisan pendulum swing that follows the natural action-reaction chain of national resolve, fickle or profound. How is it that, as in 2000, you can use a system to win an electoral nonresult that is simply handed off to a partisan Supreme Court for a final decision to justify eight years of two bad wars, one dubious and the other dishonorable in the extreme—and then, after the system hands you a defeat on the merits, take to the streets with such vitriol directed against the system itself? If it was a government takeover, it was simply that of angry voters, fed up with bad war, squandered resources, and an economic meltdown caused by
laissez faire.
The Electronic Mob Logs On
Wieseltier makes another observation of merit. He cites the platform of the web, our digital town hall, as the perfect instrument of the electronic mob, “the perfect technology of polarization.” In the hands of hundreds of thousands of anonymous commentators, it has become a detriment to any possible détente between the right and left. Has the electronic mob become a threat to democracy? Or just the
quality of democracy?
I know the history of our electoral democracy incorporates meanness, lies, dirty tricks, and ugliness of every description. Still, I don’t think our system was ever enabled for the kind of vapid anonymity allowed by our avatars of destruction. Once you might have published a harsh letter to the editor under Name Withheld by Request, but the editor knew your name, and served as the filter through which your opinions had to pass to reach the print-based marketplace of ideas. You could, I suppose, photocopy hate speech tracts and attach them to doorknobs, but someone might see you and inquire as to what you were up to. But if you want to write like James von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum shooter, even under your own name, now you can do so hiding in plain site on the web.
No, what we have now is something utterly different. We have a mechanism to unleash a disinhibited fury on any unsuspecting reader who scrolls below the fold at almost any news or blog site in the world.
And that hatred has jumped the fold in this political season, from cyberspace to the greener pastures of reality programming, like some GMO nightmare brought to you by Fox. The left, thankfully, though perhaps to its chagrin, has never produced anything close to the caliber of ranting found in Rush, or Glenn, or Bill, or even Sarah. And that isn’t to say that the right has a monopoly on hate. It simply has a monopoly on the persona of hate.
Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, up until the 2008 election, serious people on the left utterly despised the efforts of their government. It would be silly to argue otherwise. Was the nature of the rhetoric substantially different from the tea party rhetoric, the Fox rhetoric, and the gun rhetoric of 2009? I would argue that it was. In the escalation of 2009, we find the subtext of menace. We hear talk of a coup d’état commissioned by a man who is masqueraded as the joker and pals around with terrorists. His legitimacy is questioned beyond the questioning of those who were devastated by Al Gore’s crisis-averting concession. His fundamental legitimacy is questioned by the so-called birthers on fake constitutional grounds—and this is reported as news on Neilson-leading cable news shows.
Hanging around on the open carry gun forums researching two posts for Open Salon, I was shocked by what I found there. I found, among other things, an openness to armed insurrection. The fantasy was largely seen by this audience as an inherent benefit of the Second Amendment—an armed citizenry to keep the federal government at bay. Of course this is not the purpose of the Second Amendment and never was. The purpose of a well-regulated militia was to defend the citizens and the government that represented them—not the citizens
from the government that represented them.
Following the town hall meetings, and the cable dudes who fanned the flames of the electronic mob, I began to hear faint overtones of solidarity with the
Molon Labe (“until the last man”) nuts. Armed and dangerous, going rogue,
Molon Labe—and loving the Constitution? I don’t buy it.
Beyond the rhetoric of keep your government hands off my Medicare, we have a nation of Constitution lovers. But many hate the result. The impulse to use a Constitution to keep one party, the conservative party, in power in perpetuity—what is that? A Christian Republican order, and yet one mandated by the Constitution? I would argue that this impulse, one that I considered recently in a piece on paleoconservatism, is essentially Christian Nationalism. You can love the Constitution and Christian Nationalism at the same time, but it would not be the
actual Constitution.
The actual Constitution leaves room for secularity, for individual
and states’ rights. What the Constitution favors is checks and balances. You cannot govern from the right in perpetuity and claim that anything but is anathema to democracy. That is, you cannot claim that and still profess to love the Constitution. The Constitution says that the people shall, in representative format, govern, through a series of intermediary structures that seek to balance governance toward the center.
That is why I cannot fault the Senate too bitterly over their retrograde stance on health care reform. It takes 60 votes to push anything through. And it takes 60 votes to undo that legislative change. This balancing mechanism prevents even the most outlandish Republican victory in 2010 from undoing what the Senate did last week. I would not say I love the Constitution and hate the Senate. It was behaving in accordance with its structural configuration. I know the 60-vote rule is not written in stone. But it does serve a purpose. Can you imagine the damage to basic liberties, such as habeas corpus, that could have been wrought by post-9/11 Senate if 50 votes were all it took?
The electronic mob howls that it loves the Constitution and hates the result. You cannot do both simultaneously. The Constitution emphatically allows the current Democratic majority to govern as it sees fit, subject to actual Constitutional limitations, just as the Democrats governed decisively after Lyndon Johnson’s landslide win in 1964. If you hate the result of actual democracy, flawed as it is, you cannot love the Constitution. You can love the rhetoric of the electronic mob, you can love the ethos of individual defiance, you can love Jesus Christ as your personal savior, you can love your gun, you can love your particular notion of this country as the best on earth, but, I would argue, not the actual Constitution—not if you hate the result.
