Summer 2021—Competing Constitutional Frameworks: Upholding And Defending The Constitution Of 1787

My paternal grandmother passed away quite recently. She was diagnosed and dead from colon cancer all in a matter of just a few days. Her passing was very much a surprise to me, but I was blessed to have the opportunity of speaking with her on the phone just three days before she died. In this final conversation with my own grandmother, one of the last things she ever asked me was “Christopher, you REALLY think Trump was a better president than Biden?” Grandma seemed sincerely taken aback by my prompt and ready answer: “Grandma, I think President Donald Trump is the best president this country has ever had since Ronald Reagan.” Needless to say, this final moment between us felt disjointed and a little strained, but Grandma and I at least had the presence of mind to accept it as a positive that both of us could still be pleasant to one another despite our radically different viewpoints about the things going on in our country.

At the very end of her life, I could not understand my grandmother’s viewpoint. I still don’t understand it. It is worth mentioning, however, that this difference of opinion between us did not come as a surprise to me. I’ve known for many, many years that my grandmother and I stood on opposing sides of the political aisle. I’d grown accustomed to feeling baffled that someone as wonderful as my own grandmother could ever believe, as she clearly did, that former Vice President Joe Biden is somehow a better leader for our country than someone like Donald Trump. I’ve grown rather accustomed to feeling alienated from many people I know on the left, beloved friends and family though they may be. This is the new normal for me. I suspect it is the new normal for some of you as well.

I’ve written extensively of late about the ever-widening cultural and political divide in America, about the two different versions of America we are now seeing increasingly at war with one another. Whether we are recognizing it on a day-to-day basis, Americans are living out their lives within two very different Constitutional frameworks. Conservatives proactively seek to honor and uphold the spirit of the U.S. Constitution as it was written in 1787. This is not to say that conservatives seek to reinstate race-based slavery or segregation; rather, it is the conservative movement that simply wishes to uphold the Founding first steps taken by our country towards a more perfect union of justice and opportunity for all.

Contemporary American leftists (“progressives,” as they prefer to think of themselves), on the other hand, venerate the Constitution of 1964 and 1965, the years when civil rights laws first began ushering in our modern age of bureaucratic government and judicial activism that all serve to overpower normal democratic processes in the pursuit of the American left’s crusade for social justice. Ever since the 1960s, the Democratic Party has increasingly embraced this dangerous new Constitutional framework in which government exists not only to enforce fairness for all, but to rectify supposed societal transgressions against social justice, deal swiftly with perceived moral emergencies, and address systemic inequities real or imagined…and all without ever needing to go through the traditional democratic institutions and processes normally associated with impassioned public debates that end at the ballot box. Since the 1960s, the Democratic Party has been the vehicle with which the American left has pursued power within this altered Constitutional framework. I refer to this framework as dangerous because it has inherently pitted Americans of different races, sexes, creeds, backgrounds, and belief systems against one another. Indeed, the problem with employing the overwhelming power of government to deal with a never-ending parade of moral emergencies is that somewhere, somehow, someone ends up being labeled as a villain unworthy of being treated fairly, reasonably, or respectfully. True, that type of person was usually a hateful Southern racist or segregationist back in the 1960s; however, nowadays, that type of person could easily be someone who merely feels that gay marriage is a sin, that gender is not a fluid concept, that first graders shouldn’t be taught about drag queens and masturbation, or that the content of one’s character is far more significant to a person’s identity than the color of their skin.

On the left side of the political spectrum, Democrats are seeing their party swing in a more radical direction than perhaps ever before in that organization’s history. Democrats may be tempted to blame this leftward turn on the advent of Donald Trump as a political figure, but I think that is a false excuse. Many Democrats whom I know and love—including close family and friends who matter a great deal to me personally—are allowing their aversion of Donald Trump to warp their understandings of the present set of crises our country currently faces. And even allowing for the possibility that they are right and I am wrong, it has still gotten to a point at which I don’t even feel like I know them that well anymore, so great is the gulf between us.

Many Democrats, like my grandmother, cannot see beyond Trump’s “demagoguery, crudeness, and unprecedented incivility.” They cannot see because they refuse to see. They refuse to credit President Trump for his proactive dismantling of our cripplingly corrupt administrative state, his imperfect but admirably staunch federalist handling of the COVID-19 scare, his opposition to mobbing and the burning of neighborhoods, his refusal to endorse the illegal destruction of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass statues, his work in halting the disgusting indoctrination inherent to critical race theory trainings, and his never-ending insistence that Americans should live unashamed lives of intelligent patriotism. I’ll grant my deceased grandmother one valid point: Trump was no angel, it is true. However, when wholly corrupt opponents like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden stand as the alternative choices, voting for an angel is hardly necessary, and voting for someone who is less than an angel really doesn’t ultimately feel that bad.

Many of us live side-by-side with leftists who fervently believe things that we conservatives cannot accept: that American society is deeply racist and oppressive; that “progressive” rewrites of our history aren’t inflicting serious mental and emotional damages upon our young people and their senses of patriotism and self-worth; that a vast network of “white supremacist” radicals on the right wing of the political spectrum are conspiring to destroy—consciously or unconsciously—our country’s allegedly beneficial nanny-state apparatus; that Republican objections to Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, open borders, and perversions of gender and the family are only motivated by hatred and bigotry. If you take the time and energy to think seriously about these irreconcilable worldviews, it is my belief that you will come to understand what is at stake. I believe you will see, as I do, that what happens to us in the present rides heavily upon our understandings of America’s past. As a historian, I feel this deeply. As a conservative, I am not unwilling to admit and accept that I live in a country and a society which has very rarely lived up to its highest ideals, especially when it comes to the just treatment of all racial groups. But whereas we conservatives argue that recognizing our country’s flaws is at the heart of what makes America, our Founding Fathers, and our Constitution so great and worthy of celebration, leftists (and sadly, many liberals) proactively relish every chance they get to use America’s past mistakes to crucify the whole project of republican government as formulated by Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and the rest.

Christopher Caldwell, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, gave a speech in January of 2020 at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. In this speech, Caldwell used the following dichotomy to describe the danger we face as Americans who grow more and more alienated from one another:

“Let’s say you’re a progressive. In fact, let’s say you are a progressive gay man in a gay marriage, with two adopted children. The civil rights version of the country is everything to you. Your whole way of life depends on it. How can you back a party or a politician who even wavers on it? Quite likely, your whole moral idea of yourself depends on it, too. You may have marched in gay pride parades carrying signs reading ‘Stop the Hate,’ and you believe that people who opposed the campaign that made possible your way of life, your marriage, and your children, can only have done so for terrible reasons. You are on the side of the glorious marchers of Birmingham, and [right-wingers] are on the side of Bull Connor. To you, the other party is a party of bigots.

“But say you’re a conservative person who goes to church, and your seven-year-old son is being taught about ‘gender fluidity’ in first grade. There is no avenue for you to complain about this. You’ll be called a bigot at the very least. In fact, although you’re not a lawyer, you have a vague sense that you might get fired from your job, or fined, or that something else bad will happen. You also feel that this business has something to do with gay rights. ‘Sorry,’ you ask, ‘when did I vote for this?’ You begin to suspect that taking your voice away from you is the main goal of these rights movements. To you, the other party is a party of totalitarians.”

I think Mr. Caldwell’s dichotomy is an accurate one, and although I do not believe most of my Democratic associates, colleagues, friends, and family members are totalitarians, I do believe that totalitarianism is becoming the preferred tool of choice for more and more activists on the American left. Just because we conservatives consistently argue that for some, most, or even all of its history the United States of America has been the best country on the planet in which freedom-loving people could have hoped to live, leftists use this as an excuse to blame us for working diligently to bring their cultural, economic, political, and social agendas to a halt. Truth be told, we conservatives simply believe that the American Founding and the regime it established—the regime we are currently seeking to “conserve”—has a firmer grasp on the realities of human nature, virtue, and vice than any other social or political phenomenon of the last 500 years. The American Founding Fathers had something in common with modern American conservatives: they understood that a society usually starts to crumble and fall the moment the people living in that society start to doubt the goodness and justice of their society’s founding. Whereas we conservatives actively promote classical morality in our community organizations and educational institutions, we feel thwarted at every turn by leftists who reject traditional morality in favor of “woke” social justice, climate change alarmism, and a doctrine of self-loathing for our shared past.

I’d like to clear up the historical record by stating my emphatic belief that the Democratic Party has been seeking to fundamentally supplant our country’s moral Constitutional framework ever since the days of Andrew Jackson, when Democrats first created and perpetuated the “slavery as a positive good” doctrine; how disgustingly ironic it is that the same political party that once upheld race-based slavery, violent rebellion against the Constitution, and racial segregation enforced by terrorism is now the same party which accuses Republicans of exploiting black people, accuses conservatives of anti-Constitutional rebellion, and uses phrases like “black lives matter” to justify modern terrorism of their own. I emphatically believe that the Democratic Party today promotes ideologies and policies that are allegedly meant to save us all from the Founding evils of racism, sexism, and capitalism; in reality, these ideologies and policies are actually designed to fundamentally transform our country into something the Founding Fathers wouldn’t recognize. I, for one, do not think this is a good thing.

I stand opposed to leftism in all its forms because I have seen, as so many of us have, how it strips Americans of their faith in their own way of life. For leftists, who often prefer to think of themselves as “progressives,” the U.S. Constitution is a document unworthy of passing on to future generations essentially unchanged; instead, more “modern” ideas of “government by the experts” and more “sophisticated” principles for reorganizing society should be adopted. Progressives have been arguing for this ever since Democratic president Woodrow Wilson justified “war socialism” for pursuing victory in the First World War, indulged in scientific racism to openly discriminate against black Americans, cracked down on political expression he disagreed with or disapproved of, and described the value of education as a process through which young people should be taught to be “as unlike their fathers as possible.” Since Wilson, American progressives have become increasingly aggressive at trying to make all of us as unlike our Founding Fathers as humanly possible. Progressivism is not an attempt to improve or build upon the American Founding; as the years go by, it is becoming increasingly clear that it is instead an effort to supplant what the Founding Fathers left to us. Constitutionalism and progressivism are engaged in a death struggle with each other, and we are quickly moving towards a crisis point of no return. Will that crisis point be manifested as another disputed presidential election, an especially repugnant Supreme Court decision, a major military disaster, or an imagined looming catastrophe like COVID-19 or any of the global warming hoaxes? Will it come when we conservatives feel like we can no longer tolerate the stifling programs, policies, and premises of our opponents, who insist that the Constitution must “evolve” itself into oblivion, that the cradle-to-grave welfare state is morally unassailable and here to stay, and that the meaning of values and the identity of gender are all fluid and ever-changing? Will the conflict finally erupt into open and widespread violence once the electoral stalemate—essentially static from the late 1960s and up until the Obama years—is broken and conservatives as a group consciously come to the realization that we are now forced to live in a world where our rights and privileges exist solely according to the whims of the state?

Sadly, I have my own doubts that there is any more time or opportunity in our failing republic for organized and effective resistance to the leftist onslaught. Too many of our good people have been lulled away into inaction simply because leftism is so good at cloaking itself in the supposed moral rightness of democratic majorities (real or falsified) and the so-called “spirit of the age.” Frankly, I am completely disheartened by this contemporary spirit, which was summed up this way by Charles Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College: a dangerous array of progressive causes that include “packing (again) the Supreme Court, eroding the Senate filibuster, abolishing or effectively abolishing the Electoral College, statehood for the District of Columbia, an epidemic of emergency powers and executive orders at all levels of government, the revival of ‘socialism’ (never far from progressive ‘democracy’) as a moral, political, and economic possibility for America, the expungement of American history as systemically racist and oppressive, the contraction of religious liberty and especially of public expression of commonsense morality, unending affirmative action with negative implications for colorblind law, and a Woke, ‘antiracist’ revolution to proscribe Politically Incorrect words, opinions, and people, which revolution threatens to turn our republican government into a race-based oligarchy.” Still, we all desperately need to pay more attention to any adroit analyses of these disturbing leftist plans that we come across, and we all need to do more to stand up against these plans wherever and whenever they appear in our families and communities. Standing up for and defending the principles of the Constitution as they were enshrined in 1787 is the only course of action left to us which will begin to bridge the gap between Americans who believe in competing Constitutional frameworks which cannot exist together for much longer.

--Christopher Peterson, July 3^rd, 2021