I’ve mentioned before that the American left hates the US Constitution. Sure, they will pay lip service to it because it plays well with the public. And they are happy to use it as a cudgel when it serves their goals. But fundamentally, they (rightly) see the Constitution as an impediment to implementing their big government agenda.
The left has been working overtime in recent years to undermine the Constitution. They have tried to paint it as a relic written by racist old white men to perpetuate white supremacy, racism, and oppression. They have attacked it’s structure as undemocratic (which it actually is, by design, and that is a good thing.) And they have challenged long held basic rights enshrined in the Constitution including freedom of speech, religious freedom, and of course the right to keep and bear arms. Fossilized paste-eating dimwit and alleged president Joe Biden recently reminded Americans that (to the left, at least) none of their Constitutional rights are absolute. Big Government will have to make exceptions when your pesky freedoms interfere with their vision of the public good.
So this recent Orwellian diatribe by an MSNBC hack comes as no surprise:
To be fair, he is (kind of) right. Yes, the Founders were “obsessed” with protecting individual liberty. Of course, their obsession was driven by their own experience with the English crown and a sober examination of all of human history. In almost all societies, the individual has been secondary to some other public entity deemed more important. Whether it was a King, a Dictator, a Church, a Party, or some nebulous “public good” as defined by a Politburo.
The revolutionary innovation the Founder’s made was putting the autonomy of the individual above all else. Liberty was, and largely still is, a unique ideal to base a system of government on. Yet it is an inevitable conclusion to reach when you start from the premise that “all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
To protect individual liberty, the Founders created a government with very limited and precisely defined powers. Those powers are explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. But that wasn’t good enough. To wield this power, the Founders required the widespread consent of the governed. Not only a majority of citizens, but a majority of geographical regions have to be on board. The Founders feared a tyranny of the democratic majority nearly as much as they feared the tyranny of a king or despot. So they created the Senate and Electoral College to ensure the individual States had a loud voice, regardless of population.
A democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner
-unknown
But in their obsession, even that amount of protection for individual liberty still wasn’t good enough. So we got the Bill of Rights. Ten amendments to the Constitution that explicitly put certain things totally out of government control. And regardless of what a mental midget like Joe Biden says, they are absolute. Not even a 99% majority can strip them from you. Freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and especially the right to bear arms, are completely out of bounds. According to the Constitution, they are fundamental God-given rights that every human being enjoys.
I expect the left’s assault on the Constitution to only increase going forward. It’s the one societal boundary they haven’t been able to smash yet. And the three Trump-appointed Justices mean the Supreme Court isn’t likely to reinterpret it’s plain meaning into Orwellian nonsense any time soon. With Court packing off the table, their only other option is to delegitimize it. The bottom line is the left doesn’t really believe individuals are capable of governing themselves. They believe some amount of authoritarian rule is necessary. There are some problems that, in their minds, are just to big or complex to address by freely cooperating individuals. In short, the know better, so just shut up and obey.
So, yes, the Founders were absolutely obsessed with individual liberty. They created a document so focused on liberty, that it has survived 230 years of attempts to subvert it, largely unscathed. And we should thank God, they did. Because individual liberty is pragmatically sound, morally superior, and the very heart of American exceptionalism.