The Constitution under siege

We are seeing an ominous uptick in criticisms of the utility, and, by extension, of the continuing validity of the U.S. constitution, one of the most recent being Time magazine’s disingenuous and agenda-driven attack. One of CNN’s talking heads, Fareed Zakaria, has even proposed rewriting the thing from scratch, employing Facebook and Twitter to get input from the public (Would that include the growing portion of the public that consists of illegal aliens? Just askin’.)

Ok, fine. Let’s rewrite it. But here are a few things to keep in mind.

With respect to maintaining the present federal union of fifty states under the umbrella of a centralized government, all bets are off. The original constitution was adopted voluntarily by representatives of all the then-existing states at a constitutional convention, and subsequently ratified by all of the states. Any state that decides not to ratify the proposed new and improved constitution becomes a sovereign nation, or is free to combine with other like-minded states in an alternative union. Want to keep your union-dominated kleptocracies, California and Illinois? Great. Like ObamaCare, Massachusetts? Swell. But include Texas and Virginia out.

But let’s assume, for a moment, that all of the state governments have agreed beforehand to be bound by the final result of the great Facebook and Twitter Constitutionalpalooza (presumably having dismissed any fears of insurrection and even civil war). What happens if the majority of participants decide that the new constitution should include things that would bruise progressive sensibilities? Maybe the majority opines that freedom of speech is all well and good, but flag-burning is beyond the pale. And while freedom of religion is nice in theory, Islam, say, is held to be so flagrantly inconsistent with the ideals of a modern state that its practice should be banned. Or – horrors! – conservatives should be equally represented in the professoriate at all state-supported schools. Illegal aliens? Mass deportations to begin the first Monday in October. Just how, exactly, do you get those troublesome worms back into the can?

Oh, but wait. You constitutional revisionists aren’t really talking about a plebiscite, are you? What you really intend is for the process to be “guided” by “experts” who will vet the vox populi, weeding out all of the embarrassing anti-progressive sentiments, leaving us with a government of forward-looking technocrats whose sole benchmark will be eliminating “red tape” (currently known by the soon-to-be archaic words, “individual liberty”) in order to facilitate the imposition of the provider state on a grand scale, unhampered by anything more restrictive and rigorous than the situational philosophizing of ideologically-compliant politicians, bureaucrats and judges.

Make no mistake. The revisionists object not only to the framework for self-government, but to the very idea of self-government. In short, what they want is an all-powerful central authority that can do whatever it wants – as long as what it wants to do is consistent with leftist ideology. And how to preclude deviations from that ideology? There’s really only one way.

Anybody else smell despotism?

Update: Linked by paisan Bob Belvedere.