We Need a New Republic

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it... We might as well require a man to wear the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

--Jefferson

The reverence of Americans for their written constitution is so profound that they do not profane it with their eyes, relying instead upon a corps of specially trained and purified functionaries to read it and perform such rituals and propitiate such forces as the text may require. Americans assure one another that this written but largely unread constitution is "the greatest" and the cause of such happiness as the Republic affords.

Just how "great" is it? Well, the principal constitutional problem used to be slavery. The constitution, far from facilitating aolution, dissolved in civil war. Equally sublime results have been attained under the constitution of Yugoslavia. For the most part, our constitutional "successes" have been instances when the document was ignored with winking comments about its "flexibility." This makes the myth of the "written constitution" somewhat ludicrous.

The Bill of Rights, of course, was not part of the document drafted in Philadelphia but a set of amendments put forward by opponents of that document, which was ratified by awfully small margins even though it was supported by almost everybody who mattered.

From the eighteenth century through the nineteenth and well into the twentieth, American radicals put forward plans for radical change-- change at the root, the fundamental, which is to say, the constitutional level. But modern "progressives" have accepted the fundamental structures as given, and have sought change only at secondary, superficial levels.

Now an enthusiastic Right has entered constitutional politics in force, which an eye not so much to institutional change-- which is hardly necessary for the privileged classes-- but to trivializing the constitution and thereby eliminating the vestiges of constitutional culture. The Right has become adept at launching amendment drives for prayer and flag, church and family, hokum and drivel. The 1996 Republican Party platform calls for seven constitutional amendments.

Due to efforts begun long ago by farsighted Rightists, the approval of one or two more legislatures would force the calling of a national constitutional convention. While the ideologies driving the movement are those of special interests, the desire for real change is broad and urgent. A poll in Mississippi revealed that three quarters of the people there favor a national convention-- a level of fundamental dissatisfaction not reached even in 1861.

Like it or not, the constitution is changing and the pace of change is likely to accelerate. In the absence of a movement toward something better, we shall be force-marched by media propagandists and yahoo demagogues toward something worse. If a "civilized society" does not remake the constitution in its image, the new barbarism will surely imprint its own likeness upon it.

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