The Blog

2021-

2021-12-23 d
CRISIS IV

The Single Most Important Thing We Can Do To Save the Constitution

If James Madison rose from his grave today, he’d be astonished. Not that a demented, corrupt scoundrel was now serving in the same office he once held—as astonishing as that is. Nor that the federal government had metastasized into a liberty devouring leviathan that towers over his great state of Virginia. What would surprise him is that, after nearly 250 years, his Constitution, no matter how tattered and torn, has endured.

Our classrooms have abandoned an appreciation for the profound genius of the Founders and the institutional gifts they gave us. Instead, classrooms breed contempt for our history. The Founders’ priceless legacy is the notion that government is established to protect men’s liberty and, because men are no angels, that government must be limited, accountable, and divided.

Even today, the most elementary constitutional lesson is probably still taught: the legislative branch makes the laws, the executive branch enforces the laws, and the judicial branch adjudicates the laws—but today that’s a lie. Unlike the obvious panoply of deceit cascading from every corner of the government and complicit news media, this lie, although more toxic to our Constitution and more dangerous to our freedoms, goes largely unrecognized.

We have an all-encompassing de facto fourth branch of government—the administrative state, the magnum opus of the progressive movement. The movement’s name itself is diabolical. Who isn’t for progress? Faster, bigger, better—it’s the zeitgeist of America. But the Progressives wanted a different type of progress: to progress beyond the Constitution.

Teddy Roosevelt was our first Progressive president but his real damage was running for a third term under the Bull Moose party, thereby splitting the Republican ticket and ushering in Woodrow Wilson, a true progressive. He was an intellectual blinded by his good intentions and bred with a malevolent contempt for a Constitution that obstructed his ambitions.

Wilson, our only president with a Ph.D. (indisputable proof it should be disqualifying), was corrupted at John Hopkins University by a faculty heavily influenced in the Hegelian tradition (belief in an all-encompassing organic state as opposed to American individualism). Wilson’s 294-page thesis was an all-out assault on our Constitution: “The period of constitution-making is passed now. We have reached a new territory in which we need new guides, the vast territory of administration.” Wilson viewed the Founders’ separation of powers as an “unpleasant wearing friction” depriving expert administrators of the “means of making its authority complete and convenient.”

To Wilson, the Constitution was an anachronistic relic written in the age of fighting kings and wholly incompatible with the modern day. Appealing to “the science” of the day, he claimed “The government is not a machine, but a living thing. It is accountable to Darwin, not Newton. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.” They must evolve.

Article V of the Constitution describes precisely how it might evolve but, impatient for change, Wilson had a better idea: “All that progressives ask or desire is permission to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.” So modest, so scientific.

But what Wilson wanted was to radically restructure it: “If it could not stretch itself to the measure of the times, it must be thrown off and left behind.” Wilson wanted the government to be run by an “administration of executive agents...virtually supreme in all things.” At his inauguration, it is a wonder the Good Book itself didn’t leap from his hand as he swore to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.”

Despite Wilson’s scholarly rhetoric, he was only mildly successful in his diabolical assault on liberty. As history has repeatedly shown—from the Reichstag fire to 9/11 to COVID—it takes a crisis for men to willingly surrender their freedom. For the Progressives, that crisis was the Great Depression. (read more)

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