On Friday, The New York Times published its latest op-ed calling for the end of the Constitution of the United States. The authors, Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, teach law at Harvard and Yale respectively. They argue that the Left’s progress has been stymied by constitutionalism itself. “The idea of constitutionalism,” they correctly write, “is that there needs to be some higher law that is more difficult to change than the rest of the legal order. Having a constitution is about setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass day to day.” This, of course, orients the process of law toward the past: there are certain lines that simply cannot be crossed. And, as Doerfler and Moyn point out, “constitutionalism of any sort demands extraordinary consensus for meaningful progress.”
And herein lies the problem for Doerfler and Moyn: constitutions “misdirect the present into a dispute over what people agreed on once upon a time, not on what the present and future demand for and from those who live now.” The solution, they say, lies in dispensing with the Constitution entirely; the proper solution to the Constitution is in “direct arguments about what fairness or justice demands.” After all, they admit, “It’s difficult to find a constitutional basis for abortion or labor unions in a document written by largely affluent men more than two centuries ago. It would be far better if liberal legislators could simply make a case for abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having to bother with the Constitution.”
How can the Constitution be jettisoned? The authors suggest packing the Union with more states; “reorganizing our legislature in ways that are more fairly representative of where people actually live and vote”; turning the Senate into a legislative vestigial organ, without any actual power.
At least they’re saying the quiet part out loud.
The truth is that the Constitution is “antidemocratic,” in the sense that it sets up a series of limits on what a democratically elected government can do. The Constitution is a charter of limited powers, delegated by the people and the states to the federal government; neither the people nor the state governments would ever have consented to the sort of pure populism promoted by Doerfler and Moyn. The founders deplored the idea of an unfettered federal government ruled only by popular passions. That is why they put in place a system of checks and balances to forestall mob majoritarianism. They recognized a simple truth: that the best and most responsive government presides over homogeneous interests, generally locally, and that as we abstract rule away from the people, interests diverge. This means that as government abstracts away from the people, it ought to be granted less and less power.
The Left hates the Constitution for precisely that reason. To the Left, the Constitution is a mere barrier against the utopian mission to restructure human relations, and ultimately, humanity itself. In this view, large government is to be the leveling force among human beings, cramming down the views of one half of the country on the other half. Local governance is dangerous because it might lead to diversity of viewpoint and practice; federal government is the best available tool for shaping and molding. Dispense with the Constitution’s limits on the powers of the federal government, and suddenly transformational change becomes possible.
The only problem is that such a viewpoint utterly disregards the history of human relations. A government that presides over 330 million human beings with a variety of different viewpoints on core moral issues is unlikely to rule either benevolently or successfully if granted the unfettered power to flatten a multiplicity of jurisdictions and ways of life. Limits are the key to both benevolence and success in governance. Dispensing with the Constitution may sound pleasing to those who seek drastic change on the greatest scale, but drastic change of that nature typically looks more like tyranny than progress.
Ben Shapiro, 38, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author; his latest book is “The Authoritarian Moment: How The Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent.” To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
those two clowns should be expelled from the nation and harvard closed for subversion.
TO ME if they feel the constitution should be overturned, THEN EVERY DAMN ONE OF THEM< SHOULD NO LONGER enjoy a single one of its protections. PERIOD.
Personally, I’d like to call for the end of the New York Times.
Our Founders knew from the study of failed past attempts by other nations at pure democracy, that the unbridled passion of the moment of the unreignable mob always ends in its own destruction, which is why they created a Republic, with only the best of Democrat principles enabled, while using the chains of the COnstituion to hold down those which would destroy us. Many believe that to reign is to lead, but like a horse, reign is to control. You would no more ride an unbridled emotional charged stallion into a tree clustered forest for a Christopher Reeve crippling moment of truth, than ride the emotional tide of a crowd of Drug addicted BLM Democrats told that their free drugs were about to be cut off, along with their free lunches, so lets all meet at the park that has statues built to the founding American Supermen. The American Constitution is the reigns designed to keep the government beast from going out of control. Only those who hate peace prosperity and unity who seek to benefit and gain control of our nation in social division along lines of race, sex, gender, religion and party would seek to take off the reigns and let loose the Kraken. THEY are the enemy, the enemy within and a cancer that needs to be cut out in any form when discovered, no matter how small because if left to their own devices always grow large when given the chance. Secular Socialism and the party that promotes it is now our prime enemy.
To do what they want would take a convention of the states, each with only one vote as in the past. These two must remember it was the sovereign states which ceded power to the Federal government and many may not be willing to give up so much this time seeing how it has been abused. The individual states would have to agree, this could not be a top down Federal usurpation of po.wer
THE FEDS for decades, have been upsurping state power though.. I unfortunately, don’t see a stop to it any time soon.
Professors like these at prestigious universities are the problem. They are doing their best to brainwash the youth into destroying this country. This should be considered treasonous and they should be removed from these schools.
If i had my way, EVERY DAMN ONE Of them, would be publicly STRIPPED of their US Citizenships, AND WOULD GET EXPELLED from the nation, permanently….
Just hippies who never left the campus and by dumb (bad for us) luck wound up as professors…
Are the ones who are presently in power.
Without the Constitution we will no longer be a free America and those dunces will have to come down out of their ivory towers to be slaves for the democRAT party.