2,217 words 
The Left clutches their pearls about the Constitution whenever the Right attempts to do anything productive, especially on immigration. Using buzzwords like “due process,” which they do not themselves believe in (as shown by the Covid lockdowns and treatment of the J6ers), is a standard Saul Alinsky tactic which is becoming less effective from overuse.
But what exactly does the Left mean by the Constitution? This term lends itself to manipulation because it is as ambiguous as it is grandiose. We have two diametrically opposed visions of what the Constitution means, as if it were two separate documents. Can this opposition be purely explained by how the Left argues in bad faith and is anti-white? Or is there perhaps something more?
Let’s do what the Left does and deconstruct what “the Constitution” really means. It is a social construct, after all.
Despite a superficial sense of unbroken continuity since 1776, the truth is that the US has had several constitutional revolutions. This is perfectly normal in history and usually nothing special. For example, France has had two Constitutional orders, the Fourth and Fifth Republics, since WWII alone. All Eastern Europe had to create new political orders when they regained their sovereignty with the collapse of the USSR. Even highly stable monarchies have the occasional succession dispute. But the key difference is that the American constitutional revolutions were undeclared.
Christopher Caldwell in his book The Age of Entitlement is spot on in explaining how in the 1960s, the original Constitution wasn’t just warped but outright replaced by Civil Rights legislation and caselaw. The judicial insurrection which Stephen Miller talks about happened a long time ago. The recent flurry of pro-migrant injunctions from district court judges (which the Supreme Court sternly struck down in Trump v. CASA) was just a more blatant phase of it.
There was an even earlier Constitutional revolution in the 1860s. Originally, the states and national government were supposed to be equal. Federalism is nice in theory, but in practice it was doomed to fail. Ultimate sovereignty cannot be divided. In fact, divided sovereignty is an oxymoron, as is even shared sovereignty. The question of which would be sovereign, the states or the federal government, was decided in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. General Sherman’s war crimes were then followed by the North’s vicious “Reconstruction” to further beat the states into submission.
But there was more. One of the acts of the very first Congress in 1790 was to limit citizenship to white people. Abraham Lincoln and many other abolitionists originally intended for the black slaves to be repatriated to Africa or the Caribbean, not made into America citizens. In 1862, Lincoln made his stance unequivocally clear when he told a delegation of black leaders to the White House:
You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.
The Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 went far beyond how the Thirteenth Amendment freed the slaves a few months before Lincoln’s death in 1865. Rather than sending them to overseas colonies or parallel societies within the US (such as the Indian reservations), these latter two amendments granted blacks legal equality with Americans, to include being able to serve on juries and vote.
On some level, many of the radical abolitionists who advocated for integration knew as Lincoln did that it would be harmful to both races. But behind their moral sanctimony, they were more interested in punishing Dixieland than in helping blacks. Anarcho-tyranny, anti-white judges, using violent blacks as a golem, and changing the electorate when they vote the wrong way is not new in American history.
A constitution is inherently tied to the people it is supposed to serve because the well-being of that people is, or at least should be, its ultimate goal. Thus, in addition to changing the people who will implement and interpret their constitution, radically changing a people changes their constitution because it changes its ultimate goal. There is a stark difference between serving the American people and serving the miscellaneous biomass that happens to reside within the US today. Thus, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments didn’t amend the Constitution, but destroyed it a full century before the Warren Court’s judicial activism.
Making the federal government sovereign over the states and making non-whites Americans were clean breaks from the original Constitution (and for what it matters, entirely unconsented too). It didn’t even last a century. There is no continuity.
No, we should not allow the Yankees and their successors to conflate the constitutions of the 1960s and 1860s with the original. Moreover, there is a final, third conflation which must be broken down: the Bill of Rights which was ratified in 1791 versus the Constitution of 1788 which it amended.
The Bill of Rights is commonly thought of as complimenting the Constitution, like salt and pepper. The truth is that they were essentially a drug deal between the Federalists and Antifederalists. They began in tension with each other like oil and water, and seem to be ending that way too.
The substance of the Bill of Rights is ancient. It comes from Anglo-Saxon traditions which existed even prior to the Norman conquest of 1066 and which go back as far as the ancient Germanic concept of Freiheit. For example, the right to bear arms comes from the right and duty of freemen to own weapons to defend themselves and to serve in the fyrd, or Saxon militia. Trial by jury and due process were also ancient customs. The Bill of Rights excites people to this day because it is so primordial. In contrast, few people aside from academics have any interest in bicameralism, and most haven’t even heard of the Commerce Clause.
The substance of the Constitution, meaning the original seven articles (henceforth the Articles), is the hyper-rationality of the Enlightenment. In the grand scheme of things, the Enlightenment is still new, and should not be conflated with ancient customs well-rooted in history and genetic instinct. Most of the Enlightenment didn’t even come from England, but from France, making it not just new but also foreign. And in France, where it was allowed to manifest its true form, unhindered by a conservative English or American handbrake, it led to a blood drenched, proto-Bolshevik reign of terror. That something is new does not automatically discredit it, but it should be subject to heightened scrutiny. And we need not scrutinize the Enlightenment very much before we encounter the guillotines.
The essence of the Articles was that perfect rules could overcome the realities of human nature. But rules are the form, not the substance, and it not the rules which mold men but men who mold rules. Fretting over legalism is as silly as thinking that a neighborhood is defined more by its Home Owner Association rules than by the type of people who live there. Neighborhoods in Smallville, San Clemente, and Compton could have the exact same HOA rules but would still be drastically different communities. Likewise, if we copy-pasted the US Constitution onto Austria, Italy, the Shire, or Liberia we would also have completely different political orders. Imagine thinking otherwise. As Oswald Spengler said:
On the other hand the worshippers of political ideals create out of nothing. Their intellectual freedom is astounding, but their castles of the mind, built of airy concepts like wisdom and righteousness, liberty and equality, are in the end all the same; they are built from the top story downwards.
The prime theme of the Articles is separation of powers. Yes, some aspects of the separation of powers are ancient, but the ancient ones are generally moderate. Extreme separation of powers was a reaction against absolute monarchy, but absolute monarchy is almost as new as the Enlightenment. The Magna Carta checking the power of the king with that of the Church and nobility in 1215 was a return to the status quo of European feudalism and a far cry from the Enlightenment’s hyper-rationality and ultraviolent extremism.
Admittedly, the separation of powers found in the Articles was not exclusively a product of the Enlightenment. The Founders were also copying the separation of powers found in the ancient Roman Republic, which did work wondrously, and the advice of the Socratic philosophers to build a mixed regime by the one, the few, and the many. But the Roman system was created by and used by ancient Italians who were near indistinguishable from Renaissance and modern-day Italians. Saxons and Romans might both be European, but they are not the same.
So why could the ancient Romans make separation of powers work while the Anglo-Saxon attempt to copy them quickly crashed and burned? The key lies with James Madison in Federalist Paper #51: “Let ambition check ambition.” The Italians were able to make separation of powers work because they were and are a fiery, ambitious, no-nonsense people. The history of the SPQR reads like a mafia movie because, as every good mafia movie emphasizes, there is a direct line of continuity between the Romans, the Renaissance, and the mafia. It’s the same people doing the same thing according to different forms in different times.
No disrespect, but the Saxons are too polite. Thus, we are slouching towards Weimar because “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It doesn’t help that the US was infiltrated by hostile foreigners such as Jews, Indians, and Chinese who are good at exploiting rules, principles, and values while having no respect for them. Therefore, the separation of powers provides none of the promised checks and balances for anti-American policies, while even the most basic of patriotic policies face overwhelming gridlock.
Furthermore, I am frankly puzzled by why the Founders wanted to copy and paste the Roman system of checks and balances when they had ambitions of westward expansion. The Founders were familiar with Edward Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire along with Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline which argue that the Roman conquests facilitated the rise of autocracy. This was due to the difficulty of controlling the expanded military necessary for a vast empire along with the previously unimaginable amounts of wealth and power up for grabs.
But the concept of Manifest Destiny, and thereby building an American Imperium, was present from the very start even if the term wasn’t coined until 1845 by John L. O’Sullivan. In fact, one of the main causes of the American Revolution was a desire to expand westward over the Appalachian Mountains, both because offense was the best defense against Indian raids, and to conquer vast wilderness realms which would be transformed by the first civilized people to seize them. (The British prohibited westward expansion because they did not want to administer or defend that land and especially when they considered the American colonies to be a low priority). And the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-6, which was dispatched not that long after the Bill of Rights and Constitution of 1788 and 1791, showed that reaching the Pacific was a goal from very early on.
The vision of a continent spanning American Empire was incompatible with a Constitution modeled after the Roman Republic. Why wouldn’t that “new order for the ages” go the exact same route as the SPQR and become an autocratic Imperium? Jesus? Enlightened rationality? A Masonic deep state? The most likely explanation I can conceive is that the Founders envisioned a gradual expansion and thus a moderate transformation. But America expanded much quicker than Rome.
The great questions of history are not determined by constitutions, it is history which determines constitutions. And American history has determined that America will be an autocracy. The only question is whose autocracy, and whether the Bill of Rights will continue to exist under it.
When the Right talks about the Constitution, they almost exclusively mean the Bill of Rights within the context of serving the American people.
When the Left talks about the Constitution, they almost exclusively mean the HOA rules of the Articles or the subversive case law of the Warren Court, which heavily relied upon a warped reading of the Fourteenth Amendment which itself is highly sketchy due to being passed through brute coercion rather than consent. And of course, the Left’s reading is entirely focused on fulfilling the antiwhite vision of John Lennon’s “Imagine” in which random foreigners are not just made equal to, but exalted above real Americans.
There is no “the Constitution” as in a single unbroken political tradition. The Bill of Rights was conceived more in opposition to the Articles than in tandem with them. The original order of 1791 was gravely wounded in the Civil War and its aftermath, was further mutilated by the Warren Court, and is now threatened with a final killing blow from a judicial insurrection.
For the Constitution of the Right to live, the Left’s may have to die.
David Zsutty is on X @DavidZsutty.
17 comments
I’m quite certain I’ll live long enough to see an America led by a Caesar figure where people wonder what all that fuss about rights and constitutionality was about.
Overall very great article. Just one point of contention: I don’t think it would be right to compare Manifest Destiny to Roman imperial expansion.
Why?
Racial homogeneity: the Romans were ruling over a vast empire with vast numbers of highly different peoples, which is what more than perhaps anything else enabled the descent into tyranny. Because each of those peoples didn’t care one wit about the others the center could, for example, use Germanic troops to crush a rebellion in the Balkans. OUR elites are in fact replicating those conditions intra-nationally here and in Europe.
By contrast, the Indians were relatively small in numbers and replaced and displaced rather than conquered, making the American “empire” almost entirely white. In fact, the US did flirt with and soundly reject outright empire during the Mexican War: the All-Mexico movement sought to conquer and annex the entirety of that non-white nation, but men such as Calhoun advised against bringing foreign races under US rule and the proposal was utterly rejected.
“The Romans were ruling over a vast empire with vast numbers of highly different peoples, which is what more than perhaps anything else enabled the descent into tyranny.”
I think it was around 50AD that a Roman Poet said that Rome had become the universal sewer into which the entire world shits. The same can be said about America today, alas.
Strongly agree. Manifest Destiny was about as populist as it gets in America. It is as far away from Imperialism as you can get.
Western settlers poured into a nearly-empty continental expanse once distant King and Parliament could not prevent it ─ assuming that any regime on Earth could have ultimately prevented it.
Westward Anglo-Saxon settlement and expansion was more than anything the motivation for Independence itself and not so much Jacobin ideas or taxes on tea and stamps, and it made common sense. London or Paris were not ever going to settle the interior properly, and the arid lands West of the 100th Meridian were a different breed of cat entirely that took getting used to.
From watching too much TV Westerns and Hollywood movies, many people think that the U.S. Cavalry went West to tame the Injuns (or exterminate them depending on whom you talk to).
Actually, the Cavalry went West to keep White settlers from exterminating rampaging Injuns when they went on the warpath. And Europeans, especially, have tended to buy into the Noble Savage myth uncritically so this story remains popular.
🙂
This is a very good explication of the two legal coups of the 1860s and 1960s. Thank You to Counter-Currents for putting such quality work in the public eye.
The constitution was originally meant to protect life, liberty and property only. Now it protects every invader who manages to make landfall in our country. The left wants “No Kings,” that is no one is above the law, except of course the Guatemalan interloper, and the dark-skinned baby born here to illegals.
They say the constitution is not a suicide pact but with the illegal accretions that is exactly what it has become. Which is why we need that Caesar figure backed by a strong majority of the population. His day, I think, is on the rise.
Great article. The problem with the constitution is that it was vague from the beginning, it should have specified that each right was for the white race from the very beginning. 🙃
White supremacy was implicit from the beginning and it would have been difficult for most in 1790 to have imagined the depths of Negrolatry that would exist four score or so years later, let alone in our day. Slavery and the Negro Problem itself was just like the proverbial can kicked down the road for later, and it didn’t end well.
🙂
Jefferson said our relation to the Negro was like having a wolf by the ears–you can’t let go and it’s nearly impossible to hold on.
That much is implicit in the Preamble describing how the country was being created to secure the blessings of liberty for “ourselves and our posterity”. The idea of turning America into the dumpster of the world would’ve been unthinkable back then.
Whether explicitly White supremacist or not, the U.S. Constipation may as well be written in crayon on toilet paper. That’s about what the thing is worth and the enemy and its hordes of rape orcs will simply ignore and burn it cause there’s not been one iota of brutal resistance and ruthless, bloody reconquering. I have Italian ancestry myself and share the same surname as Fra Diavolo, a noble guerilla fighter who fought to the death against these proto-bolshevik filth so there’s an instinctive repulsion with me against the all-too-Anglospheric ‘luv and tolerance’ of the intolerable that gives me the cringe bumps. Unleash the counter-enlightenment. Hellfire and swords to the enemy liege.
Strongly disagree that the Federal system was intended to effectively “split” sovereignty, 50/50.
Hamilton clearly favored a National government that was Sovereign and States are themelves not “sovereign” at all but merely territorial-administrative units that do have, in deference to their former sovereignty, certain rights guaranteed by the Constitution (notably the 10th Amendment, which reserves the bulk of responsibilities to the states).
However, getting the Constitution ratified was not an easy process and the anti-Federalists were a powerful bloc. In good faith as promised, Madison laid out a set of Constitutional Amendments for a Bill of Rights once the founding document was ratified.
Many issues like Slavery and the Negro Problem that ultimately destroyed the Union were just matters kicked down the road to let someone else deal with them later.
Hamilton campaigned with Gen. Washington’s support for a Constitutional Convention. The country under the Articles of Confederation had no clear policy for raising revenue, and some states had paid their Revolutionary War debt while others had not. Each bank and state tried to issue its own currency, and Continental currency was the most worthless of all.
In one fell swoop, Hamilton bought and nationalized the Revolutionary War debt and sold it out as secure bonds as an investment bearing interest which gave investors a stake in the integrity of the new currency. The Constitution also allowed for a national tax base for the first time with tariffs and excise taxes that guaranteed the soundness of the new currency, which was declared by fiat with the new government to make it the “legal tender for all debts public and private.” American currency thus went from inflationary and worthless to a high level of trust.
However, getting the Constitution ratified involved so many compromises that Hamilton might have suspected by the time of his careless duel with the Vice President that the Republic was rent by factions and would not last too long anyway.
State governments enamoured with Jeffersonian agricultural romanticism over manufactures jealously guarded their “internal improvements” like railroads and waterways, to the point that most Constitutional theorists until the Depression and the New Deal believed that the only legitimate undertaking of the Federal government, economically or otherwise, was with the Armed Forces and interstate commerce. Many transformative projects like the Tennesee Valley Authority could have been conducted under national auspices much earlier.
By the time of the Southern Secession in 1861, the Abolitionist North had been using the Tariff of Abominations to attack the Antebellum Southern slavocracy ─ and was exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do per Hamilton, which was to raise national revenue and to promote domestic manufactures.
Though he did not believe in making voters nor jurors out of Negroes, Mr. Lincoln tended to speak from both sides of his mouth on controversial things and to refuse compromise.
He was dead wrong that if the States had the right to form a Union in the first place that they had no right to also leave the Union. President Lincoln gets due credit for saving the Union, but he is seldom given the proper credit for helping to destroy it in the first place.
🙂
Very good article. I would add to the separation of powers at the federal level (the three branches) the separation of powers between the federal government and the states (federalism), which was severely eroded both by Lincoln and the 14th/15th amendments and the malforming civil rights laws and judicial rulings of the 1960s.
Three weaknesses of the original 1788 Constitution that I can think of are:
Failing to explicitly stipulate that States can secede from the Union
Not setting the maximum per capita representation for the House of Representatives
Not establishing the number of Supreme Court justices and thus preclude the left’s favorite move of threatening to pack the court.
America is now so polarized I do not see any new constitutional amendment ever being ratified, which means leftist judicial engineering will remain a threat.
There’s a Bill of Rights Constitution which is built on merit, and a Civil Rights Constitution which is built on privilege.
These two parties want their respective constitutions to apply to the opposing party. The only thing that resolves the issue is for the federal CRA to be abolished and be replaced with state legislation through the states rights mechanism of the Articles. Blacks can have their safe spaces from whites in New York and California.
Blacks can have their safe spaces from whites in New York and California. And give our states away to more these ungrateful, smelly, stupid, criminal lowlife bastards?? I hear the bottom of the ocean is very nice with the antiracist extremophiles munching on slime grubs.
Which “body politik” do you belong? The “Brides of Christ” messianic global absolute communistic “theocratic” monarchy of the Judeao-Christian synagogue’s? Or of the “body politic” of the rightful sovereign’s of the National Constitutionalism of the several Republic’s in confedration/federation styled the united states of America? —> https://www.unz.com/article/why-are-we-christians/#comment-7236265 https://archive.org/download/nationalconstitutionalismarchive/nationalconstitutionalismarchive.pdf
Don’t forget that in the 1750’s the mid-west and Canada were French territory.
Yes, and at the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763 ─ or the French & Indian War ─ the English King was protecting French and Indian trade by prohibiting Americans from Westward expansion beyond the Appalachians.
And as Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence, one of the King’s long train of abuses was inciting the merciless Indian Savages against these American settlers on the frontier.
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
This was the populist cause of American Independence that they seldom teach in school.
🙂
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