Leftists Admit They Can’t Win Without Rewriting The Constitution

Seldom does a headline simultaneously proclaim impotency and promise utter destruction, but The New York Times managed it: “Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court.”

To be fair, this was not an opinion piece per se but a partial transcript of an episode of Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast, where Douthat interviewed Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic, a columnist at The Guardian, and a research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. The occasion was Nwanevu’s first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

Nwanevu’s book is free of original argumentation. His example of why the Senate is “anti-democratic” is that California, a state that could be “one of the 40 largest countries in the world,” only has two senators, which gives a state like Wyoming “about 60, or more than 60, times the representation than people in California.”

And don’t try to say California’s 52-member delegation in the House of Representatives — the largest in the House by far — evens things out: “The Senate shapes the judiciary, it shapes the executive branch, and obviously, it’s a veto point for the passage of even ordinary legislation.” Thus, Nwanevu argues, “we have a fundamental piece of our system that flouts basic democratic principles.”

Never mind that the House originates all monied bills, or that all impeachments must originate in the House, or that House and Senate must both pass a bill before it sees the president’s desk.

His ideas for “saving democracy” are just as moldy. Create new states (his nominees, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., are the usual suspects). Stuff the Supreme Court. Have a national, popular vote for president. The same ideas the left has been repeating for years now. Nwanevu is just the latest parrot to sing the same song for the choir.

The Will of the People

Nwanevu does manage one point of semi-originality when he claims that the will of the people — what many would call the core concept of self-government — is just a mirage:

When you read polls and you say the majority of American people believe this on taxes, and another majority believes this on environmental policy, and a majority believes this on a woman’s right to choose, and so on — these are not all the same group of people. There’s not one “the majority” that’s being represented across all of those issue spaces. 

The only legitimate majority in Nwanevu’s mind is the one that agrees on every issue with the regularity of an atomic clock. Forget the idea’s ridiculousness. Forget that these natural factions were the center of discussion for James Madison in “Federalist No. 10.” Forget too that, by this logic, Nwanevu’s own “reforms” would be dead in the water democratically speaking, since the same majority would probably not agree on all of them. Nwanevu only proposes this idea because it allows him to disempower and disenfranchise the people he despises — you.

For Nwanevu, democracy means “fair contests […] where people have an equal chance to contest power, and a majority is the way that we adjudicate who wins a particular contest. If you’re a minority now, you might be in the majority next time.” But all of the democracy-saving ideas he takes out of mothballs stack the deck in favor of his people. Adding D.C. and Puerto Rico as states gives leftists four more senators (if the Senate is kept). Scrapping the Electoral College means that flyover country will be squashed by blue cities election after election. Leftists packing the court ensures an airtight progressive majority that will steamroll any opposition to the Borg.

And steamrolling is the agenda. Take this example: Nwanevu says that the first thing he would put forward, if he oversaw a Democrat administration’s strategy, is the PRO Act to abolish states’ right-to-work laws. The decision of the millions of people in those states, expressed at the ballot box or through their state legislatures, would be blasted with buckshot. Democracy is wonderful — so long as the right people make the “right” choice.

A New Constitution

This is far from the first time the left has called for the abolition of the Constitution. But this is the first time the Times’ editors, at least, said the quiet part in the subtitle, “Why the left can’t win without a new Constitution.” It’s a great silver lining when your enemies admit they are hopeless unless they rewrite all the rules. But we should also be wary. If the leftoids have reached the point where they feel comfortable pulling their intentions from under wicker baskets, it’s yet another sign that the cultural and political fights of the last 30 years are obsolete and we can either adapt or go extinct.

Another reason is Nwanevu’s idea for selling this “new American founding”: linking “democracy” with “get[ting] our due from work, so that we’re more empowered, and we have more rights.” It’s “socializing” people to want to give more and more of their resources to overarching government programs. It’s convincing people to sell their birthright for the promise of some broth.

It might work. If our times teach us anything, it is that anything is possible, from Donald Trump winning back the White House to an out-and-proud communist winning the Democrat primary for mayor of New York City.

The obvious, short-term solution is to solve real problems. Many have said that the Republican majorities in the House and Senate need to start bringing up single issue bills for votes. Either these solutions will pass and be signed into law, or the GOP will harvest new midterm ammunition against the Democrats. Win-win.

The long-term solution is also obvious: proper education. For too long, the Constitution has been treated as a holy relic. It is, but our holy relic has been put behind glass, not just in the National Archives but in our minds. We’ve forgotten that the Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant into war. Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age journal, recently wrote of the Constitution:

is a canal network, channeling the violent pressure of public will into potentially productive courses. Unlike liberal philosophy today, the Constitution does not depend on dispassionate nice guys, every citizen a humble philosopher […] The whole system, Constitution and the rest, is made for the raging current, not to stop but to put it to work.

He’s right. And with this new focus on the Constitution must also come a retelling of the American Dream, a revitalized American myth for the 21^st century, a poetic-narrative that doesn’t just teach what it means to be an American and how to be an American, but makes this knowledge visceral, plants it in our stomachs so that ideas like Nwanevu’s are not just ridiculous but nauseous. Once we have planted that, our position will be strong indeed.

Nathan Stone is a storyteller who looks at culture, politics, and religion from a different point of view on his YouTube channel Nate on the Stone, and who exercises moral imagination in his writing. A lover of books, music, and the outdoors (especially with dogs), he earned a master’s degree in American history from Liberty University in 2016. Subscribe to his channel and follow him on Twitter.