Has the Constitution Failed?

All right. Uh well, since I just mentioned the Constitution, we'll do this one. This was uh this was one of our closest to 5050 uh propositions. Uh the constitution has failed, and energy spent trying to restore it is fruitless. Although once again we agreed with each other, uh, but the audience was very close to 5050. Uh so this one's a little difficult because I the the framing was hard for me to exactly nail down, but you have to keep it. Telling me the propositions are difficult is a compliment, by the way. So you're not absolutely so the the answer is I think the Constitution is valuable. I think the Constitution is absolutely critical to our way of life. However, I think that the Constitution, as I argue in my book, The Total State, uh, is an emanation of the way of being of Americans.

It is not the Constitution that made Americans, it is Americans that made the Constitution. And so when we say the Constitution failed, what we really mean is Americans failed to maintain the spirit of the Constitution. And without that spirit, the words on the paper mean nothing. The social contract is a lie. There is no social contract. There are no objective ways to enforce that contract. There's only the continued practice of the people and their tradition. And so if we as a people continued the constitutional action, if we governed ourselves in that way, which by the way is impossible after the 14th Amendment, if we want to get into that. But we have slowly but surely amended our Constitution away that basically strips away all of the virtue and individuality that was baked in the Constitution in the first place.

And so did the Constitution fail us? Did we fail the Constitution? I think the easier way to understand this is that the Constitution is always and only a reflection of the people who live in the nation. And seeing as we have fundamentally changed our nature as people and imported a bunch of people who don't give one crap about our constitution or our traditions or our beliefs, we have then thereby changed the nature of the Constitution, whether we wrote down those changes or not. In some cases we did, but you know, 14th Amendment is a massive change, but look at the Civil Rights Act, right? That completely rewrites the American experience, the idea of free association, rights that were inherent to Americans, and we didn't write a single constitutional amendment to change that. And yet the legislation completely rewrote our constitutional order.

So I think that's the issue. Okay. Well, I did agree. I'm I've been moved by the spirit of the Constitution to now disagree with you. Fair. Uh also it's more entertaining that way. Uh, you know, so yeah, I I my you know, my my agree answer would be w where we are today, the Constitution got us here uh to a decent degree, and so there's not this clear ability to, you know, reset it, and I think we have to learn from that failure, and I would agree with your analysis there where uh you can't and and and this is often a tricky one to get the libertarians to understand there's there's just no set of words that you can write down that will bind the future, they'll be interpreted the same way by people different than you, and so you ha it you you can write these things down, you can create a constitution.

If that constitution isn't being read by people with a similar spirit to yours, you're just not gonna get the same outcomes. At the same time, there are aspects of the Constitution, there are propositions in the Constitution and extending into the Bill of Rights and associated things, where you know Americans are drilled to believe these things, and it does seem to work better than not, you know, like if if if if the second amendment was not a part of the Bill of Rights, you know, would we have the rights, you know, to bear arms that we do today? You know, if the f and we have a free speech topic that, you know, free speech was not the first amendment, you know, would that be would Americans believe in it to the same degree? Um, you know, Michael Humer, uh, who's uh a philosopher I like, uh, you know, has also made the point that uh one way the Constitution has clearly worked is it's worked procedurally.

You know, we uh we elect a president every four years, and that transfer of power is remarkably clean by historical standards. You know, if you went back in time two thousand years and you're like, well, uh whoever controls the military is just gonna listen to the next guy who's in charge. Uh and you're just gonna do whatever he says, that'd be a preposterous idea, right? You know, and and nonetheless, like that actually works. It's kind of crazy to me that this still works and and maybe it won't work. Maybe this will be maybe it's like not gonna work for much longer. But it is like it's kind of crazy, right? Like like we we we ha America has a remarkably powerful military and they respect and follow you know whoever is elected. I mean I think that's an interesting thing to assert from New Hampshire, but now it's out you know uh the people of Arkansas learned something very different about the American military.

Well sure sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. And of course we've seen the military subverting Trump uh in various ways and other things. So I I'm not gonna say it's like a flawless system. But it it really does seem like like the idea that 'cause well could sort of the other side of this argument is, oh well it's just about the people. And if we just had the right people, it wouldn't we would we don't need the words I I don't think that's true. I think you need both. I think you need both. I think I think you need the words and the people. And so the Constitution has failed insofar as we've drifted from the types of people who are doing the interpreting, but I think that uh you know if we didn't have those words at all, I I you know it's not clear I I think we'd probably be worse off, you know.

I mean there's a case to be made for that. Uh you know there's the the battle between written and unwritten constitutions is an interesting one. I think ultimately Joseph DeMestra was right that no no human has ever written a constitution, that ultimately constitutions are written onto man's heart by the divine, and that's why they end up uh, you know, c kind of being constructed in the way that they are. Uh the people have to live that constitution first, and then it gets codified into uh something written. If that's good, and it probably is in certain, you know, scenarios, then fantastic. Uh, you know, the the anti-federalists uh were obviously fighting for a bill of rights. The Federalists said if you write down a bill of rights, people think it's limited only to those rights, and so therefore, uh, you know, going ahead and codifying those rights is a mistake.

We can quibble over that. I mean, ultimately I think the most interesting way to insta to interrogate this is to just to look at the most recent Supreme Court ruling when it comes to birthright citizenship. We just had a conservative Supreme Court full of originalists say that the 14th Amendment actually applies to every Chinese birth farm uh, you know, i in the United States. So is that the originalist understanding of the 14th Amendment? I mean, I can't imagine a world in which it is, but that's what we're being told. And d how did the words on paper, you know, defend us against that? Not at all. But again, the 14th Amendment is deeply flawed in many areas. I've already made that case. Uh so I won't sit on that hobby horse too long. Uh, but all that to say, I I don't think there's anything wrong with writing things down in a constitution, ultimately.

I think it serves some level of function. I think we should be loyal to those beliefs. I just think believing that that is sufficient, that pointing to the constitution and saying it's written down over here, uh, thinking that that ultimately solves your problem is obviously proving itself to be uh, you know, uh not correct at all. Well, yeah, I completely agree with that.