Constitutional Matters

Main audience: people in the USA (especially citizens), others may want to see what the global authoritarian push may try in their countries

First page of the Constitution of the USA, image from Wikipedia article describing the document and its history

Before you read this post, you’ll want Heather Cox Richardson’s post from Sunday as background. Please read it. I am happy to wait.

… <waiting> …

A Bit More Background

A key aim of the Destroyers currently wearing red hats is to dismantle the entire governmental structure of the USA and replace it with an authoritarian version. This used to be a quiet, stealthy goal. It has become an overt, loudly declared public pledge.

Toward that end, they’ve been steadily taking not only Congress whenever they can, but state legislatures. For several years they’ve been alarmingly close to controlling enough states to call a Constitutional Convention. A ConCon can be called to write and submit as little as a single amendment to the existing Constitution. Campaigning for a popular change such as abolishing the Electoral College could make it easy for enough legislatures to call for a ConCon.

But a ConCon is not limited to doing only what it was called to do. When it meets, it can rewrite the entire Constitution. A ConCon would let the Destroyers wipe the slate clean and create an entirely different government with entirely different laws in one fell swoop.

We have a clear picture of what Version 1.0 of this idea looks like. James M. Buchanan, the American architect of the long term route the Destroyers are following, designed the Constitution put in place in Chile that successfully cemented Augusto Pinochet in power for so many years.

Nothing I’ve said here is speculation or conspiracy theory. It’s well documented. In recent years its proponents have become bold about it in public.

My Thoughts About This

Heather Cox Richardson’s post made me realize we are highly unlikely to be able to keep the Constitution. I have been thinking for a long time that we should be prepared for a ConCon, but I felt overly optimistic about how much resistance there will probably be against complete replacement.

HCR articulated why replacement could be easily promoted. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, the Constitution as it stands now can be painted as a poor fit.

If you are a Destroyer, you want an authoritarian regime and can’t have it under this Constitution. That’s simple and easy to articulate.

If you are politically liberal, this Constitution was originally intent upon keeping government small and out of your hair, protecting property ownership more than the welfare of the people as a whole. Now it is much easier for business barons to acquire an insanely large share of everything valuable, and the general population needs a larger, stronger government to keep any semblance of fairness. Our Constitution has been patched to fit the post-World War II “liberal consensus” and make government capable of acting to protect ordinary people. That patchwork has proven to have chinks which pro-authoritarians can exploit.

With information-age microtargeting, each end of the political spectrum can be easily told this Constitution doesn’t provide the government they want. As we have seen, if you tell people a tailored message often enough, most people adopt it.

At a ConCon, pro-authoritarians would arrive with a draft replacement already in mind. Liberals would arrive with only concepts that need to be thrashed into shapes they can agree upon. Liberals wouldn’t even be ready to start writing while pro-authoritarians would present a document and campaign for a vote to seal it in place.

Their new Constitution for the USA would start with what Pinochet did in Chile and add refinements to make it even harder to unseat a dictator. The Destroyers have spent decades upon decades working toward their goal. They created a long term plan, attracted billionaires to fund it, steadily built an ecosystem of businesses in charge of crucial elements of operations (major government contractors tilt heavily Republican in who runs them), and never eased up. They documented it all.

In the blue-hat portion of the USA’s political spectrum, we believed differences between the two main political camps were about policy. We believed that except for a tiny minority of nutbars, we all sought the best for our country and only disagreed about details of how to make the country ever-better for an ever-larger proportion of its people.

We were naive.

Because of that, we weren’t working on a long term plan to make wholesale changes. We were working on incremental improvements rooted in election cycles. We were focused on leading when we had a majority in a governing body and compromising when we weren’t, trying in either case to negotiate in good faith. Meanwhile they were working on gaining control. In a healthy democracy, nobody is ever fully in control.

Shape It ASAP

Leaders on the liberal side of American politics need to begin drafting a new Constitution now. If they don’t, the eventual ConCon will only have one version to consider and it will be the pro-authoritarian construct.

We shouldn’t throw away everything our current Constitution has. I didn’t appreciate it enough until after I moved to the UK. The USA Constitution is the political equivalent of a sophisticated, exquisitely well designed and written software program. I’m not talking only about checks and balances. It has “exception handling routines” all over the place. It is a work of genius. Fitting it to the modern world should not involve starting again from scratch.

On the liberal side, our impulse is to work on anything so important in the open with as much participation as possible from across the breathtaking variety of people who make the USA so unusual. Our impulse is not to do it behind closed doors in order to keep opponents from having plenty of time to figure out how to tear it apart. But we need not to wave it in front of adversaries any earlier than we must, so we have to reconcile our desire for openness with a need to keep our draft confidential until it is time to take it to a ConCon floor.

If you have the ear of a liberal leader, plant seeds with them about this. It needs to be done quietly, in the background, in parallel with all the short to medium term strategizing, organizing and activism that is also necessary. Without long term preparation, short to medium term work is likely to be cut off by a Pinochet-style Constitution on steroids.