The New American Parts of the political Left are coming right out and admitting that they want to get rid of the U.S. Constitution, in favor of pure democracy â despite the dangers â and many conservatives are helping them.
The 19th-century anarchist Lysander Spooner argued that the effort of the Founding Fathers to create a limited government through a written Constitution had failed: âBut whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain â that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it.â
Spoonerâs complaint was that the U.S. Constitution was not sufficiently restraining the power of government.
But a recent forum at New York University sponsored by Harperâs Magazine and reported on in its October 2019 edition attacked the Constitution from the opposite direction. In a cover story entitled âDo We Need the Constitution?â five left-wing âscholarsâ concluded that the Constitution is what is holding back the progressive agenda, and is the source of most of our modern political problems â at least from their leftist perspective.
Some of the participating scholars argued that the Constitution needs to be abolished in its entirety, while one participant suggested that their goal of updating our system of government to what they wanted could be achieved with an Article V constitutional convention.
The moderator, Rosa Brooks, set the tone for the discussion by decrying a culture that âreveres this piece of paper as if it had been handed by God out of a burning bush, and treats the Constitution as more or less sacred.⊠Is it really a good thing to have a document written almost 250 years ago still be viewed as binding us in some way?â Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown.