The FBI, CIA, and Pentagon began surveilling, abusing, smearing, blackmailing, infiltrating, and destroying people and organizations who were suspected of promoting communism, socialism, leftism, liberalism, or progressivism.
The CIA also began specializing in the art of assassination —
When the Constitution was ratified, it brought into existence a limited-government republic. That meant a government whose powers were very limited — limited, that is, to those powers enumerated in the Constitution itself.
After World War II, that all changed. U.S. officials told the American people that while the Allied powers had been victorious against Nazi Germany, that did not mean, unfortunately, that Americans could rest. The United States, they said, now faced an enemy that was arguably an even bigger threat than Nazi Germany. This new enemy, they said, was America’s World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union, which was ruled by a communist regime.
They said that there was a worldwide communist conspiracy to take over the world, including the United States. That conspiracy, they said, was based in Moscow, Russia. U.S. officials convinced Americans that, to use the title of a movie that came in 1966, “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.” Most everyone became convinced that the United States was in grave danger of going Red, with commies ending up running the IRS and the rest of the federal government.
In addition to this supposed threat from communist Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union, Americans were told, was the threat from communism itself, which was a philosophy that entailed having government take care of people, as compared to a society in which people take care of themselves. U.S. national-security state officials viewed communism as a political and economic narcotic that, once imbibed by people, would inevitably seduce them into wanting more.
To combine this twin treat of communists and communism, U.S. officials said, it was necessary to convert the federal government from the limited-government republic on which the country was founded to what is called a national-security state, which is a type of governmental structure that characterizes totalitarian regimes. The big difference between the two governmental structures is that in a republic the government’s powers are limited while in a national-security state they are not.
The national-security state consists of a massive, permanent, and ever-growing military establishment (i.e., the Pentagon and what President Eisenhower called the military industrial complex), a secretive agency with the power to assassinate, kidnap, detain, and disappear people (i.e., the CIA), and a surveillance agency with the power to secretly monitor people’s activities (i.e., the NSA).
Close the federal Department of Education? Ronald Reagan proposed abolishing the Department of Education while campaigning for president in 1980. The Republican Party platforms of 1980 and 1996 likewise called for the department’s elimination, yet, the federal education budget increased under President Reagan (with a GOP-controlled Senate) and exploded under President George W. Bush (with GOP control of the Congress for over four years). The Republican Party platform during the age of Trump (2016 and 2020) did not call for the department’s elimination.
Every four years at their convention, Republicans adopt a new party platform, but at the 2020 convention in Charlotte, the Republican National Committee (RNC) “unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement.” Instead, it resolved that “2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention.”
The 2024 Republican platform has 10 chapters. Chapter 7, which contains nine paragraphs and a preamble, covers education: “Cultivate great K-12 schools leading to great jobs and great lives for young people.” The ninth paragraph contains a proposal that on the surface seems quite radical for Republicans:
9. Return Education to the States
The United States spends more money per pupil on Education than any other Country in the World, and yet we are at the bottom of every educational list in terms of results. We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run. Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party so that they can do the job of educating our students that they so dearly want to do. It is our goal to bring Education in the United States to the highest level, one that it has never attained before!
Close the federal Department of Education? Ronald Reagan proposed abolishing the Department of Education while campaigning for president in 1980. The Republican Party platforms of 1980 and 1996 likewise called for the department’s elimination, yet, the federal education budget increased under President Reagan (with a GOP-controlled Senate) and exploded under President George W. Bush (with GOP control of the Congress for over four years). The Republican Party platform during the age of Trump (2016 and 2020) did not call for the department’s elimination.
Because the Constitution nowhere gives authority to the federal government to have a Department of Education, however, the department should be eliminated. And because we have a federal system of government, as James Madison explained in Federalist No. 45, the powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite—any government provision of, regulation of, oversight of, or spending on education must only take place at the state level if it is to take place at all.
But Republicans can’t make up their mind on education. Before they get to their ninth paragraph in which they call for the elimination of the Department of Education, Republicans propose to do the following in their preamble and first eight paragraphs:
offer a plan to cultivate great K-12 schools.
support schools that focus on excellence and parental rights.
support ending teacher tenure, adopt merit pay, and allow various publicly supported educational models.
emphasize education to prepare students for great jobs and careers.
support project-based learning and schools that offer meaningful work experience.
expose politicized education models and fund proven career training programs.
support overhauling standards on school discipline.
support universal school choice in every state in America.
advocate for immediate suspension of violent students.
support hardening schools to help keep violence away from our places of learning.
restore parental rights in education.
enforce our civil rights laws to stop schools from discriminating on the basis of race.
ensure children are taught fundamentals like reading, history, science, and math, not leftwing propaganda.
defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children.
champion the First Amendment right to pray and read the Bible in school.
reinstate the 1776 Commission to support patriotic education.
promote fair and patriotic civics education.
support schools that teach America’s founding principles and Western Civilization.
And even in the ninth paragraph in which they call for the closing of the Department of Education, Republicans propose to cherish and protect teachers and “bring Education in the United States to the highest level, one that it has never attained before!”
“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”
Very little is said about how Article Nine could make Japan a leader in security because Japan is positioned to make real security threats like climate change, the collapse of biodiversity, pollution, information warfare, and class warfare, the center of its security policy to a degree that other nations are not capable of.
It is one of the great ironies of history that at the very moment the United States plunges deeper and deeper into war hysteria, that our politicians and government officials are possessed by the demons of complete annihilation and endless expansion, that falsehood and hypocrisy wrap their tentacles around the arms and legs of public intellectuals, at the very moment that it becomes impossible in Washington DC to talk about any subject that is not tied to war, at the very moment that the entire United States is being transformed into a military economy—one wherein all critical decisions are made by military contractors, privatized police, prisons, and for-profit intelligence (and at the top, the militarized private equity firms who pull the strings) it is a terrible and comic irony that we, of all the nations of the Earth, should be pressuring Japan to give up its commitment to oppose militarism as expressed in the Japanese constitution and to join us, as junior partners, in our suicide march towards world war and nuclear holocaust.
We have things so completely backwards. The United States does not have any need to, let alone have any right to, pressure Japan to give up its peace constitution, or to stir up the desires for fortune latent in Tokyo’s military contractors. We know that some Japanese are already itching for an excuse to prepare for war, and to destroy Japanese civil society by creating a military economy as a means of bringing even more wealth and power to the few.
No! It is the United States that needs a peace constitution, and it needs it right now.
We failed to return to a peace economy after the Second World War and the institutional and cultural cancer resulting from an economy stimulated by, and propped up by, war, has metastasized and spread throughout the entire society so that war is everywhere, from children’s toys to parking spaces for veterans, to glowing tributes by politicians to those who kill in blind obedience to the state.
We need now an institutional, intellectual, and spiritual commitment to an economy and a society that is founded in peace, that is committed to peace, and that rewards citizens for their constructive economic contributions to the wellbeing of their families, their neighborhoods, their regions, their country, and to the entire Earth.
I do speak these words lightly. And I speak them as someone who has spent decades thinking about, and writing about, security and conflict. But the truth must be spoken, and we do not have long before the great reckoning.
Maybe there are those who can justify a society that is addicted to war, to destruction, and to endless expansion. That is not my job.
War is not caused by a few bad apples, or a lack of maturity among political leaders. It is the product of an economic system that demands consumption and praises growth. For war is the greatest force for consumption and growth—until, of course, it leaves everything in ruins.
War is a product of a concept of economics, detached from morality and humanity, that has no concern for the long-term and that focuses on returns for the rich calculated over weeks and months, an inhuman economics wherein the long-term wellbeing of the citizens of the Earth is irrelevant.
This speculation-driven casino economy has pushed overproduction across the country which forces us to wrap everything in plastic so as to keep profits flowing to petroleum companies, and to prepare for war because the only factories left in America are those making military parts. Yes, most constructive factories have been moved overseas as part of the great “free trade” fraud perpetrated by the corporate parties.
The Japanese Constitution
Let us take a look at article nine of the Japanese constitution, that part of Japan’s post-war legacy that is so offensive to the American politicians and bureaucrats who have become the slaves of military contractors, and that is also repulsive to the bankers behind the stage who benefit from war preparations in Asia.
Article nine is also a rallying cry for Japanese militarists who wish to create a new empire and for well-paid security consultants deployed in Japan to promote expensive fighter planes that cannot even take off and land, missile defense systems that cannot stop anything, but who are unconcerned by the fact that Japan cannot provide its own food, that its water is being slowly poisoned with chemicals from factories and military bases, or that its nuclear power plants are sitting targets just waiting for an enemy attack.
Article nine states,
“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”
Article nine is invaluable in its intentions and spirit and it has had a positive impact around the world, even as its meaning has been diluted, then distorted, and then eviscerated though shifts in Japanese policy, starting with the establishment of the “Self-Defense Forces,” followed by the integration of the Japanese economy into the American war economy during the Korean War, and culminating in the false concept of “collective security,” a fig leaf for aggressive military expansionism and entry into the international arms market.
At the same time, we must recognize that there are problems with Article Nine.
First, the text suggests that Japan must renounce war as an idealistic aspiration for “international peace based on justice and order,” rather than as a necessity in an age in which we are faced with the choice between “hegemony and survival,” as Noam Chomsky famously put it.
The absence of a concrete articulation of the logic behind renouncing war for a practical goal, not only for the abstract ideals of justice, has generated unending criticism holding that the Japanese constitution is overly idealistic and even a violation of Japan’s sovereign rights.
It will be critical in future debates on security policy to explain how Japan’s position on the use of war is realistic and strategic, and how it is unmistakably in the long-term interests of the Japanese and the international community.
It is also critical that Japanese, and Americans, challenge the assumptions underlying American security policy. Failure to do so, that is to merely assume that somehow Japan is protected by the United States while it enjoys its “peace constitution” encourages criticisms in the United States that Japan is a free rider, and complaints in Japan that Japan has become an American colony. That is to say that both the United States and Japan must express a similar commitment to peace.
In addition, article nine employs the terms “war” and “nation” as if they are static, unchanging, objects whose parameters are clear and that do not shift or evolve over time.
The essential nature of war does not change; the means by which war is waged, and the subjects in war, are constantly evolving. It is still true that guns, tanks, and fighter planes are used to wage war. Yet war today extends into diverse fields and takes place in visible and invisible forms at multiple levels. The media, entertainment, and AI have been weaponized and used to dumb down and render the population passive. This is not technology for a more convenient life, but rather another form of war.
Nano technologies are employed to invisibly attack the functions of the body, or to alter the environment. New biotechnology weapons can render victims ill, or incapacitated. The same for electromagnetic radiation, infrared radiation, and a host of other new weapons, or potential weapons.
Information warfare similarly is employed to create false narratives that confuse citizens as part of a divide and conquer strategy.
These forms of war fall outside of the narrow definition of “war” put forth in Article Nine, even though these forms of war are being conducted today in a more devastating manner than traditional warfare.
Similarly, the concept of “nation” has shifted so radically as to demand significant revision of the concept of war. War today is not conducted just between nations, but also between ethnic groups, between multinational corporations, and increasingly between classes. The driving force behind the current global war is a class war between the super-rich and everyone else, that it to say a war that goes beyond the assumptions of Article Nine.
We are confronted by a brave new world stretching to the horizon in which national borders are only for little people, in which the nation state exists only for television broadcasts and United Nations events, in which the real decisions behind the war against humanity are made by hidden financial powers who manipulate all the governments of the world, presenting us with pathetic puppets who stumble through a tragically amusing diplomatic show that is put on for the working man and women by private equity.
Sadly, the current discussion of Article Nine of Japan’s constitution revolves around how to remove it, or to misinterpret it, so as to transform Japan into a nation that wages war, and that will have the third largest military in the world.
Very little is said about how Article Nine could make Japan a leader in security because Japan is positioned to make real security threats like climate change, the collapse of biodiversity, pollution, information warfare, and class warfare, the center of its security policy to a degree that other nations are not capable of.
No individual or organization that claims to believe in the Constitution, fiscal conservatism, free markets, or limited government should be taken seriously when calling for tax increases instead of drastic spending cuts. Only real cuts will solve the problem: not bogus plans to balance the budget in 10 years or limiting spending increases to some measure.
But it’s not just liberals who are clamoring for tax increases.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a right-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., “dedicated to tackling our nation’s greatest challenges by producing work that promotes our institute’s core values: free people, free markets, and limited government.”
Too bad that the AEI thinks that increasing taxes on Americans is in line with its core values.
Exhibit A
Alan D. Viard is a senior fellow emeritus at AEI, “where he studies federal tax and budget policy.” In his recent testimony before the House Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Tax Policy, Viard advocated that the United States institute a European-style value-added tax (VAT) because “the United States faces a large long-term fiscal imbalance that will burden future generations and that threatens long-term economic growth.” Said Viard:
The United States should follow the lead of 170 other countries and territories by adding a VAT to the federal tax system. The VAT is economically similar, but administratively preferable, to a retail sales tax. The VAT is far less regressive than entitlement benefit cuts, although it cannot match the progressivity of high-income tax increases. The VAT also avoids most of the economic distortions induced by high-income tax increases, although it is not as economically efficient as entitlement benefit cuts. Because it occupies a middle ground between those two alternatives, it offers a plausible basis for bipartisan compromise, particularly once the limitations of the alternative options are understood.
“He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said: ‘No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.’”—Donald Trump to Sean Hannity on being asked if he would abuse power after being re-elected
Once a dictator, always a dictator.
Power-hungry, lawless and steadfast in its pursuit of authoritarian powers, the government does not voluntarily relinquish those powers once it acquires, uses and inevitably abuses them.
Then again, the president is already a dictator with permanent powers: imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional thanks to a relatively obscure directive (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20), part of the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, which gives unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president in the event of a “national emergency.”
That national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.
It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security.
The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.
For all intents and purposes, the Constitution has long been suspended, and we’ve been operating in a state of martial law for some time now.
The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.
Yet according to documents obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.
Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been planning and preparing for such crises for years now, quietly assembling a wish list of presidential lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.
Indeed, President Trump’s administration even asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deems it necessary during the COVID-19 crisis and “other” emergencies. The Department of Justice (DOJ) went so far as to quietly trot out and test a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution.
Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
Thank you for your support in 2023. Although you have kept me working yet another year, I find it encouraging that there are still some Americans who can think independently and who want to know. As Margaret Mead said, it only takes a few determined people to change the world. Perhaps some of you will be those people.
My traditional Christmas column goes back to sometime in the 1990s when one of my occupations was being a newspaper columnist. It has been widely reprinted at home and abroad. Every year two or three readers write to educate me that religion is the source of wars and persecutions. These readers confuse religion with mankind’s abuse of institutions, religious or otherwise. The United States has democratic institutions and legal institutions to protect civil liberties. Nevertheless, we now have a police state. Shall I argue that democracy and civil liberty are the causes of police states?
Some readers also are confused about hypocrisy. There is a vast difference between proclaiming moral principles that one might fail to live up to and proclaiming immoral principles that are all too easy to keep.
In the days of my youth Christianity was still a potent force in America. It was part of most people’s lives, whether they were believers or not, and it regulated their behavior. That is why in Atlanta during the 1940s and 1950s we did not have to lock our door at night, and boys and girls could be gone all day without parental supervision and be completely safe. It is why I, as a 5-year old, could walk a mile safely to school and return home safely. Today parents who allowed such independence would be arrested for “child endangerment.”
The power of Christian morality over behavior has faded substantially. Nevertheless, even today in the remains of our civilizational foundations many, if not most, people are still guided by Christian morality. As Christian tradition fades as the basis of behavior, barbarity will gather more strength and reign over us.
Liberty is a human achievement. We have it, or had it, because those who believed in it fought to achieve it and to preserve it. As I explain in my Christmas column, people were able to fight for liberty because Christianity empowered the individual.
The other cornerstone of our culture is the Constitution. Indeed, the United States is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the United States is a different country, and Americans a different people. This is why assaults on the Constitution by the regimes in Washington are assaults on America that are far worse than any assaults by terrorists. There is not much that we can do about these assaults, but we should not through ignorance enable the assaults or believe the government’s claim that safety requires the curtailment of civil liberty.
In a spirit of goodwill, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a successful New Year.
Paul Craig Roberts
The Greatest Gift For All
Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.
The current American system of government is incoherent without assuming great capacities in the ultimate boss. But collusion between politicians and the media suppress the truth about incapacity in the White House. This problem existed long before Biden, and it will continue after he returns to Delaware for his final vacation.
The Founding Fathers sought to create a government that would be under the law and under the Constitution. Since World War One, presidents have amassed far more arbitrary power to rule by decree. Every recent American commander-in-chief has expanded and exploited the dictatorial potential of the presidency. Yet, because elections continue to be regularly held, most Americans do not think of the nation’s chief executive as a despot.
For generations, American politicians spoke reverently of the Constitution as America’s highest law. In the 1800s, presidential candidates would compete by attesting their fidelity to the nation’s founding document. But in recent years, the Constitution has fallen into disrespect. The rule of law now means little more than the enforcement of the secret memos of the commander-in-chief.
Power has been concentrated in the White House in part because the friends of Leviathan favor policies that cannot survive the light of day or open debate in the halls of Congress. Pundits pretend the system remains on automatic pilot to serve the citizenry just like in the early days of the American republic. Advocates for centralized power have talked as if they were deluded by some political perversion of the mystic advice in the movie Field of Dreams: “Gather all the power, and the noble leader will come.”
Wild-eyed optimism about the character and competence of American presidents should have received far more ridicule, but what happens when the absurdities become too great to hide?
This has been a problem in the United States for most recent presidents, but the issue is most intense with the current chief executive.
Sleepy Joe’s rapid decline
President Biden seems increasingly distanced from the day-to-day duties of his office. In June at the Air Force Academy graduation in Colorado, Biden stumbled leaving the podium and hit the platform as hard as if he’d been dropped from a low-flying helicopter. It took multiple Secret Service agents to eventually get the president back on his feet.
Visiting Japan for a summit in May, Biden uncorked a 40-second utterly incoherent answer to a question that mystified even his biggest devotees. Some commentators speculated that the jet lag and time difference undermined the drugs that Biden routinely takes to spur apparent mental sharpness.
In a bizarre finish for a recent MSNBC puff piece appearance, Biden practically jumped out of his chair and shuffled off stage like a hungry geezer responding to the dinner bell at the nursing home.
Biden took off almost the entire month of August for vacation. His repose was interrupted by a brief visit to Maui, the scene of a horrific fire that had left hundreds dead and thousands homeless. Biden pirouetted in front of the audience and claimed a minor kitchen fire that occurred in his Delaware home a few decades earlier — in which he almost lost his cat, his 1967 Corvette, and his wife — was on par with the devastation suffered by Maui residents. Political leaders in Hawaii were covering up a vastly higher death toll than they admitted — and many if not most of the fatalities were due to profound government failures.
By the end of August, Biden “spent all or part of 382 of his presidency’s 957 days — or 40 percent — on personal overnight trips away from the White House, putting him on pace to become America’s most idle commander-in-chief,” the New York Post reported.
On the other hand, I have quite a strong loyalty to one concept of governance—that of liberty—minimal government. The Athenians were on the right track but were unable to sustain their idea over the long haul. Similarly, the Magna Carta was an excellent step in the right direction. Better still was the US Constitution. To all of these efforts I feel loyalty. But, as stated above, such a high-minded concept is elusive and, when it occurs, may not last throughout the lifetime of the individual.
Recently, after reading an essay of mine, a reader angrily questioned my loyalty to the USA. My immediate reaction was that I’m not a US citizen. I therefore tend to observe the US dispassionately, just as I’d observe any of the nearly 200 “foreign” countries in the world.
But, as I’m British, what if he’d questioned my loyalty to the UK? Would he have a valid point? Well, at the very least, he’d certainly have a question worthy of an answer.
I, of course, have a legal right to live and work in the UK, and yet I choose not to. It’s simply not my idea of a great country in which to reside. As much as I regard the traditional English village to be an ideal environment in which to live, I reside elsewhere. The reason is that I place a very high value on personal freedom, a nonintrusive government, and a populace that doesn’t feel that it’s entitled to largesse that’s been forcibly taken from another segment of the population.
But that doesn’t exactly address the question of “loyalty,” does it? Well, there, I must confess, I tend to answer the question with another question. Whenever someone speaks to me of his loyalty to his country, I’m inclined to ask him to define “country.”
We are now in an existential struggle to preserve the values that founded the most successful constitutional system in the history of the world.
It is our legacy that now can be either boldly defended by a grateful people or lost in the whimper of a disinterested generation.
Rejection of the Constitution began at roughly the time the ink was dry. Government employees are required to uphold the constitution. The very few that try are duly punished.
Below is my column in Fox.com on the poll released last week showing an increasing number of citizens have lost faith in our constitutional system and now view violence as warranted to silence those with opposing views.
It is a crisis of faith that represents the greatest possible threat to our Republic. The loss of faith and fealty constitutes one of the greatest crises that our nation has faced since its foundation.
Here is the column:
A recent startling poll shows that a majority of voters not only view the opposing party as a threat to the nation but justifying violence to combat their agenda. The poll captures a crisis of faith that I have been writing about for over a decade as an academic and a commentator. Many now question democracy as a sustainable system of government. It represents the single greatest threat to this nation: a citizenry that has lost faith not just with our system of government but with each other.
The polls by the University of Virginia Center for Politics shows a nation at war with itself. Fifty-two percent of Biden supporters say Republicans are now a threat to American life while 47 percent of Trump supporters say the same about Democrats.
Among Biden supporters, 41 percent now believe violence is justified “to stop [Republicans] from achieving their goals.” An almost identical percentage, 38 percent, of Trump supporters now embrace violence to stop Democrats.
Not surprisingly, many of these people have lost faith in democracy. Some 31 percent of Trump supporters believe that the nation should explore alternative forms of government. Roughly a quarter (24 percent) of Biden supporters also question the viability of democracy.
Faith is the one thing that no system of government can do without. Without faith in the underlying values of a constitutional system, authority rests on a mix of coercion and capitulation.
For years, I have written about this growing loss of faith and how it has been fueled by our intellectual and political elites. In the echo chamber of news and social media, citizens constantly hear how the opposing party is composed of “traitors” and how the constitutional system works to protect enemies of the people.
Viewers now get a steady diet of figures like MSNBC commentator Elie Mystal who called the U.S. Constitution “trash” and argued that we should simply just dump it.
In a New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the Constitution to be “radically altered” to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
MCViewPoint 
