Gongol.com Archives: March 2025
March 8, 2025
Adapt and amend it, but don't dare try to end it
Among certain circles on the left, it is fashionable to assert that the Constitution is a bad document. Not just imperfect, but wholly unworthy of keeping. Perhaps it appeals to a proto-revolutionary instinct that shares a strain of thought with Trotsky's "permanent revolution", or perhaps it is merely misguided frustration with the outcomes the Constitution has recently produced. ■ The assertion, though, is utterly without merit and should be dismissed with prejudice. The Constitution is a human-generated document, full of compromises and artifacts of past ideas since reconsidered. That human quality means it is inevitably imperfect. ■ The Founders knew that. That's why the Constitution contains a mechanism for revision -- the amendment process in Article V. Knowing that humans are imperfect, they incorporated a process for self-correction, right from the start. ■ Some may argue that we have used that process too little. Others may argue that we have depended too heavily upon extra-Constitutional mechanisms (like Supreme Court cases and executive actions) to arrive at Constitutional corrections. Both observations may be right. ■ But for any and all of its flaws, the Constitution reflects not only the decisions of 1787, but also the subsequent evolution of thinking ever since. The continuity is the point: Like almost every technological product of our built environment, it has been changed and updated, often incrementally, with the context and knowledge of the time. ■ The Founders had means to latch their doors. Later on came deadbolt locks. Today, electronic keypad locks can be found almost anywhere. Each step along the way has been evolutionary, building upon both prior and contemporary knowledge. ■ Someone might reasonably say, "I think the lock can be improved". It would be unreasonable to say, "People still break into houses, so I think the concept of the lock is a bad one and should be thrown out." Too much knowledge is already embedded in the modern lock to imagine that starting entirely from scratch would be a better idea. ■ Likewise for the Constitution. The core concepts of the Constitution are balance and restraint. If outcomes look like they have become imbalanced or unrestrained, then the answer isn't to jettison the concepts but to demand loyalty to them. The Constitutional system we inhabit is the result of 236 years of incremental progress, and the flaws of its results are human flaws, first and foremost. ■ To their credit, the authors of the Constitution accounted heavily for human nature -- a nature that hasn't fundamentally changed since their time. What we know has changed, but not our nature. And what we know has been incorporated into the system through the consent of hundreds of millions of people ever since. ■ Those who think they know so much better that they could replace the system wholesale from a blank slate reveal only that they are infected by a terminal case of hubris. James Madison himself was sure that we could improve upon his work. But to replace it altogether requires thinking that we know better than everyone who contributed over nearly a quarter-millennium to what we now possess.
