U.S. Constitution

There has always been a powerful, even existential, tension between the established principles of the U.S. Constitution and natural law and our better human aspirations, especially the humanitarian aspirations of elites. Historically, the U.S. Constitution began its life as an attempted formal written expression of the latter two.

Yet, over time, American executives, legislators and jurists have found that their perceptions of what should be and what is codified in law are not necessarily the same, and in frustration they have frequently resorted to short cuts, to the detriment of Constitutional interpretation, and worse, the growth of a tradition of its abuse.

American Constitutional history is, of course, greatly complicated by the history of slavery. It is also greatly complicated, however, by the history of money and its control by national and supra-national financial interests. Both slavery and the ability to control money have perverted the American economy and the American spirit.

One can see these twin threads of corruption played out in history in a piece by Louis Michael Seidman in the New York Times, entitled "Let’s Give Up on the Constitution."

Every generation finds a way of dismissing the historical and governmental significance of the Constitution with a clever turn of phrase. The most recent and notorious example of this trend is probably found in remarks by President Obama as he was just entering the national scene "2001 Obama WBEZ Interview Redistribution Wealth Warren Court."

The irony is that the efforts to eliminate slavery and to control money have greatly weakened the Constitution and its traditions of limited government, personal responsibility and the rule of law, so much so that the very means of defending human freedom and commerce have been lost in the process.

Yet such is the fruit of the labors of the impatient, especially the impatient elites who are ignorant of history. In effect they have gradually transformed a stable system, which was codified by a written Constitution, into a dangerously fluid situation marked by legal realism.

There does, given human history's sorry record, seem to be a dismal inevitability to it all. Perhaps Spengler was right after all.