The Clueless Constitution: Welcome Aboard

For all the evils that twitter put in front of our eyes (not forces, because we can always turn it off, but that’s an issue for another day), some of the worst come from surprising sources. CATO’s Jonathan Banks brought this bit of news: “Coming soon to Trump’s America: A new era of minority activism.” Well, that’s good to hear. Activism is what everyone should be doing, and indeed, minorities should certainly assert their views.

But the good news didn’t last very long.

Deep down, millions of Americans believe a simple morality tale that goes something like this: The white Christian establishment is the original source and continuing guardian of America’s tradition of liberty and limited government, and minorities threaten it because they don’t share the same attachments.

This has always been nonsense. But in Donald Trump’s America, that will become even more obvious. Indeed, if America’s liberal democracy has a future, it is no longer with Trump’s overwhelmingly white backers, but with minorities.

Cite please? Well, of course, that’s silly. Hyperbole needs no cite, and this claim is wild hyperbole, believed only because it’s believed. Sure, there are facts in there. Like it or not, our founding fathers were white Christians, and they were certainly the establishment of their day, but it’s been a long time since then, and we’ve been through a few changes. Ending slavery was a biggie.

Does anybody argue that Trump was the candidate elected to safeguard the Constitution? Then again, neither was Clinton, who is white and Christian as well. After a litany of horribles that Trump may (or may not) cause, we hit paydirt.

All of these tendencies need to be forcefully resisted. But where will this resistance come from? Not whites.

It’s not exactly clear what is meant by “forcefully.” Take up arms against the government? Is this a call for revolution?  I don’t think so. I hope not, because there is a very good chance that will end up with a lot of dead bodies of people of color, and that would be a terrible thing.

But “not whites”?

Now, obviously, tens of millions of white people actively opposed Trump. And equally obviously, not all the white folks who voted for Trump necessarily approve of his character or tactics — and are appalled by his racism. But too many of them also didn’t think that his executive excesses posed a huge danger to them — or else they wouldn’t have pulled the lever for him. That’s also the reason why they’ll likely look the other way if Trump tramples the Constitution.

The writer, Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation, has some mad mind-reading skillz. It’s not easy to know what tens of millions of people are thinking. It’s even harder to know what they will do in the future. Yet, she apparently does. Very impressive.

The best hope then to rein in Trump’s future excesses comes not from white people — but his prospective victims, minorities.

That’s great news. Who doesn’t want the best hope to prevent “future excesses” and the “trampling of the Constitution”? I do, even if I’m not up to the task. So how is this going to happen? What should minorities do? How will this trampling be thwarted?

Wait, what? Nothing? Not one single, itty-bitty, tiny, itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy thing? Well, there’s this:

The fear and trembling that Trump is striking among minorities, about 40 percent of the population, could be a potent force to protect the Constitution. Minorities have every reason to heighten their vigilance. They need the Constitution’s protections more than ever. This is one reason why so many of them are out on the streets protesting Trump’s election. These protests will escalate if the Trump presidency unfolds as expected — as will lawsuits against his administration by civil libertarian outfits.

We may be entering a new era of minority activism.

Protests? Okay, they are always fun and effective. Maybe a nice petition at Change.org, because they work miracles. Oh, lawsuits. Those are the thingies filed by lawyers. Lawyers are those people who go to law school, pass bar exams, work hard to achieve competence with or without a logo or 1000 leads for $10. But they aren’t necessarily, you know, minority. And the color or gender of the lawyer doesn’t generally have much of anything to do with the merit of the suit or the effectiveness of the advocate.

You see. there are people now, lawyers, who have been fighting against unconstitutional laws and actions for quite a while. Actually, since the founding of the nation. Some are white and Christian. Others not so much. None of us give a shit about such matters. What we share is the fight for the Constitution.

And much as I hate to break this to you, we haven’t gotten a whole lot of support from much of any identity group, because they’ve been too preoccupied with their own self-interest to give a damn about the Constitution. So what makes you say this, tell the nice white folks who actually do the fighting that they suck?

This is, in a way, as it should be. After all, the whole purpose of the Constitution is to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. The only foolishness might have been the fairytale that a white majority with an abstract love for the Constitution alone could ever be a reliable custodian of America’s freedoms.

The “whole purpose”? Well, no. You pick a bad week to give up sniffing glue? But let’s chalk that up to facile rhetoric, like the simpletons who explain “the real problem,” as if Mencken never existed. But the rest of that sentence violated the rule against perpetuities, because anyone who reads it will be made stupider forever.

The phrase, “the tyranny of the majority,” is descriptive in that the legislative branch cannot enact laws that violate any person’s protected constitutional rights. Even if the majority of Americans want to outlaw hate speech, they can’t because the First Amendment prohibits the government from doing so. So those in opposition to such a law would be in the minority.

But that doesn’t make them “minorities,” as in black or Hispanic (and it goes without saying that women are not a minority, but you probably knew that already).  I see what you did there, and it cost me some brain cells. Why do you hate brain cells so much?

As for the “fairytale,” there has never been a majority of anyone in America, color or gender notwithstanding, that has loved the Constitution “alone” or been “a reliable custodian of America’s freedoms.”  That’s why some of us do it, long before Trump got elected and without regard to your relativistic notion of freedom.

But it will be nice to have more laboring oars to defend America’s freedom, even if they don’t have the slightest clue what the Constitution is all about. And we don’t give a damn whether they’re minorities or not. Welcome aboard.

 

 

17 thoughts on “The Clueless Constitution: Welcome Aboard

  1. Agammamon

    “The writer, Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation”

    Ah, her.

    I used to like some of her writing – I’m a fairly strong supporter of open borders and she seemed to have a decent grasp of why India is both doing as well and as poorly as it is. Unfortunately this election has driven her mad. She’s gone into a full-blown ‘white-panic’ mode and ran screaming to join the other racists.

    1. Agammamon

      “I used to like some of her writing”

      Or more correctly, I still like most of her older work, its the post-Trump stuff where she’s gone off the deep end.

  2. B. McLeod

    Lots of words there from Mr. Banks, but basically racism. But then, racism is OK for “progressive liberals,” ’cause their racism is good racism.

    1. SHG Post author

      Mr. Banks didn’t write the post. It was written by Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation. I mention that because both come from libertarian positions, and yet, this is quite the progressive slant.

  3. Mark

    Wednesday morning, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Jonah Goldberg feel the same sense of shock as I did upon Trump’s win. We typically agree on very little, but we shared the same degree of surprise and an appreciation of the enormity of the change.

    Shiksa thinks everything can fit neatly into a post-colonial textbook, but she’s no different than hundreds of others who fall back on what they’ve learned to explain what they don’t understand.

    1. SHG Post author

      Shiksa? I have no clue what Jonah Goldberg had to say Wednesday morning. I don’t know what Shikha thinks. I do know what she writes, and that what she wrote ranges from progressive gibberish to legal drivel. Had she not concluded with an outrageously ignorant expression of constitutional doctrine, I likely would have ignored the rest. The internet is replete with progressive gibberish, but the legal drivel out of Jonathan and Shikha was more than I could take.

  4. Norahc

    Sounds like Scott is laying the groundwork for a new third party to be on the next ticket…the Constitutionalist Party. The key party platform? Respect and defend the Constitution.

    The truly sad part is that we really need a party like that.

    1. SHG Post author

      Need it? You bet. Are there enough people who will grasp that we need it? Not a chance. It’s so much easier to indulge the feelz than think.

      1. Norahc

        It’s taken me a lot of years of my life to realize that I’m not a Republican or Democrat, but a Constitutionalist. Hopefully other people out there aren’t as slow on the uptake as I was.

  5. Kirk Hadley

    I wish she would’ve just said “I’m pandering to try to increase libertarianism’s popularity amongst minorities” instead of trying to polish that turd with a veneer of “legal philosophy.” But hey not everyone can be the candidate who supported AEDPA then told black folks she carries hot sauce so it’s all ok. Also because this was a vapid, meaningless comment I’ll go ahead and polish my own turd with a nice “Greenberg 2020.”

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