Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, promoting his very patriotic book “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” recently penned an op-ed and appeared on MSNBC to float the idea that we need to toss out the United States Constitution — arguably the most eloquent and functional if imperfect governing document ever written, which every Western nation has modeled their own on — and replace it with something a little more Democratic™.
Here the psychopathic cross-eyed nerd — who would be the first to go in the kind of French Revolution-style chaos he’s fomenting, like Piggy in Lord of the Flies — explains.
Via Los Angeles Times (emphasis added):
“No matter the outcome of the November elections, it is urgent that there be a widespread recognition that American democracy is in danger and that reforms are essential. No form of government lasts forever, and it would be foolhardy to believe that the United States cannot fall prey to the forces that have ended democracies in many other countries.
Although the causes are complex, many of today’s problems can be traced back to choices made in drafting the Constitution, choices that are increasingly haunting us. After 200 years, it is time to begin thinking of drafting a new Constitution to create a more effective, more democratic government.
Signs abound that American democracy is in serious trouble. Confidence in the institutions of American government is at an all-time low. The Pew Research Center has been tracking public trust in government since 1958. It has gone from a high-water mark of 77% in 1964 to our contemporary 20%.* A poll in September 2023 indicated that only 4% of U.S. adults said the American political system worked “extremely or very well.” A recent Gallup poll had only 16% of Americans expressing approval for how Congress is performing its job.
Especially individuals in their 20s and 30s are losing faith in democracy. A Brookings Institution study found that 29% of “young Americans say that democracy is not always preferable to other political forms.””
First of all, “democracy” is a broad term that means different things in different contexts. When it’s used generally, it just means rule by the people, and in that sense is the antithesis of authoritarianism of various stripes.
But when it’s used as a specific governing model, direct democracy, of “pure democracy,” is a euphemism for mob rule. This is not what the Founders intended, because anyone who has read Lord of the Flies understands enough about human nature to foresee the outcome.
Second, the reason no one trusts the government is because it’s run by crooked totalitarian bastards — not because of academic concerns over the nuances of the Constitution.
But they’d rather not talk about any of that on MSNBC or any corporate state media, because they are functionally the state.
Continuing:
“There is an alternative to a spate of separate amendments: starting fresh by passing a new Constitution. It does not take much reflection to see the absurdity of using a document written for a small, poor and relatively inconsequential nation in the late 18th century to govern a large country of immense wealth in the technological world of the 21st century.
It may seem strange and frightening to suggest thinking of a new Constitution at a time of great partisan division. But that existed in 1787; in many of the states, the Constitution was just barely ratified.”
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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The only problem I have with the US constitution is that it has never been enforced, certainly not since the time of Lincoln when he ripped it to shreds to attack the South that was protesting about tax rises. He closed down newspapers that dared to disagree with his illegal war and jailed journalists en-masse for the same crime of wrong think.
WE have a SCOTUS that refuses point blank to jump in and short circuit any nonsense going on in the lower courts that is clearly anti-constitutional thereby enabling "the process is the punishment" brigades in the FBI/CIA etc etc etc to destroy people's freedoms and their finances all while the SCOTUS sit on their hands raking in fat salaries for doing precisely nothing. We have a SCOTUS that legalises child murder that no serious state should ever contemplate.
We have every member of the US armed forces that swear to uphold the constitution but are members of a standing armed forces that the constitution they swore to uphold completely bans except in absolute extremis and only then for a short period of time.
We have members of congress that swear to uphold the constitution and then raise the rafters in ovation after ovation when a Johnny foreigner tells them that freedom of speech in the US needs to be curtailed because he and his genocidal regime that are wholly beholden to US weapons of war for their rabid existence don't like it.
We have a country full of so-called Christians that swear allegiance to a pathetic flag when Christ told them never to swear an oath of any sort and to let their yes mean yes and their no mean no because anything else was enabling evil and we all surely see the evil the US has become where it destroys the village to save it.
The US constitution is not outdated, it has not failed America ......... but Americans from the first to the last have most assuredly failed the constitution.
Thanks for posting this. I'll be following your posts closely in future. A quick skim of this guy's Wikipedia page shows he ticks every single box to qualify for being a bona fide enemy of the American people. His loyalties lie elsewhere. His mission is to undermine the country that made his success possible. The United States is infested with many of his kind.