(Doug, could you please send this to lbo-talk? I'm having problems with my mailbox.)
Kelley:
>the relentless critique crowd
>never seems to have anything else to offer, accept some vague claim that
>it'll be all better once we get rid of capitalism.
E.P. Thompson wrote some wicked critiques of the relentless critics, but The Making of the English Working Class also shows how political impulses can be diverted and debilitated by constitutionalism. Appeals to ancient liberties and witenagemots and Alfred the Great correspond to the divinations of the original intent of the benevolent ancestors. New ideas sprout up often enough, but they just don't appeal like What would Jefferson do? It took social disaster to change people's minds in England. . . . The critique of constitutionalism is good to keep out there just to keep people from feeling too shy to think about politics after the founders did all that founding. Jordan: On the subject of arms, the federalists promised that
the people, far from ever being disarmed, would be sufficiently
armed to check an oppressive standing army. The anti-federalists
feared that the body or the people as militia would be overpowered
by a select militia of standing army unless there was a specific
recognition of the individual right to keep and bear arms. Me: "The people as militia" obviously did not mean the Whiskey or Shays Rebellions. Real popular uprisings got put down. The people here probably means property owners, people who could legally shoot trespassers, slaves, and other infringers for reasons other than self defense.
The problem is not with the Constitution, it's with the ideology surrounding it. If it's not there and it could easily have gone in, it can't be such a great idea. Like rights to food and shelter. Was it Jean Kirkpatrick who called the UN Declaration on Human Rights a letter to Santa Claus?
As Henry observes, the Constitution doesn't specify any
socioeconomic system. Which means that what we're
seeing is not a function of the Constitutional
structure, but rather of the power of money --of
Capitalism, as Kelley points out-- to _subvert_ the
Constitution.
Me: How is capitalism is subverting the Constitution? Corporations as people and political money as political speech is the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution. That's them doing their job. The Constitution won't be any help here.
Henry:
It seems to me that the US Constitution is reasonably good document. The
problem is the regressive interpretation by a Supreme Court that bent on making
American society more repressive and exploitative than it needs be
Me:
Is regressive interpretation or progressive interpretation more of an abberration? The conservative side has pretty much won the fight in legal theory. They are all originalists now and it's understandable. It takes unusual creativity (plus mass unrest) to squeeze progress out of the Constitution. Don't hold your breath waiting for the next Warren Court. The 14th Amendment as interpreted by O'Connor et al. is going to be the main weapon in law and politics against any kind of antiracist progress.
Charles: Yes, the Amendment Provision has been dubbed the "revolution" provision by
some
authors. Me: so the revolution will get ratified by the House, the Senate, and 3/4 of state legislatures? It was the Reconstruction that made the Recon. amendments, not the other way around, right? Nick