Welcome back to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America Podcast.
Thomas Paine believed that Americans must control their constitutions of government, that they should revise and update it every generation. But the Framers, subverting Paine's vision of a democratically controlled government, intentionally left out of their Constitution any process through which the people could do just that. As Jerry Fresia points out in episode 3, that was because their Constitution was designed to prioritize the individual accumulation of wealth and property over the well-being of society as a whole. The Framers did not want that system to be changed. In fact, as we are about to find out, they really did not want the system to even work, and peaceful political revolution was to be repressed at all costs.
In the previous episode, we discussed the kinds of changes we could make to our constitution which would make it more effective and democratic. We also noted that Americans, unlike in any other country, have an unusual reverence for their Constitution. As a consequence, our Constitution has remained frozen for over 230 years. Before we can even begin to think about making changes to our Constitution, like the ones we discussed in episode 4, we need to understand more about this rather bizarre reverence Americans have for their Constitution. For that, I’ve asked Daniel Lazar to talk with us about his book, The Frozen Republic.
There are more than a few big changes to our National Charter that are widely considered to be more effective and democratic than the ones we use today. We have talked about many of them already, yet those democratic improvements are essentially being ignored, even rejected by Americans, because Americans are captured by the very political system they are supposed to control. Americans don’t think about changing their constitution, or making a better one, because they blindly believe it is perfect and therefore impossible to improve.
Americans are largely unable to think rationally about the dysfunction of our political system or to express peacefully how it might be changed. We no longer understand how political systems even work, and we are afraid of each other. We no longer even want to control our constitutions of government. We’d rather suffer the intolerable consequences of a system driving us all over the edge than to dare to imagine we could create a better political system than the one we have inherited. It appears our constitution now controls us. We must obey it rather than critique it, and apparently, Americans prefer this kind of bondage to exercising their right to control their systems of government and to protect their liberty from the tyranny of the past.
Daniel Lazare is a journalist and the author of The Frozen Republic (1996), The Velvet Coup (2001), and America’s Undeclared War (2001). He is currently working on a book about the politics of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and he has been a long outspoken critic of the almost religious reverence of our Constitution, and he is here today to explain why.
Daniel, welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in American Podcast, it's great to have you here!