Defending the Constitution will be impossible if the American people fail to realize the importance and sacredness of the document.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote about “the Left’s assault on the Constitution.” Turley argues that the progressive attack on the Constitution goes beyond proposals to “pack” the Supreme Court, but also includes efforts to undermine free speech. Perhaps one of the most fundamental questions of the 2024 election will be the future of constitutionalism in the United States. Whether it is proposals to “pack” the Supreme Court, undermine free speech and religious liberty, abolish the Electoral College, or undermine the Second Amendment, there are many potential consequences of a progressive victory in 2024.
“Saving our democracy” is the rallying cry of the Democrat Party in the 2024 presidential campaign. Democrats and progressives (liberals) argue that former President Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, a charge that is not only ridiculous, but also dangerous. Further, it also reflects a hidden agenda using and abusing the term “democracy” to disguise a radical agenda that goes beyond “big government” taxing and spending. This warrants a prediction that if the Harris-Walz ticket wins and the Democrats control a majority in Congress, it will result in the largest progressive leap for our federal government since the New Deal.
Many progressives are arguing for a “renewed democracy” and claim the Constitution is both obsolete and a roadblock to their reform agenda. This is actually not a new philosophy, but an argument that progressives have been making since the late 19th century. Progressives argue that the Constitution itself is not only outdated, but that the principles contained within the Constitution are flawed. They seem to believe that modern society must evolve, and along with that new rights must also emerge.
President Woodrow Wilson reflected this philosophy when he wrote:
“Our life has broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political formulas do not fit the present problems; they read like documents taken out of a forgotten age.“
Wilson argued that as a nation “we are in the presence of a new organization of society.”
During the decade of the 1920s, or what became known as the Republican Ascendancy, a conservative direction descended on American politics. In the presidential election of 1920, the electorate rejected the progressive philosophy of President Woodrow Wilson and elected Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding as President. The Harding administration initiated a period of constitutional conservatism which battled against the progressive philosophy of the administrative state and the “living” Constitution. President Warren G. Harding described the Constitution as the “ark of the covenant of American liberty.”
Constitutional historian Melvin I. Urofsky described the 1920s “as a battleground between traditionalists fearful of the new ways and modernists eager to shed the shackles of older ideas and practices.” At the center of this battle was the Constitution and whether the Constitution was a document that limited the role of government or evolved and changed to meet the challenges of the 20th century by giving the federal government more power.
Political historian Morton Keller accurately described the conservative belief toward the Constitution during the 1920s as “a veritable cult of Constitution worship.” President Harding, Vice President and later President Calvin Coolidge, Chief Justice William Howard Taft, and President Herbert Hoover, among others, all fit into this mold of upholding and applying the Constitution to public policy.
In fact, Hoover joined Harding in describing the Constitution as the “Ark of the Covenant” of liberty. During the 1930s it was Hoover who boldly challenged President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. As the New Deal unfolded, Hoover argued that there were “nests of constitutional termites at work.”
A fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives is how they each view change. Change is inevitable, but from a conservative perspective, it should be prudent and measured. “My idea of a conservative is one who desires to retain the wisdom and experience of the past and who is prepared to apply the best of that wisdom and experience to meet the changes which are inevitable in every new generation,” wrote Herbert Hoover in defining conservatism.
This is the direct opposite of the progressive philosophy that views change as not only constant, but also insists the Constitution should not block “progress.” This was the view of Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt and is the view of Vice President Harris today.
Our present crisis over the Constitution is not just political, but cultural. The nation is in a civic education crisis where the American people and children, at all grade levels, are increasingly ignorant of the Constitution and the principles and history of the American Founding. Defending the Constitution will be impossible if the American people fail to realize the importance and sacredness of the document.
As President Warren G. Harding stated, “it is good to meet and drink at the fountain of wisdom inherited from the Founding Fathers of the republic.” “I wonder what the great [President George] Washington would utter in warning, in his passionate love of the republic and his deep concern about future welfare, if he could know the drift today,” noted Harding. Harding’s question is something that the nation must take seriously as it address the crisis in civic education, which is leading the republic down a perilous road.
In writing the “foreword” to James M. Beck’s The Constitution of the United States Coolidge wrote that “it is of first importance that the study of the Constitution should be [an] essential part of the education of the American youth.” He also warned that “the Constitution is not self-perpetuating:”
“If it is to survive, it will be because it has public support…The Constitution of the United States is the final refuge of every right that is enjoyed by any American. So long as it is observed, those rights will be secure. Whenever it falls into disrespect or disrepute, the end of orderly organized government, as we have known it for more than one hundred and twenty-five years, will be at hand. The Constitution represents a government of law. There is only one other form of authority, and that is a government of force. Americans must make their choice between these two. One signifies justice and liberty; the other tyranny and oppression. To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.“
As a nation, we need to spend more time at the “fountains of wisdom” of the Founding Fathers. President Calvin Coolidge stated: “The more I study it, the more I have come to admire it, realizing that no other document devised by the hand of man ever brought so much progress and happiness to humanity. The good it has wrought can never be measured.”
Americans must rediscover the “constitutional worship” that defined the conservatives of the 1920s. This will require both a political, and more importantly, a cultural reformation.
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