The Ante-Constitutionalists

It is easy to deride the surreal superficiality of right-wing ideologues from Glenn Beck to Michelle Bachmann who seem to fancy themselves Constitutional scholars and celebrants of the "Spirit of the Founders" simply because they take care to post their authoritarian, theocratic, economically-illiterate, plutocratic, race-baiting woman-hating death-dealing rantings in a calligraphic font against a parchment colored background.

Yes, it is easy to poke fun at the phony "Constitutionalism" of those who would poke so many holes in the document in question: who demand the repeal of, here, the 14th Amendment, there, the 16th, then, the 17th, and on and on, all the while demanding all sorts of new Amendments to displace who knows how many others, debauching the First with police-state wish-fulfillment Amendments prohibiting flag-burning and criminalizing marriage equality, debauching privacy protections scattered across the Bill of Rights with an Amendment prohibiting abortion, and, again, on and on and on.

Indeed, it is easy to get the impression that today's Republicans despise pretty much every Amendment but the Second, and that they get that one wrong as well (the regulation of gun use was ubiquitous in Colonial America, and hardly disapproved of, meanwhile, taken together, the Second and Third Amendments emphasize the Founders concern that the United States remain a civilian rather than military order, since militarism erodes the norms and forms of representative governance). It is hard to shake the impression as well, I'm afraid, that the so-called "originalism" of too many of these Republicans reflects scarcely more than an ugly inchoate pining after the more institutionalized white-racism and patriarchy of a Founding-era America offering up the horrific spectacle of human slavery and women treated as chattel, a spectacle to which the original Constitution likewise testified to the world.

What I would point out, however, is that in their hostility to taxes, in their hostility to public investment in infrastructure, in their hostility to the administration of general welfare, in their indifference to the privatization of military and policing forces, in their prioritization of state over federal government (selective and incoherent, to be sure, but no less strident for that), these curiously anti-constitutional "Constitutionalists" are better grasped as ante-constitutional, as advocates, that is to say, for the state of affairs in the years between the Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution when an altogether different document, The Articles of Confederation, prevailed over the United States.

This is important because it doesn't just expose the interminable fulminating "Constitutional" discourse of Movement Republicanism as rife with hypocrisy, error, confusion, deception, and fraud. But this curious re-imagination of the federalizing Constitution as if it were in fact the more anarchic Articles of Confederation that predated it connects this Republican faux-"Constitutionalism" with that unique defiance of sense that characterizes so much of what the Republicans do and say in this catastrophic consummation of the irrational authoritarianism born in their reaction against the New Deal, nurtured in their Cold War hysteria, exacerbated in their embrace of the militant Christian Right, and crystallized in the rank corporate-militarist madness of the killer clown administration of George W. Bush:

As with their defiance of the warranted beliefs of the consensus of climate scientists on the subject of anthropogenic catastrophic climate change -- as with their hostility to elementary enabling tenets of contemporary biology, geology, cosmology -- as with their refusal of basic macro-economic literacy in the aftermath of Keynes -- as with their denigration of straightforward harm-reduction policy-assumptions on a range of issues from sex education, family planning, and drug use to gun control, capital punishment, and multilateral foreign diplomacy -- Republicans in affirming the vision of government embodied in the Articles are championing a vision that is not only ugly and foolish in conception and on its face, but one that has already been tried in reality and seen universally to have failed the test of reality.

Worse than their serial misrepresentations and incomprehensions of the Constitution they claim incessantly to worship as they defile it in word and spirit, Republican faux-Constitutionalists are championing in the name of Constitutionalism a return to the catastrophically dysfunctional irresponsible anarchy of the immediate post-Revolutionary Republic whose plain and palpable failure induced the Founders to write the Constitution and establish a working responsible solvent representative secular civilian law-abiding rights-respecting legitimate federal government in the first place.

As with so much they say and do these days, Republicans are not contributing substance to the debates into which they are injecting themselves, throwing their weight around, but exhibiting loudly and proudly that they lack the most basic enabling understanding that qualifies one to participate in the relevant debates at all, with the consequence that treating them otherwise can only debase the debate, render it insubstantial. Know-nothings cannot contribute to the advance of knowledge, criminals cannot contribute to the advance of the law, authoritarians cannot contribute to the advance of democracy, and to pretend otherwise is always only to join them in their mischief-making.