From the time Barack Obama received the Democratic Party\u2019s presidential nomination, his detractors to his right have repeatedly lambasted him for his disdain for the Constitution.\u00a0 From FOX News personalities to talk radio hosts, many are the self-professed champions of the Constitution who spare no occasion to warn the rest of us of the \u201cradical\u201d designs that Obama and his minions seek to impose upon the Republic bequeathed to us by the Founders.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lest there be any confusion over what follows, let the record note that President Obama most definitely is <\/em>contemptuous toward the Constitutional Republic that our Founders sacrificed all to establish.\u00a0 I will go even further: even though he wouldn\u2019t dare say as much, given what is known of his ideology\u2014an ideology notable not only for its unmistakably leftist ideals, but for its racialism\u2014Obama, I am afraid, is probably quite contemptuous toward the Founders themselves (the Constitutional convention was, after all, whiter than a Tea Party rally!).\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n What his opponents say about him, in other words, is true and then some.<\/p>\n But while his Republican opponents may be truthful as far they go, they don\u2019t go nearly far enough, for in calling attention to the speck in Obama\u2019s eye, they fail to recognize the beam in their own.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Constitution that such establishment \u201cconservatives\u201d tirelessly invoke has been rendered largely irrelevant by both Republican and Democrat alike.\u00a0 And this has been the case for a long, long time.\u00a0 In fact, ironically, the case can and has been made, and with far more eloquence and force than I am capable of mustering at this juncture, that if we could identify one person who could be said to have hammered the first nail in the coffin of the Constitutional Republic of our Founders, it was a Republican<\/em>: Abraham Lincoln.\u00a0<\/p>\n From the time of the War Between the States, America has assumed a shape that the Founding generation would have found abhorrent, for from that moment, the individual states\u2014sovereign entities all of them\u2014were essentially reduced to agents of the national government that they created.\u00a0 Thanks to the labors of \u201cHonest Abe\u201d\u2014who Republicans and \u201cconservatives\u201d still regard as America\u2019s best president\u2014the father became the son and the son the father as the creature overcame its creators and the federal government broke loose of the fetters that the states had thrown upon it.<\/p>\n The kind of association delineated by the United States Constitution is what has been called a civil association. <\/em>Political philosophers from throughout the centuries have invested much energy and imagination into distinguishing a civil association from other understandings of a state.\u00a0 Whether it is Hobbes or Montesquieu, Hume or Kant, Burke or Oakeshott, a study of such portraits brings some common features into focus\u2014features embodied by our Constitution.<\/p>\n First of all, the civil association to which our Constitution gives expression is indeed a moral <\/em>association.\u00a0 What this means, however, is that the terms of which it consists and with respect to which associates are related to one another are not <\/em>devices for achieving substantive results<\/em>; they are formal conditions<\/em>\u2014laws\u2014that the associates are obligated to satisfy regardless <\/em>of the results on which they set their sights.\u00a0 Like any morality, the morality of civil association prescribes general principles that are indifferent to the many possible ways in which those principles can be lived out.\u00a0 Or the laws of a civil association are like the rules of a game: they are impartial<\/em> with respect to the players\u2014who, in this case, are the associates (or citizens).\u00a0<\/p>\n Second, although we don\u2019t literally misspeak when we speak of \u201cConstitutional rights,\u201d the predominance of such talk among Americans has blinded us to the fact that it is really obligations<\/em> that the Constitution specifies, obligations that are equally distributed among the associates that compose the civil association that the Constitution defines.\u00a0 For example, \u201cfreedom of speech\u201d is nothing more or less than the obligation of each associate to refrain from impeding the liberty of every other associate to express himself.<\/p>\n In short, the Constitution consists of formal obligations to be fulfilled, not substantive plans to be executed.\u00a0 That is, it tells us not what <\/em>we have<\/em> to do, but how <\/em>we must act while doing whatever it is <\/em>we choose <\/em>to do. Today\u2019s \u201cconservatives,\u201d though, like their leftist opponents, are ok with the government violating the Constitution, as long as the \u201cwhat\u201d that it pursues is to their liking.<\/p>\n The government delineated by our Constitution is basically a government divided against itself with the federal government assigned an exceptionally limited role.\u00a0 Today\u2019s \u201cconservatives,\u201d however, in spite of all of their rhetoric regarding \u201climited government,\u201d to as great and quite possibly greater an extent than anyone else, have actually encouraged the homogenization of our once diverse government.\u00a0 That is, through their endorsement of the criminalization of drugs and prostitution, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, public education, an income tax, federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, No Child Left Behind, and \u201cfaith-based initiatives,\u201d to say nothing of their support of an ever larger military and an elaborate \u201cHomeland Security\u201d apparatus\u2014i.e. George W. Bush\u2019s \u201ccompassionate conservatism\u201d\u2014these \u201cconservatives\u201d have actually strengthened the hold of the federal government over the states.\u00a0<\/p>\n In light of these reflections, contemporary appeals to the Constitution and the Founders on the part of \u201cconservatives,\u201d leftists, and almost <\/em>everyone in between are, at the very best, anachronistic, for the vision of the Founders has long been a thing of the past. \u00a0<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n originally published\u00a0in The New American<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the time Barack Obama received the Democratic Party\u2019s presidential nomination, his detractors to his right have repeatedly lambasted him for his disdain for the Constitution.\u00a0 From FOX News personalities to talk radio hosts, many are the self-professed champions of the Constitution who spare no occasion to warn the rest of us of the \u201cradical\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n