It might be difficult to decide which is more offensive: the fact that a law school dean can be either so toweringly ignorant, or so dismissive, of Natural Rights that he can spout this drivel, the fact that the dean’s salary is tax subsidized, the fact that he can get a publishing contract to spread this curdled-cream collectivism, or that he can get such a receptive audience on the obnoxious MSNBC.
Whichever facet of this truly ugly political shadow-play one studies, it contributes to one’s understanding that many so-called “legal theorists” and politically motivated media members, as well as many of their politically powerful friends, love to promote both the canard that the U.S. government operates as “a/our democracy,” and that the U.S. Constitution is a clunky anachronism that puts said “democracy” at risk.
The latest high-profile deceiver in this regard is Erwin Chemerinsky, who is the author of the scintillating new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever” – so, of course, one can see his “democracy” canard in bold text. And the book is subtitled, “How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” allowing us to wonder how the so-called rule book that creates the federal offices and applies the limits to them also can be the thing that threatens itself.
Regardless of, or perhaps because of, these logical, historical, and philosophical problems, MSNBC August 30 made sure to offer the Berkeley Law Dean plenty of time to look the fool on “Morning Joe.”
🚩 Berkeley Law Dean Says It’s Time to Rewrite the Constitution
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) August 31, 2024
“Isn’t it time to start thinking of a new Constitution? Isn’t it absurd that we’re governed in 2024 by a Constitution written in 1787?” pic.twitter.com/yhyPHsvJDd
And Chemerinsky wasted no time to spout idiotic blather, releasing what appeared to be a rehearsed litany of complaints about the Constitution and how it seems to stand in the way of what he wants: more gang rule over innocent people and their own individual rights to property, their freedom of contract, their right to self-defense, and right of free speech.
First up, the Berkeley Law dean revealed his disdain for the fact that the Electoral College in 2020 chose for President someone who did not win the “popular vote.”
Which makes one wonder if he’s read anything by the founders and if he knows that they were well aware that the Electoral College was supposed to act as a check on large-population states lording it over small-population states.
Of course, the idea of state differentiation, and the concept that there might be vestigial state semi-autonomy, are verboten in Mr. Chemerinksy’s lexicon. It’s U.S. hegemon for him; it’s DC-Created-UNIFORMITY, and that includes your individuality.
It’s the tyranny of the majority, all for his totemic religion of “democracy.”
He and other collectivists claim to be fighting for “individual choice” – it’s their pretense, their fakery, that their tyrannical “democracy” means you get to control your life.
Actually, the way to lead to greater self-control is to allow for freedom, decentralization, and autonomy, not democratic pretenses that actually allow for gangsterism across an entire continent.
He added:
“Two Senators per state is undermining democracy.”
Since the Founders wanted the Senate to be composed of people who were chosen by the state legislators to represent state interest -- again, trying to balance population-heavy states that might have more sway in Congress -- and since many Americans view the 1913 Seventeenth Amendment as a massive cut against that principle, this law dean might want to return to the books, rather than WRITING books.
Chemerinsky also decries the fact that, as he says, “In the last session of Congress, there were 50 Democratic Senators and 50 Republican Senators, but the 50 Democratic Senators represented 42 million people.”
So what? Again, not only was the Senate designed to be the legislative body where state legislatures sent so-called “representatives” for their state governments, the very idea of “representation” in any political system is philosophically and logically impossible.
All forms of statism, be they “democracies,” “monarchies,” or “constitutional republics,” are imposed on people. By definition, they are involuntary. If they were voluntary associations of people, again, by definition, they would be socially, personally, achieved organizations and no one would be forced to be involved or to pay.
Likewise, “representation” in any political system is mathematically, temporally, and ethically impossible. There would never be enough so-called “representatives” in a political body to represent all the people under the rule of that government every time some idea is debated. Elected politicians don’t approach each person they “represent” to get their opinion on every new bill after they get elected. Political decisions effect multitudes who aren’t yet born, and if people believe in allowing their neighbors to truly represent their own interests, they cannot ethically impose a government on them and then claim those people are “represented.”
But this man loves to use the term “democracy” to pretend that mob rule means individual self-rule.
The way to allow each person to choose for himself is to eliminate the power of the state, in any form, over him. The US Constitution was an attempt to restrain the government coercion over individuals, and Mr. Chemerinsky does a disservice to us, to truth, and to logic by claiming, with the able assistance of MSNBC, that even more of the dangerous majority rule through government is akin to allowing for true decentralization and individual choice.
And MSNBC is not alone in promoting him. On August 31, the New York Times published a long, vacuous, screed by Jennifer Szalai pushing Chemerinsky’s book. Ranging from her complaint that Donald Trump didn’t win the “popular vote” yet appointed three Supreme Court Justices – Justices who helped overturn their gilded “Roe v. Wade” decision in 2022 and return the question of abortion statutes to where they belong, in the states – to her discussion of Chemerinsky’s posit that if the Constitution isn’t “amended” to allow for more gang rule over individual rights, the west coast states could secede to become “Pacifica,” Szalai also misses the point about freedom versus democracy.
In fact, by arguing that west coast states might secede to get away from the federal government, both she and Chemerinsky both tacitly admit to the benefits of decentralization over “rule by the mob,” they reveal the value of state autonomy within that confederation the founders tried to design, and they admit that smaller spheres of control are better than being at the mercy of the collectivist madding crowd.
Related: CA Assembly Passes Newsom-Favored, Tyranny-Flavored Call For Constitutional Convention To Ban Guns
In fact, their position even sends a high-five back to the secession of the Confederate States, which recognized that their interests were being crushed in the north-dominated, northern-population-favoring, D.C. government.
Clearly, these people don’t like the barriers the U.S. Constitution includes that are supposed to stop the growth of government, stop or retard the tyranny of the majority, and protect what is left of our rights from attack by politicians.
But in seeing how dismissive they are of those rights and those barriers, we can recall that, over 100 years ago, pro-liberty author and entrepreneur Lysander Spooner already explained to us that the Constitution had not stopped the predators from expanding their claims over us. He noted in his 1870 essay, “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority,” that not only had the Constitution proven an inadequate defense against political usurpation of our rights, he noted that none of us signed it. Technically, it has no authority over any of us because we were not a party to it, and only those who agree to join an organization can be said to be contractually obligated to abide by the agreement.
In other words, though the Constitution technically has no authority over us, the least we can do is ask the people who join that government and its inferior offices to abide by the rules.
They do not.
Instead, they, and they collectivist acolytes seem to do everything they can to undermine the barriers it contains that are supposed to stop “majority rule” over our individual, God-given rights, they get angry at us for asking to be left alone, and they use linguistic legerdemain like the word “democracy” to claim they are working for the little guy.
They are working against self-control, autonomy, and peace. They want people to forget that the founders decried "democracy," that people such as Ben Franklin said it was "two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch..."
And no magic words they try to employ can hide their hunger for power.