The Left clutches their pearls about the Constitution whenever the Right attempts to do anything productive, especially on immigration. Using buzzwords like “due process,” which they do not themselves believe in (as shown by the Covid lockdowns and treatment of the J6ers), is a standard Saul Alinsky tactic which is becoming less effective from overuse.

But what exactly does the Left mean by the Constitution? This term lends itself to manipulation because it is as ambiguous as it is grandiose. We have two diametrically opposed visions of what the Constitution means, as if it were two separate documents. Can this opposition be purely explained by how the Left argues in bad faith and is anti-white? Or is there perhaps something more?

Let’s do what the Left does and deconstruct what “the Constitution” really means. It is a social construct, after all.

Despite a superficial sense of unbroken continuity since 1776, the truth is that the US has had several constitutional revolutions. This is perfectly normal in history and usually nothing special. For example, France has had two Constitutional orders, the Fourth and Fifth Republics, since WWII alone. All Eastern Europe had to create new political orders when they regained their sovereignty with the collapse of the USSR. Even highly stable monarchies have the occasional succession dispute. But the key difference is that the American constitutional revolutions were undeclared.

Christopher Caldwell in his book The Age of Entitlement is spot on in explaining how in the 1960s, the original Constitution wasn’t just warped but outright replaced by Civil Rights legislation and caselaw. The judicial insurrection which Stephen Miller talks about happened a long time ago. The recent flurry of pro-migrant injunctions from district court judges (which the Supreme Court sternly struck down in Trump v. CASA) was just a more blatant phase of it.

There was an even earlier Constitutional revolution in the 1860s. Originally, the states and national government were supposed to be equal. Federalism is nice in theory, but in practice it was doomed to fail. Ultimate sovereignty cannot be divided. In fact, divided sovereignty is an oxymoron, as is even shared sovereignty. The question of which would be sovereign, the states or the federal government, was decided in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. General Sherman’s war crimes were then followed by the North’s vicious “Reconstruction” to further beat the states into submission.

But there was more. One of the acts of the very first Congress in 1790 was to limit citizenship to white people. Abraham Lincoln and many other abolitionists originally intended for the black slaves to be repatriated to Africa or the Caribbean, not made into America citizens. In 1862, Lincoln made his stance unequivocally clear when he told a delegation of black leaders to the White House:

You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.

The Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 went far beyond how the Thirteenth Amendment freed the slaves a few months before Lincoln’s death in 1865. Rather than sending them to overseas colonies or parallel societies within the US (such as the Indian reservations), these latter two amendments granted blacks legal equality with Americans, to include being able to serve on juries and vote.

On some level, many of the radical abolitionists who advocated for integration knew as Lincoln did that it would be harmful to both races. But behind their moral sanctimony, they were more interested in punishing Dixieland than in helping blacks. Anarcho-tyranny, anti-white judges, using violent blacks as a golem, and changing the electorate when they vote the wrong way is not new in American history.

A constitution is inherently tied to the people it is supposed to serve because the well-being of that people is, or at least should be, its ultimate goal. Thus, in addition to changing the people who will implement and interpret their constitution, radically changing a people changes their constitution because it changes its ultimate goal. There is a stark difference between serving the American people and serving the miscellaneous biomass that happens to reside within the US today. Thus, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments didn’t amend the Constitution, but destroyed it a full century before the Warren Court’s judicial activism.

Making the federal government sovereign over the states and making non-whites Americans were clean breaks from the original Constitution (and for what it matters, entirely unconsented too). It didn’t even last a century. There is no continuity.

No, we should not allow the Yankees and their successors to conflate the constitutions of the 1960s and 1860s with the original. Moreover, there is a final, third conflation which must be broken down: the Bill of Rights which was ratified in 1791 versus the Constitution of 1788 which it amended.

The Bill of Rights is commonly thought of as complimenting the Constitution, like salt and pepper. The truth is that they were essentially a drug deal between the Federalists and Antifederalists. They began in tension with each other like oil and water, and seem to be ending that way too.

The substance of the Bill of Rights is ancient. It comes from Anglo-Saxon traditions which existed even prior to the Norman conquest of 1066 and which go back as far as the ancient Germanic concept of Freiheit. For example, the right to bear arms comes from the right and duty of freemen to own weapons to defend themselves and to serve in the fyrd, or Saxon militia. Trial by jury and due process were also ancient customs. The Bill of Rights excites people to this day because it is so primordial. In contrast, few people aside from academics have any interest in bicameralism, and most haven’t even heard of the Commerce Clause.

The substance of the Constitution, meaning the original seven articles (henceforth the Articles), is the hyper-rationality of the Enlightenment. In the grand scheme of things, the Enlightenment is still new, and should not be conflated with ancient customs well-rooted in history and genetic instinct. Most of the Enlightenment didn’t even come from England, but from France, making it not just new but also foreign. And in France, where it was allowed to manifest its true form, unhindered by a conservative English or American handbrake, it led to a blood drenched, proto-Bolshevik reign of terror. That something is new does not automatically discredit it, but it should be subject to heightened scrutiny. And we need not scrutinize the Enlightenment very much before we encounter the guillotines.

The essence of the Articles was that perfect rules could overcome the realities of human nature. But rules are the form, not the substance, and it not the rules which mold men but men who mold rules. Fretting over legalism is as silly as thinking that a neighborhood is defined more by its Home Owner Association rules than by the type of people who live there. Neighborhoods in Smallville, San Clemente, and Compton could have the exact same HOA rules but would still be drastically different communities. Likewise, if we copy-pasted the US Constitution onto Austria, Italy, the Shire, or Liberia we would also have completely different political orders. Imagine thinking otherwise. As Oswald Spengler said:

On the other hand the worshippers of political ideals create out of nothing. Their intellectual freedom is astounding, but their castles of the mind, built of airy concepts like wisdom and righteousness, liberty and equality, are in the end all the same; they are built from the top story downwards.

The prime theme of the Articles is separation of powers. Yes, some aspects of the separation of powers are ancient, but the ancient ones are generally moderate. Extreme separation of powers was a reaction against absolute monarchy, but absolute monarchy is almost as new as the Enlightenment. The Magna Carta checking the power of the king with that of the Church and nobility in 1215 was a return to the status quo of European feudalism and a far cry from the Enlightenment’s hyper-rationality and ultraviolent extremism.

Admittedly, the separation of powers found in the Articles was not exclusively a product of the Enlightenment. The Founders were also copying the separation of powers found in the ancient Roman Republic, which did work wondrously, and the advice of the Socratic philosophers to build a mixed regime by the one, the few, and the many. But the Roman system was created by and used by ancient Italians who were near indistinguishable from Renaissance and modern-day Italians. Saxons and Romans might both be European, but they are not the same.

So why could the ancient Romans make separation of powers work while the Anglo-Saxon attempt to copy them quickly crashed and burned? The key lies with James Madison in Federalist Paper #51: “Let ambition check ambition.” The Italians were able to make separation of powers work because they were and are a fiery, ambitious, no-nonsense people. The history of the SPQR reads like a mafia movie because, as every good mafia movie emphasizes, there is a direct line of continuity between the Romans, the Renaissance, and the mafia. It’s the same people doing the same thing according to different forms in different times.

No disrespect, but the Saxons are too polite. Thus, we are slouching towards Weimar because “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It doesn’t help that the US was infiltrated by hostile foreigners such as Jews, Indians, and Chinese who are good at exploiting rules, principles, and values while having no respect for them. Therefore, the separation of powers provides none of the promised checks and balances for anti-American policies, while even the most basic of patriotic policies face overwhelming gridlock.

Furthermore, I am frankly puzzled by why the Founders wanted to copy and paste the Roman system of checks and balances when they had ambitions of westward expansion. The Founders were familiar with Edward Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire along with Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline which argue that the Roman conquests facilitated the rise of autocracy. This was due to the difficulty of controlling the expanded military necessary for a vast empire along with the previously unimaginable amounts of wealth and power up for grabs.

But the concept of Manifest Destiny, and thereby building an American Imperium, was present from the very start even if the term wasn’t coined until 1845 by John L. O’Sullivan. In fact, one of the main causes of the American Revolution was a desire to expand westward over the Appalachian Mountains, both because offense was the best defense against Indian raids, and to conquer vast wilderness realms which would be transformed by the first civilized people to seize them. (The British prohibited westward expansion because they did not want to administer or defend that land and especially when they considered the American colonies to be a low priority). And the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-6, which was dispatched not that long after the Bill of Rights and Constitution of 1788 and 1791, showed that reaching the Pacific was a goal from very early on.

The vision of a continent spanning American Empire was incompatible with a Constitution modeled after the Roman Republic. Why wouldn’t that “new order for the ages” go the exact same route as the SPQR and become an autocratic Imperium? Jesus? Enlightened rationality? A Masonic deep state? The most likely explanation I can conceive is that the Founders envisioned a gradual expansion and thus a moderate transformation. But America expanded much quicker than Rome.

The great questions of history are not determined by constitutions, it is history which determines constitutions. And American history has determined that America will be an autocracy. The only question is whose autocracy, and whether the Bill of Rights will continue to exist under it.

When the Right talks about the Constitution, they almost exclusively mean the Bill of Rights within the context of serving the American people.

When the Left talks about the Constitution, they almost exclusively mean the HOA rules of the Articles or the subversive case law of the Warren Court, which heavily relied upon a warped reading of the Fourteenth Amendment which itself is highly sketchy due to being passed through brute coercion rather than consent. And of course, the Left’s reading is entirely focused on fulfilling the antiwhite vision of John Lennon’s “Imagine” in which random foreigners are not just made equal to, but exalted above real Americans.

There is no “the Constitution” as in a single unbroken political tradition. The Bill of Rights was conceived more in opposition to the Articles than in tandem with them. The original order of 1791 was gravely wounded in the Civil War and its aftermath, was further mutilated by the Warren Court, and is now threatened with a final killing blow from a judicial insurrection.

For the Constitution of the Right to live, the Left’s may have to die.

https://counter-currents.com/2025/07/what-constitution-are-we-even-talking-about