What Explains Today’s Political Craziness?

Extreme socialist proposals are on the rise, and a shocking number of Americans  — particularly among the young and “educated” — are taking them seriously.  Where have these ideas come from?

Abolish the Senate.  Abolish the Electoral College.  Make the Supreme Court and President subservient to the House of Representatives.  Open the borders and give all entrants the right to vote.  Eliminate or shackle law enforcement.

These proposals have a common goal — to facilitate enactment of the socialists’ agenda.

The proponents claim the U.S. Senate is “undemocratic” because it gives two votes to each state, regardless of population, which restrains the power of big-city voters.  In addition, the six-year terms of senators, and the internal procedures of the Senate, create barriers to fast-tracking legislation that might be supported by a narrow majority.  The Electoral College is deemed undemocratic for similar reasons.  The President is an undemocratic force in that he or she can veto measures adopted by the legislature, and the Supreme Court is undemocratic in that it can strike down legislation favored by a majority of the people.

These proposals have not suddenly sprung up from nowhere.  They have incubated for a long time, including in our schools.  The Fairfax County Public School System (FCPS) is illustrative.  Its policies and its social studies curricula can easily lead our youth to conclude that our Constitution is seriously flawed.

The leftists are right in one sense.  The Constitution does not establish a purely democratic system of government.  The Founders quite deliberately rejected such a system, for good reasons.  Political thinkers have recognized for more than two millennia that unfettered democracy can lead to rash measures and tyranny of the majority, trampling individual rights and liberties (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Montesquieu, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, to name a few).  Historical experience has confirmed, again and again, that the “people’s will,” if unrestricted, can lead to mob rule, chaos and dictatorship.  The aftermaths of the French and Russian Revolutions are cases in point.  As constitutional scholar Jonathon Turley states in his recent book Rage and the Republic, “the greatest threat to a democratic system in history has been the rise of majoritarian tyranny, the despotism of the many over the few.”

To avoid this, our Founding Fathers opted for a constitutional republic — a system where the people select their leaders but where the leaders are constrained by a written constitution.  In the U.S. Constitution, federal powers are limited and enumerated; other authority is left to the States.  In addition, federal authority is divided among three co-equal branches, each having checks and balances on the others.  Also, the Constitution requires legislation to be approved by two separate bodies (a Senate and House of Representatives), which are elected by somewhat different constituencies for different terms of office.  And, when the legislature does enact a law, it is subject to an executive veto and judicial review. A further check is the Bill of Rights, which protects individual liberties against overreaching conduct by the legislature and the executive.  All of this was intentionally adopted to thwart the goals of those who might seek to enact radical, ill-considered, unfair legislation.

In my high school Civics course in the 1960s, I learned that our Founders were wise and far-sighted in adopting this framework.  I suspect that almost all readers of this article received similar educations about our constitutional system.

How about today?  Unfortunately, not so much.

In early 2022 Fairfax Schools Monitor obtained a copy of the Curriculum Guide that FCPS was providing to teachers for the U.S. Government course taken by 12th graders. It is a shocking document.

The course summary states that the priority is to teach students “social science thinking skills and practices, with an emphasis on the concepts of power, position, bias, and agency.”  The Guide for the two-week unit on the U.S. Constitution (HERE), states that it is “a study in power and privilege.”  It explains that the three “essential standards” for teaching about the Constitution are (i) to understand the federal system of government “with an emphasis on the concepts of power, position, bias, and agency”; (ii) to “analyze the harmful impact of bias and injustice on the world”; and (iii) “to stand up to exclusion, prejudice and injustice.”  Teachers are told that the “intended learning outcome” is to “develop [students’] understanding of agency, power and privilege by analyzing the American Constitution” and “to analyze the harmful consequences of bias and prejudice in the founding of America’s government structure ….”!!!

In other words, instead of teaching that the Constitution created a wise, carefully-crafted structure for stable and reasonable governance, FCPS teachers are told to portray it as a deeply flawed instrument that embodies bias, injustice and privilege.

The Curriculum Guide does not specify how the Constitution is allegedly flawed.  Presumably, however, it is referring to the facts that the Founders were all men, that the 1787 Constitution did not give women a right to vote, and that it didn’t abolish slavery.  The first two of these points simply reflect societal norms of the Eighteenth Century, not a denial of rights that women enjoyed previously or elsewhere.  And as for the evil of slavery, the designers of the Curriculum Guide fail to mention that it would have been impossible in the 1780s to unite thirteen colonies into a single nation if a prerequisite for doing so was to abolish slavery; that would have been a nonstarter for the Southern colonies.  The FCPS course designers also fail to mention that the Constitution included a mechanism for future amendments, and that this mechanism was later used to prohibit slavery (the 13th -15th Amendments), and to guarantee that women would have the right to vote (the 19th Amendment).

In any event, even if the original Constitution was flawed because of its failure to grant equal rights to women and African Americans, it is grossly inappropriate to treat these failures as the main points to be learned about our governing document.  To do so, as the FCPS Curriculum Guide does, impugns the Founders’ great step forward in creating a workable structure for governance of, by and for the people.  It also undermines unity and patriotism in the 21st Century.

So, if you have wondered how stupid, crazy proposals to rewrite the Constitution can take hold, begin by looking at our public schools.

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