Constitution Party: Worthless By Larken Rose
http://www.larkenrose.com/blogs/tmds-blog/2000.html
In my last message, I pointed out that the Libertarian Party has watered down its message, basically dumping the principle it was founded on, in order to get votes. Well, while I'm at it, I might as well offend some more people. The Constitution Party is also worthless. Why? Several reasons:
1) Contrary to the divine holiness some people image the Constitution to have, it really is just a piece of paper (or parchment). While some of what the Founders wrote--the Declaration more so than the Constitution--expressed some pretty darn important and profound concepts, they still ended up creating a ruling class. It was supposed to be a tiny, "limited" ruling class, but they still pretended to bestow upon politicians certain powers that you don't have, I don't have, and none of the writers or signers of the Constitution had. Nice trick.
Sorry, but the term "Constitutional principles" is an oxymoron. The Declaration, for example, stated that all men are created equal, in terms of rights, but the Constitution (in true Animal Farm fashion) then claimed to give some of those "equal" people the right to forcibly rob all the other "equal" people. Yes, the power of "taxation" was supposed to be significantly limited in several ways, but it was still the power to steal. How does that match the notion of everyone being "created equal," and the only purpose of "government" being to protect rights? It doesn't. It is a direct, blatant, glaring contradiction. And working hard to get us back to a glaring contradiction, as the Constitution Party does, is not a good idea.
2) The Constitution cannot consist of unwaivering principles, because it was designed to be amended. If the control freaks go through the official, formal procedure of "amending" out all those pesky limitations, then what? Then totalitarianism will become "Constitutional," and what would the Constitution Party say then? The truth is, instead of being some perfect expression of truth incarnate, the Constitution started as a huge, self-contradictory, illegitimate compromise, between some people who actually wanted individual freedom, and others who wanted to rule.
(It's worth noting that the predictions of the anti-Federalists, who didn't like the Constitution, turned out to be about a zillion times more accurate than the promises of the Federalists, who swore that the beast they were creating would remain small and meek.)
3) People have been so thoroughly trained to believe that freedom must be "legalized" before it is good, that they remain determined to bash their heads against the wall of the "political process" to achieve it. This is true of the Constitution Party and many others. If you believe in inalienable rights, why are you asking the politicians for "legislative" permission to do things? For example, the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution) describes things that "government" was not supposed to do at all-- yet they do them on a regular basis. If your answer is to try to elect people who will change that, you're implicitly conceding that they weren't inalienable rights to begin with. By definition, if you need a "law" to allow something, it's not a "right." So, aside from the contradictions in the Constitution itself, if you actually believed in the "inalienability" of rights described therein, you'd be doing whatever you could--including things the politicians have deemed "illegal"--to defend those rights. Begging the master to let you speak your mind, or to let you be armed, or to spare you from random searches and interrogations, and so on, carries with it the implied message that you need the master's permission to do those things. As a result, trying to regain "rights" via the political process is an inherent contradiction.
4) The American people, having been thoroughly indoctrinated into the cult of statism and the worship of collectivism, don't want what the Constitution describes. (Neither do I, but for very different reasons.) By playing the "democracy" game, the Constitution Party is basically conceding that what the majority wants is what matters. Yes, they would like the majority to agree with them, but since it doesn't, why play a game (i.e., voting) that merely reinforces the looney notion that the majority has the right to rule in any way it sees fit (or in any way it's duped into supporting)?
5) The Constitution created the monster you see now. No, this is not what it described, but (just like the theory of communism) that's what it actually resulted in in the real world. So, pretending for a moment that there is the slightest chance in hell that the American people would even support going back to the Constitution, why would anyone expect it to turn out differently next time?
(Incidentally, the ink was still wet on the Constitution when the principles described therein were trashed. If you haven't before, do a little research on the crushing of the Whiskey Rebellion and Shay's Rebellion (see correction below), the Louisiana Purchase, and the Aliens and Sedition Acts, for starters. Each of the first three "Presidents" trashed the Constitution, and any principles it pretended to be founded upon. Pretty much every President since then has done the same, though some more dramatically than others.)
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Again, I eagerly await the hate mail, since I just bashed what many treat as infallible, holy doctrine: the Constitution. But before you tell me how stupid/evil/insane I am, consider this:
There have always been opportunistic control freaks waiting to take any bit of truth, any righteous cause, any good idea, and turn it into power and control for themselves. The Founders stated a lot of profoundly important truths. For example, had they quit after the Declaration of Independence, I would have had very few complaints. But the fundamental principles stated by some were immediately hijacked by others for their own power.
Ironically, we have a fine analogy to study today. The Republican Party is now going to great lengths to hijack the ideas and enthusiasm of the "Tea Party" movement, to use as a source of power for itself. In other words, they are trying to use the advocacy of freedom as a tool to gain dominion over others. This is an exact rerun of what happened a couple hundred years ago, when a few pro- freedom radicals (e.g., Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, etc.) spoke the truth and got some attention, and some political conmen hijacked the results, and used it as a tool for power for themselves. The result was the Constitution. So before you bash me, make sure you're not accidentally cheering for the usurpers, thieves, liars and control freaks, instead of the people (like me) who actually want you to be free.
Larken Rose
http://www.larkenrose.com
(P.S. For those of you who think that at least a step toward freedom would be an improvement, I sympathize a bit. However, when has that ever actually happened? And why is there any reason to expect it to happen now, because of any "political" efforts?)
In this post, I incorrectly listed the Whiskey Rebellion AND Shay's Rebellion as taking place after the Constitution was ratified. The Whiskey Rebellion was after, but Shay's Rebellion was shortly before, under the "Articles of Confederation." It doesn't change the point, but I didn't want my history botch-up to go uncorrected.
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