“Unburdened” by the Constitution

Last week at the Democratic National Convention, all sorts of major players from the party’s coalition gathered to nominate—or coronate—Kamala Harris for president.

That Harris had not received a single primary vote, or that she had been foisted on her party only after it became clear that the sitting president was likely to lose to former President Donald Trump, was less interesting perhaps than what Democrats perceive Harris will do as president.

Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, argued that Harris’ election would potentially be the time not merely to secure democracy but to reimagine it, with people who “look and love like us” at the center of the body politic. Robinson wanted to think of freedom in a more revolutionary way than what the founders “put down on that little piece of paper.”

Democrats have not been shy about what their reimagining of democracy looks like. They want to get rid of the Senate filibuster, a chief institutional check on the sort of narrow majorities that would have 51 percent of the country rule in a near despotic fashion over the other 49 percent. They want to pack the Supreme Court in an entirely unconstitutional fashion, neutering any institutional aspect of the government that they can’t control. And they tell us that they want to do this in the name of “democracy.”

What’s interesting, of course, is that this isn’t new. Throughout history, revolutionaries have, in the name of democracy, instituted the worst sort of tyrannies humankind has ever seen. During the French Revolution, the Jacobins, in the name of democracy and progress, created an unhinged and unstable regime that ended up murdering thousands of French citizens. The anarchy and bloodshed of the first French Republic ended with the rise of an actual despot, Napoleon Bonaparte. His nephew, Napoleon III, figured out that appeals to democracy were effective ways to maintain control. He loudly supported one-man, one-vote democracy and used plebiscite after plebiscite to secure his hold over the government and its people. Likewise, Democrats seem willing to seize power whenever they win a presidential election, even as they routinely lose state-level elections.

Among evangelicals and particularly well-known commentators, it is popular to play a sort of both-sides game with American politics. Both parties are bad, we are told. And to some extent, that’s true in that Trump and Harris belong nowhere near the presidency. But the Democrats have gone one step further and proposed a political ideology that moves Americans past their settled constitutional state and into a regime devoted to cultural, political, and social revolution. Harris’ repetitive and mindless incantation of “What can be, unburdened by what has been” is less cartoonish and more legitimately worrisome than anything else she says in public because it portrays her belief that humans can somehow escape the past and escape history.

Every totalitarian state in modern history—from the French Revolution’s Year One to the Soviet Union’s Red October to Communist China’s Cultural Revolution to Pol Pot’s Year Zero—has been predicated on the belief that humanity can start anew, cleansed of the imperfections of what has been. Nathaniel Hawthorne warned of this disposition in his short story “Earth’s Holocaust,” where a group of progress-oriented Americans burn up Western civilization in a great bonfire, hoping to rid human society of its past ills. At the end of the story, the arsonists meet a gleeful Satan who laughingly tells them that the source of the world’s ills was none other than the human heart, not the imperfect but still beautiful history of Western civilization.

Kamala Harris and her surrogates seem convinced that if they just could finally get rid of the U.S. Constitution, American history, and Americans who revere both, they could build a perfect world. It is as stupid, ignorant, and dangerous a notion now as it was in Hawthorne’s time.