The Economist’s Lexington makes a provocative case that the Tea Baggers obsession with the Constitution and its framers has become unhealthy:
Accept for argument’s sake that those who argue this way have identified the right problem. The constitution, on its own, does not provide the solution. Indeed, there is something infantile in the belief of the constitution-worshippers that the complex political arguments of today can be settled by simple fidelity to a document written in the 18th century. Michael Klarman of the Harvard Law School has a label for this urge to seek revealed truth in the sacred texts. He calls it “constitutional idolatry”.
The constitution is a thing of wonder, all the more miraculous for having been written when the rest of the world’s peoples were still under the boot of kings and emperors (with the magnificent exception of Britain’s constitutional monarchy, of course). But many of the tea-partiers have invented a strangely ahistorical version of it. For example, they say that the framers’ aim was to check the central government and protect the rights of the states. In fact the constitution of 1787 set out to do the opposite: to bolster the centre and weaken the power the states had briefly enjoyed under the new republic’s Articles of Confederation of 1777.
Americans don’t realize quite how old the Constitution is by world standards. (An advantage of never being invaded or having your government overthrown.) It’s by far the world’s oldest and the only one from the 18th century that’s still in use.
Unfortunately, for the Teabag nation-the founding fathers have to be judged on who they really were-not the myths that have been created about them. And they have to look at the whole Constitution, as amended, a point I have made before. I find it instructive that tea baggers love the Constitution and pronounce that it should be strictly adhered to, except when it comes to issues they disagree with, issues like the 14th Amendment, which suddenly is flawed and out of date.