Seeing Through the Constitution

Stop Blaming the Liberals

From a Google Image Search - LA Times - 6.8.2025

Republicans "saw through" the Constitution during their days in the "wilderness" while the Democrats' ideology was winning hearts and minds. To keep a democracy, since the events of 1960 and beyond, we had to do what you do when reading a good fiction book, we had to "suspend our disbelief". Republicans stopped having faith in the paths that America and the world were travelling. They began to explore the weaknesses in our documents for possible loopholes. They found sections the founders left deliberately vague that they could exploit.

Republicans are conservatives. To keep their faith in God they had to find a way to justify their belief in white supremacy. They had to see Civil Rights laws as bad laws destroying morality in their nation. They had to see alternative genders as heresies. When they lost the Civil War, they were Democrats, but the former slave states now identify as Republican states. A few other states have joined, now making up the red states.

Republicans/conservatives embraced a form of narrow, judgmental religious beliefs; the mindset that brought to the world the horrors of the Inquisition. It's difficult to see Trump as a kind of Torquemada, feared leader of the Spanish Inquisition, but he is. He brings retribution. He cozies up to evangelicals because their view of morality involves the same bigotry and self-righteousness that in Trump and his loyalists has nothing to do with religion.

Republicans/conservatives decided they would be America's conscience. They believed that humanitarianism, science, and globalism (except for global capitalism) were changing America in ways they could not accept. Were all Republicans acting from an evangelical impetus. No. Many Republicans and political extremists were just "players". They were driven by bigotry, white supremacist sentiments, white nationalist sentiments, Nazi visions of a "pure" racial nation, using fascist methodologies to overthrow the liberal path America was on and to grab power and fortune.

America was at the mercy of forces of change. We were losing our industrial flavor and relying on computer technologies which did not hire out-of-work factory workers whose skills were a mismatch for new jobs. Many workers blamed their unemployment, their early retirement, and the loss of retirement funds on new hires, now called DEI hires. Black workers were taking their jobs, they imagined. Women were taking their jobs. Immigrants were taking their jobs. They did not see that it was outsourcing, cheap foreign labor, the opening of Russia and China to capitalism, and the end of an industrial moment in America that took their jobs. New-hire minority workers (black and brown workers and women) did not keep their new jobs for long.

Worries about climate change were ramping up and affecting the amount of manufacturing in America. The environmental movement was not new, but its advocates were becoming more strident. Events like acid rain falling in the Adirondacks (not an industrial area) and toxic communities like Love Canal, areas of the country that experienced more extreme weather, and flooding of city streets along the Miami coast inspired an interest in environmental science. Animal and plant extinctions added urgency. Melting ice caps promised complications in coastal geography, existence of island nations, trade and power patterns. Individuals whose wealth depended on the continued use of fossil fuels wanted to believe that humans could not affect climate changes, although past practice had shown this was not always the case.

The events of 9/11 brought global violence to America, something we had not previously been subject to on this scale by invaders. The knowledge that we allowed foreigners to train for these terrorist missions on our own soil raised suspicions about whether immigration was still safe even as our guilt about polluting the world suggested that climate migration might require some empathy. These differing ideas put conservatives and liberals at loggerheads.

Money has long been the path to power, the path to ideological control over an entire nation, even though that nation is not full of like-minded people. With money and power, you can control those who embrace liberalism and reverse the course of a nation. Whose ideas are likely to produce a better future? Should we retreat into continental isolation? Is this what annexing Canada, Greenland, and Mexico is about? Should we turn back the clock to become the manufacturing powerhouse we once were? Should we get our women back in line? Is male domination the answer? Can we be sure that continuing to rely on fossil fuels won't lead to our destruction? Will we be able to keep desperate climate migrants at bay? Will there be a third world war? Will there be more pandemics? So many new fears and unanswerable questions, inspire opposing theories about America's best path to the future. (Then add AI and generative AI, crypto coin and bitcoin, and the Singularity.)

Conservatives apparently came to believe that if they stripped the Constitution of any new liberal laws and Supreme Court decisions, if they took our documents back to the way they read before the Civil War, they could use this new ideology, "Originalism," to take over the US government without committing sedition or treason. Then they could steer or force the nation to pursue the conservative way.

However, this is not the 18th or 19th century. The world has moved on. America spread capitalism. We were not as successful at spreading democracy. We now live in a time when authoritarian nations surround Europe. We live in a time when wealth and power are shared, and America is not necessarily the world's alpha dog nation. We live in a time when our planet is on the brink of environmental disaster and the party of white nationalism believes that puny humans can't learn to accept the environmental requirements of a changing planet and adapt to them.

Learning to live lightly on the planet with 9 billion people requires these "players" to give up too much individual wealth and power. They would rather turn to genocide, isolation, Nazism, and fascism, to golden domes, and authoritarianism hoping to control a nation they will force to ignore earth's requirements (ignore science). They would rather require American women to produce babies (meaning white babies if they can devise a way to make that happen). It's scary to even imagine why conservative men find this an important goal. Do they worry that our nation will die by aging out, do they worry they won't have enough workers to turn into wage slaves. It is difficult, in the face of their fascism, their cruelty, their brutality to look forward to living in a state that they control.

Republicans/conservatives may have convinced some of our family members and friends that the liberals turned the world upside down and are the source of all the changes in the state of our world, but that is not what happened. Our colleges and universities did not have a grand plan to put America on a global path, to seek greater economic equality among nations, to address problems in third world nations that could spread to other nations, or to address religious animosities. These ideas simply reflected the zeitgeist of the moment and a desire to keep the peace.