Republicans Unmasked

The United States Constitution begins “We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union . . .” The writers didn’t say “to form a perfect union;” rather they added a questioning and qualifying adjective. They did not mean to aspire to achieve a state of perfection but instead create a government that aspired to yet did not achieve flawlessness. Given the struggle they undertook to create the Constitution and the necessary compromises they had to make to accomplish this task, they must have understood that the document and the nation it produced was far from perfect and would forever be so. They must have surely known that perfection was not and never would be attainable. But they did mean to try: but what did intend by ‘a more perfect union?’ More perfect than what? Certainly, more perfect than the monarchy from which they had most recently achieved independence. More perfect than the monarchies from which they had fled. More perfect than the loose union they had established earlier in the Articles of Confederation Though the preamble to the Constitution announces that We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America, those ideals were never achieved for ourselves and our posterity. The Constitution was from the beginning a flawed document that fashioned a flawed nation and bursting with high ideals that were paradoxically corrupt at their base.

     There were horrible compromises made in the writing the Constitution: I would cite the clause that defined the slave as being only three-fifths human; or the refusal in the document to end slavery and to grant suffrage to all citizens, whatever their race, gender or sexual preference. Slavery, the original sin of these United States, has cast its poison into the nation’s veins for these four hundred years, and the massacre of Native Americans and thefts of their land even yet stains the landscapes of the nation. Perfection might have been an ideal, though to whose idea of perfection we might assign the description ‘ideal’ I can’t say, but I know that the reality was much grimmer.

     But as it has been said, “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” One person’s ideal, or the ideal of any one social group remains specific to that faction and is not necessarily shared by any other group of people. Laws are created to advance toward that faction’s ideal. But, Isaiah Berlin writes, “The law cannot be a tyrant. Rousseau does not mean by liberty the ‘negative’ freedom of the individual not to be interfered with within a defined area, but the possession by all, and not merely by some, of the fully qualified members of a society of a share in the public power which is entitled to interfere with every aspect of every citizen’s life.”      And so I consider at a minimum that the voter suppression enactments that the Republican majority are enforcing throughout the country are simply a usurpation of the rights of citizens to participate in their choice of ideals. But the Republicans, having legitimately lost the Presidency and the majority of both houses of Congress, mean to change the rules so that the people that voted for the other parties and against them will not be able to vote in the next election.  Their actions in the words of Isaiah Berlin say to the rest of us, "Since I know which way to drive the human caravan; and since you are ignorant of what I know, you cannot be allowed to have liberty of choice even within the narrowest of limits, if the goal is to be reached . . . I know what you need, what all men need . . . What choice have we, who have the knowledge, but to be willing to sacrifice them all?” Of course, their knowledge is horribly flawed, and it is founded on flagrant lies and naked prejudices. It seems much less than true that for the Republicans their actions stem from ideals; rather, I believe their actions are exercises of power and a grasping for complete control for the sake of holding power and not to promote the general welfare or secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Berlin suggests that this quest for perfection rests at the center of the rise of the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century. I think the Republicans have become no better than the fascists and perhaps have even become them.