The Socialist's Constitution

Progressives are at base socialists in the Marxist mode. They won't admit it, because socialism has been discredited historically; but because markets will always produce winners and losers, and because different outcomes (inequality) are inherent to capitalism, the left's ultimate goal remains the eradication of the institutional structures that give rise to those patterns of difference.

In the American experience, however, the nation's founding saw the establishment of such robust institutions of liberty that the progressives have had to work piecemeal, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, in order to erect a structure of state socialism here at home. A central part of that program, clearly, has been the delegitimation of the American regime. All the recent attacks on American exceptionalism are right in that vein, along with the deranged periodic outbursts by leftists, screaming things like "I hate this G**-damned country!" (because they have to take personal responsibility for their own health).

And now three years into the Obama interregnum, left-wing radicals are becoming more aggressive in enunciating fundamental reforms to the constitutional order, designed to limit the classical liberal vision of the Founders. (Nancy Pelosi's call to amend the Constitution to limit conservative speech is one key example.) The protection of property rights was central to the constitutional project. As James Madison warned in Federalist #10, the mischiefs of faction could work to bring a majority to power that was determined to expropriate private property in the name of the people. It's no surprise then that our republican form of government, along with the separation of powers, was designed to protect minorities from the will of an unruly mob. The Founders feared "mobocracy" in pure majority rule. The signal achievement of the founding was to elevate the notion of individual liberty above that of collective rights, and that is today what is most despised by contemporary progressives qua socialists.

This is all frankly long-established and well-known. The problem for the left is that the constitutional order stands in their way. So what's the solution? Same as it's always been: change the narrative, lie and deceive, and then leverage into power a false epistemology that functions to radicalize the pre-revolutionary cadres and bolster the vanguard leaders to "fundamentally transform" the nation in the mold of the Marxist collective.

Today's New York Times provides a particularly good example in the op-ed from William Forbath, a radical labor historian at the University of Texas School of Law. Here's a long sample from Forbarth's essay, "Workingman’s Constitution," which is the lead commentary at the top of today's New York Times op-eds (p. 21):

WORK and opportunity, poverty and dependency, material security and insecurity: for generations of reformers, the constitutional importance of these subjects was self-evident. Laissez-faire government, unchecked corporate power and the deprivations and inequalities they bred weren’t just bad public policy — they were constitutional infirmities. But liberals have largely forgotten how to think, talk and fight along these lines.

And they’ve done so at the wrong time. The Supreme Court is again putting up constitutional barriers against laws to redress want and inequity. While it handed liberals a victory on the Affordable Care Act, it also gave a boost to conservatives to revive the old laissez-faire Constitution in the polity and courts: new doctrine and dictums for their attack on the welfare and regulatory state.

But there is a silver lining for liberals as well: in much the same way that the conservative court of the 1930s forced Franklin D. Roosevelt and his allies to construct the constitutional foundations of the New Deal state, today’s court challenges the White House, the Democrats and the liberal legal community to reassert a constitutional vision of a national government empowered “to promote the general Welfare” and — in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s terse formula — “to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it.”....

The majority opinion of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., along with the jointly written dissent of the other four conservatives, outlines the doctrinal and rhetorical bases for assailing much of the New Deal-Great Society constitutional order over the coming years....

Liberals have too often been complacent and purely defensive. The Constitution, they often declare, does not speak to the rights and wrongs of economic life; it leaves that to politics. Laissez-faire doctrines were buried by the New Deal.

Until last week, this response may have been understandable. But it was always misleading as history, and wrong in principle, as well. And it was bad politics, providing no clear counternarrative to support the powers of government now under attack from the right.

That’s a major failing, because there is a venerable rival to constitutional laissez-faire: a rich distributive tradition of constitutional law and politics, rooted in the framers’ generation. None other than Madison was among its prominent expounders — in his draft of the Virginia Constitution, he included rights to free education and public land.

Likewise, many framers of the Reconstruction amendments held that education and “40 acres and a mule” were constitutional essentials that Congress must provide to ex-slaves. They also held that equal rights and liberty for white workingmen required a fair distribution of initial endowments, including free homesteads and free elementary and secondary education, along with land-grant-funded state colleges.

In the wake of industrialization, turn of the century reformers declared the need for a “new economic constitutional order” to secure the old promises of individual freedom and opportunity. America was becoming a corporate oligarchy, making working people wage slaves, impoverished and ill-equipped for democratic citizenship.

The New Deal brought this progressive vision to partial fruition. In the preindustrial past, Roosevelt explained in countless speeches, the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights “in acquiring and possessing property” joined with the ballot and the freedom to live by one’s “own lights” to ensure the Constitution’s promise of “liberty and equality.”

But the “turn of the tide” came with the closing of the frontier and the rise of great “industrial combinations.” New conditions demanded new readings. “Every man,” he said, has a “right to make a comfortable living.” Alongside education, “training and retraining,” decent work and decent pay, his Second Bill of Rights set out rights to social insurance, including health care.

The distributive tradition has evolved, but its gist is simple and durable: you can’t have a republican government, and certainly not a constitutional democracy, amid gross material inequality.

That, my friends, is a manifesto for the modern socialist agenda in the United States. I've highlighted the key sections and phrases. For example, progressives have bastardized the "General Welfare" clause of the Preamble to mean the social welfare state rather than the pursuit of general well-being and happiness (as stressed by the Declaration of Independence). We should regulate the economy in the name of labor, according to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, which in essence means to regulate for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Also, "laissez-fair died with the New Deal" and in its wake emerged a new constitutional "distributive" order based on collectivism and collective rights rather than liberty for the individual, in contrast to what the Founders had established in 1787.

And more: Not only would post-Civil War America promise 40-acres and a mule for the former slaves, white workingmen would be guaranteed "a fair distribution of initial endowments." What are those initial endowments? Land? Capital? Property? To provide those endowments would require expropriating them from those who had them, which could be done only by force and through the wholesale evisceration of the constitutional guarantees for private property. This, then, is the left's "new constitutional order," one that would bend "the Constitution's guarantee of equal rights" into the distributive guarantee of "acquiring and possessing property" in a redefined conception of what constitutes "liberty and equality" in the United States. Indeed, the call for a "Second Bill of Rights" is nothing less than the demand for economic leveling and the rape of the wealthy in the name of the masses. Only then, after "republican government" is destroyed would the progressives be able to secure their long-cherished utopia of "constitutional [mob] democracy" free from the despised "gross material inequality" of the capitalist system.

Forbath's "Workingman's Constitution" is a cheap spinoff from his Dissent essay from earlier this year, "Workers’ Rights and the Distributive Constitution." And according to his bio, Forbath is a regular contributor to the Nation, the left's pro-Soviet literary outlet throughout the Cold War and after. Indeed, Forbath's work is all about economic redistribution, but it's veiled in legalistic and political garb that is central to the stealth neo-Marxist progressive agenda. So just make a note of it. The "Workingman's Constitution" is in fact the "Socialist's Constitution." The only thing missing is the more explicitly aggressive class conflict language one finds at, say, the Trotskyite "Worker's World."

So, there you have it. The bonus being that it's no surprise that Forbath's flaming anti-Americanism finds a ready home at the New York Times editorial pages.

UPDATE: Linkmaster Smith links: "Forbath Lost Me at ‘Laws to Redress Want and Inequity’." Thanks!