The Reactionary Utopian
                     January 16, 2007


FOREIGN AND WHAT?
by Joe Sobran

     Is there any hope of restoring constitutional 
government in this country? Well, if there isn't, things 
are pretty bleak.

     After all, our elected officials take an oath to 
uphold the Constitution and to defend it from "all 
enemies, foreign and domestic." Those last two words are 
often overlooked, maybe because they apply to so many of 
the people taking the oath. To restore constitutional 
government merely means ensuring that our rulers take 
their own promise seriously.

     When I'm asked why I care so passionately who 
"Shakespeare" really was, I explain that the Shakespeare 
myth closely parallels our constitutional mythology. What 
may have begun as an honest mistake has become a fraud.

     Honest mistakes don't stay honest forever. Sooner or 
later, if you won't admit a mistake, you have to lie, 
distort, and falsify evidence. People usually do this in 
order to maintain positions of power. They can't afford 
to admit error.

     With Shakespeare, the fraud doesn't consist in 
holding the traditional view that he was the man from 
Stratford; it consists in denying that there can be any 
room for doubt, when in fact there is abundant reason for 
doubt and an abundance of intelligent doubters.

     Similarly with the Constitution. The fraud doesn't 
consist in holding that the U.S. Supreme Court may be 
right; it consists in holding that anyone who rejects the 
Court's interpretation must be wrong.

     Most people, being intellectually timid, rely on 
authority and hate to believe that the authorities can 
err seriously. But all human authority is not only 
fallible, but, over time, is virtually certain to err 
wildly.

     The reason is simple. Consider the Supreme Court. It 
presumes that the rulings of its predecessors are correct 
and rarely overturns them. This means that after a few 
generations, each ruling of the Court has presumed the 
rightness of several previous rulings, each dependent on 
the one before it. The slightest error in the sequence 
will produce further errors down the line.

     Imagine what would happen to automobiles if the 
engineers at Ford and General Motors worked on the 
principle that their predecessors must have been correct 
in all their calculations. Or how would you like to fly 
in an airplane constructed on a similar presumption?

     Happily, engineering doesn't rely too heavily on 
veneration for authority. On the other hand, religion 
does, because that is its nature. If God reveals 
something, it is authoritative. The question is which 
model government should follow: practical science or 
religion.

     The answer is obvious enough; the idea of the 
Constitution was that government was a practical science 
accessible to ordinary people. That is what 
"self-government" meant: Everyone should be able to read 
the Constitution and join, if only by arguing and voting, 
in making laws in accordance with its principles.

     No aristocracy or priesthood had any special 
authority, because the very idea of such authority had no 
place in self-government. No faith was required, because 
it was agreed that suspicion, or "jealousy" of 
government, was the only attitude that could preserve 
liberty.

     But in the 20th century, authority has returned in 
the guise of the "expert." 'Tis he who tells us what our 
Constitution means, and who finds complexities and 
ambiguities where we suspected none. The Supreme Court 
has gradually changed its character from a body of men 
who had to justify their decisions with reason and 
evidence to an authoritarian body whose word is law (and 
whose stabs at logic only confuse matters).

     In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton assured his 
fellow citizens that the Court's rulings would be no 
better than the arguments it could make for them. Now the 
Court lays down the law by the sort of unarguable 
"arbitrary will" republican government was supposed to 
save us from.

     We have long since passed the point where the 
Court's vagaries might be excused as honest mistakes. 
Several of its members would have been impeached and most 
of its powers clipped, except that the other two branches 
of the federal government have no more regard for the 
Constitution than the Court does.

     In short, the Constitution is being "defended" by 
the sort of people -- domestic, of course -- it's 
supposed to be defended against.

[This column was originally published by Universal Press 
Syndicate September 23, 1997.] 

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