Quaker Voice / Quaker Spirit
Website Established and Maintained by Daniel A. Seeger
Political Idolatry: The Worship of the U. S. Constitution
When our nation was founded, the thirteen American colonies were deeply reflective of the late-medieval British society from which they sprang. Aristocratic people in America owned great landed estates like Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier, the plantation homes of our first, third and fourth presidents. Actually, magnificent as each of these were, they were dwarfed in comparison to others. The Rensselaerwyck estate in the Hudson Valley was
over a million acres in size, while the Fairfax estate in Virginia was over five million acres and incorporated land in twenty counties.
Historians estimate that approximately half the white people who migrated to America during the colonial period came as indentured servants, who, upon the end of their indentures, became the rural and urban poor. And then, of course, there were the thousands upon thousands of enslaved African-Americans, and the increasingly restive and arbitrarily disinherited Native Americans.
Yet, the founding elites of the United States cynically employed the rhetoric of the Enlightenment about human rights, equality and liberty to rally the populace around the rebellion from England, while at the same time cleverly devising a system of governance for the new nation which would ensure their own continued privilege and dominance. The new Constitution managed to ignore the rights of Native Americans, enslaved African Americans, freed African-Americans, women, and propertyless white men – that is, the great preponderance of the population of the new nation. As has been often pointed out, ensuring the perpetuation of the institution of slavery was an animating motive for many of the arrangements which characterized the new government.
Ten of the first twelve United States presidents felt comfortable buying, selling, owning, and cruelly exploiting other human beings. That it required a dreadful Civil War before there could be an end to slavery is itself a tribute to the ingenuity of the founders in ensuring that the trappings of democracy would not easily result in substantive democracy.
Today we are still saddled with the hypocrisy of our nation’s founders, and have even seen the remnants of democracy which survived their machinations whither away. The founders’ public proclamations of human rights, equality and liberty persists, as does the reality that the institutions which presumably give expression to these
principles actually subvert them. What are we to make of the fact that in the Senate, which consents to treaties and to the appointment of Supreme Court justices, a state like Wyoming with less than a million citizens has the same representation as a state like California with 40 million citizens? And that the electoral college which elects presidents installs in office people who received a minority of the votes cast, the last two instances of this leading to absolutely disastrous administrations? And that the process for amending the Constitution is weighted so as to make adjustments next to impossible?
It is no accident that we are saddled with the ridiculous situation that corporations are considered to have the same rights as human beings, that money is equated with speech, that office holders are bought and paid for by an outlandishly wealthy elite, that the environment is being irretrievably plundered, and that no way can be found to ensure that every person has an equal right to participate in tamper-free elections.
It is time to free ourselves from a cultish worship of the United States Constitution and all the mythology this involves, and to think clearly about the goals and objectives of a second American revolution – this time a non-violent one – which will at last establish political freedom and economic justice for all.