Fade Resistance Performance
One of the great goals of education is to initiate the young into the conversation of their ancestors; to enable them to understand the language of that conversation, in all its subtlety, and maybe even, in their maturity, to add to it some wisdom of their own.
The modern American educational system no longer teaches us the political language of our ancestors. In fact our schooling helps widen the gulf of time between our ancestors and ourselves, because much of what we are taught in the name of civics, political science, or American history is really modern liberal propaganda. Sometimes this is deliberate. Worse yet, sometimes it isn't. Our ancestral voices have come to sound alien to us, and therefore our own moral and political language is impoverished. It's as if the people of England could no longer understand Shakespeare, or Germans couldn't comprehend Mozart and Beethoven.
How Tyranny Came to America...
To most Americans, even those who feel oppressed by what they call big government, it must sound strange to hear it said, in the past tense, that tyranny "came" to America. After all, we have a constitution, don't we? We've abolished slavery and segregation. We won two world wars and the Cold War. We still congratulate ourselves before every ballgame on being the Land of the Free. And we aren't ruled by some fanatic with a funny mustache who likes big parades with thousands of soldiers goose-stepping past huge pictures of himself.
For all that, we no longer fully have what our ancestors, who framed and ratified our Constitution, thought of as freedom - a careful division of power that prevents power from becoming concentrated and unlimited. The word they usually used for concentrated power was consolidated - a rough synonym for fascist. And the words they used for any excessive powers claimed or exercised by the state were usurped and tyrannical. They would consider the modern "liberal" state tyrannical in principle; they would see in it not the opposite of the fascist, communist, and socialist states, but their sister.
If Washington and Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton could come back, the first thing they'd notice would be that the federal government now routinely assumes thousands of powers never assigned to it - powers never granted, never delegated, never enumerated. These were the words they used, and it's a good idea for us to learn their language. They would say that we no longer live under the Constitution they wrote. And the Americans of a much later era - the period from Cleveland to Coolidge, for example - would say we no longer live even under the Constitution they inherited and amended.
In the present political system of these United States, which could best be described as "Post-Constitutional America", the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our current form of government. What's worse is that our constitutional illiteracy cuts us off from our own national heritage. And so our politics degenerates into increasingly bitter and unprincipled quarrels about who is going to bear the burdens of war and welfare.
As typical victims of a broken educational system and disinformed citizens of this media-ridden country, it takes a long time - an embarrassingly long time - to learn what is being passing on, here. It's like studying geometry in old age, and discovering how simple the basic principles of space really are. It's the old story: In order to learn, first you have to unlearn. Most of what we've been taught and told about the Constitution was misguided or even false. And we've never been told some of the most elementary things, which could have saved us a tremendous amount of confusion.
The Constitution does two things. First, it delegates certain enumerated powers to the federal government. Second, it separates those powers among the three branches. Most people understand the secondary principle of the separation of powers. But they don't grasp the primary idea of delegated and enumerated powers.
Consider this. We have recently had a big nationwide debate over national health care. Advocates and opponents argued long and loud over whether it could work, what was fair, how to pay for it, and so forth. But almost nobody raised the basic issue: Where does the federal government get the power to legislate in this area? The answer is: Nowhere. The Constitution lists 18 specific legislative powers of Congress, and not a one of them covers national health care.
As a matter of fact, none of the delegated powers of Congress - and delegated is always the key word - covers Social Security, or Medicaid, or Medicare, or federal aid to education, or most of what are now mislabeled "civil rights", or countless public works projects, or equally countless regulations of business, large and small, or the space program, or farm subsidies, or research grants, or subsidies to the arts and humanities, or... well, you name it, chances are it's unconstitutional. Even the most cynical opponents of the Constitution would be dumbfounded to learn that the federal government now tells us where we can smoke. We are less free, more heavily taxed, and worse governed than our ancestors under British rule. In thinking about this government, you could wonder: Was George III really all that bad?
To be clear, Constitutional and unconstitutional aren't just simple terms of approval and disapproval. A bad law may be perfectly constitutional. A wise and humane law may be unconstitutional. But what is almost certainly bad is a constant disposition to thwart or disregard the Constitution. It's not just a matter of what is sometimes called the "original intent" of the authors of the Constitution. What really matters is the common, explicit, unchallenged understanding of the Constitution, on all sides, over several generations. People; this is not Rocket Science!
Simplicity...