We’re Tearing Asunder the Constitution

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, 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.”

Sounded good in the summer of 1787 in the City of Brotherly Love.

Today, the people of the United States are akin to a nation of Cain and Abel. Some are debasing the once perfect Union, others are doubting the establishment of justice, injuring domestic tranquility … and you get the point.

The United States of America has become partitioned. The levels of polarization across the country can be counted in minute degrees, with opposing fanatics quickly and violently displaying their likes and dislikes as they take to task everyone who does not toe the prevailing line of thinking.

Right versus left, Democrat versus Republican, conservative versus liberal, black versus white, Christian versus Jew, to vaccinate or not to vaccinate. Imagine that after 234 years it has become dangerous to express an opinion in the United States that is a constitutionally guaranteed right, embodied in the Bill of Rights. You can’t speak it or you’ll be ostracized and you can’t listen to it or you’ll be censured.

Indeed, we can’t expect or want a unitary point of view for that would be equal to Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, with their attendant punitive practices. However, the American house that we see today divided against itself surely cannot stand, confident of a secure future, as Abraham Lincoln observed.

Critical race theory and cancel culture have forced many to take a warped look at American literary and film classics such as “Gone with the Wind” while leaving unscathed “West Side Story.” Many Americans are reeling with guilt for being created in the wrong color or sex without any chance for repentance or clemency.

None of this bodes well for our collective future.

U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), accepting the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, took aim at this unhealthy dichotomy by faulting those on both extremes of the nation’s political divide. “Many of us have been disappointed of late by the actions of some people who’ve chosen the easy way, playing to the crowd, itching the ears of the resentful with conspiracies and accusations,” he was quoted as saying at the virtual ceremony. “I take heart in the fact that such displays are still newsworthy and are generally met with disdain.”

The domestic political squabbles are having a real impact, Romney said, by diverting the nation’s attention away from three great challenges facing the country: the rise of China, global climate change and the “degradation of the national balance sheet.” I could add one or two more but these three are enough for now.

Romney said there’s plenty of blame to go around.

“Some of us on the right infect the nation with claims of election fraud, tech and media outrages, even vaccine fantasies. From the left come ‘hyperwoke’ accusations and antipathy toward free enterprise, the very means of our prosperity,” he added.

Indeed, we, Americans, are rightly or wrongly chomping at the bit for a good fight – and often times quite literally – without giving thought to whether we should. Intolerance has replaced tolerance.

And then there’s Alan Dershowitz, renowned former Harvard Law School professor and liberal defender of the downtrodden, who painfully admonished his fellow countrymen for creating a “very dangerous situation” with their diametrically opposing points of view.

“We’re in a very, very dangerous situation now where the left, which has enormous influence on American universities, has enormous influence on social media, has enormous influence on certain kinds of politics in the media, are trying to suppress free speech, and they’re succeeding, and we have to fight back,” Dershowitz was quoted as saying in an article in The Epoch Times.

Certainly the demands of some against others resemble ultimatums of the Gestapo or KGB. The obstacles placed on some experts, for example those who don’t accept the prevalent thinking on COVID-19, bring to mind societal control and messaging control of “1984.”

Dershowitz went on to say that big tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google are today engaging in “massive censorship” that endangers the freedom of speech itself.

“That’s not good for the country, it’s not good for the Constitution, it’s not good for freedom of speech. It’s not good by any standards, and it has to stop. And we, the consumers, have to demand that Facebook and YouTube and Twitter stop this censorship,” he continued.

Harkening to Voltaire’s famous quote about freedom of speech, Dershowitz said, “What Donald Trump tweets—I may disagree with every single word he says—but he has the right to say it. And more importantly, people forget the First Amendment has two aspects, one, the right of the speaker—Donald Trump to speak—that’s one part of it.

“But the second part, which is largely ignored, is the right of you and me the public to hear and read and see what he has to say to accept it or reject it in the marketplace of ideas,” he added. “When you ban a speaker, you also ban his viewers and listeners from having access to that speech, and that’s an equally dangerous aspect of violating free speech rights.”

Yes, you deprive your neighbors of information that can be turned into knowledge, which then becomes actionable intelligence. Could that lead to the dumbing down of America?

In the heyday of the evil empire, as President Reagan called the USSR, Andrei Amalrik, the late Russian dissident wrote a scathing analysis of the future of the Soviet Union titled appropriately “Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?” Today I wonder if the United States of America has the commitment and determination to rise above each person’s predilections and protect our perfect union.