The Futility of Constitutional Originalism

Why did the United States Constitution fail? That it has failed is beyond doubt, as is the how, the method by which it was subverted and enervated; the question of why, however, remains open to debate. Did the Constitution fail because it was “open to interpretation”? If so, if its Framers truly meant for it to be “interpretable,” why was there no expressly delineated methodology for doing so? If one asserts, against the great weight of historical evidence, that the Framers did intend for our Constitution to be malleable to the ephemeral whims of our inferiors, one must still ask precisely how that interpretive work was to be done. The American “Right” answers the interpretability and malleability questions with an emphatic yes, and posits an equally emphatic “original intent” for its preferred rule of interpretation. This textual originalism has always been my approach, but it is almost as compromised as the laissez faire “living Constitution” perversion.

The Constitution was perfectly suited for the Anglo-American colonist-turned-citizen, the virtuous Christian man, and fell apart when God was removed and the Anglo-American disenfranchised through egalitarian mass democracy. Then, the Constitution was readily abused. Could the Constitution have been made “abuse-proof”? No more than a people can be made immune to the evil which stains their nature. The Founders acknowledged this in their recognition that a Constitution can only be as good as the people it purports to represent. Does this necessarily mean that the Constitution carried within it the seeds of its own destruction? Could it have been any other way? Aside from reserving American citizenship to “free white persons” in the very first session of Congress in 1790, the Founding generation did not feel it necessary to take any meaningful steps to ensure that their nation would remain the morally virtuous, white, Christian country that it was. They undertook no “citizen-building” program as they built the nation. Why? They didn’t need to. Though they had their concerns, there is no way that they could have predicted the decline and fall of their proud people into a subjugated heathenism.

i recently wrote a treatise on what I have termed the foundations of the Egalitarian Regime. On two installments, the same brilliant comment was left by H.V. Traywick, Jr., an excerpt of Hamlet, Act V, Scene I. Hamlet asks Horatio, “Is not parchment made of sheepskins?” Horatio answers, “Aye, my Lord, and of calfskins, too.” Hamlet concludes, “They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in that.” I can picture in all too vivid relief the dark, irradiated wasteland that “the United States” will be in a decade or less, with a few surviving soot-stained former Republican legislators muttering to themselves, “At least we still have the Constitution.” What is the point, the purpose, of this exercise, of undertaking an exploration of what its Framers intended their Constitution to mean? What is the point of demonstrating that each daily depredation on our liberties is unconstitutional? In other words, who cares? Who is listening?

We have allowed unaccountable, virtually omnipotent kritarchs (whose power, mind you, comes only from our subservient refusal to challenge their atrocious usurpations) to unilaterally declare what is or is not “constitutional,” based on a bastardized version of “precedent.” The cocktail “conservatives” who parrot the originalist line today simply uphold the last eighty years’ worth of patently unconstitutional Leftist rulings, while the rest of American history is jettisoned into the ether. We have allowed our Constitution to become nothing more than meaningless, shapeless putty in the hands of demons. Again, the Constitution failed. The Founders placed their Republic into the hands of fools who proved themselves incapable of keeping it. The only possible purpose that I can see for investigating and illuminating the original intent is that Americans — specifically, white, conservative Americans — still at least nominally proclaim to revere the Founders and the Constitution. What will they do with this knowledge? If experience is any predictor, nothing.

Aside, though, from that one limited purpose, it has proven to be sickeningly ineffective to illuminate the original intent, at least for the purpose of using it to prove the egregious fraud and hypocrisy of the ruling class. Why is originalism an ineffective response to the destruction of America? Simple, really. Because the Enemy no longer even makes the pretense of claiming that it is the guarantor of the original Constitution. The Enemy is an acolyte of William Lloyd Garrison, who called that document “a covenant with death” and “an agreement with Hell.” The Enemy does occasionally claim that they represent the ideals of the new Constitution and the fictional egalitarian “founding” which they promulgate, but it does so while castigating the real Founding and demonizing the Founders and the Framers, effectively writing them out of history. When it thus contends, the Enemy claims to be the true standard-bearer for an “American” ideal that never existed, the guarantor of a “founding” wholly divorced from the Founders, the Constitution merely a vehicle easily altered and dispensed with, each new depredation celebrated as another step along the inexorable march toward the fulfillment of this ever-changing egalitarian myth that American history has been recast as. What good does wringing our hands and pulling out our hair over original intent do when the original America is precisely what the Enemy has sworn to annihilate?

​Originalism is a failure, just as our Constitution is a failure, just as the polity soon to be formerly known as the United States of America is a failure. Our response to our cultural genocide and physical dispossession cannot be to cling to a document which was eviscerated in 1865 and whose last remnants disintegrated through the first half of the twentieth century. Our response to ubiquitous calls for our deaths cannot be to wave a piece of paper around as if has magical properties. The Enemy has tossed the exsanguinated Constitution into the Valley of Gehinnom. If the reader believes that lawyers will save him, one hour in a law school will suffice to disabuse him of his hope. The Constitution is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant to the struggle now in its nascency. We cannot return to the Republic any more than we can turn back time itself. Even if we could, we shouldn’t, for relying on the same Constitution which allowed itself to be penetrated is suicidal. What we can do instead, though, what we must do, is begin to plan for what comes next. Before even this can occur, though, we must take a good, long look in the mirror. We are to blame for the Hell that has been wrought of this land that once was ours. We must change ourselves before we can recapture our degraded nation from the talons of the ascendant Satan gorging himself on our ruin.