The reverence Americans profess for the Constitution is all
too often a selective and self-serving devotion. Constitutional fundamentalists,
as I call them, treat the Constitution the way that religious fundamentalists treat
sacred scripture: they read only the parts that serve their interests,
interpret those parts in self-serving ways, and claim to be faithfully obeying
the commands of a higher, noble authority in doing so. Like all cults, the cult
of the Constitution makes use of powerful propaganda to justify the unequal
distribution of power and privilege. The outsized focus on constitutional
rights relating to guns and speech perpetuates the political, economic, and
cultural domination of white men rather than serving the interests of “we the
people.”
This selective constitutionalism transcends political
affiliation. While conservatives dominate the appropriation of the Second
Amendment for racist and sexist ends, both conservatives and liberals use the
First Amendment to promote free speech ideology that reinforces white male
supremacy. The civil libertarian fetishization of the “marketplace” finds its
fullest expression in the idealization of the Internet, where guns, speech,
money and everything else supposedly circulate freely –but always to the
primary benefit of white men above all others.
This book endeavors to take the Constitution seriously, not
selectively. It does so by focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment, the keystone
of the Constitution. The equal protection clause demands that Americans be
treated equally under the law, which includes equal protection of their
constitutional rights. To dismantle the cult of the Constitution that has
sustained an elitist and antidemocratic system of constitutional protection for
more than two hundred years, it is necessary to engage in honest constitutional
accounting. We must confront the fact that constitutional rights and resources
have overwhelmingly been allocated to the interests of white men, and that the
white male monopoly on power is neither natural nor benevolent. To achieve the
unfinished project of equality, we must reorient our constitutional attention
to the most vulnerable.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
The reverence Americans profess for the Constitution is all too often a selective and self-serving devotion. Constitutional fundamentalists, as I call them, treat the Constitution the way that religious fundamentalists treat sacred scripture: they read only the parts that serve their interests, interpret those parts in self-serving ways, and claim to be faithfully obeying the commands of a higher, noble authority in doing so. Like all cults, the cult of the Constitution makes use of powerful propaganda to justify the unequal distribution of power and privilege. The outsized focus on constitutional rights relating to guns and speech perpetuates the political, economic, and cultural domination of white men rather than serving the interests of “we the people.”
This selective constitutionalism transcends political affiliation. While conservatives dominate the appropriation of the Second Amendment for racist and sexist ends, both conservatives and liberals use the First Amendment to promote free speech ideology that reinforces white male supremacy. The civil libertarian fetishization of the “marketplace” finds its fullest expression in the idealization of the Internet, where guns, speech, money and everything else supposedly circulate freely –but always to the primary benefit of white men above all others.
This book endeavors to take the Constitution seriously, not selectively. It does so by focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment, the keystone of the Constitution. The equal protection clause demands that Americans be treated equally under the law, which includes equal protection of their constitutional rights. To dismantle the cult of the Constitution that has sustained an elitist and antidemocratic system of constitutional protection for more than two hundred years, it is necessary to engage in honest constitutional accounting. We must confront the fact that constitutional rights and resources have overwhelmingly been allocated to the interests of white men, and that the white male monopoly on power is neither natural nor benevolent. To achieve the unfinished project of equality, we must reorient our constitutional attention to the most vulnerable.