Mulligan the Masterpiece

Americans do well to lionize the founding fathers, especially since our contemporary leaders so clearly lack the judgement and intellect of the authors of our republic. But the idolization, the idolatry, of these men, and of their words of wisdom, have led us to a calcified place where we play the 21st century with 18th century rules.

Since we no longer chain ourselves to the founders' scientific theories, technological tools, tolerance for chattel slavery, or preference for attire, why do we exalt their political theories as unalterable except by the blasphemous?


This dynamic is somewhat analogous to a blind belief in the Bible, which was written by men whose views of geography, geology, astronomy, chemistry, anatomy, physics, government, law, and economics are absurd caricatures of a thankfully extinct dystopia. Why then do most of us assert that their religious constructs are beyond amendment?


The anti-democratic compromises made with the construction and adoption of the constitution aggregated to the benefit of states with small populations, giving them influence on par with states with far more citizens. One (white) man, one vote would apply within states, but not between them. And therein lies the flaw. It is a flaw that should never have been accepted and which must now be reversed.

It's time to mulligan the masterpiece. It's time for a new constitutional convention.

When one considers the monumental concessions given to smaller states, which were sometimes only "small" because they did not count slaves as full people, it is clear that the founders gave the greatest import to the necessity of the 13 colonies coalescing as one nation, rather than two or three. It was thought, not without reason, that any more than one new nation would result in domestic war or in hopeless disunity in the face of European powers.

It is impossible to argue that, had the United States not formed a single nation in 1787, it would not have been rapidly undermined and dismembered by England or France. It is also impossible to argue, however, that the Civil War of the 1860's was a reasonable price to pay in the interest of ensuring domestic tranquility (for white men) in the 1780's.

Regardless of where one stands on the wisdom of such sacrifices to small states, only the people who live in those states could possibly maintain that such sacrifices are still necessary or fair. It is necessary or fair that Wyoming has as much power in the Senate as California, even though California's senators represent a full seventy times as many Americans as do Wyoming's?

It is necessary or fair, or remotely democratic, that a president could take office after objectively receiving far fewer total votes than his opponent?

The Constitution is amendable, which is commendable,but the amendment process is held victim to the same distortion as the functions of government itself; it is possible for a constitutional amendment to fail even if office holders representing ninety percent of the American people supports it. Because of the small states.

The Constitution is incredibly difficult to amend, and any attempt to amend the undue influence of the small states would automatically fail, due to the very undue influence it aims to quell.

We are so loathe to change the constitution because, when it was written, it was simply the most important political document ever written. Needless to say, it was the best constitution in the world, since it was the only constitution of a technically democratic republic.

We are not the only democracy anymore, however; we are one of scores. And it would be imprudently narcissistic to maintain that no concept has been tested by these scores of democracies over the last two centuries that we might learn something from.

The small state sacrifices were made for five or six slaveholding southern states originally. Now, half of the fifty states in the union enjoy these undemocratic perks. Know what else? After the Civil War, the minimum price the Confederate States should have had to pay for its treason is the indignity of assuming their proper place in our union, with the same amount of per capita influence as those Yankee bums, who insist on burdening their states with free highways and electricity.

Electing better people isn't going to help us. We need to elect a better Constitution.