Out of the Mouths of Babes: “The Constitution Sucks”

My grassroots Champions of the Constitution network - now in 13 states - recently pushed back against a tweet from the Gravel Institute which asked:

• “What if – hear us out – the Constitution sucks, and is wrong about everything, and shouldn't be the basis for running a society in the 21st century?”
  
  

The Gravel Institute was formed with funds left over from former Senator Mike Gravel’s recent run for U.S. president.  The Institute is a kind of anti-Prager U, making short videos to fight the political Right.

The Institute advocates for direct democracy through national referendums, even though direct democracy has a history of descending into mob rule that tramples over the individual and takes away individual rights.  The Institute also supports defunding the police and destroying capitalism through socialism (i.e., “democratizing ownership”) and wealth redistribution. 

Before you take the Gravel Institute’s notions too seriously, you should know it’s being run by college kids.  The chairman is a math student at Columbia University.  The finance director is another student at Columbia who is 20 years old.   The operations director apparently is the most august of the bunch, having earned a political science degree from American University in 2018.  The pages for the latter two are deleted from the Institute’s website now, but the Google entries document these facts (see below).  We know the chairman is a college student because he said as much. 

So these are the youngsters who, in addition to destroying the police and free enterprise, want to destroy the Constitution because, in their words, it “sucks”.   They want to break the social contract and destroy America.  They don’t want America; they want something else.  And I’m supposed to listen to college kids with zero real-life experience and throw out the oldest written Constitution in the world that has stood the test of time?  When did freedom become a bad idea?  It didn’t, unless you think it’s a good idea to live in tyranny.  When did a tradition of individual rights that can’t be negated by direct democracy become a bad idea?  It didn’t, unless you think it’s a good idea to trample over the individual and not allow people to speak their minds.  When did separation of powers and limited government become a bad idea?  They didn’t, unless you think turning everything over to a tiny socialist elite who are only in it for wealth and power for themselves is a good idea.  Unconstrained total government?  That didn’t work out so well in the 20th century, did it.  Apparently, the august peers of the Gravel Institute who were barely out of diapers when the 20th century ended missed a few things in their college education.  Maybe they should watch a few more Prager U videos to get up to speed with the rest of us.   

Nothing against 20-year-olds, but I don’t want them deciding what kind of country we’re going to have, at least not until they’ve studied every constitution in history like the Founders did.

But here’s the point for right-minded folks:  The Gravel Institute’s tweet has over 38,000 ‘likes’ as of this writing.  That’s 38,000 people who hate the Constitution and all it stands for.  If the political Right wants freedom, free enterprise, limited government, and individual rights to endure, it has to do a much better job of propagating and defending its ideas. 

(comments from Champions of the Constitution members at the website)