What Is Our Regime?
20th October 2022
It is not just some crazy notion at the Claremont Institute, some crazy right-wing think tank’s invention, that we no longer live under the Constitution. The Left has been trying to undermine and overturn the Constitution for a long time. That agenda has been consistent. And the only thing that’s really changed is the rhetoric. The Progressive movement is where the attack on the Constitution first started more than a hundred years ago. And the most famous proponent of that was Woodrow Wilson, the only political scientist to be president of the United States. That tells you something right there—his being a political scientist.
And he was very open about repudiating both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as relics of the 18th century that had no relevance to the modern world. That’s where this all started. But it was a little too bold, and it’s not an accident that Wilson was followed by 12 years of Republican presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Then, Franklin Roosevelt came along. Roosevelt didn’t change the agenda, but he did change the rhetoric.
And that’s where the Left started adopting this idea: they’re actually defenders of the Constitution, but they simply tweaked, and redefined, and reworked all of the concepts. And so, you’ve got a living Constitution, and you’ve got all this language about rights, but they were no longer the natural rights that the founders defended. They were a whole series of invented new rights that the government would bestow on us, rather than natural rights that the government would protect.