The Law And The Lawless Part 4: Innovation And Obfuscation

Imagine the following, Gentle Reader: A great physiologist has discovered an absolutely infallible cure for cancer. It's effective against cancers of all sorts, no matter what parts of the body are affected. Moreover, it's easily affordable, has no side effects, and doesn't demand anything of the patient after treatment. How would you view such a development?

Wild applause, right? The developer is the hero of the age, right? Nobel Prize, the Medal of Freedom, ticker-tape parades, the works, right? Right?

Whoops, I forgot to mention the catch: The treatment only works on heterosexuals. Moreover, it's in the nature of the thing that it cannot be made to work on homosexuals -- that any modification attempted will render it lethal to them and useless to the rest of us.

Now how do you think it would be viewed, and by whom?

My bet is that homosexual activists would rise up in a fury. Their allegations of bigotry and conspiracy would be loud enough to shake the world. There would be massive protests against the developer, against any honors awarded to him, and against any distribution of his discovery until "this flaw is removed from it." Activists would petition the federal government to nationalize the treatment, preventing its deployment and ensuring that political forces would determine when it could be used, and on whom.

(There are some interesting side trails worth exploring in this hypothetical. The treatment's ineffectuality on homosexuals would confirm the biological basis of sexual orientation, which has long been asserted by homosexual activists but lacks an evidentiary foundation. Beyond that, there's at least one cancer that heterosexuals don't seem to get: Kaposi's Sarcoma. But those are subjects for another time.)

Since special-interest groups tend to possess political power beyond what their numbers would suggest, the Lavender Mafia might well carry the day, especially if the Democrats were in power at the time and felt their support to be marginal. However, the use of homosexuals as the goat-group here is almost irrelevant to the political dynamic. Make the goat-group blacks, or Hispanics, or Muslims, or left-handed persons, and the consequences would be much the same.

Yes, there's a larger point to this. Give me a second to fetch more coffee.

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We seldom think of politicians as a special-interest group, yet it's clear that they are one. They share a common interest that the rest of us don't feel: the acquisition of power and the perquisites that accompany it. Indeed, the rest of us have an "interest" that's the exact reverse: we want to be free: that is, we want to be left alone to live as we choose, interact with others as we choose, and manage our own affairs as we choose, free of outside interference. We regard the existence of others with power over us as noxious, even pestilential, and would greatly prefer that there be no such phenomenon as politics. We regard even the bare minimum of authority required to maintain public peace and order as a "necessary evil."

(Yes, that applies to mouthy commentators who write ceaselessly about politics, too.)

As it happens, long ago a group of inspired men came together and discovered a cure for politics. They envisioned a state of affairs in which political machinations is chained down to the irreducible minimum required for national defense, the protection of the innocent, and the resolution of disputes. They proceeded to codify their dream in a document unique in human history: the very first corpus of law that would bind, not the individual, but the State and its agents.

They made a few mistakes. Chiefest among them was the failure to specify in the document itself that it was a bill of limitations on government. For example, the opening clause of Article I, Section 8, which reads:

Congress shall have power:

...really should say:

Congress shall only have power:

There are other places in the Constitution where a similar minor rewording would have made much of the subsequent chicanery far more difficult, if not impossible. But the Founding Fathers believed that the mere existence of the document, and its erection as "the supreme Law of the Land," would express its underlying premise adequately well. If we grant their assumptions, they had achieved the foremost innovation in human thought ever applied to politics and government: a "cure" for the "disease" of politics, a preventative for the abuses of power suffered by all the societies that had preceded them. We honor them for their achievement and forgive them for not foreseeing the maneuvers of the special-interest group we call politicians.

Politicians went to work at weakening the restraints "the supreme Law of the Land" laid upon them almost immediately. We stand at the end of more than two centuries of such skullduggery. Yet even those of us who resist the Omnipotent State most fiercely seldom ponder what made the de facto nullification of the Constitution's constraints on the State possible.

The purpose of the document, which the Founding Fathers thought so perfectly clear, had to be obscured. That has been the highest priority of our political class ever since ratification.

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This series of essays must come to an end at some point. That point has arrived, both in time and in subject matter. The core of our degradation cannot be expressed any more clearly than this:

The very law written to bind politicians to a fixed set of authorities and responsibilities has been nullified by the politicians themselves.

To pull that off, they had to deceive a great many persons about the purpose of the Constitution, and corrupt a great many others into yielding our Constitutional protections for some other consideration. The shibboleths they used in that effort -- "the public good is the highest law," "we've got to be practical," "the Constitution is not a suicide pact," and the like -- could not contradict the words of the Constitution, but were effective at obfuscating its purpose in the minds of many, especially those who'd never troubled to study it.

Accordingly, we who understand and love freedom can no longer look to the Constitution for the protection of our rights. The "game" of politics in these United States, which was supposed to be "played" under a compact set of "rules" any literate American could read and understand, has changed irreversibly. The lines have been erased; the net is down; there's no "umpire" to call "foul."

It's in light of that bleak recognition that you, Gentle Reader, and all our confreres nationwide, must decide what should come next.