The Constitution is Dying on the Vine

Too many people on both the right and the left refuse to support Constitutional rights and the continuation of elected governance

This graphic from a recent Axios poll should give you chills. Not in a good way.

Per this poll, we have reached a point where:

• One-third of the country thinks unelected leaders are better than weak elected ones.

• One-third of the country, including over 40% of Democrats think Presidents should be able to remove judges; and,

• Nearly forty percent of the country thinks the government should side with the majority over the rights of ethnic or religious minorities.

This isn’t even just a red flag for our Constitutional way of governance, it’s a hurricane warning.

The most surprising thing about this statistic is just how many people prefer a strongman government over a “weak” elected government. In the age of Donald Trump and worship of dictators like Viktor Orbán, it’s no surprise that 42% of Republicans surveyed preferred a strongman.

But Democrats are fooling themselves if they think they don’t have a similar problem considering nearly a third of Democrats surveyed support a strongman unelected system too. Of course, those of us who have paid attention to the Democrats run toward socialism are hardly surprised.

Nor is it a surprise that so many Democrats want to remove judges. This is certainly related to the recent decision overturning Roe v. Wade and years of Democratic overpoliticiziation of the Supreme Court.

But it is the lack of support for minority rights that is the least surprising yet most damning statistic of all. It shows a complete lack of respect for religion and religious minorities, and it certainly shows the fact that people want government to enforce whatever it is that they believe.

Here’s another disburing nugget from the poll:

A third of Americans — 34% among both Republicans and Democrats — said the federal government should have the power to prosecute members of the news media who make offensive or unpatriotic statements. A slight majority (51%) disagreed.

Apparently 34% of the population does not understand the Freedom of the Press in the First Amendemnt.

¹

Now let’s understand that this poll is not necessarily indicative of the mood of all people. The poll apparently was “conducted Sept. 1-2 by Ipsos on their online survey panels in English.” I have a presupposition that these panels consist of people who are extremely only, which these days seems to radicalize people much more easy than people who are not extreme online.

But even if it is not representative of the population writ large, it shows that an extremely disturbing number of people on both sides of the aisle that don’t support and don’t appreciate Constitutional governance as we know it. I don’t know what the solution is. But I do know that both the Trumpy “national conservative” crowd on the right and the “woke” and socialist crowd on the left don’t respect the rights of others and neither groups has a use for governments that won’t use state power to impose their rule.

Just a reminder that we desperately need to ensure that we are teaching civis and government at all levels of schooling. Because otherwise, we continue to watch the Constituion and our rights die on the vine in real time.

1. I know for a fact that there are people who think I should be in jail for having an opinion. I could probably name names.