The funny thing about the left is that they say they hate religion and believe they are anything but religious. They seem damn proud of the fact that they are not and look down on all Christians but if you study the progressive idea of a living constitution you will see that progressives are very spiritual people. The progressives introduced the idea that the constitution (the supreme authority of the nation) changes with the SPIRIT of the times and they literally believed that there was a collective spirit at work in society. This spirit perfected the collective body (which they also saw as a single organism) very slowly over time and in order to allow this spirit to do its work a static ‘rulebook’ would not do. We had to have a dynamically changing rulebook that adjusted to that spirit at any moment in time which is why the progressives had to have a constitution that had to adjust to the spirit of the times.
The spirit they were referring to was the spirit of the collective body of the nation and the body could not evolve if supreme authority was stuck in a previous age. Once this spirit was allowed to function the people will be perfected at the end of history by that spirit’s will. This is why progressives call themselves progressives because they see themselves as progressing to this endpoint.
This comes out of the Hegelian (where Marx comes out of) political philosophy where they believed the mighty Roman Empire died because people lost their civic spirit which allowed it to whither. I believe that Hegel written this in Philosophy of Right in which he used this historic incident to explain why it and all other societies died off. When the people lost their civic spirit the society was endangered of losing its cohesion and falling apart just like the mighty Roman Empire did.
What is behind all progressives in living constitution is a mortal fear that the forces that maintain societies cohesion will cease to exist if we don’t embrace the civic spirit. Society must maintain its spiritual cohesion which is why all progressives of left and right value uniformity in thought in order to maintain that cohesion. They constantly value the ‘middle’ where no one has any independent thinking that can destabilize the collective cohesion from which the collective spirit can exist. They must believe in a living constitution in order to allow this spirit to operate or our society will cease to exist.
I know many modern progressives of both left and right will deny this but that is because the intellectual philosophy that they inherit did not come with a deeper explanation of why it exist. They do not literally pray to a national spirit of the organic body like their intellectual ancestors did but they inherit the ideas without knowing the creative impetuous behind those ideas. Like so many other ideas we inherit from proceeding generations we may not know why but we still practice them and progressives still worship the national spirit without even knowing why.
This may sound really bizarre but what else can explain why Obama and many other liberals values ‘progress’ above all else. We look at them like ‘what do you mean by progress or change?’ without a clue of what that means. They see society evolving to this perfect endpoint just like their intellectual ancestors believed.
They don’t know what that endpoint will look like and since they don’t know what that endpoint is they can’t even define what it is to ‘progress’ or ‘change’. They just know they must progress or change which is why there political slogan is ‘change’ and ‘progress’ without an actual definition of what that is.
They don’t need to know what that is because it is a supreme faith in an unknown national god in the same way Christians believe God is at work in humanity. There is a link between religious faith and progressivism in that early Marxist philosophers struggled to understand what is ‘spirit’. They believed religion was an attempt to understand what that is but believed Christianity (like all other religions) was false because the spirit existed within the community of the nation and not within the individual himself.
Yes–communist, fascist, and progressives are very spiritual people but the spirit they worshiped is the spirit of the nation which is why American progressives like living constitution because it allows that spirit to do its work in society. In their view, the true will of the people (or true democracy–do you notice how spiritual that sounds?) existed within that general spirit and not in the mechanical voting of the voting process itself. Democracy doesn’t exist if that ‘true’ spirit isn’t doing its work because that is true democracy while all other democracy is false. True democracy reflected the will of the nation’s spirit and not the in the worldly act of voting.
We can see where this way of thinking will lead us because if we define the will of the people by this supposed true will then whoever thinks they know what this true will is has the moral right to deny the mechanical worldly democratic process. They have the right to decide what the people should think because they know what the ‘true’ will of the people is. The people be damned—they already know what it is!
This is what enabled communist to control everything because they believed they knew what the true will was and if the people didn’t resonate with that true will then their was something wrong with the people. Doesn’t this sound familiar in our modern political world when dealing with the far left?
Living constitution is not a harmless act of deliberately misinterpreting the document to fit a certain political need but a belief in a true spiritual will that exist within the body of society. The Pharisees of this true will tell us what it should mean because they know what the true will of the people is and if we allow living constitution to continue our historical endpoint will be a totalitarian state where we are told what our will is which will be done by the people in power. The people’s expression of their will will be deemed false and excommunicated out of the political process which is the nature of a totalitarian society.
They say this can’t happen here but it is happening here. We must stop what is happening or our historical endpoint won’t be as great as our beginning. We the people have had enough!
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