I think it's one of the defects of the Constitution that it is written in minor 18th century doggerel which can be twisted to produce the worst results, results like the Dred Scott, the "separate but equal" Buck v Bell, Sullivan, Buckey v Valeo and a whole host of other judicial attacks on equality and democracy and even a person's right to their own body and the granting of unequal rights of speech to billionaires by Supreme Court fiat. The thing isn't merely open to abuse, it invites abuse.
When I look at such documents as Deuteronomy, especially the famous "Blessings and Curses" chapter, 28, its warnings about the consequences of evil living, how small evils have a way of multiplying and generating more evil and before you know it everything goes to hell, it is far more realistic than the absurd 18th century meliorism that you sense the Founders sucked in with that "Enlightenment" content mixed with what is now known to be a very misleading and flawed reading of the history of Rome then current. Of course, they wanted to keep the evil of slavery so they wanted to make room for that institution for themselves and their slave-owning posterity, while pretending to be all about everyone being created equal. Their Northern allies, like Hamilton, had a similar, superseding, agenda of opportunism. That's bound to snowball in pretty much the way it has. Anyone who thinks that the Trumpian-fascism, the razor blade we are all sitting on, isn't an extension of that sin didn't notice his harnessing of racism to win with the racist vote on behalf of the billionaire boys club.
For us, I'd say that the first problem is to distinguish between the blessings of liberty from the curses of libertarianism, because that is what this is. It wasn't long after first reading a lot of lefties online that I realized a lot of them were not really liberals, that lots of them were libertarians whose goals were bound to defeat a real American liberal agenda of equality, economic justice and the common good. I think I realized that the morning I read of of the, at the time, big "liberal" bloggers was dead set against anything like the Fairness Doctrine because it offended his great-big free-speechiness. It made me realize how much of his other stuff was really libertarian and not liberal. And I also realized that those people, generally white, generally affluent or at least comfortable and contented, were often huge snobs who cost liberals a lot more voters than they would ever convince to come out. And, as in his case, their attention drifts and they start the slide into apathy if not Republicanism.
The distortion of those rights most important to the entertainment of the leisure class and the media profits into something that swamps everything else, even, as we see in the attacks on the survivors of gun massacres, the right of grieving and injured people to not be turned into the focus of attacks and lies as the attacks are called down by FOX and Alex Jones to their armies of trained attack baboons, is something that real liberalism has to recognize as poisonous to any real and sustainable egalitarian liberalism that promotes the real goals, a decent life for everyone and the blessings of decency and morality. The civil libertarians will come to the aid of FOX and Alex Jones, they'll tell their victims to just suck it up because their lives aren't as important.
American liberalism, founded on the rock of equal justice, economic justice, is not compatible with libertarianism, libertarianism is very compatible with fascism, as we are seeing before our very eyes. It is a curse. Those 60s liberals, they weren't all liberals. Nat Hentoff was very happy to end his days working at the Cato propaganda cess pool.
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