A Cultural Change

Ask around among your friends and see who's actually read the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Even among Baby Boomers, putatively better educated than generations since, it's only a minority. Some years back, a poll was done to discover what Americans thought of the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights.

When given verbatim reading of one or another of the first ten amendments -- minus identification of where it came from -- a surprising number either thought the protected right shouldn't be protected or, worse still, thought it was somehow communist.

Is this because most people are inherently stupid?

No, the answer lies in our culture. Americans are exceptionally poorly educated, thanks to our government monopoly elementary and secondary school system. Results include a culture that places more importance on American Idol and the personal life of Britney Spears than on American government and the daily abuse of power by the executive and Congress.

In fact, with the general ignorance of the Bill of Rights, most Americans would likely not notice most of their rights being taken away.

If it were not for a small minority of libertarians and civil libertarians, both major parties, and their special interest group allies, would have long ago scrapped the Bill of Rights. They've been chipping away at it furiously over the years, especially during the last eight, but consistently for several decades.

Ultimately, it will require a change in culture, a rejuvenation of widespread interest in how the government works and how much power it has, to change this state of affairs. The "progressive" solution of giving government even more power will result, eventually, in autocracy just as the ancient Roman Republic ended, as several democratic Greek city states ended, and as the French Revolution ended.

Our culture - with amnesia about what happened last year, much less last century or a couple of millenia ago - has to change if we want to stop a headlong rush into a new age of imperial autocracy followed by a new Dark Ages.

But for the moment, we seem quite unconcerned about it all.