By Lee Cary
The American political Left and Right have fundamentally different mindsets concerning the U.S. Constitution.
The Democrat Party has largely adopted the Left’s mindset. They’ve captured the party.
The mindset of the Republican Party oscillates between soft-Left and soft-Right positions, rendering its image as being…Moderate. Or, to some of us, Fuzzy, at best.
The Left’s mindset surfaced early with the German socialist activist who’s credited with initiating the international-expression of socialism: Ferdinand Johann Gottlieb Lassalle (1825-1864).
Lassalle was a jurist and philosopher, as well as a student of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel was a precursor of Marxism. If alive today, Hegel would feel at home in the Democrat Party. He wrote:
“Government has the foremost task of acting against [economic inequality] and the general destruction consequent upon it. This can be done directly through making it difficult to achieve high profits; and when [the government] abandons a part of this (labor) class to mechanical labor and factory work and leaves it in is rough state, it must however preserve this whole class is some kind of viable condition.”
Hegel offered an early case for the modern welfare state.
Now, back to Lassalle and to what he wrote about national constitutions:
“Constitutional questions are…not questions of right, but questions of might. The actual constitution of a country has its existence only in the actual conditions of force which exist in the country; hence written constitutions have value and permanence only when they accurately express those conditions of force which exist in practice within a society.”
Translated into today’s language, that comes out as…the constitution is a “living document.” It explains why the Executive branch of the U.S. Government feels empowered to enforce or ignore the U.S. Constitution at will. Its might makes what it does, or does not do, right.
Back before the ’08 general election, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo called then Presidential Candidate Barack Obama “a new kind of intelligence.” The claim came in an interview with Larry King. King never asked Cuomo what he meant by that.
In fact, there’s no “new kind of intelligence” coming out of the Democrat administration in Washington, D.C. these days that, ideologically, cannot be traced to the roots of the modern, socialistic, welfare state that go back, at least, to 18th Century Europe.
