Description: On the US Constitution and related topics: socialism, religion, the Middle East....
“ A Crisis Coming ,” David Leonhardt’s recent 5,400-word article in the Times, certainly has its strong points. It effectively highlights the Constitution’s most undemocratic features, an Electoral College that has allowed two of the last four presidents to waltz into the Oval Office despite losing the popular vote, a woefully lopsided Senate that gives California the same weight as demographic midgets like Wyoming and the Dakotas, a House that shortchanges the majority “because of the way districts are dr
But the article is a sign that the Times is at last waking up to the fact that we have a real problem on our hands, which is certainly good. Still, I’d only give Leonhardt a C- due to a number of bloopers. The most serious occurs in the third paragraph when he says that “the United States today finds itself in a situation with little historical precedent.” The statement is flat-out wrong. Hasn’t Leonhardt ever heard of the Civil War?
The “irrepressible conflict” is usually depicted as a great moral crisis in which a young nation finally woke up to the fact that it could no longer continue as half-slave and half-free. This is correct as far as it goes. But the war was also a constitutional crisis involving a rough semi-democracy that was rapidly morphing into its opposite, which is to say a hideous dictatorship.