Preserving our Constitution for an Un-Serious Nation

The biggest-selling book with American conservatives right now argues that the answer to all of the above is "constitutionalism". On the other hand, the radio host Jesse Kelly says:

I incline to the latter view myself. At this point, conservative complaceniks tend to trot out Adam Smith: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." But not this much - not Covid lockdowns and open borders, Afghan "translators" and Haitian "refugees", Big Tech and Big Trans, BLM and CRT, ID for the IHOP but not for the voting booth, China as America's manufacturer and America's loan shark...

Is the United States Constitution going to save you from the above? No, the Constitution enabled it - or, to put it at its mildest, failed to prevent it. James Kirkpatrick:

Once you abolish the principle of equality before the law, any law - from the Constitution down - is irrelevant.

One of the foremost constitutional theorists of the founding generation, John Adams, observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He wasn’t the only Founding Father to hold this view. Indeed, James Madison wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”

Consistent with these experiences and beliefs, the Founders imbued liberty-preserving principles into the very structure of the new government. They divided power between federal and state governments, apportioned federal power among three branches of government, and limited the power of the federal government to certain delegated functions. But the Founders also knew that these devices alone were inadequate to preserve and sustain our new nation....

Why did they believe that the success of the union ultimately depended on the virtue of the people? Simply put, the Founders knew that government was downstream from culture. A virtuous people would courageously defend the rights endowed by their Creator and restored by the blood of patriots. But a fearful people would readily cede these rights in exchange for a fleeting sense of security....

It falls, then, to the family, the church, and educational institutions to transmit “to each new generation the virtues without which free societies cannot survive: basic honesty, integrity, self-restraint, concern for others and respect for their dignity and rights, civic-mindedness, and the like.”7 In other words, even the structural constraints of our Constitution will fail without institutions to teach people how those constraints protect liberty, to explain why that liberty is vital to the success of our country, and to inculcate the virtue needed to resist a culture of immediate gratification....

Victories in court will be hollow and ephemeral if we fail to instill in future generations the virtues upon which our nation was founded. The decisions of the Supreme Court and, ultimately, the preservation of the Constitution itself rest downstream from culture...