Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote about “the Left’s assault on the Constitution.” Perhaps one of the most fundamental questions of the 2024 election will be the future of constitutionalism. This warrants a prediction that if the Harris-Walz ticket wins and the Democrats control a majority in Congress it will result in the most radical transformation of government since the New Deal.
Many progressives are arguing for a “renewed democracy” and that the Constitution is both obsolete and a roadblock to their reform agenda. This is actually not a new philosophy. President Woodrow Wilson reflected this when he wrote:
“Our life has broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have changed our economic conditions…The old political formulas do not fit the present problems; they read like documents taken out of a forgotten age.”
Wilson argued that as a nation, “we are in the presence of a new organization of society.”
During the 1920s, a conservative direction descended on American politics. The election of President Warren G. Harding initiated a period of constitutional conservatism which battled against progressivism. President Harding described the Constitution as the “ark of the covenant of American liberty.”
Constitutional historian Melvin I. Urofsky described the 1920s “as a battleground between traditionalists fearful of the new ways and modernists eager to shed the shackles of older ideas and practices.” At the center of this battle was the Constitution and it was a document that limited the role of government or evolved to meet the challenges of the 20th century by giving the federal government more power.
Political historian Morton Keller adequately described the conservative belief toward the Constitution during the 1920s as “a veritable cult of Constitution worship.” President Warren G. Harding, Vice President and later President Calvin Coolidge, Chief Justice William Howard Taft, President Herbert Hoover, among others were examples of this constitutional conservatism.
Hoover also described the Constitution the “Ark of the Covenant” of liberty. During the 1930s it was Hoover who boldly challenged President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. As the New Deal unfolded, Hoover argued that there were “nests of constitutional termites at work.”
A fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives is how they each view change. Change is inevitable, but from a conservative perspective it should be prudent. “My idea of a conservative is one who desires to retain the wisdom and experience of the past and who is prepared to apply the best of that wisdom and experience to meet the changes which are inevitable in every new generation,” wrote Hoover.
For the conservative, change must be kept within the limits of the Constitution.
Today, our crisis over the Constitution is not just political, but cultural. Defending the Constitution will be impossible if the American people fail to realize the importance and sacredness of the document.
As President Warren G. Harding stated, “it is good to meet and drink at the fountain of wisdom inherited from the Founding Fathers of the republic.” “I wonder what the great [President George] Washington would utter in warning, in his passionate love of the republic and his deep concern about future welfare, if he could know the drift today,” noted Harding.
As a nation, we need to spend more time at the “fountains of wisdom” of the Founding Fathers. President Calvin Coolidge stated: “The more I study it, the more I have come to admire it, realizing that no other document devised by the hand of man ever brought so much progress and happiness to humanity. The good it has wrought can never be measured.”
As a nation we need to rediscover the “constitutional worship” that defined the conservatives of the 1920s. This will require both a political, and more importantly, a cultural reformation.
