Wherever I write, I am aware that I represent a minority of one, who regards the US Constitution with total distain for the injustice and corruption that it has introduced into the lives of modern Americans. It has made it possible for their lives to be trashed morally, economically, and legally inside their own country, while pitting citizen against citizen as they are forced down into a cruel, god-foresaken, social dystopia. And the Constitution's cluelessness about the modern world has allowed the people's tormentors to be elevated to the highest positions of authority in the land, where they legally hide their abuses behind their classified documents. Yet it is a rare human being that will put the blame where it clearly belongs.

Daniel Lazare is one of the rare ones.

He blogs with uncommon intellectual-honesty about constitutions and explains how ours misleads us and subverts our democracy. His articles appear in a number of national magazines — Le Monde diplomatique, the New Left Review, The Nation, Harper's, The London Review of Books, The American Conservative — athough he is often the lone voice of unflattering truths. Lazare is the author of several books on U.S. politics, among them "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy." On January 1, 2020, he released what I think of as Cliff Notes for watchers of Impeachment 2020, published by Strategic Culture. Lazare's brief essay 'American Collapse' is excerpted, below. It offers helpful context for the government's latest and greatest folly, which has heretofore been televised with absolutely no context at all.

On the receiving end are American minds that have been soaked in a brine of cloying patriotic narratives designed to foster self-deception. Terrorized by abstract enemies from a young age, the people often compete to denegrate their own humanity, which is seen as a weakness. They blind themselves when the ugly truth reveals that they are clinging to lies and hypocracy. They readily rationalize the atrocities that are being committed around the world in their names. The US Constitution has shown them the American way.

American Collapse

 

In order to understand the great impeachment charade, it’s important to keep three facts about the strange bird known as the United States uppermost in mind.

The first is that the US is the ultimate law-based society, one whose structure derives entirely from a single four-thousand-word document created in 1787. The second is that while Americans think of the Constitution as the greatest plan of government known to man, it’s actually the opposite: a grotesque pre-modern relic that grows more unrepresentative and unresponsive with each passing year. A pro-rural Electoral College that has overridden the popular vote in two of the last five presidential elections; a lopsided Senate that allows the majority in ten urban states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty; lifetime Supreme Court justices who can veto any law at variance with an ancient constitution that only they understand – it’s a broken-down old rattletrap in need of a top-to-bottom overhaul. Yet it’s so thoroughly frozen that structural reform is all but unthinkable.

The third thing to keep in mind is that as the constitutional system grows more and more undemocratic, the two-party system that grew out of it in the nineteenth century grows more undemocratic as well. The result is a bipartisan race to the right. Sometimes, the Republicans seem to be in the lead as Trump imprisons thousands of immigrants fleeing murderous conditions in Central America that the US war on drugs helped create. Other times it’s the Democrats as they beat the drums for imperialist war against Russia.

Take all these factors – xenophobia, mindless obeisance to ancient law, a president imposed against the popular will, etc. – mix thoroughly, place in a super-hot oven due to a growing imperial crisis, and impeachment is what pops out. The process itself is very old, a by-product of fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman law. (Impeachment derives from the Old French empeechier, meaning to ensnare or entrap.) The British abandoned it in the late eighteenth century when Edmund Burke wasted seven years impeaching an Indian colonial governor named Warren Hastings on grounds of corruption. (The House of Lords finally acquitted him in 1795). But then the Americans took it up and now, two centuries later, are immersed in the same brainless exercise.

The results were all too evident in mid-December 2019 when one Democrat after another took to the House floor to denounced Donald Trump for violating the ancient constitution by withholding lethal military aid from the neo-Nazis of the Ukraine’s Azov Battalion....

Follow the link for the rest.

"If the US staggers from one imperial disaster to another even while descending into civil war," says Lazare, "It's because the US is locked in an ancient mindset that is increasingly divorced from reality. It’s lost in a constitutional labyrinth of its own making, and impeachment is leading it deeper and deeper into the maze."