Here is the opening of a Tom Woods email newsletter from back on the 11th (emphases mine):
This morning on Twitter…a Theo Jordan expressed a common enough opinion:
"We are so fortunate to have our Constitution. Look at the state of affairs in places without such expressed rights, like Canada, Australia, the UK, etc. This revolution has fully castrated them. And it would be the same here if not for that document. Defend it with your life!" […]
I understand where Jordan is coming from, since that's where I used to be. But no piece of paper is self-enforcing, and if you think a piece of paper is going to stop people determined to carry on the social revolution, you have grossly underestimated them.
We are two Supreme Court justices away from being Canada, Australia, and the UK, to use Jordan's examples.
Like Woods, I used to be where Jordan is. In one sense, I am still there, in that I am able to recognize that we are better off than those other Anglophone nations specifically because of the 1st and 2nd Amendments to the Constitution. The same forces that are at work undermining speech and self-defense rights in the rest of the Anglosphere are at work here, and they would already have had similar victories here had those amendments not existed.
Yet even with those amendments, the erosion of our rights continues. How long before it is complete? And if, as Woods says, a few Supreme Court justices were flipped, would that be that? It might. The Constitution, ultimately, is just words on paper. If enough people are determined to do an end-run around it, they will.
Look at where we are now. Look at where we went in 2020. Was that not a wakeup call for those of us who have long revered the Constitution? Was it not an indication that Lysander Spooner was correct when he said,
But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it.
Read this statement logically and you realize that it is indeed irrefutable. It’s either A or B. There is no C. What he goes on to say next…
In either case, it is unfit to exist
is arguably more provocative. Yet, as many of you know, I have come to agree.
Yes, we are better off in our constitutional republic than others who lack our protections—especially our Bill of Rights. Yes, things can be made better or worse if better policies are implemented. But they will always get worse again. Democracy has many inherent problems. And more fundamentally, all such governments are rights-violative monopolies that share several primary characteristics in common with slavery.
After all you have seen over the last few years, and all you have read, are you ready to at least consider that the constitution, as amazing a creation as it was, is not the bulwark of liberty that we’ve believed it to be? Not only are the good aspects of it easily overborne, as we saw in 2020, but it enshrines a system that, simply put, is not good. Before you answer, please read Spooner’s description of that system:
The consent, therefore, that has been given, whether by individuals, or by the States, has been, at most, only a consent for the time being; not an engagement for the future. In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot—which is a mere substitute for a bullet—because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defense offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.
Why is any of that okay?
Getting to the next phase in our evolution requires first realizing that we must evolve. And unfortunately, right now, patriotic conservatives’ reverence for the Founders and the Constitution is one of the obstacles in the way. I get it. I have been there for most of my adult life. But as I said to friends of Facebook yesterday—it’s time to put down the tricorne hats and just walk away.
If Jefferson were alive today, I believe he would agree. You can see it is his writing—he clearly believed that the system they created was an expedient that should be changed if it did not serve the principles that animated its creation. Thomas Paine certainly would agree, as would all the Anti-Federalists (Patrick Henry and Sam Adams most famous among them), who opposed the Constitution at the time. They were already perceiving what Spooner and later libertarian anarchists saw more clearly in the centuries to follow. As a result, they insisted on inclusion of the Constitution’s best part—the Bill of Rights.
So there are some of the most passionate and eloquent of the Founders right there. If they were alive today, their tricorne hats would have been pointed in the direction of something new. Ours should too.
If I had to choose, I would prefer we had kept the Articles. All the problems I have heard people say about it over the years are not problems IMO. Features, not bugs, especially the neutered and nearly non-existent federal government. Control freaks being control freaks I can see them having ruined that in their favor as well and we may have ended up here regardless, but it almost certainly wouldn't have been as easy. Even when we learned about both in high school, I could never quite place it at the time being young and dumb, but something about it (articles) always seemed at least somewhat better for the people in my mind. And in fact, just re-read em a couple weeks ago.