Book Description

The US Constitution of 1789 has been disobeyed from the outset because it could be. Its anti-democratic bias, its lack of democratic process, has made it impossible for the people to directly police their so-called "representatives," judges, and constitutional officers. None of them, contrary to what they so often suggest, are the champions of the objective truth. All human thought and action is tradition-bound. Because it was not specifically prohibited and sanctioned in the constitution of 1789, the government has monopolized the means of cultural production -- the schools, the universities, the welfare system, policy-making science, immigration, and the courts. It has leveraged this monopoly in its attempt to make its liberal, rationalist tradition the culturally dominant tradition and the dominant interpretation of the otherwise static text of the positive law -- including the constitution itself. The so-called "rule of law" is the rule of a dominant tradition. We must make it impossible for the government to unilaterally determine that tradition. Democracy is the private ownership and control of the means of cultural production. This must be asserted explicitly in our constitution if democracy is going to survive. We need a new postmodern constitution which rejects the modern liberal notion that the government can be rooted in universal standards of rational justification and universal principles of justice; that it can be tradition-neutral. Democracy is rooted in a whole web of belief about Reality, including the nature of man and therefore the nature of justice. The Rebirth Constitution recognizes the Christian foundations of real democracy, including the rejection of any official state religion and the separation of the state from every form of non-technical education. The western religious tradition is the foundation of all limits on the state. The state must have a tradition to administer justice. Paradoxically, that tradition must be one which, by its very nature, puts itself at risk by giving the people complete control over the means of cultural production. Without this popular control of the culture there is no liberty and there is no peace. This is what justifies the very same government's enforcement of the democratically derived law; its prohibition of sub-cultural law when such law violates the law written by the people and interpreted by the tradition they make dominant through competing private education and the election of their judges. The Rebirth Constitution is an explicitly postmodern, neopopulist artifact. It is a text that will please libertarians, but whose foundations are unquestionably post-liberal.