The US Constitution: intended to provide liberty and justice for all?

Read this article and tell me what you think.

A Constitution for the Few: Looking Back to the Beginning — by Michael Parenti

The argument is that the actual way that the Constitution came into being served more to preserve and protect the status of the American upper class than the ideals we commonly assume today. Parenti wrote another essay in 1980 entitled “The Constitution as an Elitist Document,” which has been republished in The US Constitution edited by Bertell Ollman and Jonathan Bimbaum. In the introduction to that volume, Ollman makes this provocative statement: “The framers did everything they could—consistent with winning acceptance for the document—to avoid placing the loaded gun of popular sovereignty in the hands of the people.”

Recognizing this framework as the philosophy under which the Constitution developed puts a different spin on a number of significant events in American history that resulted in an expanded enfranchisment that came to include non-property owning males, blacks, and women. The expansion of popular sovereignty would then constitute an attack upon the elite culture that produced the Constitution, rather than a realization of its values.

Or… liberal bias in the media? How about a conservative bias in the system? Just a thought…

That’s not to say the whole thing is irretrievably screwed, though it’s possible that it is. But at the very least, we need to reconsider the presuppositions upon which we base our understanding of American government. Just ask the Native Americans.

People who have power tend to do whatever they can to hold onto that power, and give it up only begrudgingly (and arguably often in ways that either create new power for themselves or minimize the effect giving up the powers will have on their supremacy). That is no less true for the people who instituted the American forms of government than any other. Remembering that it seems that pragmatism may have had more to do with issues like the Bill of Rights and other arguably progressive measures in the Constitution than idealism.

Good night, and good luck.