Constitutional government failed in America, long ago.
It is not certain that Eisenhower ever read the Constitution.
Might as well expect illiterate Goths without even spoken Latin to govern by Roman law.
And the lawyers of the courts, alone literate in the sacred language and many of them stupid, dishonest, or both, have long joined the office-holders of the political branches in succumbing to the irresistible temptation to lie about the Constitution or ignore it altogether.
Reading Newton's Eisenhower.
Reading Seidman.
It does not follow that the government is less free for being less constitutionally legitimate.
Actually, in many ways it is more free.
And it is at once more national, more secularist, more liberal, more social-democratic, and more monarchist than the document provides for, in large part but not entirely owing to a powerful judicial dictatorship of lies.
But the Constitution still plays a role in our politics, in some ways like the role of the Bible in popular Christianity.
Everyone feels obliged to insist his views are Biblical.
And lawyers and politicians are like theologians and preachers whose tendentious interpretations are sometimes coincidentally accurate and in no case valued the more for that, except as that is a propaganda advantage.
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