There’s two ways to consider the constitutional foundation of the modern United States: A) as the Constitution itself and its amendments, interpretted according to what the authors meant when it was written, or B) as the de facto modern interpretation and application of constitutional jurisprudence and precedent, which is often considered to be at odds with the original intent of the authors of the Constitution and its admendments, but nonetheless has become widely accepted practice.
Consider: which of these is the conservative approach, and which is the liberal approach? By liberal and conservative, I don’t mean left-wing or right-wing, but am using them in the sense that conservatives conserve what exists, while liberals are liberal in considering different ways things might be (the original meaning of these terms)
The first option, A, which only looks at the written document itself, might often be described as a conservative approach, while B, which throws out the original intent and substitutes a new spirit to it, may be viewed as liberal. But I contend that it is actually the inverse: the conservative view of the US’s constitutional foundation is to conserve the existing precedent in how its government functions, which dates back broadly to the 1930′s, with some of the modern understanding of the constitutional foundation even going back as far as the Civil War, and has thus been the law of the land for nearly a century and a half.
Meanwhile, the approach of throwing out modern interpretation and precedent in favor of the original intent and meaning of the Constitution is quite a liberal approach, swapping a system that has been shaped and strengthened by cultural evolution for a prototype which is untouched by cultural evolution, and should (by default) be regarded with the same level of suspicion that liberal (i.e. paradigm shifting) proposals should (by default) be regarded with.
There’s two ways to consider the constitutional foundation of the modern United States: A) as the Constitution itself and its amendments, interpretted according to what the authors meant when it was written, or B) as the de facto modern interpretation and application of constitutional jurisprudence and precedent, which is often considered to be at odds with the original intent of the authors of the Constitution and its admendments, but nonetheless has become widely accepted practice.
Consider: which of these is the conservative approach, and which is the liberal approach? By liberal and conservative, I don’t mean left-wing or right-wing, but am using them in the sense that conservatives conserve what exists, while liberals are liberal in considering different ways things might be (the original meaning of these terms)
The first option, A, which only looks at the written document itself, might often be described as a conservative approach, while B, which throws out the original intent and substitutes a new spirit to it, may be viewed as liberal. But I contend that it is actually the inverse: the conservative view of the US’s constitutional foundation is to conserve the existing precedent in how its government functions, which dates back broadly to the 1930′s, with some of the modern understanding of the constitutional foundation even going back as far as the Civil War, and has thus been the law of the land for nearly a century and a half.
Meanwhile, the approach of throwing out modern interpretation and precedent in favor of the original intent and meaning of the Constitution is quite a liberal approach, swapping a system that has been shaped and strengthened by cultural evolution for a prototype which is untouched by cultural evolution, and should (by default) be regarded with the same level of suspicion that liberal (i.e. paradigm shifting) proposals should (by default) be regarded with.