The Very Revolutionary United States Constitution

The American revolution was a revolution, but it wasn’t revolutionary; what was revolutionary was the United States Constitution.

American  Thinker 

During college one of my professors in Political Philosophy said that the only real revolutions in modern Western civilization were the French and the Russian.  He was right, but I didn’t quite get it at the time.  I do now.

While the American revolution was ostensibly a revolution, in reality it was more of a divorce where the kids kept the same parents, they just lived with their Mom.  Their Dad was still their Dad, but they didn’t have much to do with him. In contrast, the French and Russian revolutions were basically the children taking their parents out back and shooting them….

The American revolution was a revolution, but it wasn’t revolutionary. But what was revolutionary was the United States Constitution.

For the first time in history, a government was formed by a written constitution that described rights that were inherent from God (as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the constitution of most of the original 13 states) upon which the government could not impede.  What’s more, the entire thing was created for the specific purpose of limiting the power of government. This was made clear by the Bill of Rights, which—beginning with Massachusetts—became the quid pro quo for getting the Constitution ratified. And in case anyone missed the point, the last of the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights states “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

That was every bit as revolutionary as the French sending King Louis XVI to the guillotine or the Bolsheviks shooting Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family in a basement.  But what’s more, unlike those other two revolutions, the American Constitution didn’t result in rivers of blood and a collapse of society.  On the contrary, it set the American experiment on its slow but methodical march to revolutionize the world and unleash the potential of man.

The American experiment worked… for almost 200 years.  Of course it didn’t work perfectly for everyone all the time, nor for some people any of the time, but for the overwhelming majority of people who have lived in the United States over the course of its existence, life has been better here than almost any other place on Earth.

But that experiment is in the process of collapsing. Why?  Simple.  Because the nation that was birthed with a constitution specifically geared toward limiting government power has metastasized into a nation where the government controls virtually everything.

Today it’s almost impossible for a person to get out of bed and go through a normal day without violating one or more laws.  Just the federal government alone, which was the government the Constitution sought to control the most, has so many laws that it itself can’t tell you how many there are. Justice Gorsuch estimates as many as 300,000.  To his credit, President Trump sees the problem.

But that is just one part of the problem.  Another, even more dire, is playing itself out on our X accounts and on TV right in front of us — except obviously, on the MSM….  I’m of course talking about the criminal enterprise that is known as what seems like the entire Somali population in America. It appears that Somalians in America have stolen almost as much money from American taxpayers as the entire GDP of Somalia itself. 

This of course comes mere months after we saw DOGE discover the USAID / NGO grift machine documenting tens of billions of taxpayer dollars going to fund countless leftist programs.  Not surprisingly, both involve Democrats… but that’s an issue for another day.

As enraging as all of this is, these treacheries are just a drop in the bucket of where America has gone off her Constitutional rails. One need to look no farther than the federal budget to understand it. Today, 70% of federal spending goes to things that did not exist when the Constitution was written.

And we’re not talking about air traffic control towers or NASA.  No, these are programs where the government basically takes taxpayer’s money and gives it to someone else. And what would those things be? Social Security, Health, Medicare, Education & Income security. (While SS is not redistribution, it is money the government demands and then controls the distribution of.) That’s fully 70% of federal funding, clocking in at a cool $4.4 trillion. A century before, domestic spending — at that time usually on roads and farm subsidies — made up less than 13% of the federal budget.  Another way of looking at this is that in 1821, federal spending made up 2.5% of America’s total GDP while today it’s in excess of 23%.

The fraud in Minnesota and via USAID are merely the most blatant examples of a system that has gone rogue.  Half of American households pay essentially no income taxes while 100 million Americans receive some sort of government assistance.  And the icing on the cake is that we’re not even spending our own money, we’re borrowing to do so, and today the national debt stands  at 100%of GDP and unfunded mandates at twice that.

Between the stultifying regulations, the income redistribution and the rampant, government sanctioned fraud dressed up like social programs, Americans have betrayed their birthright.

America became the most powerful and consequential nation in human history specifically because of her explicitly limited government. For a period of almost 200 years she stood as a beacon of freedom and hope and opportunity. 

To the outside world that illusion of greatness may remain, but the reality is, much like the French Ancien régime before the revolution, there is a cancer at its core. And that cancer is government.  Not government per se, but rather an out-of-control government that regulates too much, spends too much, and controls too much.  Our government has become a leviathan in every manner possible and its tentacles and largesse have undercut the foundation upon which the nation was founded.

With the Democrat party’s Stalinist leanings and Stasi-like practices getting too difficult for free men to tolerate, the election of Donald Trump was a requisite for averting a real revolution. But it’s not sufficient.  The America that changed the world for the better, that unleashed a level of human achievement unlike any other cannot survive as a borg, which is exactly what it has become.

If Donald Trump and the mostly useless GOP Congress really want to actually make America great again, starting in 2026 they will turn their metaphorical guns and scalpels on the government itself and begin to bring back the primary idea that made America great in the first place:  Limited government. Without that, everything else is little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and the outcome will be the same.