Why I remain a constitutionalist...

When it becomes en vogue to question the basic rules that oversee society then you are advocating having no real society...

So more and more people are challenging the idea of our basic Constitutional Republic as well as the American society as a whole. Are there legitimate concerns with how the rules are being altered and how the rules are being ignored? Sure. But just because not everyone wants to live by the rules of society, doesn't mean that the answer is to ditch them for something more palatable to those who complain the loudest.

But this is like almost everything else these days. A growing number of people (mostly the radical illiberal on the far left) simply don't like rules. More and more people in our society have fundamentally rejected religion, traditional education, our Republic, the constitution, and even the courts in general. Pretty much every portion of society that lays out a set of ground rules for people to follow is almost universally rejected. They reject the idea of church, because it pushes morals. They don't like the idea of traditional education because it is fact based and based on orderly rules. They don't like the idea of a Republic because they do not believe others have the right to autonomy to create their own rules. The constitution (and especially the bill of rights) is an outdated idea because it pushes rules. The courts are just people pushing these same rules that many simply do not want to follow.

When you do not have basic rules that people can agree on, this is what happens:

The polls by the University of Virginia Center for Politics shows a nation at war with itself. Fifty-two percent of Biden supporters say Republicans are now a threat to American life while 47 percent of Trump supporters say the same about Democrats.

Among Biden supporters, 41 percent now believe violence is justified “to stop [Republicans] from achieving their goals.” An almost identical percentage, 38 percent, of Trump supporters now embrace violence to stop Democrats.

As a flower child rock musician growing up in the 60's 70's and 80's... I believed in the various liberal ideals of freedom (or at least liberal at the time). There once was a time when conservatives would "accuse" a liberal of being a "card carrying member of the ACLU" as if it was an insult or a serious allegation. The ACLU at the time was 100% all in on standing up for the principals of the constitution and the bill of rights. The ideals of personal freedom and placing the rights of the individual above the potential tyranny of the government was at that time a liberal ideal. It was based on the bill of rights, which were a set of rules that our Government had to play by as it pertained to their citizenship. Not that the conservatives were not following rules, it's just that they had their own rules (mostly provided by the church) that often times clashed with the freedoms our constitution provided.

As time moved on, the left became less and less "liberal" as it would been described by the liberals of previous generations and more and more authoritarian (or what previous generations might have seen as almost fascist). Today, they want to follow what the Government tells them on a day to day basis (as long as those leaders are those they voted for) while rejecting the core principals that is supposed to be for their protection.

When this happens, you end up with things like Covid lock downs, mask mandates, and the government forcing citizens to take a dangerous experimental vaccine in order to basically participate in society. Our economy is probably years away from recovering from these costly mistakes that could have been avoided had we just made our elected officials follow the rules that have successfully guided us for over two centuries. When one looks back (keeping a firm grasp on the fact that these leaders were dead wrong about what they were forcing on their citizens) we can see the dangers of not following rules. Or possibly just following rules that are made up willy-nilly at the whims of public opinion.

Nope. We need rules to protect us from ourselves. The constitution, the bill of rights, the court system is all in place to prevent what has been happening recently. This is (at the end of the day) the ultimate battle. Not between the right and left, but between order and disorder.