Individualism, the understanding that in the body politic each person has their own individual rights and are held equally before the laws, found its start in William of Ockham in 1330s when he wrote amongst many treatises the Work of Ninety Days. Ockham set out to decry the then Pope's condemnation of the Franciscans. He resulted in establish several things. First, individualism, an extension of his critiques of Aristotle. Second the establishment of the idea that Kings ruled by Divine authority, and his absolute rejection of such a hierarchical schema of society. Third his abject rejection of Papal authority and the need for consular decision making. The Counsels led to the assembly of individuals to reach a concurrence, the Divine Right was non-existent since we were all equal, and the individual had rights descendant from Natural Rights and embodied in natural Law.
Now as to how one may govern we see Montesquieu. His writings became the basis for our Constitution. The Bill of Rights embodied our individual freedoms and rights. The interplay between Constitution and Bill of Rights is a balance between the governing and the governed.
Now along come what appears to me to be the proto-Marxist theories from Harvard and Yale destroying the core of our individualism. In the NY Times the two authors it is noted state:
When liberals lose in the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century — they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong. But struggling over the Constitution has proved a dead end. The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism. The idea of constitutionalism is that there needs to be some higher law that is more difficult to change than the rest of the legal order. Having a constitution is about setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass day to day. Our Constitution’s guarantee of two senators to each state is an example. And ever since the American founders were forced to add a Bill of Rights to get their handiwork passed, national constitutions have been associated with some set of basic freedoms and values that transient majorities might otherwise trample. But constitutions — especially the broken one we have now — inevitably orient us to the past and misdirect the present into a dispute over what people agreed on once upon a time, not on what the present and future demand for and from those who live now. This aids the right, which insists on sticking with what it claims to be the original meaning of the past.Arming for war over the Constitution concedes in advance that the left must translate its politics into something consistent with the past. But liberals have been attempting to reclaim the Constitution for 50 years — with agonizingly little to show for it. It’s time for them to radically alter the basic rules of the game.
In my opinion this proto-Marxist argument is simply: we know better than all of these others and it is our duty to tell them how to behave. Indeed it is an almost Stalinist pronouncement, on a centralized regime devoid of any historical context regarding the founding of our country.
I have seen this type of pseudo-intellectual approach in many of the younger generation. Namely, one does not have to deal with any facts of historical constructs, one merely need have their own idea and if it is theirs it must be right. Any conversation with an older generation individual and one of these newer characters always entails the younger refuting the position of anyone else and suggesting theirs without basis just to appear to be smarter. In reality this approach demonstrates the gross lack of intellectual comprehension.
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