Emergencies Override the Constitution: Christopher Caldwell and COVID-19

The social upheaval brought about by the coronavirus can easily serve as an epilogue for The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, which Christopher Caldwell published just before the full-scale outbreak of the pandemic.  It details “The Roots of Our Partisan Divide” that were born in the tearful emotionalism of innocent civil rights songs like “We Shall Overcome,” but soon became an underground political bulldozer for doubling the Constitution itself.

       Caldwell suggests that constitutions and governments aren’t overthrown by military force these days.  The old militaristic model of the Bolshevik Revolution is too old hat to be cogent again.  Social and political emergencies are the new revolutionary triggers that provide the necessary disruptive cover and disorder.  “Usually when European governments of the past bypassed their constitutions by declaring emergencies, it was on the grounds of a military threat or a threat to public order,” he says.   World War I was started by an assassination, which ended with the Marxists in power, where they remain, but less overt.

    As with WWI, the covert assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King in the early 1960s can only be surmised in terms of deeper players.  We do know that the Democratic Party took a sharp leftward turn, though not until changing its color from red to blue.  Lyndon Johnson automatically took over the government.  He and his allies immediately pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 past a stunned and docile congress, the representatives of a shell-shocked voting populace.  Now every lightweight political hack knows that “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” 

    This was the beginning of the end of the traditional America that generations had grown up with.  For Caldwell, “in America, as our way of governing has evolved since 1964, emergencies are declared on a moral basis: people are suffering; their newly discovered rights are being denied. America can’t wait anymore for the ordinary democratic process to take its course.”  Is it a moral basis that resides in the sugary emotions of pop music?

    The game plan was to insert radicals into the leadership of public institutions, from universities to television media, from Hollywood to the Supreme Court.  Caldwell argues that decision-making and power soon filtered down to lesser bureaucrats once radicals were in those places:  “civil rights law gave bureaucrats and judges emergency powers to override the normal constitutional order, bypassing democracy. But the key question is: Under what conditions is the government authorized to activate these emergency powers? It is a question that has been much studied by political thinkers in Europe.”

    The latest emergency, of course, is COVID-19.   With no time to let people vote on what they want, or even to convene bodies of representatives, middle managers seem to be making spot decisions personally.  Whose idea was it to quarantine, for the first time in history, the healthy rather than the sick?  To lockdown and almost destroy the public itself? People are bewildered by a cacophony of voices and opinions.  The president’s leadership is undercut at every turn by the mainstream media.

    Some argue that COVID-19 is simply an act of nature, others that devious Chinese launched it to gain power in a weakened world.  Others yet are convinced that the attempt to cripple American society is consistent with the anarchistic juggernaut that began in 1964, but was temporarily sidetracked by the unexpected election of Trump in 2016.  When global warming failed as an existential threat, the coronavirus suddenly came forward like a Democratic Party super hero to save the leftist state.