What Did John Adams Say About Defending Constitutions?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns communism, Democratic Socialists of America, and the youth group of the Democrats. Daniel McCarthy recently shared his thoughts on this topic in an article published in The Daily Signal. 

The Democratic Socialists of America don’t like being called communists….

Yet, however the group self-identifies, its agenda is openly revolutionary.

It plans call for, among other things, abolishing the United States Senate and making the executive branch and the Supreme Court subservient to the House of Representatives.

Like many a revolutionary organ, the DSA acts as a party within a party, and it increasingly represents the youth wing of the Democrats….

Yet DSA’s ideas are remarkably old-fashioned – so old, in fact, they were refuted by John Adams in 1787.

That was the year he began publishing a multivolume work called “A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America.

It was so long ago Americans still spelled “defence” with a “c.”

The book refers to “constitutions,” plural, because Adams hadn’t seen the new U.S. Constitution drawn up in Philadelphia that year.

He was actually defending the state constitutions against French intellectuals who insisted they should be more radical.

That was just two years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, with all the murder and mayhem it would bring.

The old French versions of today’s DSA schemers condemned bicameral legislatures for the same reason Mamdani’s and AOC’s fans do now: Their idea of “democracy” called for centralizing power in a single body.

No checks, no balances, and certainly no federalism – the whole nation was to be personified in an omnipotent unitary legislation.

Adams, who had been one of the first American revolutionary leaders to call for independence from Britain, was no enemy of popular self-government.

But pure democracy would be as bad as any other kind of centralized despotism – so he defended the “mixed” constitutions of the states, almost all of which had separate upper and lower legislative chambers and divided legislative, executive, and judicial power.

The federal Constitution was drawn up on the same principles – and combined them with a division of powers between the states and national government.

A glance at how the Constitution has performed for the last 239 years, compared to the chaos and bloodshed that engulfed revolutionary France once the proto-DSA types started getting their way there, shows who was right.

But DSA, not content with dreaming of an end to capitalism, wants to end constitutionalism as well.

Revolutionary parties, like Russia’s Bolsheviks, have often had such farfetched goals – the point isn’t to achieve them so much as it is to wreck whatever already exists.

DSA’s first step is to radicalize the Democratic Party, making previously outrageous ideas like packing the Supreme Court seem mild by comparison to the Democratic Socialist program. Abolishing the Senate may be politically impossible, but de-legitimizing it is a way to delegitimize obstacles to centralized power – not just the Senate itself, with its equal representation for all states, large or small, but the very principle of federalism.

 

… DSA wants to make the whole country like California, only worse. That’s their idea of democracy – the socialist version.

It’s the revolutionary French version as well, and it’s as un-American as anything can be. Yet it’s a magnet pulling the Democratic Party hard to the left.

Notoriously, DSA has a disproportionate number of members who are highly educated but low-paid or unemployed.

Like the Marxists of the last century or the French philosophes of the century before that, they’re sophisticated enough to seem like they know what they’re talking about, if you haven’t learned how disastrous their ideas have proved to be in practice.

But American education doesn’t teach much about the horrors of communism or France’s Reign of Terror.

Radicals occupied the educational establishment early on, and now they’re reaping political rewards for the ignorance they’ve fostered in the public.

According to recent Cata Institute polling, Generation Z – Americans between ages 14 and 29 – favors socialism over capitalism by 53% to 45%, though the “Democratic Socialist” label polls less well.

Despite having “democratic” in its name, however, DSA doesn’t need majority support to bring about revolutionary change for the worse: A motivated minority is enough when the majority is unaware of its danger.