I believe that progressive became a term of description much earlier than the 1980s, more like the first two decades of the 20th century, when the term liberal, morphed into leftism, and became political dynamite. A change in terminology was politically necessary.

Self-proclaimed “liberals” today have no trouble legally mandating all manner of regulation at the state and national level, denying basic freedoms to individuals, and they have no problem doing so. They will mandate it non-democratically through judicial mandate if they must. This is the behavior of the Left, not of liberals.

And to head off just one objection, the issue of slavery was not necessarily supported by the Constitution, Dred Scott notwithstanding. Self-government is messy business, not to mention “unworkable,” with no clear, well-defined path to the best outcome . . . that is why throughout world history oligarchy and monarchy were almost exclusively the basis for government.

Progressive, leftist, liberal. Liberal is no longer an accurate term for those on the left. And progressive is the term used by those of the left, when liberal unfortunately became a term of derision early in the 20th century, used by many of whom consider themselves “liberal.”

To put it another way, I think we have to judge the Constitution by the way it has worked. Of course, most people who pay attention to these things will have cases that they felt were wrongly decided and other disagreements with the direction of certain aspects of constitutional law. But it doesn’t make sense (at least to me) to revere the Constitution and claim we stopped abiding by it some time decades (or more) ago. It seems to me that is really to say that the Constitution stopped working.

Glad to hear that, as a group, progressives do not agree with Seidman. So, can we hear your opinions as to the meaning of the Constitution?

Like David Nickol, I don’t think I’d classify myself as a ‘progressive’ – and the ‘meaning of the Constitution’ is kind of underspecified. Do you mean ‘what the text signifies’ or ‘how important is the Constitution to our government’ or ‘how important is the Constitution to a sense of American identity’ or what?

Contra Seidman, I think there is real value in having written ground rules that define the basic framework of our government, and are very hard to change or ignore.

Some interpretation and elaboration is going to be necessary, though. Take, for example, the Fourth Amendment. The text says people are to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” from unreasonable searches and seizures. True, the Founders had no inkling of computers or the Internet. But does that mean that the Constitution really only protects ‘papers’? That the government can’t snoop on a printout without a judge’s signoff, but it’s free to peruse the same file on a computer? Protecting such files seems entirely natural to me.

(And I still don’t understand how asset forfeiture can possibly be justified in light of the Fourth Amendment, either.)

Nor do I think the document as written is perfect, or even close to optimal in many ways. I’d prefer something like the Borda count or approval voting for our elections, to take one example.

But we need those rules, which should be very hard to change or ignore – otherwise politics has a tendency to devolve into Calvinball.

Republic people, we live in a constitutional republic. It is vastly different from the mob-rule of a democracy.

Sheeesh.

Ok, I’m done.