Amerika

Unlike on all other Right-wing sites, apparently, you read here about how the Fourteenth Amendment was the beginning of the end for American government. Others react with shock; how can government giving us more rights be a bad thing?

Generally the law is explained as forcing the states to apply the Bill of Rights in their laws, but this misses the bigger point: the 14A created a mandate for government to intervene anyway there was not “equal protection.” This reversed the Bill of Rights, which was not focused on equality at all, but avoiding government overreach!

In other words, with one single amendment, the Americans entirely reversed the direction their government was taking. Instead of a Constitution designed to keep government out of private affairs, the 14A created a Constitution that demanded government interfere in all areas where inequality might exist.

The founding fathers would have scoffed at the idea of hiring quotas, progressive taxes, and hate crime laws. These created the same situation from which they hoped to escape where powerful interests hijacked society for their own ends. In the American case, however, the powerful interest was pity for the minority.

As even the mildest sources recognize, equal protection under the laws was the heart of the 14A, and expanded quickly to its simplest concept, “equality”:

On July 9, 1868, the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified, granting citizenship and “equal protection under the laws” to anyone “born or naturalized in the United States,” including formerly enslaved people.

When you demand “equal protection under the laws,” you end up with a guilty-until-proven-innocent situation: any government, law, or private citizen is assumed guilty unless they can show that they were not discriminating. If any citizen is found to be unequally situated, the assumption is that illegal bigotry is to blame.

Previously, laws followed an innocent-until-proven-guilty scenario. Unless you could point to government preventing someone from exercising their natural rights, everything was assumed to be above-board and it was figured that God or nature (and possibly Darwinism) would sort everything out.

Not surprisingly, the 14A had to be mandated through a hostage situation where the former Confederate states had to sign on to re-join the union:

Southern states also resisted, but Congress required them to ratify the 13th and 14th Amendments as a condition of regaining representation in Congress, and the ongoing presence of the Union Army in the former Confederate states ensured their compliance.

Good laws do not require hostage-taking.

As even affirming sources recognize, the 14A inverted the Constitution and therefore needed to be passed as an amendment because otherwise it would have been seen as unconstitutional in the light of all previous laws and the Constitution itself. With an amendment however, the Constitution could be turned on itself:

Before the Civil War, state and federal courts were quite reluctant to rule laws unconstitutional. They were especially reluctant to do so to protect individuals and minority groups from hostile majorities. The Supreme Court had said it would intervene directly against state laws only when they violated expressly stated constitutional prohibitions. That meant that the provisions of the Bill of Rights, the main listing of Americans’ civil and procedural rights, did not apply against the states.

By stating explicitly that “no State shall” abridge the rights of citizens, deny due process, or deprive persons of equal protection of the law, the Fourteenth Amendment met the Supreme Court’s requirement. Moreover, it mandated that that courts intervene to protect very vaguely defined rights.

Slowly, they interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to impose on the states most of the rights listed in the Bill of Rights. With Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision ruling government-required school segregation unconstitutional, the Supreme Court began to overturn all government-sponsored racial discrimination. In the seventy-plus years since, state and federal courts have extended the principle to age and gender discrimination, aided by supportive state and federal legislation.

The 14A did not simply impose the Bill of Rights on the states… it imposed it on private citizens. The legal reasoning went that if the state tolerated inequality, it was then denying its citizens a right to equality. The 14A invented government-created rights.

In this way, it followed the French Revolutionary model as seen in the Napoleonic Code which emphasized equality through reason enforced at a federal level:

Napoleonic Code, French civil code enacted on March 21, 1804, and still extant, with revisions. It was the main influence on the 19th-century civil codes of most countries of continental Europe and Latin America.

Political unification was paired with a growing national consciousness, which, in turn, demanded a new body of law that would be uniform for the entire state. The Napoleonic Code, therefore, was founded on the premise that, for the first time in history, a purely rational law should be created, free from all past prejudices and deriving its content from “sublimated common sense”; its moral justification was to be found not in ancient custom or monarchical paternalism but in its conformity to the dictates of reason.

Under the code all male citizens are equal: primogeniture, hereditary nobility, and class privileges are extinguished; civilian institutions are emancipated from ecclesiastical control; freedom of person, freedom of contract, and inviolability of private property are fundamental principles.

Europe followed the same path of decay of most advanced civilizations: create easy jobs, then create a mass of workers, then use them as a political base — at which point all politics becomes gift-giving of tax money — and then convert to a fully managed system where socialism is a type of insurance against revolution and inequality.

In the pursuit of this symbolic goal of equality, the civilization consumes itself from within. It taxes its most capable in order to subsidize its least capable, and when it ends up with more of the latter, becomes ruled by the passions of trends, panics, manias, fads, bullying, and other of the worst behaviors of humankind.

With the 14A, the USA caught up with the European model although it took another eighty years for it to fully vest. As the second world war kicked off, the USA like the Communists redefined itself as a society of equality, and forgot about the need for constant recycling of genetics through competition.

As Rome II fades away and prepares to go out as a third world society, it makes sense to recognize that the 14A not just transformed our laws, but erased our best genetics and replaced them with yes-men, followers, NPCs, trend-chasers, careerists, and other people who miss the forest for the trees.

Such people operate in a means-over-ends mode where they try to do the right procedure and follow the right social morality and only care secondarily if they get anything done of any use to anyone. Their goal is to feed at the trough of society by going through the motions, not invest themselves emotionally in something.

As you celebrate 14A Day, remember that 99% of your fellow citizenry thinks the 14A was a good thing when in fact it is the pathway to our doom.

Tags: 14A, civil rights, equality, human rights, napoleonic code, natural rights