My previous diary entry seems to have been of interest. Thank you for all the comments. I hope I can continue to interest readers. Again, my book provides much of the background for what I have to say. The next three entries will follow up on some of the comments to the previous entry.
Many people, when they think of government change think that it has to be done through Constitutional Amendments, and since such amendments are so difficult to get passed, the possibility of change seems so remote that it seems better to just accept the way things are, and try to work within the system. As I have thought about it, and I have a chapter on amending the constitution in my book, I have concluded that amendments are not the issue at all.
If one makes a survey of the amendments to the constitution, they can be divided into those that were successful, and those that failed. The prohibition amendment failed and was repealed. The 14th and 15th amendments failed, at least for the first 100 years of their existence, and in fact were perverted into other ends (see Jack Beatty, The Age of Betrayal).
Those that were successful, on the other hand, succeeded because the changes that they made in fact already existed in the country. Women's suffrage, for example,became a constitutional amendment because the country, and individual states, had already begun to allow women the vote. The income tax amendment passed because people outside of the Supreme Court had begun to recognize that a new form of taxation was necessary to fund the growing federal government. More generally, successful constitutional amendments serve only to ratify what has already changed in the thinking of the people. The amendment does not produce the change: the change comes first, and then the amendment is passed.
The implication of this observation is that one should not wait passively for a constitutional amendment to produce a desired change, or even try to pass an amendment in order to produce a change that has not already begun in the thinking of the people. The change comes first, and the amendment follows. In short, if we want to change the government, we have to change the government--at a political level. An amendment to ratify the change may or may not follow. Thinking about constitutional amendments is only a distraction from the main business of producing change.
To me this is a liberating way of thinking about government change. The difficulties of amending the constitution is no longer an obstacle.
Next: our elected president