He goes on to note that “Before any particular arrangement of power and beyond deployment of any specific set of rights, stood an orientation toward the future and a commitment to secure it, a security on which all other securities rested.”
We see this “orientation toward the future” in the language of the framers. “Posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theater, in favor of private rights and public happiness,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 14; in the preamble to our Constitution, which seeks to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”; and in one of the most important explications of American constitutionalism by a president, the Gettysburg Address.
But this future sense is missing from the president and his political movement. Set against it, Jackson correctly observes, is a “radicalized politics of apocalyptic orientation” that “happily sacrifices the prospect of a future for a present-tense ‘victory’ or redefines the sacrifice of the future as victory itself.”
When the president claims sovereign power to ignore Congress or deport foreign nationals without due process — when he treats the law as a suggestion, rejects any limits on his authority and makes the government his personal fief — he is both degrading the constitutional order and abdicating his responsibility to future generations of Americans. He is rejecting the obligation we have, as citizens, to carry on the effort to “form a more perfect union” and ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” He is selling our birthright so that he might enjoy a bit more power for the time he has left in office, indifferent to what it might mean for Americans yet to be born.
Thankfully, Trump’s anti-constitutionalism is not the last word. How can it be otherwise? “It is the people who make constitutions work,” Commager wrote. “Where people are ignorant or apathetic, where they distrust democracy and are frightened by liberty, constitutionalism will fail and tyranny will take its place.” But, he said, “Where people are enlightened and alert, where they are inspired by faith in themselves and in democracy, where the spirit of liberty flourishes, constitutionalism will succeed.”
Where all this goes is still up to us.