Once upon a time, words meant something, and it meant something that we, for the most part, could all agree on. But more and more people want to play Humpty Dumpty and play the “master” by imposing their view of what ought to be said by declaring that what has been said in fact does so, even if the text itself is explicitly contradicted.

How many people believe that Constitution should stand for, not what it actually says, but what it “means in current times”?

A majority of Americans.

“A majority of Americans (55%) now say the U.S. Supreme Court should base its rulings on what the Constitution ‘means in current times,’ while 41% say rulings should be based on what it ‘meant as originally written,’ according to a recent Pew Research Center report on American democratic values.”

The desire to play Humpty Dumpty has been a long-standing tactic of the Left.

The obvious problem with this is that almost every person who believes that “U.S. Supreme Court should base its rulings on what the Constitution ‘means in current times,'” won’t have a say as to what, exactly the “Constitution ‘means in current times'”, or indeed what any word means at all, and those of that 55% will likely not like what the Constitution is made to mean in the hands of those with actual social and political institutional power, and certainly won’t like it when the other side is the one exercising that power.

We, as a civilization, or any civilization for that matter, can not exist with two different definitions and meanings to the same set of explicitly written words. Either one side shall triumph over the other or be ended by the other, and the current meaning will be whatever the victor declares it to be, thus rendering the entire point of a commonly understood framework that applies equally to everyone a moot point.

To a large extent this is a major distinction between conservatism (in the Anglospheric vein) and Progressives and their fellow-goers: Either we have an overarching understand and rule of law that all are subservient to and none can lord over, or we have those with actual institutional privilege and actual institutional power wield that power in, if we are lucky, an arbitrary and capricious way, or, if we are unlucky, in a very targeted and methodical manner. If those who are of the type that prefer the latter, the best we could hope for is a relatively non-bloody rectification of names.

Hat Tip: Hot Air.

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