Robert Curry—American Greatness contributor and author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea—appeared on the Seth and Chris Show yesterday to discuss his recent article, “Replacing Scalia and Replacing Constitutional Rights.” The theme of Curry’s work may help us to understand how we, the American people, can begin once again, to exercise the sovereignty our Constitution recognized and sought to guarantee.

Curry’s argument, he avers, is a simple one: America is in a Constitutional crisis because we “no longer understand the ideas that would enable us to work the mechanism properly.” Put differently, we are slowly losing our capacity for self-government. As his article on Scalia made clear, we demonstrate our confusion about the ideas that set us apart from other nations even in the language we use to describe our rights. The Founders understood them to be inalienable and the purpose of government, therefore, to be securing those rights. But today we talk of “constitutional rights” as if they were given to us by that instrument—as if their point of origin is something as arbitrary and changeable as a human contract.

The good news, however, is that our problems are self-inflicted and for this reason we also have the power to correct them. We may have forgotten the ideas that informed the Founders and their understanding of what is required of a self-governing people, but according to Curry we still “kind of have them in our bones if we don’t have them in our intellects.” America is not intended to be a country ruled by experts or a chosen few. We have the power to remind ourselves again of what it means to be a free people and that task really isn’t as daunting or intimidating as the “experts” would have us believe. We should defy them and do it.

You can (and should) listen to the whole interview here:

https://soundcloud.com/thesethandchrisshow/the-seth-and-chris-show-january-11-2017-h2