Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale University, is the author of "The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic."

America and its Constitution have been moving leftward from the founding to the present.



After ousting a hereditary monarch and an unelected Parliament, self-described revolutionaries in the 1770s initially crafted a states’-rights confederation. A decade later, Americans tossed that overboard to create a liberal, egalitarian national government featuring far more central power to tax and regulate and far more democracy.

Reforms included an elected House, and an end to religious qualifications, and property qualifications for federal public service — all of which came from a stunning series of votes across the continent permitting unprecedented political participation and extraordinary free speech. A Bill of Rights, demanded by the populace, quickly supplemented the original plan, promising a range of liberal rights including free expression, religious equality and safeguards for criminal defendants.

One hundred and fifty years after Lincoln’s death, we are at long last redeeming the Great Emancipator’s new birth of freedom.

Slavery and racism were the snakes in this Edenic garden, and in the 1860s a new generation of liberal reformers — self-described radical Republicans — arose to right old wrongs and move the Constitution further left. Three Reconstruction amendments promised racial equality, broader liberty and enhanced federal power to protect both. A half-century later, another generation of liberal reformers — self-described progressives — added another cluster of amendments that further expanded federal power, democratized and nationalized the Senate, enfranchised women and openly endorsed redistributive taxation.

A half century after that, in the 1960s, yet another generation of liberal reformers added another cluster of liberal amendments, extending democracy to the poor, the young and the District of Columbia (a largely black city). As these mid-century amendments were unfolding, the Warren Court revolutionized judicial doctrine by bringing it into alignment with a generally liberal written Constitution.

The current era — the Age of Barack Obama and Anthony Kennedy — fits into a larger pattern. Donning Lincoln’s mantle, a tall skinny left-of-center constitutional lawyer from Illinois was elected and re-elected in a manner that redeemed the deepest spirit of the 15th Amendment (black suffrage) and the 19th Amendment (women suffrage).

A majority of white men voted against Obama, but thanks to the earlier leftist amendments that allowed others to vote, Obama won, and two of his nominees sit on the current Supreme Court. Mainstream Protestants no longer dominate America’s highest offices. (Anthony Kennedy is a Catholic, as are five other justices; the other three are Jewish.) Obamacare is a culmination of the project of earlier constitutional progressives, who championed redistributive federal policies and woman suffrage. (Obamacare could also be called Pelosicare, thanks to the female Speaker of the House efforts to steer this law through Congress.)

Rightly read, America’s Constitution rejects the 1860s Confederacy, its flag and all it stood for — treason and racial oppression. One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln’s death (at the hand of a murderous Confederate sympathizer not completely unlike Dylann Roof), we are at long last redeeming the Great Emancipator’s new birth of freedom.



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