You're Not a Progressive. You're a Constitutionalist.

The label "progressive" exists to make the most rational actors in public policy sound like ideological outliers. Watch how the spectrum actually works. One group says children are starving and we should feed them. Another group says maybe in ten years we could create a means-tested single meal program that enriches a few CEOs while costing taxpayers three times what direct provision would. A third group says children must starve because freedom demands it, and besides, we need to fund oil subsidies instead.

The first position gets labeled radical, the second gets called reasonable, and the third gets a seat at the table.

Reject the framing entirely. We're not progressives; we're the ones defending the founding principles of this country.

The founders were flawed. They owned slaves, excluded women, and compromised with evil to hold a fragile coalition together. But they opened our foundational documents with your rights, not the government's powers. They didn't write the Constitution to tell you what you owe the state; they wrote it to tell the state what it can't do to you.

They came from a monarchy, and they used Enlightenment ideas to protect us from the worst kind of government, the kind they fought a war to separate themselves from. There were colonists who wanted to stay with England, who argued for working through proper channels and reforming from within, and the founders rejected that.

They didn't tell us to vote out tyranny. They told us to tear it down.

The Declaration of Independence is explicit: "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."¹ They tried altering, they petitioned, and they asked for representation, but they were ignored. So they abolished.

The men who wrote those words had just finished shooting at their own government, and they considered this not merely acceptable but obligatory. "When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government."¹

“Their duty.”

Our duty.

A functioning government doesn't need to be held back from hurting its citizens. The founders understood that, and they were trying to build a system that would prevent a tyrannical one, so they wrote down the floor: here's what power can't do to you, no matter what. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from government thugs kicking down your door. These aren't gifts; they're minimums.

They gave us the floor, and the GOP is tearing it up.

We're the constitutionalists, even if we're not used to thinking about it that way. We're the ones following ICE vehicles through neighborhoods and blowing whistles and honking horns to warn families before agents reach their doors, the ones recording abductions and beatings and murders so there's a record. We're living in the spirit of this nation's founding, fighting for the Constitution, for freedom, for personal liberty, for justice.

The people who keep voting to fund ICE while promising reform, the ones who call abolition politically unviable, the ones more worried about swing voters than constitutional violations: they're the monarchical loyalists. The people calling us domestic terrorists are the crown, the tyrants, the ones in power trying to criminalize opposition.

You own your house, you live in your home, and you have a right to privacy and a right to be left alone. If you're not hurting anyone else, why should the government get to fuck with you?

What a radical idea. Wouldn't it be great if we had that in this country?

We do. It's called the Fourth Amendment.

We believe the government shouldn't break down your door without a judge's permission, and we believe the president shouldn't be lining his pockets while in office. We didn't need to read the founding documents to reach these conclusions; we just followed basic moral intuitions to their ends, and the founders had the same intuitions and wrote them down.

Unfortunately, about 40% of the country doesn't agree. Too bad for them; we're here to fix this.

The Fourth Amendment. The First Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment. The Emoluments Clauses. This is the plain text of the document.

A criminal organization funded by hostile foreign entities and oligarchs, wearing the flag and calling themselves originalists, is tearing the Constitution apart, and they're mostly succeeding.

Don't let gatekeepers define what counts as reasonable. Justice and equity could exist now, and the only barriers are people who profit from their absence and benefit from keeping us afraid and helpless.

We're not the extremists. We're the Americans.

Oppositional Federalism and Intro to Soft Secession booklets available at theexistentialistrepublic.com. Or go to buymeacoffee.com/theER and download free printable versions of everything and more.

WORKS CITED

1. The Declaration of Independence, 1776.