The moment America took the wrong turn,
#Russell #Vought explains,
was when the progressive movement under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson figured out how to “radically pervert” the constitution
without having to officially amend it.

The Left
– Vought uses these terms indiscriminately: the Left, progressives, Marxists, it is all the same
– started treating the constitution as a living document.

Instead of defending and preserving the constitutional order,
they wanted to modify it in order to “keep up with a modernizing nation.”

At first sight, this may sound like standard “originalism,”
the type we have been hearing from the conservative legal movement for decades.

But when Vought talks about the constitution in a Claremont Institute journal,
and about Woodrow Wilson as the beginning of evil leftwing subversion,
there is a specific meaning to what he says.

Ideologically, the Claremont Institute is the home of West Coast Straussianism,
a term pointing to a specific school of thought on the Right that goes back to political philosopher #Leo #Strauss.

His disciple #Harry #Jaffa,
a famous Lincoln scholar and one of the most influential conservative intellectuals particularly in the middle decades of the twentieth century,
is a key figure in the West Coast Straussian intellectual tradition.

It was Jaffa’s students who founded the Claremont Institute in the late 1970s.

West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding
– and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature,
enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents.

In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy:

A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time,
thereby alienating America from the timeless essence which it once embodied.

This, to West Coast Straussians,
puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism
– ideologies that seek to remake man and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention.

That is what Vought invokes here:
When “the Left” started to “modernize” the constitutional order,
they were in fact destroying all that was good and noble about America
– they were deviating from the “natural order” itself.

Today, the constitutional order is no more.

“We are in a post-constitutional moment in our country,” Vought declares:

We have entered “a new arrangement
– a new regime if you will
–that pays only lip service to the old Constitution.”

Power now lies with the executive, Vought explains.

Not with the president, however, but with the agencies,
unelected bureaucrats, civil servants.

And these agencies are fully in the hands of a “permanent ruling class” of leftist elites.

“It has been a slow-moving revolution for over a hundred years,” Vought claims.

And this is crucial:

The leftwing revolution has already happened and succeeded.

Therefore, conservatives categorically err when they try to preserve what has long been destroyed.

“So where do we go from here?” Vought asks.

He has a solution:

Conservatives need to become “radical constitutionalists.”

Vought demands the Right “throw off the precedents”
and “be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution.”

For instance, he suggests Republican governors should declare an “invasion” of “illegal aliens,”
take control of the border themselves, and
“apprehend and return illegal aliens to the border without the federal government.”

(In January 2024, Texas governor Greg Abbott did just that,
declaring that the
“lawless border policies” by the “lawless president”
Joe Biden had failed to protect the state of Texas from the “invasion” of migrants;

by claiming a right to “self-defense,” Texas announced it was going to defy the president’s authority and nullify federal law.)

According to Russell Vought,
the current “regime” simply has no legitimacy whatsoever.
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/meet-the-ideologue-of-the-post-constitutional?triedRedirect=true