The video below shows documentary filmmaker Ami Horowitz asking Yale students to sign a petition aimed at repealing the First Amendment. Horowitz was able to collect more than 50 signatures in less than an hour in what he called an “unbelievable display of total stupidity.”
Anyone with experience teaching undergraduates should not be surprised. Nor, while I am not a big fan of conspiracy theories, do I believe undergraduate ignorance is completely happenstance.
For far longer than I have been alive, there have been various efforts to rewrite American history to support some current agenda. Among the more insidious of those was the mid-20th century mythology of the United States being founded as a Christian nation. Although still widely believed, primary source research simply does not support that conclusion.
Although it probably will not happen in my lifetime, it is quite likely that, within a generation or two, there will be a new constitution. Already, there are calls for states to convene a constitutional convention to address some relatively minor issues such as congressional pay.
However, once a constitutional convention is assembled, the doors for change are thrown wide open. In fact, that’s how the United States went from being a confederation of states during the American Revolution to having a centralized national government with the power to coerce that states before the dawn of the 19th century. A group of well-organized and determined individuals, known in textbooks as Federalists, arrived with a plan. With a few concessions and other changes, their design became the basic document known as The Constitution of the United States.
Quite likely, the new government created in the future will be less democratic and more dictatorial. Power will be consolidated in the hands of a relatively few individuals increasingly isolated from concerns of the common man or woman. Not only will the public be disarmed, any remaining rights will be on paper with either no enforcement provisions, much like court orders today, or will receive no funding.