{"id":638570,"date":"2026-07-20T20:20:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T20:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=638570"},"modified":"2026-07-20T20:20:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T20:20:00","slug":"democrats-dismiss-our-constitutional-traditions-as-nostalgia-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=638570","title":{"rendered":"Democrats Dismiss Our Constitutional Traditions As ‘Nostalgia’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Democrats Dismiss Our Constitutional Traditions As ‘Nostalgia’<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Jonathan Turley,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Below is my column in The Hill on the latest spin from the left to convince Americans to abandon core constitutional institutions and values as part of a radical agenda in the upcoming elections<\/strong>. Those who defend our traditions, on the 250th anniversary of our Republic, are now being accused of being \u201cnostalgic\u201d rather than progressive. It is a nostalgia that will take on a truly tragic element if professors, pundits and politicians are successful in this effort.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It appears that the Madisonian democracy has joined shackets and combat boots as embarrassingly outdated for many on the left. In calling for radical changes to our constitutional system, leading Democrats are now calling the lingering loyalty to our traditions as mere \u201cnostalgia.\u201d To be nostalgic in today\u2019s parlance is to be a dupe of the oligarchs and an enemy to reform.<\/p>\n

\u201cNostalgia\u201d has become the new coded term for reactionaries among Democratic figures, who are trying to convince Americans to accept radical changes to our republic after 250 years.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kamala Harris\u00a0recently insisted<\/a>\u00a0that opposition to ideas like packing the Supreme Court is mere \u201cnostalgia\u201d for a system that is no longer working. \u201cI would caution us against talking about rebuilding with any sense of nostalgia about how things work, because even before, they weren\u2019t working so well for a lot of folks,\u201d she said. That \u201cnostalgia,\u201d according to Harris, is preventing us from doing things like packing the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority.<\/p>\n

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) last week also\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cnostalgia is not working\u201d and, while refusing to embrace socialism, added that \u201ccapitalism as we know it doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Morris Katz, a political strategist for Zohran Mamdani, spoke to CNN\u2019s Dana Bash about looking beyond the label of democratic socialism and instead simply to accept that \u201cour government does not work.\u201d They are joining socialists who have\u00a0long promised<\/a>\u00a0revolutionary changes without \u201cintrospection, nostalgia or regret.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is an all-too-familiar pitch. Sixty years ago, a call to break free of \u201cold ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits\u201d revolutionized a nation. That call was heard in a Chinese paper that would help lay the foundation for Mao Zedong\u2019s bloody Cultural Revolution. Marxists had long rejected calls to preserve institutions and citizens\u2019 rights as \u201cnostalgia\u201d and \u201csentimentality,\u201d standing in the way of needed progress.<\/p>\n

For the Democratic Socialist of America organization, nostalgia stands in the way of getting rid of the Senate, presidency, and the Supreme Court<\/strong> to fundamentally change the republic.<\/p>\n

The effort is to condition Americans to adopt radical changes to our core institutions that professors and pundits say will\u00a0guarantee Democrats never lose power again<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That is not an easy task for a people who have benefited from the oldest and most prosperous democracy for 250 years. They have to be very angry or very afraid to take such a radical course.<\/p>\n

The Soviets understood that about the U.S. After Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent working in the media, defected in 1970, he revealed the four stages by which the Soviets hoped to bring about revolutionary change in the U.S. It began with undermining our institutions and values, with the help of journalists and academics.<\/p>\n

With establishment figures lining up behind radical changes, including packing the Supreme Court, the public is hearing a constant drumbeat of how our system is broken.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even Democratic judges are joining the chorus. Indeed, some appear to be auditioning for the slots promised by Democratic leaders to take over the court with a reliable liberal majority.<\/p>\n

This week, the Hawaii Supreme Court\u00a0issued<\/a>\u00a0an unhinged diatribe against the U.S. Supreme Court that abandoned any semblance of judicial restraint or decorum. It declared the majority as effectively racists, saying that \u201cThe Roberts Court sees only white.\u201d<\/strong><\/em> It portrayed the court as a rogue institution that \u201coverrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is an opinion that would make an MS NOW host blush. But it follows a pattern on the left to get people to turn against our institutions and even against the Constitution itself.<\/p>\n

Others are telling the public that they are being repressed by the Constitution, which must be scrapped. In a\u00a0New York Times\u00a0op-ed<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 \u201cThe Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed\u201d \u2014 law professors Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the nation to \u201creclaim America from constitutionalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

In yet another New York Times editorial, Jennifer Szalai\u00a0denounced<\/a>\u00a0 \u201cConstitution worship\u201d and claimed that \u201cAmericans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us. A growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky insists that it is time to trash the Constitution in favor of \u201cradical changes<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

These voices are seeking to remove all of the moderating elements of our system \u2014the safety features that have produced the world\u2019s most successful and stable republic. They are the very constitutional elements protecting us from the tyranny of the majority, protecting us from ourselves.<\/p>\n

Without those protections, we will unleash the self-destructive forces that have been tearing apart other democratic systems since Athens. It is our constitution that spared us from that fate. As James Madison observed, \u201cHad every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, history has shown that such radical proposals ultimately produce not democracy, but what the Framers called mobocracy.<\/strong> If we let that happen, many Americans will indeed look back at the last 250 years with a tragic sense of nostalgia.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times bestselling author of \u201cRage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution<\/a>.<\/em>\u201c<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nMon, 07\/20\/2026 – 16:20<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Democrats Dismiss Our Constitutional Traditions As ‘Nostalgia’ Authored by Jonathan Turley, Below is my column in The Hill on the latest spin from the left to convince Americans to abandon core constitutional institutions and values as part of a radical agenda in the upcoming elections. Those who defend our traditions, on the 250th anniversary of… Continue reading Democrats Dismiss Our Constitutional Traditions As ‘Nostalgia’<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":638554,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[20,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-638570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economic-empowerment","category-national-security","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=638570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/638554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=638570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=638570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=638570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}