THE CONSTITUTION -- CONFOUNDING THE FOUNDING FATHERS - Reconvene the Convention and Rewrite the Document - LA Times - 1987 - Gore Vidal 🤔
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But you’re making a sharper Vidal-style point: what if their Article V project does not trap us inside their country, but reveals that they have already constituted a different one?
That is a much stronger argument. [yeah, no shit]
Vidal’s 1987 piece is basically sitting right there grinning at this. He says the right, in trying to use a convention for balanced budgets, school prayer, abortion, pornography, drugs, and other items in what he calls a “Bill of Wrongs,” may have “set in motion the great engine” that could overthrow the Constitution they claim to worship. He also says that if there is to be a battle over freedoms, better to have it in the open than “backstage at the Supreme Court,” and he even suggests the Bill of Rights might be enhanced rather than destroyed.
That is the part I should have foregrounded. A convention is not only a danger. It is also a revelation machine.
If reactionary states convene around minority rule, forced birth, Christian nationalism, fossil sovereignty, federal paralysis, and judicial supremacy, then they are not merely proposing amendments. They are confessing their constitutional identity. They are saying: this is the country we want. At that point, the democratic response does not have to be, “Oh no, how do we stop them from changing our Constitution?”
Fine. You have announced your constitution. Now we will announce ours.
That is not the same as trying to win their convention. It is using the crisis to make the latent split explicit. No more “may we please amend the old order by your rules,” but WE are the continuing democratic republic, and YOUR project is the breakaway one.
That rhetorical reversal matters, because reactionaries love posing as restorationists: they “return” to the founders, “restore” constitutional order, “save” the republic. Vidal’s whole joke is that this is nonsense. He calls original intent “gorgeous nonsense,” because no one can coherently know the single intent of those fifty-five men, and because many of them did not treat the document as sacred in the first place. The Constitution itself was born from an illegal-ish supersession of the Articles of Confederation.
So yes: the move is not to ask permission from the old frame. The move is to claim the deeper legitimacy of constitutionalism against the existing Constitution’s failure.
Let them own the old dead form.
Let them be the party of Article V gamesmanship, equal-state Senate entrenchment, minority vetoes, judicial supremacy, “history and tradition,” and a Constitution too brittle to govern a modern multiracial democracy.Build a public counter-constitution.
Not a manifesto, a real draft: rights, institutions, amendment procedures, court structure, labor, climate, bodily autonomy, voting, privacy, federalism, Indigenous sovereignty, emergency powers, anti-corruption, and democratic renewal. Make it concrete enough that people can compare futures.Treat adaptability as the founding virtue.
Vidal leans hard on Jefferson’s generational-renewal idea: institutions must change while rights are guarded. That is the opposite of reactionary originalism. A better constitution should include scheduled renewal votes, easier-but-still-serious amendment rules, and a rights floor that no temporary majority or captured court can erase.Stop framing the question as secession first.
Frame it as constitutional succession. The question is not “Who gets to leave America?” The question is “Who is carrying forward democratic constitutional legitimacy?” If one side wants oligarchic theocracy in constitutional costume, and the other wants equal citizenship under a living democratic charter, the latter has the better claim to the republic.Force the legitimacy confrontation into daylight.
That is pure Vidal. He says if freedoms are going to be fought over, let the battle happen openly rather than inside the attorney general’s office or the Supreme Court’s backstage machinery. A public constitutional counter-project does exactly that. It makes people choose, explicitly, between dead-hand rule and living consent.
Where I still put a warning label: the danger is not that “they win the convention and we politely submit.” The danger is that they use convention theater to claim popular legitimacy while democratic forces remain reactive, lawyerly, and procedural. [hello democratic party, we're talking about you here] That is the ambush. Not that they create a country you must join -- that they create a country, call it the only real America, and leave everyone else sounding like they are passively objecting.
So the answer is not fear of a convention. The answer is preemption. Have the better constitution ready before the crisis fully arrives. Name the new republic before they monopolize the old one.
Make the central claim brutally simple: a constitution that cannot protect human dignity, cannot adapt, cannot correct minority rule, and cannot restrain its own judges has forfeited all moral authority. Only the living are allowed to found again.
All it takes is some goddamn bravery here in the land of the free.
