The End of the Republic

The matchless beauty of the American legal system, as it existed until September 28, 2006, originated in the thinking of the Founding Fathers, who seemed animated by two contemporary influences. The first of these was the Enlightenment and the evolution of the scientific method. Rather than arguing on the basis of a priori logic, which held (as in religious or dogmatic thinking) that answers were preordained or accessible through Received Wisdom, the Enlightenment and the scientific method born of Enlightenment thinking proceeded on the basis of intellectual humility. That the answers were not known beforehand through divine revelation, that the secrets of Nature must be discovered through a rigorous process of trial and error, through scrupulous intellectual honesty, and that service to the Truth, as it was discovered and regardless of the form it might take, was the ultimate guiding principle. Subjective assertions of being "right" were of no weight; you had to prove it, and according to precisely defined standards.

The second influence was the tyranny of the British Crown. The colonists in America had suffered under the arbitrary and cruel dictates of an unchecked monarch and were determined to eliminate such capricious subjectivity from their own legal system.

Thus, the Founding Fathers introduced the concept of an "anti-majoritarian" Bill of Rights, encoding America's basic civil liberties. If one examines closely the ideas behind the Bill of Rights, you are struck by the close correlation between the scientific method and the fundamental principles behind such bedrock concepts as the presumption of innocence, the right to counsel, the right to trial by jury, and the right of a defendant to be confronted by all witnesses and evidence against him. The maintenance of such delicate systems was entrusted to the political system, with its intricate clockwork of checks and balances. In particular, the interplay between the legislative and executive branches, on one hand, and the judicial system on the other, ensured that arbitrary and unjust decisions against individuals could either be prevented or redressed in the event of miscarriages of justice. No matter how "obvious" the criminal case against an individual, you still had to prove it, and according to the exacting standards of the rules of evidence, and only after a full, bilateral and open trial.

That system, that magnificent edifice of justice, served us so well for so long. It's gone now. We have joined the others, the juntas, the dictatorships, the Central Committees, the strongmen, the kings. We legislated it out of existence. What we will now call justice will be characterized by arbitrary decisions by Presidents and his High Command, by subjective judgments unchallenged by open trials, and by the sequestration of individuals locked up forever without legal recourse of any kind.

Why? I don't think there's any point in asking why. We lost respect for the wisdom of the Ancients, of our elders, of our betters, all of whom endured far greater threats, far more desperate battles, than we have ever seen. We proved unworthy of our heritage. We will now descend from our Enlightened ramparts into the depths of a new Dark Age.