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Amar isn't a random blogger, he's an eminent originalist constitutional scholar. I recall a blurb on the back of his book saying he was one of the five most cited living American legal scholars. He's a man who has devoted his life to the study of the American constitution.
This is the challenge facing the project of building a new American nationalism, you can't excise people like Amar without destroying much of what makes this country great.
I stand corrected.
Agreed.
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The Constitution is dead. It has not protected me, it is not protecting me now, it will not protect me in the future. To the extent that power flows from it, it is because people with poor understanding allow themselves to be scammed by appeals to it.
I emphatically do not agree that racial descent is a workable frame for pulling together a nation out of the wreck, but that does not change the fact that most of the things that made this country great appear to be either dead or dying, and the appeals to a "creedal nation" were either useless to prevent this process or actively accelerated it. The basic fact is that we hate each other, and cannot find consensus on what the law is or how it should be enforced, and that is not a survivable situation long-term.
If there be a way to salvage something worthwhile from the wreck of America, it seems likely that it is going to involve more sacrifice than your arguments presume.
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