The simple truth is this: Anyone who supports the war on drugs as it is currently being run has abandoned what the US stood for at its founding regarding liberty, freedom, and the rule of law.
I agree with the main thrust of your comment but perpetuating the 'immaculate conception' myth of the US as a government of, for, and by the people is counterproductive. In particular the war on drugs absolutely goes against the ideas 'espoused' at that time. But that still holds. Ask any senator what America stands for and they will say something like "liberty, freedom, and justice for all". That doesn't mean it is what they work for in the background.
Even while framing the constitution the controlling landowners of the US, i.e. the "US", were aware of the internal enemy that needed to be controlled.
"The framers of the constitution made the determination that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent"
> makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to insure that the government will, in his words "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority" and bar the way to anything like agrarian reform
My point wasn't that this didn't happen or the US was some magical egalitarian wonderland (though the foundational period of the US had a surprisingly level of wealth equality compared to some other periods).
Rather, my point was the manner in which they did this was to construct a system of law that protected the private individual from the instruments of government, and that we're slowly undoing that precise social contract - not stealing their wealth in exchange for restraint on government powers.
It's hard to argue even though the founding of the US wasn't perfect, and that these instruments largely came about as a protection for the wealthy, that it didn't significantly raise the profile of the citizen-as-having-rights-to-be-protected form of government or that the US doesn't have a long history of viewing such policies as important, even if there have been historic violations.
I think you'd even have trouble finding periods similar to the 50-70 year long ratcheting we've seen meant to undermine those exact same rights, or that their infringement has crept so far up the social ladder.
OK. Yes the framers of the constitution did create protections from the government for themselves, and shared that with the rest of the population. As you imply it is hard to know if the general case was a side-effect or original intent.
At the same time they purposefully sought to disenfranchise the majority so that they might change the rules at any time.
So the constitution within the constitution is that the government will protect the wealthy, and that makes sense given who was writing it.
It appears that the ruling elites now value control of the population over privacy. I see two possible explanations but perhaps there are others.
* They see the incredible growth of poverty in the US and there is no vast neighboring region in which to exterminate existing inhabitants and settle. Hence wealth protection from the masses is a higher priority than the privacy protections.
* Mass media has distorted the scale of the disenfranchising effects of our system (rich have more control and poor even less) and the wealthy realise they can use their control of the government to make huge fortunes. For example the profits of the banks are derived by transfer of wealth from taxpayers through implicit insurance since insurance allows highly profitable high risk strategies. They then choose short term profits over privacy / human rights.
In any case they choose to exercise their rights under the constitution within the constitution to change the laws to bring about repression and control.
I'm not really rebutting your point here. Instead I want to highlight that what is happening now IS consistent with the ideals of governance around during the formation of the US and what has changed is likely a lower level 'priority'
'Anyone who supports the war on drugs has abandoned liberty and freedom.'
Terms like "the rule of law" encourage a mentality that's unempathetic and unconcerned with many forms of tyranny and suffering. It encourages complicit behavior through blind allegiance and rhetoric. That allegiance will probably remain until the faithful are personally affected and destroyed by the rule of law they so thought they knew.
The rule of law is a process that should be (and usually isn't) viewed as deserving of great distrust, fear, and delicacy rather than of great admiration and worship. The largest atrocities and cruelest of societies may happen due to the rule of law. The United States' Bill of Rights is not enough. Legitimacy doesn't fear it. Meaning is created. Meaning overrides meaning. Freedom and free speech may be eternal flames in the hearts of free minds. I hope that will always be so. Legitimacy, meanwhile, paves a path with new terms while nationalists are left clinging to the rule of law.
> The largest atrocities and cruelest of societies may happen due to the rule of law.
I seem to recall these sorts of things being strongly correlated with secret police, etc, and not being in a society with stable laws that it adheres to.
Conflating secret law with law being the basis of our large scale interactions doesn't make for a strong argument, unless you can show that one necessitates the other.
Similarly, rule of law has nothing inherently nationalistic about it.
I'm curious what you'd propose as a stable large scale social structure that doesn't fundamentally depend on us establishing a mutual rulebook that we all agree to play by. I don't mean that sarcastically, I honestly want you to suggest one.
Talking about the systemically brutal consequences of people who have blind allegiance to the rule of law is not equivalent to inferring that humanitarian law (e.g. Bill of Rights) shouldn't exist. It's not equivalent to saying law isn't useful. You're conflating or projecting these sentiments. Unfortunately, conflation like that is a common consequence of nationalism. People who find faults are often derided or willfully misinterpreted. I'm not accusing you of this. It's just a point.
> "I seem to recall these sorts of things being strongly correlated with secret police, etc, and not being in a society with stable laws that it adheres to."
Those societies didn't have "secret" police. They had police who operated (sometimes in secret) legally. Every nation is as fueled by law as the next group seeking legitimacy. This shouldn't be a point of contention. No one's conflating "secret law" with "law." In a land where "secret law" becomes increasingly legitimate, it becomes a fool's errand to stress over shallow semantics, as dire reality takes shape (e.g. a prison, surveillance, military economy legitimately escalating).
> "Similarly, rule of law has nothing inherently nationalistic about it."
Allegiance to "rule of law" is entirely nationalistic in this context of nations. I'm not talking about the 'laws' of physics. The violence that inherently serves as the foundation of all national laws isn't magic. Zeus and his jack-booted thugs aren't appearing out of the sky to magically enforce words written on paper. Maybe you're trying to say that one person's interpretation of a nation will vary from another person's interpretation and, therefore, this means that one particular nationalist is not the same as another particular nationalist in the same nation. That's true. Yet, it doesn't mean much. It's usually a source of delusion ultimately.
