OUR POSTERITY | 2005-07-23
"To secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." That is the purpose of the Constitution.
That is the ONLY purpose of the Constitution, that is the only authority it rests on. The Constitution says nothing about All Mankind. The writers of the Constitution were trying to get it adopted by Americans. So they only claimed the authority of the American people.
You see, those same Founding fathers had just had experience with people who insisted that THEY knew what all mankind should do. America had declared its independence of such people. The whole point of the Revolution was that AMERICANS ruled America.
It never occurred to the Founding Fathers that they were writing a Constitution that told the rest of the world what it should do.
Nothing could have been more alien to those who wrote the Constitution than the idea that they were writing abstract principles that All Mankind was required to follow.
About fifty years after the Constitution was adopted, John Quincey Adams stated this principle again. Someone was asking America to defend freedom around the world (sound familiar?) and John Quincey Adams replied
"America is the friend of all people's freedom, but we are the defenders only of our own."
Loyalty to America is precisely what every liberal and every respectable conservative says it is not.
Loyalty to America is loyalty to "We the people of the United States of America... and OUR posterity."