Amid staff disruptions and swirling questions about its finances, the foundation created to honor the “Father of the Constitution” is scrambling to mark Constitution Day on Saturday with two woke, anti-Constitution panel discussions.
As detailed in an investigative report here last week and also discussed by the Heritage Foundation’s Brenda Hafera and others, James Madison’s Montpelier Foundation has been subject to a hostile takeover led by leftists who appear to detest Madison and want American history to be told entirely through the lens of slavery. The new management has significantly downgraded the attention given to Madison himself and deemphasized the role and status of its once-thriving Center for the Constitution.
The turmoil has attracted plenty of attention, including a surprise visit to Montpelier this week by former Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen. And the foundation faces what, earlier this summer, was a $576,000 shortfall from expected income while also facing a combination of bond payments and $1.66 million in “unfunded liabilities,” which appears to be the “borrowing” of restricted donations to use for operational expenses instead.
Saturday is Constitution Day, traditionally the big highlight of Montpelier’s year. It would be easy enough to sponsor neutral discussions on the Constitution and Madison’s role in crafting it. It is a simple fact, for example, that Madison was the first to develop fully the theory that an “extended republic” could succeed even though smaller ones had failed. The Constitution set up the first formal republican government in history where power was distributed both horizontally, among three branches of government, and vertically, between national, state, and local governments. If Montpelier wanted a more lively interpretation of undeniable facts, then surely it could have supported a panel discussion involving people with various opinions about how well each of these aspects has worked in practice.
The point is that Montpelier’s panels could be instructional and interesting without being ideologically skewed — which, unfortunately, is what they are in fact.
Instead, the new management, intent on implementing what even the discredited and radical Southern Poverty Law Center celebrates as “progressive changes,” is offering two panels of anti-Constitution leftist indoctrination — as if that will solve the attendance problem that has plagued the estate in the last year or so.
The first panel isn’t even on the Constitution. Instead, it is a self-congratulatory discussion of “Equal Power-Sharing at Montpelier,” which the staff ludicrously calls “A Madisonian Model of Governance.” The reference is to what the new management calls “structural parity,” a racial quota system by which at least half of the Montpelier Foundation board must be selected by a self-chosen committee of slave descendants and ideological allies. Never mind that the so-called Montpelier Descendants Committee notably excludes 26 actual descendants of Madison’s manservant Paul Jennings, just because they aren’t ideologically in tune with the committee. So much for “sharing” power with Montpelier’s real descendants.
Anyway, rather than talk about the Constitution, Montpelier’s new overlords — committee founder James French, now the Montpelier board chairman; current MDC chairman the Rev. Larry E. Walker; and interim Montpelier CEO Elizabeth Chew — will talk about how great it is that they now have power at the estate.
The second special panel isn’t something laudatory or even neutral about the Constitution but about how it supposedly has failed. Called “Is the Constitution in Danger?,” it talks about “the current political crisis [and] America’s vulnerability to democratic collapse,” along with an obviously leftist take on “how we can reinvigorate the American spirit.”
Reinvigorate, or maybe radically reinvent. One panelist, professor F. Michael Higginbotham, argues that “race-based preference is still vital in the United States given the country’s history of slavery and its continuing, pervasive discrimination.” Racial justice, he will claim, cannot be “left to the electoral process.” He once hosted a whole written symposium dedicated to how best to achieve “reparations” for past slavery and abuse, which he called “an idea whose time has come.”
The second panelist, Jamelle Bouie, is a far-left New York Times columnist who believes the Constitution is more an impediment to happiness and justice than a help. Bouie wants to eliminate the Electoral College and equal representation in the Senate. He believes that racism is inextricably rooted in capitalism and thus that eliminating one must entail a radical restructuring of the other.
The third panelist, noted presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, is more centrist, but when she does show political leanings, they consistently run leftward.
There is no balance here. There is none of the broad diversity that really matters — that of opinion and thought. This is constitutional criticism of the Left, by the Left, and for the Left. And it’s anything but Madisonian.
