Most of the constitutional debates in which I participate are about whether to comply strictly with the Constitution as originally meant and understood, or with court precedents even their defenders admit have drifted far from original meaning, or even with disregard for the Constitution altogether as a relic that is no longer relevant to solving modern problems.

The second most common thread is among those who would like to be able to strictly comply with the Constitution as originally meant, but lament that so many seem bent on not doing so that they represent a political force that is difficult for the constitutional loyalists to overcome. Most of those see the problem not as a deficiency in the Constitution but as a decline in civic virtue, and wonder how that decline might be reversed.

Some see a problem arising from the evolution of legal English, such that the language of the Constitution, written in the legal English of 1787, is no longer readily accessible to modern users of the language, suggesting either the need for translation or amendments to
clarify the language for moderns.

But there has been raised a different argument, that the problem is the Constitution, because it demands too much of people, and that it needs to be replaced by a constitution that demands less. The argument that the people are naturally unfit to govern themselves has often been made by monarchs and oligarchs.

About the time of the English Civil War, 1645-49, a royalist was quoted to have said, "A commonwealth is not fit for the people, because the people are not fit for a commonwealth."* By "commonwealth" he meant a representative democracy or republic, such as that once proposed by Simon de Montfort in 1265 and by the Levellers during the
English Cromwellian period.

Read more: http://constitutionalism.blogspot.com/2012/07/is-constitution-fit-f...