"...And he worries that this process of reinvention may have stalled, with Americans now fetishizing the Bill of Rights, having lost sight of their own ability

"...And he worries that this process of reinvention may have stalled, with Americans now fetishizing the Bill of Rights, having lost sight of their own ability to remake the legal and political world..." And I'm beginning to seriously doubt my time commitment to this article. The actual history of the Constitution and Bill of Rights is quite interesting and involved. It covers everything from classical literature and history to The Enlightenment and the Thirty Years' War. Just talking about how some folks revere the docs so much now and didn't in the past is breathtakingly shallow. As an example of how short-sighted this is, note that the BoR wasn't supposed to say anything that needed saying. Some questioned the need for them at all. The government wasn't constructed to get that overpowering and intrusive into all of our lives. It's made not to do that. Why should we start making lists of things it can't do? It obviously can't do anything we didn't tell it to do. The founders in the U.S. dispassionately threw together a huge chunk of natural science, philosophy, and history, made a ton of compromises, and did the best they could. You don't have to worship or deify the folks or the documents they made. Just understand what was done and why. That's much more useful than going on at length about how unhealthy some segments of the population are being. This article is a political polemic, not a history lesson (unless you consider it a lesson on how things get more and less popular over time, which says absolutely nothing about the BoR) I love political essays that show how public thought changes over time. These kinds of essays tend to be difficult to discuss in large diverse online groups -- and many times, sadly, their purpose is to create false, simplistic narratives that can take the place of understanding. Best consumed in small doses and with lots of context.