"But it is worth remembering, as we've seen, that the original U.S. Constitution was itself an imperfect as well as a remarkable and eloquent document. It allowed slavery to persist, it assisted the extirpation of various native peoples, it excluded women from citizenship, and it constructed a union that almost fell apart in the 1860s. Moreover, 1787 has gradually given rise to a cult of the Constitution in the United States that is not always healthy. U.S. politics is currently characterized by some powerful and noisy groupings: the so-called Tea Party movement and various originalists, which want to treat the 1787 Constitution as a kind of scripture, as an unchanging, all-applicable Bible to stand for all time. I'm not sure this is very helpful or realistic.
"Thomas Jefferson, for one, believed that written constitutions and systems of law might stand in need of regular rewriting, because only that way, he argued, could these sort of texts go hand-in-hand with the progress of the human mind. And as far as a historian like myself is concerned, the real interest of written constitutions lies not in any claim they may make to embody national identity, or any kind of identity. Rather, a study of written constitutions helps reveal the multiplicity of identities and how they have altered and ebbed and flowed over time. Written constitutions, as I've tried to show today, are not just to do with states, empires, nations, laws and politics. Like novels, poems, books, pamphlets, newspapers and works of art, written constitutions exhibit and embody the shifting, riven, sometimes inspiring, sometimes grievous landscapes of humanity."
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