Apparently when the great mathematical logician Kurt Godel was preparing to apply for US citizenship, he studied the consitution in detail, and concluded that there is a logical flaw in it which would allow a dictatorship to be established by entirely legal constitutional means.
His friend Einstein advised him to keep very quiet about it!
There has been a lot of speculation about this… anyone have any thoughts?
Don’t mention it to The Orange One, of course… not that he would recognize logic if it bit him on the ass…
Gödel lived at a time when an authoritarian America was a farfetched conjecture and, theoretically, could only be realized against the people’s will and through the most arcane, underhanded procedural machinations.
As you allude to, we’re living in a different era. When laws and regulations are laxly enforced and resistance is slack, it turns out that there are plenty of loopholes.
One possibility is if there is no method to process something that is clearly in violation of the Constitution. We saw that with Obama’s birther nonsense and today in the SCOTUS arguments - some states do not empower the Secretary of State to block someone from the ballot even if they should not be on it. In my state of Colorado, if Elon Musk (who is not an NBC) won the state, the electors MUST vote for him. The SoS signs off on the slate as obligated. Congress cannot disallow those votes as “not regularly given” because under the current rules, a slate of elector votes signed off are regularly given.
So let’s apply this to the OP. Suppose Biden wins in 2024 and decides to run again in 2028. Clearly against the Constitution but at what point can someone stop him? I don’t think this is what Godel had in mind though.
Well before 1/6, I figured it was something like 1/6: imagine a House and Senate and Supreme Court who scrupulously — foolishly, even — obey the letter of the law, and imagine a president who explains that anyone who attacks anyone who votes against X or Y or Z gets a pardon. What follows?
Sure, you can come up with other answers if people simply disregard the law. But within the law, does that work?
I would bet it has something to do with a sort of slippery-slope approach to amending the Constitution.
For example, if you can get 3/4 of the states to make it easier to amend the Constitution, then it could be a fairly slippery slope to amending it to install a dictator.
The paradox of self-amendment arises when a rule is used as the authority for its own amendment. It is sharper when the rule of change is supreme, sharper still when it is changed into a form that is inconsistent with its original form, and sharpest of all when the change purports to be irrevocable.
Since you can amend it or even create a new constitution by legal methods there is nothing but the will of a sufficient majority preventing any form of government.
Or if the anecdote has any basis in reality, it does seem rather likely that Gödel (given the scope of his other work) was making a joke that it is impossible to write a Consitution without a loophole.
Possibly. But the idea that Godel was the first person to realize that is nonsense. It’s also easy to write a constitution without a loophole, but of course ours is based on the idea that it can be changed through a fair and legal process.
Sinclair Lewis, “It Can’t Happen Here,” published in 1935, about how the US became a fascist state through exploitation of populism and fear (sound familiar?). Not farfetched conjecture at all, even then, when Gödel was not yet 30. It was based on real-life people, including Huey Long and Charles Coughlin.
It does seem that the story emerged quite some time later when any eyewitnesses were either no longer around or might have forgotten a lot of detail?
Of course the constitution was not written by professional logicians, so it would not be surprising if a rigorous analysis turned up some logical flaws.
Certainly, but I think the idea was that Godel was worried about some loophole in the existing constitution?
But then, the constitution is just a document. It has no intrinsic powers of enforcement.
One is reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) Washington quote: “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force.”
I guess you can set some parts of the constitution as “unammendable”, but I suspect in the end that would force people to simply replace the constituion instead of ammending it.
But I still stand by what I’d said: even if we grant for the sake of argument that everyone involved robotically agrees that everything in the document is in effect, the pardon power seems like it’s just sitting there waiting to be exploited — as is — going strictly by the book.
Oops, that could be interpreted as if I were some sort of loonie libertarian or something.
I LIKE living in a society where there is a stable rule of law, civil rights etc.
Long may it continue!