Here's the bizarre mythical history conservatives are using to convince Trump to kill birthright citizenship

In 2007, Paul even tried to equate militia-style tax evaders with Martin Luther King Jr., in a since-deleted video. There’s an earlier 2004 CNBC video in which Paul says he is "concerned about the way the 16th Amendment was passed" and doesn't think it was "technically correct," trying to deploy minor grammatical disparities to throw out the constitutional amendment that empowered Congress to levy a national income tax. There’s a whole alternative universe of similarly bogus arguments, many based on earlier amendments, which the 16th Amendment would simply have overridden, if any of those arguments actually held water (which they don’t).

After Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the Tea Party movement sparked a wave of conservative calls to repeal the popular election of senators, enabled by the 17th Amendment. That might seem an odd cause for a “populist” uprising to embrace, until you recall that the Koch brothers had spent nearly a a decade trying to get the Tea Party off the ground.  Women's suffrage has been attacked by Ann Coulter, most prominently, and echoed by others.

Lest it be thought these are all comical gestures, found only on the far-right margins al gestures, we should also include the Supreme Court's Shelby County decision of 2013, which effectively invalidated the 15th Amendment’s protection of minority voting rights. It casually disregarding Section 2, “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation,” on the basis of an imaginary “fundamental principle” dreamed up by Chief Justice John “Balls and Strikes” Roberts. These and many more lines of conservative attack reflect a deep hostility to what modern America has become, not just since Lyndon Johnson or Franklin D. Roosevelt, but since Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

The Constitution is a living document, much to the horror of conservatives, in part because it has been repeatedly revised over time. And conservatives really hate that. As Epps noted in his 2012 book, “Wrong and Dangerous: Ten Right-Wing Myths about Our Constitution, “Progressive critics of the Constitution say that it was written in 1787 by rich white men, many of them slaveholders, to protect their own racial, sexual, and economic privilege. The only answer to that charge is this: True enough. But we don’t live under the Constitution set up in 1787.” After the first 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights, he notes:

[M]any amendments … have been designed to push American government and society in a progressive direction. The Thirteenth Amendment outlaws slavery in sweeping terms; the Fourteenth protects the civil rights and legal equality of citizens; the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments all expand the right to vote and protect it against state interference. The Sixteenth Amendment gives the federal government the power to enact a progressive income tax; the Seventeenth requires that the people, not legislators, choose United States senators.

In sum, Epps writes, “The arrow of these amendments pushes one way — toward greater equality, greater democratic participation, and more effective power for the national government.” The only exception — the 18th Amendment, imposing Prohibition — was soon repealed by the 21st. “The Constitution may have begun as a charter of privilege," he writes, "but over the years, we the people have remade it into a document that, for all its flaws, embodies the progressive ideas of freedom, equality, national power, and self-government.”

Conservatives' fake history of the Constitution

This grand sweep of progress, uneven and incomplete though it may be, is a necessary foundation for making sense of conservative attacks mounted against the Constitution — always, of course, conducted in its name. As Epps noted in his book, there are multiple different strands of conservative thought woven together behind these attacks. The first he describes derives from the Glenn Beck-popularized theories of W. Cleon Skousen, promulgated by the National Center for Constitutional Studies:

The “truth” about the Constitution is this: God wrote it. He handed it down to Moses, who applied it to govern the people of Israel. This divine law was carried from ancient Israel to Northern Europe after the Assyrian Conquest in 720 BCE by the famous “lost tribes” of Israel. After much wandering, these chosen people settled in the British Isles, where they took the name “Anglo-Saxon.” They ruled their medieval kingdom by the law of Moses, but its purity was lost after the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE. The Founding Fathers of the new United States, inspired by the Lord of Hosts, wrote the Constitution to restore His Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

Since it is God’s will that Americans live like medieval Saxons, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that virtually all of modern American life and government is unconstitutional: Social Security, the Federal Reserve, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, hate crime laws — illegal inventions of a people who have been led astray by false prophets. The trouble began with the Civil War, a needless conflict in which the wrong side won. Slaves were happy and carefree in slavery. Racism was caused by pushy Northern abolitionists. State governments are not required to observe the Bill of Rights. The very idea of separation between church and state is a pernicious myth; the First Amendment’s religion clauses establish “nondenominational” Christianity as “the religion of America.”

It’s a bizarre fantasia, but hardly an anomaly, as Epps points out: “Turn on any AM radio talk station, or Fox News Channel, or C-SPAN. The far-right myth of the Constitution is being systematically mainstreamed. Americans today are frightened and disoriented. Since 2000, our society has been through a series of shocks. … In the midst of uncertainty, people are turning to the Constitution for tools to deal with crisis. The Constitution is what makes Americans who we are. … The Far Right — the toxic coalition of Fox News talking heads, radio hosts, angry ‘patriot’ groups, and power-hungry Tea Party politicians — is feeding them mythology and lies.”

Fake history in historical context

This is a historically predictable development. In “Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World,” Jack Goldstone first presented a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the processes involved in state breakdown, based on studies spanning Europe, China and the Middle East from 1500 to 1850. There was, he argued, a single basic process, which “unfolded like a fugue, with a major trend giving birth to four related critical trends that combined for a tumultuous conclusion.” The fourth and final trend was the rise of heterodox belief systems in response to the material breakdowns of the other three.

"Ideologies of rectification and transformation became increasingly salient,” Goldstone wrote, as spreading popular distress “undermined the credibility of religious leaders associated with states, and turned both elites and middling groups to heterodox religious movements in the search for reform, order, and discipline. Narratives of injustice rooted in local ideals of moral leadership spread widely and characterized the rulers as betraying national or religious virtues, and thus no longer deserving of loyalty.”

The decline of traditional religious denominations, the rise of televangelism and the spread of quasi-religious fake history narratives to reinterpret the U.S. Constitution are all facets of the same phenomena that Goldstone first observed in the early modern world, in a book published 25 years ago.

Conservatives enjoy an asymmetric advantage, in part, because they incline toward sweeping narratives, geared toward persuasion, while liberals incline toward practical problem-solving, guided by Enlightenment models of reason. That's the argument of Chris Mooney in “The Republican Brain,” also presented by George Lakoff in multiple works. This also reflects the ancient distinction between mythos (finding meaning in the world) and logos (figuring out how things work).  Liberals can’t simply adopt conservatives’ ways of thinking and doing politics, but both sides of this divide have deep roots in human nature, so no rejection of their existing strengths is really needed — only a development of what they’ve tended to neglect.

For progressives to fight back successfully, they must respond with similarly sweeping narratives rooted in powerful moral foundations, of a kind exemplified by the Rev. Dr. William Barber II in his memoir, "The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear."