Thinking about the Michigan plotters & how rooted in fundamentalism they were, even absent overt religion. They believe the constitution requires no context, that they can read it themselves and know what it means & that what they think it means is the only thing it could mean.

Consider Michigan plotter Ty Garbin, 25, a mechanic. He looks at state gov't, & maybe he reads the US constitution, & he's certain he knows how to fix it. He apparently worked on airplanes. Would he give me a tech manual & trust me to fix a plane? Would he fly on that plane?

The point isn't that the Michigan plotters were fools, which is clear. It's that their "Constitutionalism" was of a piece with fundamentalism, the ugly flip side of DIY that is the root of American exceptionalism & especially the vanity of so many American men.

This kind of literalism isn't limited to the Right. The idea that one can read a text, perhaps just once, & know all you need to know--that's the same vanity that makes one a Marxist after a glance at the Manifesto, an anarchist after, say, a few pages of Kropotkin

The antidote to the vanities of fundamentalism isn't always expertise, which has more than enough vanity of its own. I think it can be, sometimes, the democratic practice of study. Not study as a one-off; as an ongoing practice, always diversifying.