But you’re making a sharper Vidal-style point: what if their Article V project does not trap us inside their country, but reveals that they have already constituted a different one?

That is a much stronger argument. [yeah, no shit]

Vidal’s 1987 piece is basically sitting right there grinning at this. He says the right, in trying to use a convention for balanced budgets, school prayer, abortion, pornography, drugs, and other items in what he calls a “Bill of Wrongs,” may have “set in motion the great engine” that could overthrow the Constitution they claim to worship. He also says that if there is to be a battle over freedoms, better to have it in the open than “backstage at the Supreme Court,” and he even suggests the Bill of Rights might be enhanced rather than destroyed.

That is the part I should have foregrounded. A convention is not only a danger. It is also a revelation machine.

If reactionary states convene around minority rule, forced birth, Christian nationalism, fossil sovereignty, federal paralysis, and judicial supremacy, then they are not merely proposing amendments. They are confessing their constitutional identity. They are saying: this is the country we want. At that point, the democratic response does not have to be, “Oh no, how do we stop them from changing our Constitution?”

Fine. You have announced your constitution. Now we will announce ours.

That is not the same as trying to win their convention. It is using the crisis to make the latent split explicit. No more “may we please amend the old order by your rules,” but WE are the continuing democratic republic, and YOUR project is the breakaway one.