Comments on: Why Constitutionalism Is An Empty Doctrine For Conservatives

By: Hadley Bennett

Hadley Bennett — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 03:21:00 +0000

Statecraft is a bit of a lost art in the west, mostly because state interests and state objectives are the anti-philosophy of the era. Statecraft/governance is an uncomfortable subject for liberalism–the state is supposed to be a relatively passive channel for the desires of the electorate and to institute conditions only insofar as they help citizens achieve their personal objectives. Certainly, the students being trained by top-tier universities in the U.S for the civil service and especially the State Department have no idea what the fuck they’re doing, partly because they’ve received no training even remotely related to the decisions they’re supposed to make and the analysis they’re supposed to produce.

China and Russia do a much better job at educating elite students in governance. Part of the point of neoreaction is rebuilding statecraft with a western take, and that might require more digging up of old sources lost to time, as well as borrowing contemporary methods from other powers.

By: Patri Friedman

Patri Friedman — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:19:26 +0000

This point is one that those of us who study institutions and their stability, such as Mancur Olson’s public choice economics on “demoscleroris” have been making for a long time. The Constitution got us to where we are today, so if you don’t like where we are today, then you shouldn’t like the Constitution. It will just get us back here. If the problem is culture, then change the culture, to say you want to “restore the Constitution” is to focus attention on what is not the problem.

The question of how to design a more stable institution for producing good governance is a fascinating and important one; it may be very difficult, but ignoring it will not make it go away. The American Constitution did an OK job, but clearly not a great job, we should seek to improve on it, not to restore it.

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 01:21:36 +0000

“…No compact among men (however provident in its construction and sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting and inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no wall of words, that no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.”

– George Washington; Draft of First Inaugural Address, April, 1789

By: Peter Blood

Peter Blood — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 21:56:16 +0000

Way back in the day, I lived in a majority-black district (sorry, not re-gentrifying it!), and I wrote to my (black) congressman asking him to explain his understanding of the 10th Amendment and how he was voting in accordance with it. I wasn’t being malicious at the time, but if did that today I would only do it as a cruel joke on a man just tryin’ to deliver da goods to his peeps.

By: Henry Dampier

Henry Dampier — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 19:09:11 +0000

Correct. Fixed. Thanks.

>There’s something tragic about the quasi-religious reverence for the US Constitution, considering the current state of decay in the country. I would compare the belief in this “magic power”, as Danpier called it, to the leftists’ fantastical belief in equality, which disregards the innate traits and limitations of the individuals and subgroups that constitute the whole.

It comes from the same erroneous root.

By: basto

basto — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 17:08:15 +0000

…but rewriting it would change the predispositions and moral characters of existing citizens.

I think you meant it “would not change the predispositions”.

There’s something tragic about the quasi-religious reverence for the US Constitution, considering the current state of decay in the country. I would compare the belief in this “magic power”, as Danpier called it, to the leftists’ fantastical belief in equality, which disregards the innate traits and limitations of the individuals and subgroups that constitute the whole.