The Bankruptcy of George Will’s Constitutional Conservatism
(EXCERPT)
Into the 1970s and 1980s, I was a huge fan of checks and balances limited government, which conservatives, like George Will, promulgated. This political construct logically and naturally proceeds from Christian, even Calvinistic, pessimism concerning human nature, and thus the need to prevent an evil and unjust humanity, whether as individual autocrat, oligarchic clique, or democratic mob, from potentially exploiting and oppressing their fellow man through the organs of government.
This pessimism, concerning the nature of mankind, was confirmed in the lifelong study of world history. The good historians throughout history, those not promoting an ideological or social agenda, utilizing all the intellectual sorceries of the sophist, have almost always been pessimistic about human nature. (Nowadays, a large plurality of Western skeptics deny the existence of human nature.)
While I remain a fan of checks and balances limited government, a lifelong study of world history has recognized a critical flaw in George Will’s Constitutional Conservatism. It is not only the organs of civil government which needs to be constrained and checked, but also the organs of society, including and especially the organs of economic society. Unchecked imbalances of any kind lend themselves to exploitation and oppression, whether in the public realm or the private sphere.
One of the nuggets from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which economic conservatives frequently cite but rarely read, was Smith’s opposition to the existence of large banks. For the preservation and welfare of society would always require a state government, which was larger and more powerful than those banks, in order to prevent untold economic and social disaster from the follies and vices of the bankers (and/or in ably ameliorating the consequences of that disaster).
Bankers (and private agents in general) are no less prone than are the agents of civil government to “am I my brother’s keeper” egoism, venality and other vice, folly, and rapine which lead to exploitation and oppression of the less endowed. Contrary to C.S. Lewis’s famous saying, the robber barons have proven that they can, at the same time, be omnipotent moral busybodies, who torment us for our own good, who will torment us without end, and with the approval of their own consciences.1
George Will complains about the governmental behemoth. And so, he should, for reasons which exceed even those that he imagines. However, it is in his inattention to the private realm, in particular to the concentration of the means of production, that Constitutional Conservativism utterly fails.
That concentration of the means of production invariably leads to extreme economic disparities, which invariably lead to civic inequalities and two-tier justice, despite best efforts of civil officials to sever extreme economic disparities from civic/juridical inequalities. Economic disparities and civic/juridical inequalities invariably lead to class schism, to civic conflict and tumult, and to the impoverishment and demoralization of the commons. The commons, that “basket of deplorables” in the eyes of the optimates (“best men”), have throughout history consistently sought out tribunician champions to protect their few remaining interests and to do battle with the effete elites.
That refined softness (malakos) of lifestyle and enervation of manly virtue (vir) are an indirect function of excessive wealth. (There is not a necessary relationship.) Yet humanity, in its natural and unregenerate state, has never been quite able to handle prosperity, however measured (i.e., intellect, beauty, and other talents), without corrupting.
This integral relationship between prosperity, moral decadence, and societal disintegration was not only predicted by the Torah (Deuteronomy) and proven by ensuing Hebrew history. Roman moralists, Livy, Sallust, even Cicero, likewise attributed the moral decline and the ensuing disintegration of the free civic polity, which was the Roman Republic, to the excessive power and wealth that flowed into Italy and was amassed after the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE).
George Will declaims the vulgarians, who have co-opted and hijacked conservativism. Yet it is George Will’s kind of conservatism which largely contributed to the emergence of the vulgarians.
George Will declaims populism, per se. However, populism, in its most honorable form, the form which resulted, for instance, in the Roman Republic’s constitution, Twelve Tables, this through the political agitation of their “basket of deplorables,” protects the conservative mindset and structures. For while Roman practicality lacked an underlying theory to undergird their Republic, (until Cicero offered one post facto, and just as the Republic was about to be destroyed), the Republic was quintessentially conservative in disposition and in operation.
George Will is not paleoconservative monster, nor is the archconservative Charles Murray. Such persons exhibit intellectual and moral integrity. Such persons exhibit a complex, rigorous, and nuanced mind. Their problem lies elsewhere.
It’s a typical American response that anything that happened before the United States is irrelevant to the history of the United States. You’re wrong. You’re so wrong. Let me show you how wrong you are.2
From my observation decades ago, George Will has largely constrained his sphere of interest to the American, perhaps the Anglo-American, sphere, which excessively emphasizes the individual over the common good, almost to the same, yet inverse, degree that the Chinese have historically emphasized the common good excessively over the individual. (China is currently communist in name only (CINO). It is, for instance, incongruent for a Marxist state to sport and spawn billionaire corporatists.)
The Evangelical church, from which I emerge and have escaped, is likewise guilty of this American cultural captivity. “Plank in the eye” filters, partly due to being imbued the fumes of the culture and society within which one dwells, is a common, constant, and insidious epistemological impediment for all of humanity, including self. I emerge, perhaps fortunately, from a civic polity which has a thin, even minimalist, civic religion.
From what I have observed, Will’s intellectual “myopia” honors the Madisonian constitution, yet has failed to go beyond the concrete political construct to the political philosophical premises which influenced Madison. Idolatrous worship of the Constitution is common to Constitutional Conservatives.
Among other thinkers, Madison significantly drew upon a theoretical notion by Montesquieu (French), wherein a political constitution should be designed to provide checks and balances in accordance with the society as is, in accordance to the existing structures and organs of society, including the mental and moral state of its people. In another society, with a different social structure and cultural mindset, the political constructs required to achieve checks and balances shall differ.
But if the structures of society have changed radically over time, in order to restore checks and balances to society, the constitution must be changed, and this by constitutional means (not through a living constitution, wherein the jurists become petit roi, to whom congresses and parliaments become effectively subservient.
The observation from American history is that Constitutional Conservatives resisted these necessary changes to their Constitution in the late and early 19th century. They were faithful to the precepts within the American Constitution but not to the underlying philosophical premises. Eventually, as the socioeconomic structures and the spirit of any given society changes, a large plurality of society comes to disrespect the constitutional framework. It becomes a self-serving instrument of the elites.
The most glaring example of what mean pertains to the Second Amendment. The underlying purpose of that amendment was communal, as a last resort safeguard, albeit violent, against the pretensions of would-be despots and oligarchies. (The Founders were not concerned about the right to self-protection, even though this remains a valid and legitimate individualistic concern.)
In the right to bear arms, for instance, the Original Meaning of that word, arms, referred to all armaments. This would mean that each individual technically has the right to park a tank in their garage and bury a nuclear warhead in their backyard, if such were fortunate enough to have these.
Obviously, unforeseen technological progress rightly requires an adjustment to the Second Amendment, to maintain the premise of deterrence without spawning even worse perils. As it currently is, the right to bear arms is effectively regulated under a judicial living constitution, which is constantly, if hypocritically, denounced by Constitutional Conservatives.
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, New York: Harper Collins, 2014 (1970), pp. 364–5.
Niall Ferguson, “Historian Niall Ferguson on the roots of today's political polarization,” Long Now Foundation, December 18, 2018, video, 0:52 to 1:07