Americans are in the midst of a great national debate over the power, scope and reach of the government established by that document. The debate was sparked by the current administration’s bold push for government expansion—a massive fiscal stimulus, Obamacare, financial regulation and various attempts at controlling the energy economy. This engendered a popular reaction, identified with the Tea Party but in reality far more widespread, calling for a more restrictive vision of government more consistent with the Founders’ intent.
Call it constitutionalism. In essence, constitutionalism is the intellectual counterpart and spiritual progeny of the “originalism” movement in jurisprudence. Judicial “originalists” (led by Antonin Scalia and other notable conservative jurists) insist that legal interpretation be bound by the text of the Constitution as understood by those who wrote it and their contemporaries. Originalism has grown to become the major challenger to the liberal “living Constitution” school, under which high courts are channelers of the spirit of the age, free to create new constitutional principles accordingly.
What originalism is to jurisprudence, constitutionalism is to governance: a call for restraint rooted in constitutional text. Constitutionalism as a political philosophy represents a reformed, self-regulating conservatism that bases its call for minimalist government—for reining in the willfulness of presidents and legislatures—in the words and meaning of the Constitution.
Hence that highly symbolic moment on Thursday, when the 112th House of Representatives opened with a reading of the Constitution. Remarkably, this had never been done before—perhaps because it had never been so needed. The reading reflected the feeling, expressed powerfully in the last election, that we had moved far, especially the past two years, from a government constitutionally limited by its enumerated powers to a government constrained only by its perception of social need.
The most galvanizing example of this expansive shift was, of course, the Democrats’ health-care reform, which will revolutionize one-sixth of the economy and impose an individual mandate that levies a fine on anyone who does not enter into a private contract with a health insurance company. Whatever its merits as policy, there is no doubting its seriousness as constitutional precedent: If Congress can impose such a mandate, is there anything that Congress may not impose upon the individual?
The new Republican House will henceforth require, in writing, constitutional grounding for every bill submitted. A fine idea, although I suspect 90% of them will simply make a ritual appeal to the “general welfare” clause. Nonetheless, anything that reminds members of Congress that they are not untethered free agents is salutary.
But still mostly symbolic. The real test of the Republicans’ newfound constitutionalism will come in legislating. Will they really cut government spending? Will they really roll back regulations? Earmarks are nothing. Do the Republicans have the courage to go after entitlements as well?
In the interim, the cynics had best tread carefully. Some liberals are already disdaining the new constitutionalism, denigrating the document’s relevance and sneering at its public recitation. They sneer at their political peril. In choosing to focus on a majestic document that bears both study and recitation, the reformed conservatism of the Obama era has found itself not just a symbol but an anchor.
Constitutionalism as a guiding political tendency will require careful and thoughtful development, as did jurisprudential originalism. But its wide appeal and philosophical depth make it a promising first step to a conservative future.
The Washington Post, January 7, 2011
MYTH OF THE ANGRY WHITE MALE
The Angry White Male, suitably capitalized to indicate that the menace has become a media-certified trend, stalks the land, or at least the land of the media. In the 10 years before the Nov. 1994 election, there were 59 (Nexis) references to angry white men. There have been 1,400 since. A post-election front-page headline in USA Today was typical: “Angry White Men: Their votes turned the tide for the GOP.”
By sheer numbing repetition, the legend grows. “The Republicans scraped together a majority,” explains the genial Garrison Keillor, “by appealing to the sorehead vote, your brother-in-law and mine.” By early April, the term receives its official presidential seal of approval when Bill Clinton confirms that “this is psychologically a difficult time for a lot of white males, the so-called angry white males.”
Then comes Oklahoma City, and the legend has its poster boy: khaki-clad, hopping-mad, armed and dangerous. “Have angry white men gone too far?” asks the Wall Street Journal in a front-page headline right after the bombing. Apparently, yes. “Heart-breaking [Oklahoma] news reports,” explains the Journal, “show the lengths to which the anger of the much-commented-upon angry white males can extend.”
The Oklahoma bomber is now honorary class president of those conservative-leaning, Republican-voting agitated white males the media have been warning us about since November. First he gives Newt Gingrich the House. Then he blows up the federal building in Oklahoma City.
Where did this legend come from? Yes, white men shifted significantly toward Republicans in the November election. But where did the ubiquitous pejorative “angry” come from? Where is the evidence for the rage of this white male cohort? Anyone take their blood pressure in the voting booth?
USA Today’s front-page “Angry White Men” story is again typical. It offered reams of polls, not one supporting the supposed “anger” of white men. Indeed, of the dozens of polls taken around Election Day, I could find only three that even raised the issue. Frank Luntz asked voters if they considered themselves “angry voters.” Seven out of 10 white men did not.
The Voter News Service National Exit Poll asked respondents if they were angry “about the way the federal government works.” Three out of four white males were not.
The Washington Post–ABC pre-election poll asked the same question. Four out of five white males were not. Moreover, the 21% who were exactly matches the average percentage of Americans overall who have identified themselves as angry in the last 10 such polls stretching back to early 1992. Where is the hormonally challenged, mad-as-hell, sexist, racist mob that ran the Democrats out of Congress in 1994?
The absence of facts must not be allowed to stand in the way of a good line or an ad hominem charge. And the charge of male anger has a history that predates the 1994 election. It began its recent career as the ultimate put-down of those critical of the first ladyhood of Hillary Clinton. As she herself explained in an interview in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 30, “People are not really often reacting to me so much as they are reacting to their own lives.… If somebody has a female boss for the first time, and they’ve never experienced that—well, maybe they can’t take out their hostility against her so they turn it on me.”
Keillor puts it, again, more genially when he dubs the Republicans the “Party of Large White Men Who Feel Uneasy Around Gals.” Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg echoes the theme when he writes about Republicans becoming a home “for every angry group,” among them “those who resent … strong women.”
Really? Let’s look at Maryland. State Delegate Ellen Sauerbrey, who last year lost the closest gubernatorial race in the country, is a Republican. She is a tough independent politician, so tough, in fact, that for nine weeks she doggedly tried to overturn what she charged was a tainted election before deigning to concede to her male opponent.
So here’s a test of the Clinton-Keillor-Greenberg proposition. How did white males—so fearful and resentful of strong women—vote in Maryland? For Mrs. Sauerbrey, by a 2–1 landslide.
The New York Times post-election coverage cited speculation that apathy among women voters might have contributed to the huge Democratic losses of 1994. It noted a “lack of interest this year among women” compared with 1992—the so-called Year of the Woman—when “the fracas between Clarence Thomas and Prof. Anita F. Hill energized women voters.”
Women, you see, are “energized.” Men are enr
aged. When women show electoral clout, it is the Year of the Woman. When men do, it is the Year of the Angry White Male.
In fact, the Angry White Male is a myth, an invention of political partisans who wish to rationalize and ultimately de-legitimize the election of 1994. After all, neither anger, nor whiteness, nor maleness is a coveted attribute these days. The invention of the Angry White Male pointedly ascribes the current Republican ascendancy to a toxic constituency, akin to the petty bourgeoisie that brought fascists to power in the Europe of the 1930s.
A rabble of dispossessed white men—threatened by women, resentful of minorities, enthralled by talk radio—has been stirred, and that’s why the Republicans won. The myth is not just useful but comforting too. Defeat becomes tolerable, indeed virtuous, when you’ve convinced yourself that you lost to a lynch mob.
The Washington Post, May 26, 1995
GOING NEGATIVE
Delta Airlines, you might have noticed, does not run negative TV ads about USAir. It does not show pictures of the crash of USAir Flight 427, with a voice-over saying: “USAir, airline of death. Going to Pittsburgh? Fly Delta instead.”
And McDonald’s, you might also have noticed, does not run ads reminding viewers that Jack in the Box hamburgers once killed two customers. Why? Because Delta and McDonald’s know that if the airline and fast-food industries put on that kind of advertising, America would soon be riding trains and eating box-lunch tuna sandwiches.
Yet every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country—and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.
Voters declare a burning desire to throw the bums out. Polls show an aversion to politicians that can only be called malignant. And the sages pull on their beards, stumped.
The economy? It is in better shape than it has been in years.
Gridlock? People so thoroughly disgusted with their politicians want gridlock. They approve of a system that promises to stop them before they legislate again. It is not the system they dislike. It is the players they cannot abide.
Why? No need for exotic theories. The simplest explanation is always the best. Politics is the only American industry whose participants devote their advertising budgets to the regular, public, savage undermining of one another. It is the only American industry whose participants devote prodigious sums to destroying whatever shred of allegiance any of them might once have won with their customers.
Compare. About the only other business that indulges in negative advertising is the long-distance phone business. MCI tells you that AT&T overcharges. Not so, says AT&T. This piddling stuff is about as nasty as it gets.
Moreover, picking a long-distance operator hardly demands a relationship of trust. Whereas picking an airline that suspends you in a sealed aluminum tube at 30,000 feet is a matter of trust. So is picking a fast-food restaurant that presents you with heavily camouflaged meat confected by a 16-year-old with acne. So is picking a politician, who rifles your paycheck and regulates your life. Yet only the politicians work systematically to kill that trust.
Turn on the tube and watch what one candidate—any candidate—has to say about the other. Then remember that no matter who wins, one of these miserable, execrable human beings will end up representing you in Congress.
Sen. John Danforth of Missouri recalls that in his first Senate race in 1970, he ran against the popular Stuart Symington and lost. Yet both ran such positive and honorable campaigns that Danforth ended up one of best-liked politicians in Missouri. Six years later he ran again and won.
That was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. (Danforth is retiring now from a political environment turned toxic.) The politicians have since “gone negative.” The reason is simple. Negative works. It gets individuals elected. Add up all the individual acts of political homicide, however, and you have a political class that is collectively committing suicide.
The basic theme of the 1994 campaign is that everyone running is a liar, a cheat, a crook or a fraud. Take the, oh, 3rd District of Tennessee, Button vs. Wamp. Wamp portrays Button as a fraud. Button calls Wamp a liar, and compliments Wamp for “kicking [his] chemical dependency.” A nice touch.
In the most publicized case of mutual assured political destruction, the Virginia Senate race, Oliver North’s TV ad starts with “Why can’t Chuck Robb tell the truth?” which Robb’s answers with “After lying about President Reagan and even lying to schoolchildren, now Oliver North is lying about Chuck Robb.” To schoolchildren, mind you.
The immutable fact is this: As of Nov. 9, one of these two highly advertised liars will be the next senator from Virginia. Every state in the union will be sending to Congress some brutally excoriated campaign survivor. The 104th Congress is guaranteed to be an assembly of the most vilified persons in every American community. And you thought the baseball owners were self-destructive.
Do we really need seminars on why voters loathe politicians?
The Washington Post, October 28, 1994
THE TIRANA INDEX
Now that the campaign is over and the returns are in, analysis of the latest Albanian election begins. The facts are clear: Communist Party chief Enver Hoxha’s slate of candidates for Parliament won by the comfortable margin of 1,627,959 to 1. The message seems to be: Stay the course.
The party ran well in all regions and among all classes—worker, peasant and apparatchik. It swept the atheist vote. The much ballyhooed gender gap never developed. On the other hand, it failed to make any inroads on opposition support. (In the last Albanian election there was also one vote against.) Some observers had been predicting that opposition support might double, but that prospect dimmed last December when a potential leader of the movement, Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu, committed suicide.
At the time Hoxha claimed that Shehu did so “in a moment of nervous crisis.” Now party chairman Hoxha (“himself a successful candidate in the 210th district of Tirana,” writes the New York Times) says that Mr. Shehu, whom he described variously as an American agent, a Soviet agent and a Yugoslav agent, had been ordered by Yugoslavia to kill Mr. Hoxha and other Albanian leaders, but finally met his demise when he “broke his head against the unity of the party and the people.” (Mr. Hoxha’s equivocation recalls the answer that the police captain in Casablanca gave to a question about the condition of a prisoner. “We are trying to decide whether he committed suicide or died trying to escape.”) Since Albanian election law does not permit absentee ballots, analysts conclude that the one vote against Hoxha could not have been cast by Mr. Shehu. His voice will be missed.
Hoxha’s victory margin, though impressive, is not unprecedented. President Assad of Syria won reelection in 1978 with 99.6% of the vote. The Soviet embassy informs us that candidates “always” win more than 99% of the vote, usually “around 99.5%.” Indeed, it seems, anything less than 99% is considered a vote of no confidence.
Western observers are generally skeptical about these results. Because of their obsession with the authenticity of such elections, they tend to overlook their enormous value as scientific tools. For generations political science has been seeking a way to quantify freedom. Some, like Freedom House, annually classify countries according to their level of political and civil liberty. Others, like Morton Kondracke, propose the creation of a computerized despot-a-meter to take the guesswork out of such perennially taxing questions as: Who’s worse, Idi Amin or Roberto d’Aubuisson?
The trouble with these pioneering schemes is that they are too complicated. I propose a simpler system, crude, but like all crude instruments, quick, easy to use and blunt. It is the Tirana Index: The higher the vote any government wins in an election, the more tyrannous it is.
The Tirana Index lends itself to easy rules of thumb. Very bad tyranny (known to some as totalitarian states) usually gets more than 95% of the vote, and the more efficient of these, more than 9
9%. Traditional autocracies and military governments (known to some as authoritarian states), such as Turkey and Mexico, can be counted on to clock in somewhere between 80% and 95%. (Turkey’s last referendum passed by 92.) Well-functioning democracies produce winners who get between 50% and 80% of the vote.
Countries like Italy, Israel and others where driving is a life-threatening activity regularly produce winning margins of less than 50%. They can safely be classified as anarchies.
The New Republic, December 13, 1982
CHAPTER 8
CONUNDRUMS
WITHOUT THE NOOSE, WITHOUT THE GAG
At dawn on Tuesday, Robert Alton Harris, a double murderer, died in a California gas chamber, California’s first execution in 25 years. There is no doubt that Harris deserved to die. In my view, however, California should not have killed him.
Not because there is anything unconstitutional about the death penalty. The Fifth Amendment takes it as a given. Moreover, capital punishment may be cruel, but it is not unusual. A measure that is approved by 36 states can hardly be deemed one against which Americans have turned their face, which is what “unusual” means in constitutional terms.
Nor is there any high principle that the state may not put people to death. There are reasons of state—war, for example—for which the state will put tens of thousands of people to death (and risk the lives of thousands of its own innocents as well).
Nor is capital punishment unjust. Indeed, justice is the most powerful argument in favor of capital punishment. When a man wantonly kills two boys, as did Harris, it is hard to think of any penalty short of death that would restore the moral order that has been so brutally violated.
Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics Page 13