thinking out loud . . .

In replying to Steve’s and my discussion about restoring (written) constitutional government to the U.S., my friend John offers a dissonant note:

The simple truth is that the founders could not possibly have conceived of the economic, sociological or ethnic complexity of our current society, nor genuinely understood what would eventuate from their vision.  The very differences between an agrarian society and one based largely on the service sector (80% of real GDP) guarantee that individuals cannot be independent in the manner of the 18th century.  To expect to return to such a model ignores the reality of our current socioeconomic milieu.

Me:

While I assume no one can adequately anticipate the intricate look-and-feel details of society 200+ years beyond their own generation—and that’s certainly far truer now than it was in the days of the Founders—I’m really not sure what relevance this insight offers to the discussion at hand.

One of the beauties of true conservative thought is that it attempts to look at history and distill from it principles of how things actually work (as opposed to how we may wish them to work). The kinds of things that seem hardwired into the universe. Useful observations about humankind, the way people, both universally and in their individual cultures, react, adapt, create, fight. And what conservatives have learned is that, for the most part, societies are better when people are free to make their own decisions than when those decisions are delegated to or imposed by a central authority. We trust both the marketplace of buying and selling of products and the marketplace of ideas and ideals. We would rather win people’s hearts and minds to do the right thing with their fellow man than compel them by the force of law or by appropriating their property. Compulsion for the true conservative is always the last resort for government and is almost always in response to negative, intrusive behavior—criminal behavior—rather than as the favored method of achieving a governmental substitute for compassion and generosity. Conservatives believe that a given society’s compassion is more appropriately measured as an aggregate of its citizens’ freely chosen and synergistic acts of  caring and generosity than as the artificial and programmatic “compassion” of its official bureaucracies.

I look at the Constitution—amateur that I am—and I see a document not lacking anything we genuinely need today in terms of government powers. I see a document describing in sparse and adequate detail exactly what we need in order to restore balance within government and between government and the people from whom that government is supposed to derive its powers and to whom that government owes its accountability.

I long to see the United States return to a government of laws and not of men.

I want to see the United States—and the politicians who seek to lead it—restored to the ideal and practice of a written Constitution.