. . . sorts out the left's seemingly incoherent attachment to technocracy (rule by experts; see the death panel) and populism (direct democracy; see Occupy Wall Street).
As the framers saw it, both populist and technocratic politics were expressions of . . .
. . . a modern hubris about the capacity of human beings -- be it of experts or of the people as a whole -- to make just the right governing decisions. The Constitution is built upon a profound skepticism about the ability of any political arrangement to overcome the limitations of human reason and human nature, and so establishes a system of checks to prevent sudden large mistakes while enabling gradual changes supported by a broad and longstanding consensus. Experts should not govern, nor whould the people do so directly, but rather the people's representatives should govern in a system filled with mediating institutions and opposing interests -- a system designed to force us to see problems and proposed solutions from a variety of angles simultaneously and, as Alexander Hamilton puts it in Federalist 73, "to increase the chances in favor of the community against the passing of bad laws through haste, inadvertence, or design."
That such a system is far from populist should be obvious. . . . The democratic elements of the Constitution are intended to be checks on the power of government, not expressions of trust in the wisdom of the public a a whole. And even as checks, these elements are imperfect. . . .
. . . . The framers were disdainful of the potential of technocratic know-it-alls whose abstract expertise was often of value only in what Hamilton calls, in Federalist 28, "the reveries of those political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction." . . .
[Expert] omniscience could not be trusted to check the excesses of popular passion, and public omniscience could not be trusted to check the excesses of expert arrogance. . . .
. . . .
The framers' formalism, with its humility about our knowledge and its limits on our power, is at work not only in our political institutions but [also] in our economic system too. American free enterprise, like our constitutional system, establishes rules of the game that restrain the powerful and create competition that helps balance freedom and progress. And in economic policy, just as in politics more generally, that framework is undermined by a populism that wants to take from the wealthy and by a technocratic mindset according to which Washington should pick winners and loses. . . .
. . . . [The] humble assumption of permanent human imperfections and the humble desire for forms that might prevent large mistakes are at the core of the greatest achievements of the modern age: of constitutional democracy, of the free market, of the scientific method. Yet the most ardent champions of liberalism in our politics have too often failed to see the power of such humility, instead articulating a liberalism rooted in utopian ambitions or their mirror image -- naive resentments -- all dressed up as a theory of justice.
The difference between these two kinds of liberalism -- constitutionalism grounded in humility about human nature and progressivism grounded in utopian expectations -- is a crucial fault line of our politics, and has divided the friends of liberty since at least the French Revolution. . . .
. . . .
[The] Left's simultaneous support for government by expert panel and for the unkempt carpers occupying Wall Street is not a contradiction -- it is a coherent error. And the Right's response should be coherent too. It should be, as for the most part it has been, an unabashed defense of our constitutional system, gridlock and all.
(Yuval Levin, "What is Constitutional Conservatism?" National Review, November 28, 2011)
Well said.
The best-said part, by my taste, is about how constitutional democracy and capitalism are both based on the same understanding of the imperfections of human nature.
And where did that understanding come from? From Judaism and Christianity.
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