A significant minority of scholars & other public figures on the right have been busy declaring the constitutional order dead or dying. Michael Anton is the most famous—then again, he’s the only rightwing intellectual one can call famous. But people who have no fame nevertheless can have seriousness or depth—our own Carl has been writing about this matter for the better part of a decade, too. The political concern is, we’re falling under a despotism different to the various fashions of post-War liberalism: Not just fashions in adjudication or administration or rhetoric that endanger our rights or self-respect & which we must organize politically to fight against—but something different first of all because it seems a permanent change, so not a fashion, & secondly, because it seems un-American.
This fashion is spreading all the way down to social media influencers, especially on X, the bastion of the right, alongside substack. The most recent such statement to get a lot of attention was made by Wade Stotts:
On X, supposedly it was watched by 375,000 Americans. They heard Stotts give a historical overview of a multiplicity of republics defined by the major political changes in America, from the Revolution to the Civil Rights movement. Authors like the elegant Chris Caldwell are introduced into the discussion; so also eccentric provocateurs like Curtis Yarvin—anything that might combine shock & prestige is thrown in: This is not demagogy, it’s classy!
I found myself sympathetic to the man’s sentiments & concerns, but completely opposed to his line of thinking. The only thing I can do to suggest a certain affection is to refrain from characterizing his motives. He presents himself as a concerned citizen who involves himself in historical analysis (a scholarly habit unavailable to the citizen as citizen) for the sake of issuing urgent warnings—encouraging his fellow Americans to be properly, that is intelligently, concerned about their situation, for the purpose of securing justice in the real circumstances in which they act, as opposed to the rhetorical suppositions of our public speeches. Let us take him at his word & criticize only the argument.
For one thing, the analysis is shoddy, which is invariably the case in popular media, where it is easy to go from ‘republic’ to ‘republics’ without much concern for either what the people said who were involved in the events recounted or the meaning of the political terms of art; everyone in public is a post-modern critic, pluralizing, complicating, redefining, debunking, such that differences between right & left don’t amount to much… Stotts shows no awareness that he’s recycling the rhetoric of the people he blames for our political catastrophe. The ‘metrics’ are also doubtful, but they are used, like most of our conventional lies, to boast, to make something look bigger or more important than it is, & since we most of us behave that way, it is not unimportant, especially in a democracy: Most rightwing intellectuals & academics put together cannot command such an audience!
It goes without saying, statements likes Stotts’s ‘The Constitution Is Dead’ were until recently frowned upon among the respectable for their empty provocation & one had to have a reputation before one could speak in such strong words. That is, serious people despise the boy crying wolf form of advertising or demagogy—it has no effect on them, inasmuch as they are serious, they would prefer the argument & evidence, which would of course be tentative, qualified… As such, these statements were also useless at best, at worst harmful to the speaker. But it is otherwise in popular media—screaming bloody murder attracts attention, whereas qualified or tentative arguments do not matter to anyone: They do not matter to the passionate because they require sustained reflection; & they do not matter to the ambitious because they do not matter to the passionate.
The meaning of it all is this: The middle-aged men on the right are increasingly eager to tell the young men on the right that they do not owe allegiance to what they increasingly call ‘the regime.’ The New Left’s anti-Establishment identity is now how the New Right approaches politics. GenX to Millennial to Zoomer, the character & consequences of this activity are therefore an unleashing of passion where there cannot be restraint of duty or the discipline of study.
One part of the Constitution is in deadly danger, & that is respect for the Constitution. For my part, I oppose this wholeheartedly & think that loyalty to the Constitutions is the noblest & also the most practical way to live our lives. The funny thing is that this call to revolution seems to be based on an identification with losing political conflicts. Consider the multiplicity of republics. If you ask Lincoln, he didn’t create a new republic, he saved the Union—his Confederate adversaries said otherwise; or the Federalists who made the Constitution: Their ‘more perfect union’ is not a new republic—but at least some of the people we lump together as anti-Federalists did make that claim. So with current critics of ‘the regime.’ What do they have to offer except a passion for defeat, oblivion, which we used to call Romanticism?
This multiplicity of republics is not a new theme even among the respectable, indeed, it made me think of my student days in political science. We still studied at that time & we so read the eminent American political scientist1 Theodore Lowi. He also spoke about this matter in his first major work: The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States (1969, revised with new material in 1979). Lowi seems to have been forgotten although he only died in 2017—he seems to be part of a forgotten world, presumably because globalization & identity politics replaced his theory of ‘interest-group liberalism’ as the major candidate for the ideology of a ‘second American republic.’ The character of the change: ‘Descriptive’ political science was replaced by ‘normative’ concerns, which implies that the consensus in the discipline collapsed & that the connection between political science & administration changed so much that academic autonomy was completely compromised, so that truths unpleasant to the elites would be severely censored. That’s one part of the story of 20th c. America, the development of a kind of Progressive unanimity in academia through abject fear for one’s career & shameless promotion of aggressive mediocrities. Perhaps this goes beyond what Lowi decried as ‘interest-group liberalism,’ perhaps it takes us all the way to class politics. Lowi also shows the other, all-American part of the change in his career: A Jewish kid from Alabama, born in 1931, he got a PhD at Yale in 1961 & spent his career teaching at Cornell. He was one of the Kennedy-era ‘best & the brightest’—he wrote The Pursuit of Justice with RFK & was still in his 30s when he announced the end of liberalism. What promise of youth, what confidence, what beautiful ambitions…
Lowi by 1979 had even more dire words about the end of one republic & the failures of another. Let me conclude this post by quoting his preface to the second edition of The End Of Liberalism:
I wrote this book in the 1960s with the conviction that the ideologies & policies at that time were threatening to produce a deep & permanent change in the American constitution. The Democrats, guided by a new public philosbphy—interest-group liberalism—had sought to build a modern state upon good intentions & the support of organized privilege. Such a structure, they felt, could give the state the legitimacy of a broadly representative popular base, & at the same time could provide that state with sufficient independence to insure that it could intervene justly into private affairs.
Fundamental changes in policies & institutions could readily be observed & have been widely accepted as inevitable or good or both. This book was part of a small minority which treated these changes as part of a national crisis of public authority. The First Edition was subtitled accordingly. The view of the Second Edition is that we had our crisis & did not survive it. These changes turned out to be a series of adjustments our political system was making to a still more fundamental change of gov’t & of the basis ot rule. Through these adjustments we had actually remade ourselves, politically speaking, to such an extent that I have called the results the Second Republic. &, although this Second Republic is operating under an unwritten constitution, the cumulative changes & adjustments of the past two decades can be pieced together into a sketch of a constitution:
PREAMBLE. There ought to be a national presence in every aspect of the lives of American citizens. National power is no longer a necessary evil; it is a positive virtue.
Article I. It is the primary purpose of this national gov’t to provide domestic tranquility by reducing risk. This risk may be physical or it may be fiscal. In order to fulfill this sacred obligation, the national gov’t shall be deemed to have sufficient power to eliminate threats from the environment through regulation, & to eliminate threats from economic uncertainty through insurance.
Article II. The separation of powers to the contrary notwithstanding, the center of this national gov’t is the presidency. Said office is authorized to use any powers, real or imagined, to set our nation to rights by making any rules or regulations the president deems appropriate; the president may subdelegate this authority to any other official or agency. The right to make all such rules & regulations is based upon the assumption in this constitution that the office of the presidency embodies the will of the real majority of the American nation.
Article III. Congress exists, but only as a consensual body. Congress possesses all legislative authority but should limit itself to the delegation of broad grants of unstructured authority to the president. Congress must take care never to draft a careful & precise statute because this would interfere with the judgment of the president & his professional full-time administrators.
Article IV. There exists a separate administrative branch composed of persons whose right to govern is based upon two principles: (1) The delegations of power flowing from Congress; & (2) the authority inherent in professional training & promotion through an administrative hierarchy. Congress & the courts may provide for administrative procedures & have the power to review agencies for their observance of these procedures; but in no instance should Congress or the courts attempt to displace the judgment of the administrators with their own.
Article V. The judicial branch is responsible for two functions: ( 1 ) To preserve the procedural rights of citizens before all federal courts, state & local courts, & administrative agencies; & ( 2 ) to apply the Fourteenth Amendment of the 1787 Constitution as a natural-law defense of all substantive & procedural rights. The appellate courts shall exercise vigorous judicial review of all state & local gov't & court decisions, but in no instance shall the courts review the constitutionality of Congress's grants of authority to the president or to the federal administrative agencies.
Article VI. The public interest shall be defined by the satisfaction of the voters in their constituencies. The test of the public interest is reelection.
Article VII. Article VI to the contrary notwithstanding, actual policymaking will not come from voter preferences or congressional enactments but from a process of tripartite bargaining between the specialized administrators, relevant members of Congress, & the representatives of self-selected organized interests.
I mean that the American Political Science Association membership voted him the most influential academic in the discipline at the end of the ‘70s; he later presided over APSA & the International Political Science Association in the ‘90s.
Excellent, Titus! So many things I could add, but we'll start with this: what are Stotts and his ilk going to say if, as most expect, the Chevron doctrine is discarded by SCOTUS this year?
Thanks, Carl!
Very good question: Or if next year a re-elected Trump asserts constitutional control over the admin state?