The New Politics of the 21st Century
When a people are no longer are satisfied with the prevailing transactional exchange of goods and services, then values not "goods" matter.
We often defend the line and letter of the Constitution by deferential appeal to its authors, even though we know that they saw it as imperfect and questioned its longevity.
It has withstood “The test of time.” And who knows what unintended consequences would follow any effort to “bring it up to date.” Note I used both cliches and put them in quotation marks. Suffice it to say that folk wisdom memes are poor guides to the choices we have to make today.
What is relevant I think are the fundamental (monumental?) changes we have seen in our society, then to now.
We are not the same country. Global involvement on many fronts. Instant movement of word, image and finance. An industrialized society with significant monopoly interests, entrenched fiscal arrangements, well defended institutional legacies and a far larger and more diverse population and territory.
A Constitution constrains and enables. It is an attempt to relate current aspirations to past wisdom. It fits like a well-tailored suit, or hangs over like a scarecrow’s tattered garb.
More important for this opinion piece, it gains and loses legitimacy as it supports or opposes the interests of a country’s people. When it is largely unquestioned, the politics of the society are largely over who get the better deal when it comes to legitimate (under Constitutional authority) government action. When it begins to seem inadequate to the present, then politics change and conflicts are over the Constitution itself and fundamental issues of justice and human values.
We may be at that point. So much more today is problematic, i.e. at issue, contested, than in even the more recent past. The inherited “solutions,” that formed the basis of our past accommodations, are now the crises that need resolution.
The rules of any game handicap some and assist others. The desired outcome of the contest, the fairness we might say, are dependent upon the rules and the adjustments made to the rules.
In the case of a nation-state, it is a Constitution written or unwritten that lays out these basic rules of conflict and, when legitimate, affirms essential beliefs in the nature of “a good society.”
For most of our history, it was the distributive outcomes, of a federal system of divided government, with a weak central authority and a robust private system of property and trade that we took to be both product and proof of “our land of liberty.”
And now, it seems to me, we wrestle anew with the very issues that confronted the founders. Today, politics matters, in ways it has not for over 250 or so years.