So I said that before giving my ideas for a new US Constitution I would need to explain my perspective in order to show where I’m coming from and what my proposal is based on.
To sum up from one of my other pieces, “I am NOT a “progressive.” I am not a Socialist. I am a conservative in the sense that I want to preserve the American system of government. I am a libertarian in the sense that I believe in The Law of Unintended Consequences, and in the sense of Thomas Jefferson: “That government is best which governs least” and what someone else believes “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words I am what Jefferson and F.A. Hayek would call a liberal.”
I had previously considered myself a (L)ibertarian, because in the duopoly the Democrats were in many ways flawed and the Republicans were outright insane, no later than when they first started to follow Donald Trump. So I voted Libertarian. Until they went insane. And while the (L)ibertarian movement always has been an exercise in herding cats, things really came to a head with the Libertarian Party with COVID, when their demand to maintain freedom from government rules went up against the need to contain the worst pandemic in this country since the 1919 influenza outbreak. (There were a lot of people masking up then, over a decade before FDR turned this country socialist.) The “freethinker” response to COVID only confirmed that the movement was not based on a healthy skepticism to big government, but rather oppositional defiant disorder, which made it ripe for takeover by the kinds of people whose politics may not have been identical to Trump’s but were starting to run parallel. The common element was distrust and outright hatred of a political establishment composed largely of mainstream Democrats and professional bureaucrats, whom Trump calls “the deep state” and prior to him were simply “the state” or more properly the administrative state. That coalition of people had much to do with why Trump won last year and Kamala Harris lost.
The other reason I quit being straight libertarian is seeing what happens to government when the people allegedly against Big Government get a hold of it. We may not like everything government does, but until we can figure some better arrangement, it will always exist. As long as there are group resources, or resources that cannot be held individually, there will always be some designated agent to administer those resources, to make rules on group activities and to enforce those rules if they are broken. You can call it a commune, a government, or an HOA, but it will exist.
You can’t kill government, you can’t drown it in a tub. We can have a legitimate political debate as to how much is needed, but it is going to exist on some level. As they say, “power abhors a vacuum.” So one of the things we have to do is figure out what we actually need government for, as in, something that is necessary and can’t really be done by anyone else. One could argue whether that applies to, say, education. There are lots of homeschooled people, and some have argued that they do better academically than public school kids. But having government provide schooling at all levels, and creating standards, broadens the opportunities that education provides. Likewise, you could have people sponsor a highway, but the private sector isn’t able to develop the comprehensive infrastructure and highway system that the federal government developed after World War II. These are legitimate debates. But what we’re seeing with the Musk-Trump administration is targeting programs that have been useful, not because they are wasteful but simply on the basis of a reflexive anti-establishment ideology, like a mirror-universe version of the Red Guards. And we will soon see the consequences of seeing what parts of government are necessary or not, especially when the decision is made for emotional reasons.
I still consider myself libertarian in terms of my internal definition, but that doesn’t seem to be one that’s shared by the “official” movement anymore. Which is one of the points that I want to make here: Politics, at least in the US, is not based on ideas and consistent ideology, it’s based on labels. And if you can take over the labels that people agree with, like “freedom” and “America”, you can get people on board with some pretty statist and un-American ideas. Likewise from a leftist perspective, you might think that socialism is a humanist movement, and maybe in Europe it is, but in America, it has always been associated with the worst sort of Maoist and Leninist tyranny. So trying to promote racial and income equity is considered socialism, but autarky, tariffs, having the president directly manage the Kennedy Center and staff it with his cronies and having his patron boost his own government contracts while regulating his own competitors are NOT socialism.
So I do not think my position should be based on ideology as much as philosophy, because that is more consistent and more easy to test. My philosophy is what has been called classical liberalism, heavily based on Ayn Rand. Now, while these days I think Rand as a person had more issues than TIME Magazine, I don’t see anybody else in philosophy who gets to the issues with both Left and Right, particularly why the Trump Right engages in magical thinking and the Left, lacking conviction in reality and objective standards, has been powerless to address this. But I am basing my positions on these basics:
Reality exists, independent of subjective perception or opinion.
At the same time we do not have perfect knowledge of reality. Determining the truth of a thing (at least on empirical things) requires a process of examination akin to the scientific method.
For us to have the best chance of gaining knowledge and developing accurate views of the world, we need the maximum freedom to act, particularly in the action of gaining knowledge.
Thus the best systems are those which allow for human freedom in a person’s own sphere while by the same token protecting the same right for others against other individuals.
In regard to the above, I think that for most of this country’s history, our Constitution, with all of its flaws, was still the best government we could have devised. I think that it did not account for the natural tendency of people to engage in partisan politics, which is fine, except in the sense that it directly corrupts the system of checks and balances that the Founders created. This is why, for instance, the Electoral College creates results against the popular vote, because all but two states set up their electors as “winner take all”, meaning that only two candidates have a chance of getting any electors, because we define “democracy” as who wins the popularity contest between the two parties that have set themselves up to have all the advantages. And in the one clear case where we could have used a veto of the popular vote, the 2024 election, the Electors went ahead and certified Donald Trump because to do otherwise would have gone against democracy. Even though putting a check on the flaws of democracy was precisely why the Electoral College exists.
Likewise, the Founders intended impeachment to be a check on the power of an unscrupulous president (or other federal official), but in practice it can’t be. The premise was that the three branches of government are the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary (in that order) and each acts as a check on the other, because each institution serves to protect its own priorities. That’s the system on paper. The system in practice is that the three branches are the Democrats, the Republicans, and the judiciary, and the third is chosen by the dominant of the other two. And with a majority vote required to move impeachment from the House to the Senate but a two-thirds vote required for the Senate to convict, you are never going to get that many Senators to go against a President of their own party, because he is not a competitor in the system, he is their boss. If a President doesn’t have the loyalty of one-third of the Senate it raises the question of how he got elected in the first place.
I am operating on the premise that we should keep most of the government that exists, because it was working pretty well with the capacity for evolution and reform, prior to being gamed by unscrupulous and authoritarian people. This means that such changes that I propose are geared mainly towards addressing those exploits.
You will also note that by the standards of left-wingers who act like the whole Constitutional project was a mistake, all this makes me fairly right-wing. But that is a standard of right-wing prior to the current one, which is “I agree with everything Donald Trump says, even if he changed his mind three times today.” By that standard, I might as well be Che Guevara.
This perspective has been referred to as radical centrism or even ultra-radical centrism. Which is of course a contradiction in terms. But the difference is a matter of means as opposed to ends. In this case it is an acknowledgement that the current system isn’t working, that it needs to be changed, but the changes being implemented now by the anti “deep state” party are taking us further from where we need to go.
It’s been implied that the problem with “no labels” movements outside the duopoly (such as Andrew Yang’s Forward) is that they are not really distinguished from established political systems and in their pragmatism don’t have an identity. “Mark Satin worries that radical centrism, while “thoroughly sensible”, lacks an “animating passion” – and claims there has never been a successful political movement without one.”
In my mind, this objection gets back to the problem I mentioned earlier. A movement based on ideology is in danger of being hijacked by people with ulterior motives. Moreover, its definitions refer only to itself and do not adapt. When the ideology clashes with reality, ideology can only win with force. A philosophy based on finding reality and changing opinions to fit the facts is better for the world than an attempt to make facts fit someone’s opinion.
Bruce Lee was once quoted as saying: “The highest technique is to have no technique. My technique is a result of your technique; my movement is a result of your movement.” You need to be able to acknowledge the world around you and act accordingly before you try to change it.
In fact it is that very non-identity that is at the core of original liberalism. It is the premise that since we are so different not every way of life will suffice for all and therefore we cannot make our politics such an ideology that it becomes a religion. As Ludwig von Mises said in Liberalism (a book that the Von Mises Caucus has apparently never read):
“We see that as soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual’s mode of life, we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest detail. … Liberalism limits its concern exclusively and entirely to earthly life and earthly endeavor. The kingdom of religion, on the other hand, is not of this world. Thus, liberalism and religion could both exist side by side without their spheres’ touching. … Liberalism, however, must be intolerant of every kind of intolerance. If one considers the peaceful cooperation of all men as the goal of social evolution, one cannot permit the peace to be disturbed by priests and fanatics.”
I mean if “radical centrism” seems like a contradiction, well nowadays we are supposed to normalize Nazi sympathies and a unitary executive, but limits on government power are apparently un-American. At this point there IS nothing more radical than centrism.
This is the perspective I’m coming from with my next idea.