The author says up from that he agrees with very little of what Governor Abbott has to say, but seems to think that his proposals for modifying the Constitution are worth while, and that a nation-wide discussion of if and how the document should be changed is a good thing.
- Click here for the article.
- Click here for the article.
The only way to make sense of Abbott’s remarks is to view them as acknowledgment that the Constitution we have, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, may not be the Constitution we want to structure our politics in the future. I couldn’t agree more with the governor — with whom I usually agree on very little — in this case. We are long overdue for a serious discussion about the adequacy of a very old Constitution drafted for a very different country and world. Where Abbott and I almost certainly disagree is on what the particular defects of the Constitution are.
My own favorite presidential campaign was that of 1912, when all four candidates — Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Eugene Debs, and William Howard Taft — offered serious suggestions about constitutional reform or, as in the case of Taft, defenses of the constitutional status quo. Perhaps as a result, the ensuing decade featured four genuinely important amendments, even though one of them (the 18th Amendment, which introduced Prohibition) was later judged to be a failure and repealed. But that decade exemplified the view, as explicated by Publius in the very first Federalist, that Americans were in fact capable of engaging in genuine “reflection and choice” about how we wished to be governed.
The ensuing century, alas, has seen a diminution of that faith. Most of us seem scared to death (sometimes for legitimate reasons) of the viewpoints and political preferences of those who disagree with us, and the idea of a new constitutional convention, as I have learned over the last decade while advocating one, is likely to provoke horror. But to fear such change is, ultimately, to believe that the promise of a truly democratic politics is impossible because “We the People” are no longer capable of engaging in sufficient “reflection and choice.”
I'd like to point out that the last sentence points to the precise reason why the state of Texas wants its students to take two classes in government. It allows - hopefully - for the knowledge necessary to engage in reflection and choice.
Read up on the author - Sanford Levison - here.
