Fascinating article today by Samuel Gregg on why it would be a bad idea to enshrine stronger protections for property rights and a sound money supply in the U.S. Constitution, as some are proposing. Short version: constitutions are important and some constitutional protection of economic rigths is necessary, but the recent experience of Europe (both in the Euro and in some domestic developments within EU nations) shows how these kinds of constitutional and treaty obligations can actually be counterproductive if it’s too far at odds with the prevailing cultural winds. Example: the treaties creating the Euro required European nations to get their fiscal houses in order, but those nations faced countervailing cultural imperatives that were stronger; in order to obey their cultural imperatives in favor of ever-expanding welfare and debt without openly violating their treaty obligations, they began engaging in all kinds of fudging and ledgerdemain. This has now greatly compounded the problem of fiscal irresponsibility by removing most of it from easy view; it has also opened many more doors for graft and injustice as compared to the old “honest” irresponsible finances.

Fascinating history in the article as well about a movement in late 19th and early 20th century Germany, the “ordoliberals,” that advocated similar constitutional reforms to fight cartelization of the economy, but insisted constitutional reforms could only be effective insofar as they tacked with rather than against prevailing cultural winds.

Image by Kiwi

Suppose we do have a moral consensus, but we just can’t get it implemented?

Sojourners, the progressive Christian organization, asked both presidential candidates to tape three minutes of video on what they want to do about poverty. Here are the results. WARNING: Hang Together is not responsible for suicidal impulses among Republicans who view the videos.

Here’s a quick recap for those who don’t have time to watch the videos:

Obama: I’m a sensitive human being who cares about the poor, but I’m also intelligent and understand the limits of what can be accomplished. I share your values on helping the less fortunate and will do everything I reasonably and prudently can (unlike some people) but I also share your values on not creating dependency.

Romney: Hi. I’m Mitt Romney. I want you to vote for me. I’m reading a script that was written for me by highly paid consultants because we think it will make you vote for me. You won’t retain a word I say five minutes after I’m done, but you’ll remember that I look creepy. Vote Romney!

Just the fact that he actually begins the video with the words, “Hi. I’m Mitt Romney” really tells you all you need to know.

But as fun as it is, let’s leave aside for a moment the electoral handicapping, because I see a more important issue here.

Good news: Barack Obama feels the need to affirm the bourgeois work ethic and repudiate expansion of welfare. He is unable to present his position as an expansion of the welfare state; he has to depict it as merely a defense of the welfare state’s existence against radical libertarians who want to do nothing for the poor. It’s not the first time; walking back his “you didn’t build that comments,” the president picked up Arthur Brooks’s language and said that in America “you have to earn your own success.”

Bad news: It’s all a colossal con. His administration is clearing a path for states to gut welfare reform and return to endless, endless dependency. Last year the government gave a national award to a welfare office in North Carolina for their excellent efforts to convince people they needed welfare when they didn’t think they did. The local office described this as breaking down their “mountain pride.” (I shared that with a prominent pastor here in my area and he said, “they’re breaking these people down into cattle to be herded.” He’s right.) I’ve got lots more stories and not enough time to type them all in.

So here’s the problem. Suppose we have a moral consensus strong enough that politicians are forced to play along. How do we constrain their actual behavior? The ability of elections to do so is weak. Even Dan admits that the 2008 ballot was not a choice between expanding or contracting government control over all aspects of human life, but merely whether the expansion should go on faster or slower. This year’s election may be an exception where we can really exert more influence. But is that sufficient – one election every thirty years or so? Even the “Reagan Revolution” and the 1994 Republican landslide in Congress seem to have done little other than slow the process down temporarily.

Are there other institutions that can use their cultural power (the ability to name reality) to effectively hold the state accountable for practicing what it preaches between elections?

A voter in Zimbabwe’s rigged elections, 2008 (Reuters)

Jay Nordlinger, in a post entitled “We the People” (including quotation marks), argues that this election is finally placing a clear choice before the American people:

For some Republicans, it is never the people’s fault. I’ll tell you what I mean: If the Republican nominee loses, it’s always because he ran a lousy campaign. Couldn’t communicate. Made tactical blunders. Etc. I say, the electorate always has a clear enough choice. Sufficient information. . . . This year, the electorate has a very clear choice, not least when it comes to economics. . . . You can’t force people to save themselves, or their country. If they don’t want to — they don’t want to. In a democracy, people get what they deserve (or at least a majority does). Republicans often say, “The Left controls education from kindergarten to grad school. They dominate the movie industry. The news media. Entertainment television. Popular music. Everything except talk radio!” Okay — and if you think that, do you have any right to be surprised when the people vote Democrat? The 2012 election, I think, is not so much a test of Obama or Romney as a test of the people. There is a clear choice, with two very different candidates, each an excellent exponent of his view. Whatever the outcome of the election, the people will be responsible for that outcome.

I affirm Nordlinger’s urgent desire to remind us that voters have real agency. There is a disturbing trend among some social scientists to dismiss elections as mere legitimizing rituals that have very little impact on the behavior of the state. That theory doesn’t survive an encounter with the facts. Just to take the single clearest example, the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were indispensable to western victory in the Cold War.

Yet Nordlinger’s understanding of what elections are and how they work is inadequate. This, too, would not survive an encounter with the facts. Indeed, I think it is precisely in reaction against this sort of oversimplication that some social scientists overreact into the opposite oversimplification.

If I recall from my grad school days correctly, research finds that over 80% of voters (something in the lower 40s for each party) form a party preference early in life and vote for that party with few changes throughout life. You can explain that in terms of good behavior – people figure out early what their basic values, principles and aspirations are, and identify with the party that represents those; or you can explain it in terms of bad behavior – voters form party allegiances for essentially non-rational reasons and then rationalize their votes based on whatever arguments their parties supply. What I think you cannot do is attribute all agency and therefore all responsibility to the voters. Regardless of how much you see the stability of party preference as the result of good or bad behavior, their partisan consistency reflects the reality that what choices the electorate is presented with when it goes to vote is largely determined by forces outside the electorate’s control. For example, the electorate did not vote to change the economic direction of the country in 2008 partly because that option was not on the ballot.

The other forces constraining the electorate’s responsibility fall into roughly two big classifications, both of which are dismissed by Nordlinger. One is the choices of the parties and campaigns themselves. The other is the ability of non-electoral cultural institutions (“education from kindergarten to grad school . . . the movie industry. The news media. Entertainment television. Popular music.”) to control how we describe our reality and thus to control what options are within the bounds of socially defined legitimacy.

But setting aside the claim that the electorate is always responsible, periodically we get elections, like Thatcher and Reagan, where the electorate is really in the driver’s seat. When it comes to 2012 I think Nordlinger’s point is well taken. Here we really do have “a clear choice, with two very different candidates, each an excellent exponent of his view.”

Take a look at that woman voting in a sham election in Zimbabwe and be thankful we really do have the right to choose our rulers.

Back in 2005, Joe Carter invited readers to submit their recommended reading lists for a “do it yourself MA” in their fields. I sent him my list for a DIY master’s in political theory, and he was good enough to post it. Recently, Justin Taylor of Between Two Worlds at The Gospel Coalition asked me to update it; the revised version went live this morning.

Looking forward to hearing what my fellow Hang Togetherites think! What would you include that I missed?

Over the weekend, NRO’s Ramesh Ponnuru drew attention to some remarks by Rand Paul on “libertarianism” and the future of the GOP. Paul said:

I’ve been talking to a lot of the national leaders in the Republican party… and there are certain parts of the country we’ve given up on, the whole West coast and New England, so what I keep telling them is maybe we need some libertarian-type Republicans who might be popular in those areas. Maybe a less aggressive, more socially tolerant but still fiscally conservative policy that may be more libertarian might do better in California, might do better in Oregon, Washington, ne. And I think if we had that it might be a great strategy. Our problem in the presidential election is we’ve given up 150 electoral votes before we get started.

Ponnuru has a number of points in response, some of which I agree with. He points out electoral evidence that social issues aren’t hurting the GOP in these areas as much as Paul indicates, and also reminds us that both parties, really, start the electoral race with large regions of the country out of reach; it’s not clear the GOP is at a disadvantage in this regard.

But Ponnuru begins his response by saying:

I wouldn’t have thought that Rand Paul was one of the those libertarians who saw his philosophy as a combination of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism, since he himself opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. Perhaps he’s saying that the Republicans need candidates who are more libertarian-type than he is?

That’s a fair question. Now here’s my question: does “more libertarian-type” and “socially tolerant” mean pro-abortion and pro-gay-marriage? Or was Paul calling for candidates with a different kind of attitude? Perhaps for Paul, language like “libertarian-type” and “socially tolerant” really just means candidates who are willing to deinstitutionalize the culture war.

For me, reading over what Paul said, it’s the phrase “less aggressive” that especially raises this question. Do pro-life, pro-traditional-marriage politicians usually use the phrase “less aggressive” to describe the pro-abortion and pro-gay-marriage positions?

I wouldn’t prefer to use the word “tolerant” to describe what I take Paul to be describing. But then, I also wouldn’t prefer to use the word “tolerant” to describe support for the right to kill babies.

Since some of you will be wondering, and since it may legitimately be relevant, it’s worth noting that the question of Paul’s own beliefs has itself been the subject of some controversy. In his last election, his opponent attacked him with claims he’s a phony Christian. I don’t think it’s usually worthwhile to examine the sincerity of a politician’s beliefs; for if we wish politicians not to seek windows into our souls, in Elizabeth’s classic formulation, we might start by not seeking windows into theirs. (Of all men’s souls to seek a window into, I would have expected the politician would not be the spiritual tourist’s first choice.)

But that’s exactly the reason I think this datum may be an additional reason to interpret Paul’s remarks in the way I’m suggesting. After his unpleasant experience, perhaps Paul views “libertarian-type” and “tolerant” attitudes as the only way to get this kind of ridiculous thing out of our electoral politics. I don’t think so, but he may think so.