(Nov. 15) With a full week’s perspective on the Nov. 8 elections , one can see the U.S. constitutional system , in a macro sense, again worked exquisitely well.
The results provided rough justice (and roughly balanced) for two major parties that both failed to earn governing trust. Moreover, the final balance of power is a very good approximation of where the public, with all its conflicted and conflicting opinions, really stands.
This is the genius of the constitutional handiwork of James Madison and his fellow framers: It sifts through an almost infinite number of local majorities and factions in ways that reflect those local feelings in a national context. As Madison wrote in Federalist 51 , the new system guards against tyranny “by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable. … In a free government, the security for civil rights … [must lie] in the multiplicity of interests.”
Republican and Democrat campaigners carrying flags with donkey and elephant symbols
In these elections, the public saw two major parties that each had forfeited reason to be afforded significant power. National Democrats in the past two years have caused (or greatly exacerbated) inflation, economic stagnation, border chaos, a crime wave, and an illicit drug crisis that each alone are nearly ruinous. They have not just embraced but tried to impose, by government fiat, radical or counterfactual nostrums about men being women, young children being able to know they are “misgendered,” parents being impediments to the nurturing and education of their own children, mob censorship being promoted as free speech, and ethnicity associated with character traits such that the nonsensical idea of “whiteness” supposedly means guilt and dark skin is a sign of victimhood.
Until and unless true moderates retake the Democratic Party, the national Democratic Party is a danger to the common good.
Alas, national Republicans have been overrun by weaklings and demagogues pushing ideas almost as bad…. [The full column is here.]
