Today’s theme: a couple items that illustrate when and how people have changed their minds. Erwin Chemerinsky, and Malcolm Gladwell.
First, another piece about the new book by Erwin Chemerinsky (last discussed on 31 Aug), this time a review by the esteemed Louis Menand.
The New Yorker, Louis Menand, 23 Sep 2024: Is It Time to Torch the Constitution?, subtitled “Some scholars say that it’s to blame for our political dysfunction—and that we need to start over.”
What struck me most about this review were the opening paragraphs, which summarize matters that justify the Constitution and the government that has grown to enforce it. Here again, as I’ve been saying: the Constitution was an attempt to install lofty ideals to override instinctive tribal morality. Actually, as Menand explains, to override two opposing forces: mob rule, and the authoritarian threat.
All republican governments live in fear of the man on the white horse. A republican government, like ours, is a system of rules designed to prevent any one person or faction from hijacking the democratic decision-making process. The person on the white horse doesn’t respect the democratic decision-making process, is not a product of that process, and has no stake in its survival. The person on the white horse rides into town and says, Who needs rules? Let me take care of everything. And the public, glad to simplify life, or possibly dazzled by the promise of a glorious future, lets the rider take charge. Rules that no one enforces are just so much paper.
But republican governments also live in fear of the man on the street. Political decisions can’t be entrusted entirely to the will of a bare majority of voters, in part because voters tend to be relatively uninformed about politics, but, more important, because nothing prevents majorities, once in power, from oppressing minorities. A government under the complete control of a popularly elected majority is just as dangerous as a government under the complete control of a guy on a horse.
If you try to compose a list of rules that insulate the government from both evils, the autocrat and the mob, you get a pretty complex document. You get a document that hedges every grant of political power with conditions that make the power hard to exercise, including the power to alter the document. You get, in fact, the Constitution of the United States.
The Constitution is 4,543 words long. That’s roughly four magazine pages, about the length of this article (though not nearly as enjoyable). You can read the whole thing in fifteen minutes. Yet this brief text—plus its still operative amendments, another 3,112 words—underwrites our entire system of government. That system currently employs, on national, state, and municipal levels, more than nineteen million people. All those employees represent “the state,” and are subject to the Constitution’s rules about what government can and cannot do.
Menand goes on to explore why Chermerinsky, the dean of law at UC Berkeley, once defended the difficulty of amending the Constitution, and has now changed his mind. Why?
That was then. Chemerinsky’s new book is “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States” (Liveright), and the difficulty of amending the Constitution is Exhibit A. “The framers of the Constitution went too far in preventing amendments,” he now argues. As a result, we are stuck with a set of rules which not only makes addressing political problems harder but is itself responsible for many of the political problems we need to address. The Constitution’s “very existence as a largely unchanged document has become a sledgehammer wielded by a minority to prop up a system that engenders polarization and festering national discord,” he says. Chemerinsky doesn’t just want to amend the Constitution, either. He wants us to throw it out and come up with a new one.
Menand, the reviewer here, quibbles with some of Chemerinsky’s examples. And concludes equivocally.
One of the Founders, at least, worried about the dead-hand problem. “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living,” Jefferson wrote to Madison in 1789, the year the Constitution was ratified. “The dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” Jefferson thought that there ought to be a new Constitution every nineteen years. Now that would have been interesting!
The question is whether changing the software would actually make for a healthier politics. Lack of trust in government seems to be one of the main factors behind American political polarization, but trust levels here are not much different from trust levels in comparable countries. Voters in Japan, France, Korea, Australia, Israel, and the United Kingdom all report low levels of trust in government. Clearly, something besides the U.S. Constitution is responsible. If there was anything the Framers all desired, it was a government that voters could trust. Is it their fault if they failed, or is it ours?
(The print title, in the latest issue, is “Move to Trash,” with the echo of that idea about updating the software.)
Again — I’m not offering this as an item in a debate about the Constitution. Well, only in part. Rather, an example of how an intellectual (not a politician!) can change their mind given changing circumstances.
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One more.
NY Times, Emma Goldberg, 26 Sep 2024: Malcolm Gladwell Holds His Ideas Loosely. He Thinks You Should, Too., subtitled “As he releases ‘Revenge of The Tipping Point,’ the best-selling journalist talks about broken windows theory, Joe Rogan and changing his mind.” [gift link]
Here’s a link to the new book: Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering. I read his first book, THE TIPPING POINT, and couple of later ones over the years. He seemed to create a genre of books that offered insights into culture and psychology, via a combination of academic studies and personal anecdotes. I’ve sometimes described later books I’ve read as being in his mold. Gladwell has been accused of being glib, dressing up simplistic or obvious ideas as if they were philosophical insights, and I guess I came to agree to the extent that I stopped buying his new books.
But perhaps I’ll read this one. Because the point here is that he’s changed his mind about some of his conclusions in that first book. That’s admirable in itself. I’m curious to read how he came to do that. I’ll quote the first few para’s….
Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author, has an office on a quiet street in Hudson, N.Y., where he sits at a desk under a poster of Mao Zedong, the former communist leader of China. Why? Maybe to signal how ideas can be dangerous? Nope, no particular reason. There are two other Chinese communist posters on the wall, too. “I found them online for like $10,” said Mr. Gladwell, 61. “I just think it’s funny.”
Mr. Gladwell, who has spent his career steeped in ideas and translating social science research into everyday usefulness, says he doesn’t take his own ideas too seriously. But others do. His first book, “The Tipping Point,” became a sensation when it was released in 2000. The book explained how something ordinary — whether a shoe (Hush Puppies loafers), a behavior (theft) or an idea (“the British are coming”) — spreads so wide that it becomes an epidemic. Business mavens, political leaders and ordinary strivers in both those fields treated it like a Bible, mining it for insights on how to make their own products and pitches spread. Today, business schools have named leadership programs after Mr. Gladwell’s work, and many entrepreneurs cite his famous rule that true achievement has a cost: 10,000 hours of practice.
In October, he is releasing a new book, “Revenge of The Tipping Point.” Mr. Gladwell feels that “The Tipping Point” became wildly popular because it matched the optimism of the late 1990s; it mapped how to create positive change at a moment of positive potential, with the Cold War over and crime declining. (The book promoted the “broken windows” theory of policing, which suggested that the way to prevent major crimes was to strictly police petty ones, a notion that gave rise to policing practices now viewed by many as discriminatory.)
“Revenge of The Tipping Point” turns the first book’s conceit on its head, examining the forces that drive negative epidemics, which to him felt more attuned to our present moment.
Oh, and he was interviewed on this morning’s CBS Sunday morning show.
