Americans err in thinking that while their politics may be ailing,
their Constitution is fine. Sick politics is a sure sign of
constitutional failure. This is Sotirios Barber's message in
"Constitutional Failure." Public attitudes fostered by a consumer
culture, constitution worship, the lack of a trusted leadership
community, and academic historicism and value skepticism--these,
this book tells us in clear and bracing terms, are at the root of
our political dysfunction.
Barber characterizes the Constitution as a plan of government--a
set of means to public purposes like national security and
prosperity. He argues that if the government is failing, it's fair
to conclude that the plan is failing and that laws that are
supposed to serve as means can't in reason continue to bind when
they no longer work. He argues further that constitutional success
depends ultimately on a stratum of diverse and self-critical
citizens, who see each other as moral equals and parts of one
national community. These citizens, with the politicians among
them, would be good-faith contestants regarding the meaning of the
common good and the most effective means to secure it. In this
way--showing how the success of a constitutional democracy is more
a matter of political attitudes than of institutional
performance--Barber's book upends the conventional understanding of
constitutional failure. In Barber's analysis, the apparent
stability of formal constitutional institutions--usually
interpreted as evidence of constitutional health--may actually
indicate the defining element of constitutional failure: a mentally
inert citizenry no longer capable of constitutional reflection and
reform.
At once concise and thorough in its analysis of the concept of
constitutional failure and its accounts of a "healthy politics,"
the corrosive impact of Madisonian checks and balances (as a
substitute for trust-worthy leadership), and the outlook for
meaningful reform, this book offers a carefully reasoned and
provocative assessment of the viability of constitutional
governance in the United States.
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