MOVE TO TRASH

Is it time for a new Constitution?

- LOUIS MENAND

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.