Why Americans are no longer governed by the Constitution
Most conservatives view the U.S. Constitution as the central element that binds the identity of the nation together, but constitutions do not make peoples; peoples make constitutions.
The Catholic political theorist and enlightenment skeptic Joseph de Maistre believed that no true constitution can ever be written by human hands but can only be inscribed on the hearts of a nation’s people by the almighty God. For Maistre, the notion that a constitution would, in and of itself, create the character of a nation was absurd. The values and norms contained in a constitution reflect the traditions and folkways that organically emerge from the character of a people.
The shared moral vision of the people, which serves as the real force of the constitution, pre-exists the written document itself. Any rights enumerated in the document are only a written formalization of that which is already held deeply sacred by the people, and their protection is entirely dependent on the continuance of that tradition.
Maistre did not push for a universal form of government but instead believed that the best government would be one that naturally fit the needs and traditions of the people over which it ruled. An artificially imposed regime with no connection to the ways in which different communities lived their lives could not hope to govern them well. Virtuous leaders had a duty to guide their people toward a better future, but that could only be done in the context of a shared understanding of the common good. A constitution could not enforce this vision; it could only represent the spirit that already existed within the polis.
America is a vast and complicated nation. It has always been a collection of very different regions, cultures, and traditions separated by the kind of geographical distances that would have formed individual nations in a place like Europe. This is why the country was originally governed as a confederation of separate states instead of one unified whole.
Due to its divergent ways of life, geographical separation, and intermittent waves of large-scale immigration, America never truly achieved ethnogenesis. Instead, it relied on one consistent factor that most of its residents shared: protestant Christianity.
While Catholic, Jewish, and eventually Muslim waves of immigration would all arrive, America’s initial population were protestant Christians, and it is from this firmament that the moral vision of America arose.
America was founded by those who chose to leave their homes and strike out for new lands rather than compromise their way of life, and that deep instinct to prefer exit over assimilation persisted well into the nation’s history.
Due to its size and regional diversity, America never truly formed a single national culture or identity. Whenever two or more groups disagreed, rather than being forced to reconcile and become one people, they simply split, venturing farther and farther into a seemingly endless frontier. A federal model allowed individual communities and states to operate very differently as long as they held to the shared moral framework of protestant Christianity. Subsidiarity, the idea that the political problems should be resolved as close to the locality where they originate as possible, meant that the traditions and folkways of each region could be maintained while still working inside the larger system of the nation.
Correct. Unfortunately Americans have increasingly not been governed by the Constitution since the early 1910’s. Our federal government’s deviation from Constitutional restrictions has absolutely exploded since the 1960’s.
"An artificially imposed regime with no connection to the ways in which different communities lived their lives could not hope to govern them well." For example the EU and the British people.