Indulge me in a feeble pun, but Britain’s shadow chancellor Ed Balls had some chutzpah when he commented the other day, “I think [former two-term London mayor David Livingstone, Labour] would be a better mayor for London on Tube fares and jobs and housing than [incumbent Conservative] Boris Johnson who, let’s be honest, is a bit of a joker, a bit of a buffoon.” Johnson, 47, beat Livingstone, 66, handily, in a rematch of their 2008 contest. In a city that tends to vote Labour, the popular Johnson saved the Tories from total humiliation in last week’s voting. It was not that, pace Mr. Balls, he is likely to be “better” than “Red Ken” on such issues as public transportation, affordable housing, and employment. Perhaps he is; what Londoners liked is that he does not pander to them or lie about what is possible, given the economic outlook for London and England. He promises “conservative” policies to make a better London, without any cheesy multiculturalism. Although Labour pounded the governing coalition in municipal elections across England, staying well ahead of the Tories and obliterating their Liberal-Democratic partners, the Scot Nats took Glasgow, a traditionally Labour bastion, and seemed poised to gain a plurality in Edinburgh, which should allow them to govern the cultural capital of Scotland with the Socialists as junior partners. Devolution toward greater Scottish autonomy? It is not impossible that Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party (SNP) leader, will seize the momentum and sunder the union that has existed since 1707. Salmond would like to have it both ways, maintaining existing welfare regimes for Scotland that are largely subsidized by the prosperous regions of what some (not multiculturalists) still call Great Britain in the south of England, while at the same time getting full control over local social and economic policy and indeed eventually charting an independent Scottish foreign policy. This could mean — as far as Salmond is concerned, the Scot public not having been consulted — among other things, joining various “boycott Israel” movements that have gained some traction in European academic exchange policies as well as trade and commerce. Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson’s opponent in London, acquired a reputation as a consistent critic of Israel, regularly engaging in provocations smacking of anti-Semitism. Many in the Labour Party hoped he would not seek to regain the mayoralty, and his response was that he did not care as “rich Jews don’t vote for me” anyway. At any rate, Boris Johnson said with tongue only half in cheek that he was grateful his opponent was “Red Ken,” who announced his retirement from politics after this defeat. It is not a given, however, that a more centrist Labourite would have fared better against the incumbent. There has been much talk about how recent elections in Europe are referenda on the poor management of economic affairs, and in fact Boris Johnson has been remarkably pragmatic about making the best out of difficult times, and the voters did not miss this. Meanwhile, the voters of Greece, Italy, Spain, and France have booted out their incumbents, as have the voters of Hungary. There does not appear to be a clear ideological trend here — left to right or right to left, authoritarian hard guys being replaced by “feminized” nice guys, as someone remarked recently. There is no clear trend at all. In Britain, for instance, the leaderships of both parties are seeking the soft middle ground. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron — Dave to his friends — has his Thatcherite moments, particularly with regard to European policy, but then he backpedals. Why not pull Britain out of Europe if things are going badly in Europe? It is politically, legally, technically, not so simple to rend the institutional wires that bind the European states together; but has he raised the “Britain Out” banner? Boris Johnson, pragmatist — which means he thinks that what works for London, works — could prove to be a much more conservative leader of the Conservative Party than David Cameron, which is why the enthusiasm for his victory, the best news for the Tories in a long while, was somewhat muted at No. 10 Downing Street. Mr. Johnson, who came to politics from journalism. He still writes a fine, highly original tennis column for the Telegraph , which many observers of British affairs consider, with the Daily Mail , the top of the press in England. Having blocked “Red Ken” and saved Conservative hopes, there surely will be pressure on Mr. Johnson to wrest the party leadership. THE “AGAINST” TREND in Europe expresses itself within party politics as well as in the perpetual competition between governing parties and opposition. You did not even have to wait for French President Nicolas Sarkozy to go down last Sunday for talk to begin of a “recomposition” of the center-right. Indeed, with less such talk and more unity, he might have squeaked by his Socialist opponent, François Hollande. However, one simple explanation for the vote-against-whoever’s-in trend in Europe is that Europe, the thing as opposed to the place, ain’t working. That, at any rate, is the ready-made explanation usually adopted by blind-deaf-dumb journalists and instant experts from the academic boondocks. Mounting public debt — 90 percent of GNP in France! — insolvent pension funds, ever-greater demands for entitlements and high salaries by everybody, not only members of public sector unions, have bankrupted the old continent. A remote, technocratic, unelected European Union civil service, barricaded in the Berlaymont on Brussels’ rue de la Loi, passes laws and regulations that no one wants but that cramp business, cripple economic growth, prevent EU Europe from claiming and asserting its rightful place in the sun. This is a seductive argument for Americans, and especially for conservative Americans. It suggests that you get into trouble if you use “The Three Little Pigs” as your guide for living. And it allows them to warn that if we do not mend our ways, we will go the way of Greece or worse — Ukraine. This is unfair to Greeks and Ukrainians, who after all cannot be blamed entirely for the pass to which their politicians have brought them. And it certainly is not very useful advice for Americans. America is not Greece or Ukraine; it is not even England or Scotland, in case anyone needs reminding. Instead of engaging in trans-national comparisons of dubious usefulness, we ought to consider the more reasonable notion that the travails of contemporary advanced democratic states have to do with the state of advanced democracy. Voters in democratic regimes always ask candidates, Whatcha got for me?, and candidates and pols always respond with some variation on This, that, and the other thing. And quite honestly, why should they not, I mean voters and public affairs leaders both? The danger now would seem to be that the less attractive qualities that democracy promotes in both voters and leaders are like loose cannon without the traditional guardrails that, as Adam Smith perceived with regard to economic life, function as a kind of “invisible hand” to turn vices, or at least less than noble attitudes, into socially beneficial forces. “Not from benevolence,” Smith wrote, does the baker bake your bread or, in general, does anyone do anything. This human trait is not turned into its opposite by democratic regimes as they evolve into welfare states, and the bankruptcy of these is not likely to weigh heavily on the minds of bakers, bread-eaters, any more than on politicians and voters. If anything, welfare states seem to increase the human propensity to think in narrow selfish terms. Nicolas Sarkozy tried to reform the French welfare state and for a time even hoped to break the grip of “welfare statism” on the modern French mind. He did much more than his predecessor Jacques Chirac, a nominal center-right man, but that he was disavowed last Sunday, albeit by a slender margin, suggests that France, like Chicago, ain’t ready for reform. Will the recently elected Mariano Rajoy (Partido Popular, center-right) have more success in Spain (public debt 60 percent of GNP) than Sarkozy had, as he tried to reverse decades of full-turbine welfare statism? Will the “austerity” championed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a counter to the European Union’s debt epidemic serve as a rallying point for those who want to get the house in order? Will Boris Johnson’s win in London have a “thatcherizing” effect in Europe? When, in 1981, the French elected a Socialist president on a radical platform, the example of Mrs. Thatcher served as a counter-point and reference for anti-socialists not only in France but across the continent and indeed across the Atlantic as Americans came to realize their recently elected president, along with the Iron Lady, were proposing an alternative model to the one that was supposed to have the wind in its sails. This model held, prevailed, then came under suspicion again. Once again we are in a period of alternative visions. Democracy’s “gimme gimme” ethos is unlikely to ever change. Mr. Reagan and Lady Thatcher both knew this. They knew the arguments and arguments will swing back and forth as to whether your gimme is best got through the state or your own efforts — or some of both. But they also knew human nature can be channeled (sometimes negatively, by the state getting out of the way), wed to virtuous qualities, directed toward generous impulses, courageous stands. Sr. Rajoy just recently took a stand against creeping Stalinism in Ukraine — here we go — hinting that if Yulia Tymoshenko, the former, essentially liberal (in the European sense) prime minister is not released from the jail in which she was thrown by the thugs who are now in power in Kiev, Spain will lead a boycott of the Europe soccer finals, scheduled to be played in July in Ukraine. It’s only sports, but it does not matter where you start, so long as you continue. The key quality to look for this year of nearly serial elections across the democratic West culminating in our own presidential contest surely is the moral quality of the pretenders to leadership. It is not a matter of grading saints and sinners, but of finding people with the ability to point to real and true reference points and insist on them. Our societies can muddle through the welfare-state-capitalist mish-mash to which democratic politics have brought them. They cannot survive moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
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Which Way the Western Welfare States?
[Posted by Karl] Paul Krugman and other lefties are rejoicing over the results of the French and Greek elections (even if markets are not) as a rebuke against European “austerity” programs. However, it is worth remembering that those attacking ”austerity” programs in Europe are also fond of claiming Congressional Republicans are backing “draconian cuts” in the size of government, all evidence to the contrary. As the Mercatus Center’s Veronique de Rugy notes in a new paper: If there is austerity in Europe, in most cases it hasn’t taken the form of massive spending cuts. Following years of large spending expansion, Spain, the United Kingdom, France, and Greece—countries widely cited for adopting austerity measures—haven’t significantly reduced spending since “austerity” supposedly started in 2008. When spending was actually reduced—between 2009-2010 in Greece, Italy, and Spain—the cuts have been relatively small compared to the size of bloated European budgets. Meaningful structural reforms were seldom implemented. Instead, whenever cuts took place, they were always overwhelmed with large counterproductive tax increases. This so-called balanced approach—some spending cuts for large tax increases—has been proven to be a recipe for disaster by economists. It fails to stabilize the debt, and it is more likely to cause economic contractions. That summary excludes Ireland, but as Kyle Wingfield notes, the top marginal tax rate there rose 17 percent amid a global recession. In contrast, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have bounced back strongly after adopting strict austerity measures and vastly reducing government indebtedness. The finding that the big-tax, “balanced” approach to fiscal consolidation generally fails is consistent with prior studies from the OECD and IMF . So what is the effect of the Greek and French elections? Maybe not much. As Rick Ackerman reminds us, “even the socialists in Greece’s parliament were forced to support austerity measures a few months ago, because without such measures the country would have been unable to borrow enough cash to meet payroll.” As for France, even Jukebox Mafioso Matt Yglesias acknowledges: [O]ne very plausible story of what happens next is simply that the European Central Bank will decide it needs to bring the continent’s newest leader to heel. If the ECB signals that it will only support the French banking system and the French economy if Hollande sticks with the status quo program, then Hollande may well have no choice. Elections in Europe aren’t necessarily what they used to be. Or, as Iowahawk bluntly tweeted to Greece: “[Y]ou can vote against austerity all you want. Austerity doesn’t give a sh*t about election results.” Also : “French vote out austerity, gravity; prompts new fears of airborne flocks of rich, drunk flying Frenchmen.” –Karl
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French, Greeks vote against imaginary austerity
Today is May 1st. On this date in 1751, the first American cricket tournament was held in New York City. Surprisingly, though they wouldn’t be founded until over 200 years later, the Mets somehow still managed to lose the tournament. Also on this date in 1786, Mozart debuted Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), in Vienna, Austria. It is considered one of the most important and popular operas of all time. It was so well received at its premiere that there were five encores, and Mozart himself crowd-surfed for at least 10 minutes. On this date in 1931, the Empire State Building was dedicated and opened. It was the tallest building in the world at the time, at 102 stories (1,250 feet). The investors behind the construction claimed the spire atop the building would be used as a mooring post for dirigibles, although it never was. In this universe. And finally, today is Global Love Day , when we are charged with the not-at-all confusing task: “Simply be love.” You guys can’t see me, but I’m totally being love right now. I think. It sort of itches. Consider this an Open Thread . New Obama slogan has long ties to Marxism, socialism | Washington Times “The Obama campaign apparently didn’t look backwards into history when selecting its new campaign slogan, ‘Forward’ – a word with a long and rich association with European Marxism.” Confused Dr. Drew: Jon Lovitz Criticizing Obama Same Thing as Making Threats | Newsbusters “While Lovtiz has been bashed on Twitter, he clearly wasn’t expecting to be accused of making some sort of violent threat against Obama. And yet that’s exactly what happened last night on the HLN show Dr. Drew where the host, Drew Pinsky, seemed to genuinely believe that.” Obama Pushes False GM Success Story | IBD “The Obama camp can’t stop clucking about how he saved GM and the car industry. But if the GM bailout is such a success story, why can’t it pay back its debt to taxpayers?” Cleveland Occupier Arrested In Bridge Plot | Free Beacon “Brandon Baxter, one of the ‘anarchists’ arrested in a plot to blow up an Ohio bridge in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street’s ‘May Day’ protest, supported a disruptive Occupy Cleveland protest March 5.” Today’s Word of the Day comes via Dictionary.com. ort (awrt): noun A scrap or morsel of food left at a meal.
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Daily Links – May 1, 2012
They were escape artists, in several senses, and they were old men, well into their 90s, and they are remembered. Raymond Samuel, born July 31, 1914, was on his way to a fine career in civil engineering in the late 1930s, a graduate of the elite Ponts et Chaussées school in Paris and the recipient of scholarships for post-graduate work at MIT and Harvard, when war broke out — resumed. Serving on the Maginot Line, he made his way home to nearby Haute-Saône after the debacle of June 1940 and with Lucie, Lucie Bernard by her maiden name, his wife of only one year, organized one of the first Resistance networks, Libération-Sud. France stayed in the war thanks to a few souls like these, like Captain Henri Frenay, like Brig. Gen. Charles de Gaulle. Alex Cassie, born in South Africa on December 22, 1916, flew a RAF fighter in a successful attack against a U-boat in September 1942 but was hit by return fire and forced to land off the coast of Brittany, where he and his crew were picked up by a German patrol. He found himself at Stalag Luft III in Poland, where he promptly got to work in the forgery section, called Dean & Dawson after a famous London travel agency, of one of the most famous POW escape schemes of all time. Due to his skill as an artist (his degree from Aberdeen University was in psychology), he helped produce the essential false documents, ranging from ID cards to “letters” from “girlfriends,” that his fellow-escapees would carry for authenticity while making their way across Europe back to their units and squadrons. But finding that his claustrophobia endangered the plan during the trip through the tunnel to the other side of the barbed wire, Lt. Cassie gave his place to another and immediately got to work forging more papers for the next group. (This follows excellent obit in the Telegraph of April 13.) Ahmed Ben Bella, born December 25, 1918 in a small town near Tlemcen, the scholarly city of Algeria’s west that produced many of the country’s patriot leaders, was a decorated hero of the total hell of Monte Cassino. The French Expeditionary Corps under Gen. Alphonse Juin, part of the U.S. Fifth Army and credited with some of the key piercings of the Gustav Line defending Rome, was largely made up of indigenes from Morocco and Algeria, though it is only in the past 15 years or so that this has been acknowledged in French military histories. By 1945, after witnessing a disastrously brutal return of colonial policy, including a massacre of thousands following a peaceful demonstration in Setif near Tunisia, he opted for violence to achieve independence and was caught during a fund-raising operation at a operation in Oran. Escaping from prison, he quickly asserted himself as one of the historic leaders of the new National Liberation Front that refused to accept anything short of complete independence from France. Aubrac, Cassie, Ben Bella: extraordinary and yet typical of the generation — they were near-contemporaries — that won World War II for freedom, diverged on what this meant. Many, if not most, of their comrades-in-arms did not survive the war in which they gave the very best of their young manhoods or, in the Algerian’s case, the battles that followed. The passing of these men in their great old age reminds us how brave the new world is that they and their generation left us. Raymond and Lucie Samuel, nom-de-guerre Aubrac — the capitulatinist regime’s anti-Semitic legislation passed without German encouragement and Samuel was too easily identified as Jewish — led Libération-Sud and did not forget they were fighting for life: Lucie was pregnant with their second child when Raymond was caught, almost certainly betrayed by a comrade, during the meeting of Resistance leaders in the Lyon suburb of Caluire. The Gestapo, under the notorious Nazi Klaus Barbie, after a year-long hunt, netted Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s personal representative and delegate to the internal Resistance — sharply divided among movements with divergent concepts of the meaning of their wars. Moulin did not survive the torture but indicated to his friend with a final wink that he had not talked. Aubrac was sent to await the firing squad. Alex Cassie and the others prisoners for a few days dared hope everything was well, as 76 of their fellow-RAF officers made it through the tunnel and in their various disguises began the great escape westward. After a few days the bad news began to trickle in, as one after another was spotted and re-captured. Only three made it back to England; 50 were shot by the SS. An airplane carrying Ahmed Ben Bella and other top FLN leaders was intercepted and forced to land by a French air force fighter in 1956 while flying from Morocco to Egypt. The nationalist leaders spent several years in jail, to be freed only on the eve of independence in July 1962. A civil war flared up after the French departure from Algeria, but Ben Bella found himself on the winning side, backed by the head of the national liberation army, Col. Houari Boumediene. By 1963 he was president of the new “democratic and people’s republic”, opposition having been crushed, driven into exile, or silenced. Lucie Aubrac, visibly pregnant with their second child, convinced a Barbie subaltern that they were not yet married and under a French law permitting condemned to wed in extremis , to insure their children’s legitimacy, and they should be allowed to do so. While he was being transferred to another location for this purpose, Lucie and a band of partisans attacked the Gestapists, killed several, and escaped with her husband. Too hot to stay in France, the couple was exfiltrated to London where they stayed the remainder of the war working at Free France headquarters. The elder Samuels, shopkeepers, and Raymond’s older brother were eventually arrested, deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Alex Cassie did not get another chance to escape. By early 1945 the Germans were in full retreat and the inmates of stalags and concentration camps still alive were force-marched westward. Cassie was liberated by the advancing British army and went back to work for the RAF as a civilian psychologist, advancing over the years of a distinguished career to one of the British armed services’ directors of profiling and training programs. Three lives, three fates. This war that almost ended civilization as we know it has scarcely any survivors left who can tell us what it meant to them personally, though fortunately, as in these, many lives have been recorded, even turned into legend. The epic of the Resistance (which took place throughout the occupied continent), like the heroic determination of the soldiers and airmen of the Great Escape, like the men from three continents who rescued Europe in Italy and Normandy and the east, is all but gone from living memory. Raymond Aubrac became a commissaire , prefect, of the Republic at the Liberation, but displayed an excess of zeal, even in those heady days, in going after Collaborators and seizing industrial properties in view of the nationalization program promised by the new government. He took up his career in civil engineering while staying active in politics, taking fellow-travelling positions which led to an intense friendship with Ho Chi Minh, who godfathered the Aubrac’s third child. He and Lucie likewise took an “anti-colonial” line on Algeria and stayed close to the Communist Party, without joining it, on the other big issues of the post-war decades. Ben Bella, too, opted for radical change, approving the murderous purges of Algerians who had served in the French army and putting in place socialistic policies during his brief presidency, including agricultural collectivization, state-managed industrial projects and turning Algiers into a welcome center for revolutionaries from everywhere. Houari Boumediene overthrew him in 1965 and established a dictatorship that lasted until his death in 1979; you will find many in Algeria who assert that the years under the austere and taciturn president, the country achieved more that it ever could have under the reserved but charismatic and perpetually busy Ben Bella. And of course you will find many others who will not mind asserting that Ben Bella and those who overthrew him would have spared their country much subsequent trouble had they opted for the freedom Ben Bella himself fought for at Monte Cassino. Alex Cassie did not become famous and prominent in public affairs; he did his job as he had done it during the war, in years of less drama of course: loyally and honestly. Ben Bella was released from the house arrest under which his erstwhile friend and comrade had kept him and spent a number of years in Europe, with a residence in Switzerland, like the other “historic FLN leader” whom he had defeated in the 1962-3 civil war, the Kabyle chief Hocine Ait Ahmed, who is still alive and well. But the other “historic leaders” are dead, killed in action against the French army or in purges at the hands of their own comrades or in exile by the long arm of the revolution. Was it the same revolution Raymond and Lucie Aubrac thought they were serving during the years of fellow-travelling and what the Europeans called ” tiers-mondisme ,” third-worldism? Before the war, many were disappointed in bourgeois democracy, viewing it as the cause of the death instinct of the West — or at least impotent to reverse it — that seemed, since August ’14, to be prevailing over a culture of life and progress. Even so clear headed a man as Eric Blair, pen name George Orwell, hesitated at first — as did many Americans — then found his inspiration in the plain courage of ordinary people and the green meadows of England that he knew would turn red with blood, including his own, before foreign boots trampled them. The same initial ambivalence touched many in France, even as the country was invaded, and could be at least in part explained by the collapse of will and utter confusion displayed by the government. The Communist Party, however, chose a deliberate policy of non-belligerence which translated into collaboration with the occupiers. This was due to the Soviet-Nazi pact, designed to enslave Poland while allowing both sides to prepare for what each knew would be an apocalypse in the eastern plains of Europe. But even after the Party entered the Resistance in the summer of ’41, following the German invasion of Russia, some ambiguity remained in many minds regarding the ultimate aims of the war, and betrayals, based on longer-term calculations, occurred. Some preferred to banish such thoughts, celebrating the common cause — Mon parti m’a rendu les couleurs de la France , sang the most lyrical of the Resistance poets, the Surrealist-turned-Communist Louis Aragon, “My party has clothed me in the colors of France.” The Aubracs’ network welcomed the Communist reinforcements because they shared vision of the kind of world that should emerge from the global conflict. This led to tensions with the Gaullists represented by men like Jean Moulin, as well as the networks of men of the right like Henri Frenay. Wickedly exploiting rumors, insinuations, false allegations and unproven accusations that had lingered for decades, Klaus Barbie, before he died in a French prison in 1990 — caught in South America and extradited, he was tried in a sensational trial during which his attorney defended him by arguing that he had done nothing the French army did not do a few years later, in the prisons and torture houses of Algiers and environs — claimed the tipster of Caluire was none other than Raymond Aubrac. This led to further proceedings that eventually cleared the legendary Résistant , but it left, as it had to, a bitter taste. It was no secret that there were deadly rivalries within the Resistance in France — as there were in Poland and Yugoslavia, as there would be in the anti-colonial war in Algeria, the revolutionary war in Indochina. Ben Bella, if you put it in a comparative frame, did pretty well. After the “Spring” of 1989, when single-party rule was abolished and freedom of the press permitted, he launched the MDA, Democratic Movement of Algeria, an Islamic party that proposed a moderate alternative to the Brothers in the Islamic Salvation Front. Yet his rants against Israel and the Jews (and the Kabyle Berbers) were as filled with hate as theirs and, anyway, he got nowhere. He was given a state funeral, however, by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had been a young comrade-in-arms but who ditched him to become Pres. Boumediene’s foreign minister. Alex Cassie’s war was the least complicated — there was no unfinished business afterward for him, except the continuing business of defending his island nation. Yet — of course — even Great Britain could not be unaffected and untroubled by the aftershocks and the sequels of the world wars, the European civil wars if you want to call them that, or the wars to save the liberties Europeans had strived for so long to secure. We need not, should not, get histrionic and over-excited about where we are now, in the unending work to preserve our freedom and our liberties. We should learn, remember, transmit what we know or think we know about what others before us tried to do, wanted to do, did.
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We Remember What They Did
America is in danger “of becoming something of a legal backwater,” a justice of the High Court of Australia, Michael Kirby, is quoted as telling the New York Times . His comment is in a scoop that ran under the headline “?’We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World.” The story follows up on an interview Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave to Al-Hayat TV in Egypt. In the interview she said that were she drafting a constitution in the year 2012, “I would not look to the United States Constitution.” Instead she commended to her viewers the constitution of South Africa, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of Canada. Justice Ginsburg’s remarks went viral on the web among those who thought they were inappropriate for a justice bound by oath—as every American official must be*—to support the Constitution. The New York Sun commented on them in an editorial, “Lost in Egypt,” suggesting she had missed an opportunity to take the discussion of law-giving all the way back to Sinai. But the New York Times’ dispatch opens up the question of how popular an example our Constitution is these days. The Times reporter, Adam Liptak, gained an advance look at a new study on precisely that topic. He quotes its authors, two law professors, as reporting that our Constitution “appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere.” Mr. Liptak, in my view, is onto an important story here. One of the key features of these newfangled constitutions with which everyone is so smitten is that they are much longer than America’s parchment. In Canada’s constitution, which our friendly neighbor got around to writing only in 1982, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, at more than 1,000 words, twice as long as our Bill of Rights, which has 482 words. The curious thing is that with all that verbiage, the Canadians failed to find space to provide for the right that one of our greatest constitutional commentators, St. George Tucker, called the “true palladium** of our liberty”—namely, the right to keep and bear arms. “Why, that’s impossible!” you might exclaim. “No constitution writer could forget such a right.” But feature this. The South African bill of rights is more than ten times the length of ours. And in that vast verbiage there’s not one syllable protecting the right to keep and bear arms. The document covers equality, dignity, life, security of person, slavery, privacy, religion, expression, picketing, association, politics, citizenship, movement, occupation, labor relations, the environment, property, housing, health care, education, language, culture, and arrest, among other rights. But not so much as a peep about the palladium of our liberty. Oh, and South Africa’s constitution states that the whole list of rights can be thrown into a cocked hat if there’s a state of emergency. But never mind, the European Convention on Human Rights appears to be even longer than South Africa’s—running to more than 5,000 words. Yet the Europeans couldn’t find room for the palladium of liberty, either. Mr. Liptak of the Times reports that only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions feature this one of the most basic rights. I cite this right only as an example of the problem with these hyper-long and detailed constitutions. When something is left out of a long list of rights, it tends to look less like an accident—given that they thought to list so much else. If the American constitution is a rich painting done in simple, elegant strokes, the new constitutions à la mode are something out of Breugel, crowded with so many little, crabbed figures one has to hunt for any particular one of them. Finding a right becomes a constitutional version of “Where’s Waldo?” Yet the great attraction to the left in these long constitutions is that they are built less around one of our Founders’ most famous modi operandi , the idea of negative rights or restrictions on the government. These new constitutions are riddled with positive rights, meaning things the government must provide. Our negative rights are worded like this: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” etc., etc. Positive rights are worded like this from the South African Constitution: “Everyone has the right to have access to a) health care services, including reproductive health care; b) sufficient food and water; and c) social security, including, if they are unable to support themselves and their dependants, appropriate social assistance. The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realization of each of these rights.” No wonder a member of President Obama’s brain trust, Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard, has called South Africa’s foundational law “the most admirable constitution in the world.” It’s just what the left is looking for these days, a system under which the government is not only permitted to do what the left wants but, at least in principle, required to do it. This is a feature of the so-called communitarian movement, in which the community outranks the individual. It is just breathtaking to see a paean to it coming from a justice of our own Supreme Court on the airwaves of another country. THIS IS NOT TO SUGGEST that Justice Ginsburg lacks for patriotism. I would not want to do that, even for a nanosecond. Some of the clips of her remarks that are rocketing around the web exclude a number of profound observations by her that are contained in the full interview. One is an essential point about constitutions generally, which is that, as she put it, “a constitution, as important as it is, will mean nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom. If the people don’t care, then the best constitution in the world won’t make any difference.” She also spoke about the Constitution’s preamble and the intention to form “a more perfect union.” She stressed the enduring nature of that quest. No one suggests that America’s Constitution could not be improved. The Bill of Rights, after all, was itself a series of amendments. All the more admirable our Constitution has become. Editorializing on Justice Ginsburg’s interview, the Sun said it has nothing against South Africa, Canada, Europe, and Australia. America may turn out to be a legal backwater, the Sun said in respect of Justice Kirby of Australia, “but if you want to take away our Constitution, you’ll have to pry it out of our cold, dead hands.”
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‘A Legal Backwater’
