Whenever I look out upon the violence the left wishes to do to the Constitution (abolish the Senate, abolish the electoral college, etc) because it is an obstacle to their will to power, I am drawn back to the opening of Charles Howard McIlwain’s neglected classic, Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern, where he writes:
A constitutional government will always be a weak government when compared with an arbitrary one. There will be many desirable things, as well as undesirable, which are easy for a despotism but impossible elsewhere. Constitutionalism suffers from the defects inherent in its own merits. Because it cannot do some evil it is prevented from doing some good. Shall we, then, forego the good to prevent the evil, or shall we submit to the evil to secure the good? This is the fundamental practical question of all constitutionalism.
It is the foremost issue of the present political world; and it is amazing, and to many of us very alarming, to consider what insufferable barbarities nation after nation today is showing a willingness to submit, for the recompense it is getting or hopes to get from an arbitrary government.
McIlwain, a professor at Harvard Law, wrote this around 1940, which supplies the context for the last paragraph. They don’t make Harvard Law professors like they used to.
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