Opus 2018-215: Election 2018: An Insight from Sowell

One of the books on my “everyone should read” list is Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell.  He discusses the two dominate philosophies trying to guide culture in the West.  He labels them the constrained and the unconstrained visions.  The Constitution and the American Revolution are products of the constrained vision.  It maintains that man is not to be trusted and thus we have the checks and balances in our system of government.  The French Revolution was an example of the unconstrained vision.  Because they had a more humanistic view of the nature of man they did not think something like the Reign of Terror or the emergence of a Napoleon to be possible.  It is a bit simplistic but you might call the current stand of the liberals in favor of a living Constitution are unconstrained.  Those who believe in the original intent of the Constitution are constrained. 

Judicial activism as we observe it today is part of the unconstrained vision.  We have Ruth Bader Ginsberg openly calling on the precedents of  international laws to settle issues in the Untied States Supreme Court.  You have a long history of new rights carved out of the imaginations of the liberal justices.  Sowell describes it thus,

“Yet those who argue for deliberate law making through judicial activism do so not on the basis of having a democratic majority, even in a given generation, but rather on having an intellectually and morally superior process for decision making.” p. 54

We need to understand that there are elites in the world who think they know what is best for us and want to limit our options.  They do this in a genuine belief in their own wisdom and our lack of same.  This is the big issue at stake in the current confirmation battle over Bret Kavanaugh.  The progressives are concerned that he will interpret the Constitution as it is written instead of the way that the liberals want us to understand it.  The unconstrained vision believes that some people are so pure and superior that they will make the right choices.

The midterm elections are coming.  Ponder what kind of Supreme Court you want and vote accordingly.

Sowell, Thomas, A Conflict of Visions, New York:  Basic Books, 2007.

homo unius libri