On Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Movement Conservatives

Just for the record, I should add that although I compare people who say that we must stick to the vision of the Founding Fathers, even if they are proven indisputably wrong about something, to the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks, I am not saying they are morally comparable. For one thing, constitutional fundamentalists operate under democratic constraints that will prevent them from ever doing what the Jacobins or Bolsheviks did.

But even apart from democratic constraints, they have an important ideological difference from the radical left. What is wrong with the radical left was beautifully summed up in a sentence from Lenin for Beginners, written in all seriousness, “They forget it’s the world we want to change, not Marx.” Or, as Douglas Adams said, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide is not always right but it is always definitive. In case of discrepancy, it is reality that has it wrong.” In other words, the works of Marx are infallible holy writ that must never be modified, no matter how badly they work out in practice. The Communist word for heretic was “revisionist,” meaning someone with the audacity to revise Marx. The Jacobins (so far as I know) did not have quite so definitive a holy scripture as the Communists, but they had definite theories about how society worked and, like the Bolsheviks, if reality did not match the theory, they were prepared to beat on it as hard as they had to in order to force it.*

Our constitutional fundamentalists are not like that. They believe that the Founding Fathers developed a perfect society and a vision that we must strictly follow, unless otherwise authorized by constitutional amendment. That leaves them one out. If reality doesn’t conform to the Founding Fathers’ vision, the less radical among them would allow the theory to be changed by the difficult and cumbersome process of a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and three-quarters of all states. At least some of them do. The more fundamentalist among them regard all amendments from the Thirteenth onward as illegitimate (no, seriously!) and want a return to an antebellum order.

But more significantly, if reality does not match the theory, although they will not change the theory, neither do they propose to coerce reality. Their proposal, instead, is simply to ignore reality and pretend that it conforms to the theory. Ignoring reality is a lousy way to run a government or a society, but at least it beats the radical leftist approach of hammering on it until it meets the theory.

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*I should add here that, as a liberal, I am not opposed to changing the world, as many conservatives (pre-Enlightenment or modern) seem to be. Nor am I opposed to having a theory or ideology to give you a model of what you want to achieve. But the model must be grounded in reality, take feedback from reality, and be subject to change if reality fails to cooperate.