CONSTITUTION DAY.

Joel Kotkin offers what might be a back-handed compliment.  "[H]ow does an America led by mediocrities succeed? The secret sauce lies in two great assets – America’s geography and its constitution."

Read on, though, and understand his appreciation.

America’s greatest asset may lie in its centuries-old constitutional order. This is very different to the much ballyhooed, bureaucratic ‘rules-based’ system so attractive to Eurocrats and their American admirers. In Europe, decisions are based on the political fashions of the moment. Only a bureaucracy in thrall to green ideology, for instance, could have ignored all the warning signs of the current energy crisis and placed ever more bets on unreliable wind and solar in the name of stopping climate change – even while China, by far the world’s biggest emitter of CO2, is building more coal plants to power its homes and industries. Today, coal is now being consumed more than at any time in history.

Although it looks less ‘professional’ than the Brussels bureaucracy, the US’s constitutionally directed democratic governance has survived other chaotic periods like this one. As bad as our leaders may be, they are fortunately not omnipotent. In contrast, while unencumbered leaders can at times make enormous strides in catching up with more advanced countries, they almost always fail in the long run – bad news for Xi and Putin.

These lessons have still not been learned in academia and the media, which continue the old Western intellectual habit, visible in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, of eulogising foreign despotisms.

Those Men of System always envision themselves as being in charge, until they hear "Hands behind your backs there!"

Law and Liberty's D. L. Schaefer also appreciates the value of an institutional arrangement surviving.

How well the Founders succeeded in that regard was illustrated by the fact that it has endured for well over two centuries, while the vast majority of the world’s written constitutions date no earlier than the mid-twentieth century. But remarkably, [Boalt dean Erwin] Chemerinsky is more impressed by the claim of a “global think thank,” the V-Dem Institute, run by a Swedish political science professor that “democracy is eroding faster in the United States than in other major Western democracies,” to the point where it “is more on a par with Brazil, Bangladesh, Turkey, and India.”

A Berkeley Law dean, though, has to fancy himself a Man of System.

But to cite these facts is to miss Chemerinsky’s true grievance. He implicitly defines democracy as simple majoritarianism. Therefore, he deems practically all the non-majoritarian features of the Constitution, from equal representation of the states in the Senate to lifetime tenure of Supreme Court justices, anti-democratic and therefore unjust. Ultimately, he rejects the Constitution because it hinders his progressive, egalitarian vision for society.

Those ancient "anti-democratic" constraints might serve as if a Chesterton fence.  Jordan McGillis continues.

Like the infield-fly rule, the legislative filibuster was not handed down from on high, but emerged as a response to conditions on the ground—origins conservatives ought to hail. Hubris may tempt us to wipe away seemingly vestigial appendages, but we do so at our peril. The wisdom of the infield-fly rule and the filibuster is one and the same: rapidly changing the status quo upsets the delicate balance of our shared game. Conditions on the ground can change, but a century or more of history should not be discarded from the diamond or the Senate chamber without the utmost caution.

Or, as Dean Chemerinsky wishes for, a convention of the states.

Chemerinsky’s speculations about calling a new constitutional convention as an alternative to secession have no more seriousness to them. In response to fears that a new plan of government would be worse than the one it replaces, his only answer is that “the time will come when Americans will realize that the Constitution itself is endangering democracy and they will start thinking of replacing it,” knowing that “no constitution lasts forever.” Other great liberals have had far more reverence for the American Constitution than Chemerinsky. In 1878, for example, the British statesman William Gladstone called it “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” It is regrettable that the leader of one of our country’s most prominent law schools should fall so short of Gladstone’s insight as to imagine that a random group of some 55 individuals, either popularly elected or chosen by the president and congressional leaders (as Chemerinsky proposes) from among America’s current crop of politicians, academics, or bureaucrats could produce a plan of government better suited to our needs than the brilliant, highly educated, and eminently public-spirited assemblage that met in Philadelphia in 1787, just because they’re more up to date on current issues such as climate change and gun control. (At this rate, we might need a new constitution every other year.)

Well, yeah, and the only thing more chaotic than our current politics would be the chaos of an Article V convention.  "Perhaps, gridlock, or the difficulty true believers have in compromising, will more effectively preserve the existing Constitution than the political class or the courts can."  Here's another D. L. Schaefer column, with more.

[F]ormer Democratic senator Russ Feingold, now president of the American Constitution Society, described by the Times as a “liberal judicial group,” warns in a new book The Constitution in Jeopardy, co-authored with constitutional scholar Peter Prindville, that there is no way to limit a constitutional convention to a defined agenda, noting the danger of a “runaway” proceeding with delegates seeking to limit federal power over issues like the environment, education, and health care.

Regardless of how far one agrees with Feingold and Prindville’s particular policy concerns, they are right to warn of the risks of a runaway convention – even one that might alter fundamental aspects of our Constitutional structure, including the separation of powers, Presidential authority, the size, powers, and tenure of the Supreme Court, and so on. (For an illustration of the sort of sweeping scope that might be feared, consider the recently proposed new Chilean constitution, fortunately rejected by voters in a referendum, that would have eliminated the country’s senate; redefined the country as a “plurinational” state, potentially enabling 11 indigenous groups to have their own governing structures and court systems; and guaranteed over 100 “rights,” such as housing, education, internet access, and free legal advice, along with other guarantees unlikely to be affordable in practice.)

In 1787, when some critics of the American Constitution who objected to such alleged flaws as the lack of a bill of rights called for a new convention, the Federalists warned that such a convention, being considered in a time of political passions much more fervent and divisive than those that marked American society at the time of the actual convention (which met in utter secrecy), would be unlikely to produce a document superior to the one devised in Philadelphia, but would generate a far less satisfactory system.

That's the long form of the argument I shied away from raising at the Convention of the States booths at county fairs.

Deconstruct institutions of long standing at your peril.