NO CEASE-FIRE IN THE POLITICAL COLD WAR: "The prevailing liberal doctrine traces individual rights to membership in various groups--racial, ethnic, gender, class-based, etc.... Conservatives, by contrast ... trace individual rights to human nature... to the essence of an individual as a human being."(NATIONAL AFFAIRS)

• Author: Kesler, Charles R.
• Position: NATIONAL AFFAIRS

SIX YEARS AGO, I wrote a book about Barack Obama in which I predicted that modern American liberalism, under pressures both fiscal and philosophical, either would go out of business or be forced to radicalize. If it chose the latter, I predicted, it could radicalize along two lines: towards socialism or towards an increasingly post-modern form of leadership. Today, it is doing both. As we saw in Bernie Sanders' campaign, the youngest generation of liberals is embracing socialism openly--something that would have been unheard of during the Cold War. At the same time, identity politics is on the ascendant, with its quasi-Nietzschean faith in race, sex, and power as the keys to being and meaning.

In the #MeToo movement, for example--as we saw recently in Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation battle--the credo is, "Believe the woman." In other words, truth will emerge not from an adversarial process weighing evidence and testimony before the bar of reason, but from yielding to the will of the more politically correct. "Her truth" is stronger than any objective or disinterested truth.

In the Claremont Review of Books, we have described our current political scene as a cold civil war, which is better than a hot civil war, but it is not a good situation for a country to be in. Underlying our cold civil war is the fact that the U.S. increasingly is torn between two rival constitutions, two cultures, two ways of life.

Political scientists sometimes distinguish between normal politics and regime politics. Normal politics takes place within a political and constitutional order and concerns means, not ends. In other words, the ends or principles are agreed upon; debate simply is over means. By contrast, regime politics is about who rules and for what ends or principles. It questions the nature of the political system itself. Who has rights? Who gets to vote? What do we honor or revere together as a people? I fear the U.S. may be leaving the world of normal politics and entering the dangerous world of regime politics--a politics in which our political loyalties diverge more and more, as they did in the 1850s, between two contrary visions of the country.

One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. It has been transmitted to us with significant Amendments--some improvements and some not--but it is recognizable still as the original Constitution. To simplify matters we may call this "the conservative Constitution"--with the caveat that conservatives never have agreed perfectly on its meaning and that many nonconservatives remain loyal to it.

The other vision is based on what Progressives and liberals, for 100 years now, have called "the living Constitution." This term implies that the original Constitution is dead--or at least on life support--and that, in order to remain relevant to our national life, the original Constitution must be infused with new meaning and new ends and therefore with new duties, rights, and powers. To cite an important example, new administrative agencies must be created to circumvent the...