What We Can Learn from Chile

[Valin]

Power Line

Steven Hayward

Sept. 5 2022

There’s an old joke that French libraries filed their nation’s constitutions under “Periodicals.” I also recall Walter Berns once telling me the story of a visit he took to South America—it was either Argentina or Chile, I don’t recall which country he specified—where one of his academic hosts dismissed the American Constitution with the comment, “You’ve only had one constitution, while we’ve had lots of them.”

This all came back to mind with regard to the referendum this weekend for a proposed new constitution for Chile, the product of its recently installed socialist government that appears to be losing popularity at a rapid rate.

I didn’t follow the story closely, but understood that the new proposed constitution was nearly 200 pages long, with nearly 400 articles, and about 100 new “rights,” which included the usual lefty goo-goo “rights” to a clean environment, “gender equity,” and so forth. This is the kind “prolix” constitution, typical of recent decades, that John Marshall warned would never be understood by a democratic people.

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So the Chilean people rejected it in the referendum by a 60-40 margin. Maybe they looked and decided they didn’t want to become Venezuela after all:

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P.S. The New York Times has a case of the sads over the outcome: