American Covenant

Solid book. Learned a lot. Had to return it to the library before finishing… Will probably end up buying.

• America should make you hopeful
• Optimism and pessimism are both dangerous vices because they are both invitations to passivity. Hope is a virtue. It tells us that things could go well and invites us to take action that might help make that happen and might make us worthy of it happening.
• Our system forces us constantly to deal with people who differ from us.
• The Constitution aims to create common ground in our society.
• The Constitution is about how we act together when we don not think alike.
• We can think of the US Constitution as comprising a five-part framework: a legal framework, a policy-making framework, an institutional framework, a political framework and a union and unity framework.
• It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Congress is expected to frame for the future, the president is expected to act in the present, and the courts are expected to assess the past.
• The tension between the imperative to empower majorities and the imperative to protect minorities (ie: between the democratic imperative and the liberal imperative) adn the attempt to combine the two is responsible for a great deal of the Constitutions structure and character.
• The breakdown of political culture in our day is not a function of our having forgotten how to agree with one another but of our forgotten how to disagree constructively. And this is what our constitution can better enable us to do.
• The structure of the Electoral college (in which winning requires an absolute majority of electors, creating a powerful incentive to limit the number of serious candidates) has menat that our politics has almost always involved just two major parties. That means that yeah party is always working to build a broad coalition rather than to represent a narrow constituency and that the two parties compete for a band of persuadable voters who ultimately determine the outcomes of close elections.
• A direct popular vote for chief executive would ecourage each of the two major parties to focus on getting out its most devoted voters in the least politticaly competitive parts of the country, the Electoral College means there is little advantage to winning by an even wider margin in the safest states and that candidates, instead have to focus on voters in the most competitive states, which tend to fall near the ideological middle.
• Crucially, even majorities, unless they are unusually broad, need to negotiate with minorities before they can act. This is a frequent source of frustration and of accusations that our system is insufficiently democratic. But the constitution recognizes that majority rule can sometimes be a principle of oppression, not just of legitimacy. Rather than simple majority rule, it seeks something closer to consensus rule through a variety of counter-majoritarian requirements and mechanisms.
• Consensus government is a way to make majority rule a force for unity rather than division, and frustration is a means of forcing stubborn partisans to negotiate, rather than letting them seek to dominate.
• Simple majoritarianism is of no use when there arent simple majorities. Only negotiated settlement could garner durable support even as partisan control of the institutions changes hands
• The constitution is a barbell solution "Yes, both" Antifragile
• Different election systems dont just measure the same majorities and minorities in two different ways that are somehow more or less democratic or representative. Rather they bring into being two differnt sets of majorities and minorities, with two different sets of aims in mind.
• Issue referenda are at odds with the logic of our system and undermine its capacity to elevate public opinion and permote greater unity.
• Represtitive government allows for a distinction between momentary pupular impulses and durable public opinion; institutions are built to require a popular view to be firmly held by a significant majority for an extended period before it can become a root of public action.

(US Constitution is a Low pass filter) (This is a wise strategy for individual character building as well.)

• A republican ethic is an ethic of civic engagement and obligation. A republic is a regime in which politiics is the domain of the public and not the private preserve of a monarch.