One of the key insights of conservatism is that habit matters. Call it culture or tradition, or call it manners as National Review does, the corpus of informal rules, norms, and expectations that quietly governs 90 percent of life in a free society is, in most situations and conditions, much more extensive in its influence than the formal rules and procedures that govern the other 10 percent of life.
This is why we cannot simply bomb the backward corners of this unhappy world with copies of the Constitution and expect them to build liberal republics with no further input. In the long term, the law will not save you.
In the short term, it may.
In spite of Donald Trump’s mad insistence that he somehow won the presidential election he lost, there never has been any serious prospect of his remaining in office, even if the idea of his forcibly extending his presidency excites the fever swamps of the Democratic Left and the Trumpian Right. (What you hear on talk radio and read on social media is not political discourse; it is a role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons for the soul-sick people who foam at cable-news personalities — call it Kornackis & Bonginos.) The usual cretins are making a black-list and checking it twice, quantifying who’s naughty and nice with an eye toward vengeance: It took Mitch McConnell six weeks to congratulate Joe Biden on his election! Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
And it did take Senator McConnell six weeks after Election Night to congratulate Biden. He did so immediately after the real election, which happened in the Electoral College on Monday. One of the helpful features of the Electoral College is that it offers few footholds for motivated ambiguity. Of course, McConnell should have congratulated Biden earlier, rather than going along, even passively, with the charade of a double-secret Trump victory. But McConnell, like other relatively responsible Republicans, eventually was pushed to act by the relentless march of procedure.
. . .
Three big cheers for procedural regularity.
We complain about it, but we should be gladdened every time a criminal gets off “on a technicality.” Our freedom resides in those technicalities. From the rules of trial procedure to the building code, stable and generally agreed-upon sets of rules — necessarily imperfect rules — are the foundation for the credibility and legitimacy of our institutions.
But it is difficult to imagine that a society as intellectually democratic and committed to informality as our own will long be stabilized by formalities. It only takes a little metastasis for the rot in the culture to seriously muck up the machinery of formal power, and we have seen it happen from time to time in the politicization of agencies such as the IRS and the NLRB, and, more to the point here, in Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s foolish and morally corrupt effort to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf.
In the end, it will be impossible to maintain a rules-based civil order if Americans do not believe the rules to be legitimate or feel bound by them. We are in need of refreshing the habits of citizenship, without which we will in the end cease being citizens and become subjects.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
