The Constitution and the Tasks Ahead

Extract

A resurgent conservatism rules the day in the United States not only in public affairs but also in political speculation. Frightened by the uneasy ghost of the barbarism that was embodied in German Nazism and Italian Fascism and by the spread of Russian-spawned totalitarianism, political speculation in this and other democratic countries now shrinks from the hazard inherent in a rationalistic effort to remold the world of public affairs. Inquiry turns to the adoration of our inheritance, to the discovery of neglected or undervalued virtues in the institutions as molded by our forebears, and to the wise prevision which they, in simpler crisis times, expressed in their statesmanship.

My own fundamental orientation toward government developed in the “progressive” decade before mankind's applecart was sharply tilted, if not completely upset, by the First World War. It rested upon an act of preference for a democratic, freely thinking, and freely associating society. It therefore shared something of the “divine discontent” felt by all political innovators, to whom the wisdom of the ancestors always has seemed incomplete and often inadequate to meet the demands of a constantly changing society.