James Poulos

Conor Friedersdorf says Tea Partiers aren’t real constitutionalists. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the litmus. At Ricochet I submit that the right actually has two types of not-so-fake constitutionalists:

[Both] find their true political foundations outside the Document itself. Both understand the Constitution to be, at bottom, a means — to the end of Liberty for one, to the end of the Union for the other. Once we admit this, constitutionalism can actually be understood as it needs to be — as an attitude of prudential cooperation between the party of Union and the party of Liberty.

In short: we can have a knock-down, pie-throwing, meaningful argument over civil liberties policy without playing the truuuuue card.

As Camelot fades into the irretrievable past, a torch passes. My Daily Caller column for the week:

Beset by enemies, put upon by the world, victim of deliriously unreasonable expectations proudly and maximally leveraged, Barack Obama is a tragedy for the left because he proves that the contradictions of progressive politics cannot be resolved even under the most historically favorable conditions. And he is a hero because he proves that, in our time, the closest the left can come to greatness is to try, try again.

Inspired by Yuval Levin‘s National Review cover story on constitutional conservatism, I’m at Ricochet offering a somewhat sad, very bird’s-eye story about how left-liberalism is losing its authority.

If the scope and tempo of conservative liberalism [...] is founded on a certain kind of people — a people with a certain kind of foundation of their own — then the practice of left-liberalism should be distinguished for its ability to flourish whether or not a people like ours even possesses the left-liberal foundation created to oppose and replace the right-liberal one.

Don’t think this is necessarily great news for the right.