12/18/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal starts off with Jack Miller Center President Hans Zeiger’s commemoration of Bill of Rights Day at RealClearPolicy. Zeiger explains that Bill of Rights Day celebrates the ratification of the first ten amendments to the Constitution on December 15, 1791. The Bill of Rights, also sometimes called the “tail” of the Constitution,” lists crucial rights such as the freedoms of speech and of assembly that today we can too easily take for granted. Importantly, Zeiger also points out that the Bill of Rights neither grants rights nor is the exclusive protector of rights in the Constitution. Instead, it is but an extra layer of protection, adding to the safeguards in the Constitution’s Preamble and the institutional structures the Constitution set in place, which together act as “guard[s] against tyranny.”

At Ford Forum, Joseph Knippenberg considers the important question of what kind of elites should govern the country. Reflecting on the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill and their different approaches to this question, Knippenberg asks if we should we forge a generous connection with ordinary citizens or look “down on them as subjects and clients to be managed for their own good.” He finds in Tocqueville an “elite that shares with everyone a common human longing and that recognizes that bolstering our common humanity is a messy irregular business.” But in Mill's teachings, Knippenberg discovers an “elite that looks forward to the governance of technocratic experts” who “have no patience for the irregular desires and infinite longings of often 'deplorable' (as was once said) ordinary people.” This important question that Tocqueville and Mill dealt with is central to the perpetuation of our political institutions. As Knippenberg concludes, “‘Our democracy’ is indeed at stake.”