Thread by @DouthatNYT

Going to use this harsh @RAVerBruggen review of the new Caldwell book as a hook for a point that I couldn't fit into my own column:
nationalreview.com/2020/02/book-r…

@RAVerBruggen VerBruggen offers some reasons to be skeptical of Caldwell's "two competing constitutions" framework. I think you can accept the framework without accepting Caldwell's grimmer conclusions.

@RAVerBruggen The reality is that America had de facto + de jure constitutions before the 60s. Race is an obvious example; the South was not actually governed by the 15th Amendment. The progressives layered a de facto administrative constitution atop the old one well before the Great Society.

@RAVerBruggen And likewise religion. Is the "new constitution" with its assertion of group rights in tension with religious liberties? Yes, but so was the old de facto constitution of soft Protestant establishment, which coexisted with the First Amendment until the school prayer decisions.

@RAVerBruggen Indeed (to steal a @michaelbd point) you can plausibly see the "new constitution" as an *extension* of the old Protestant establishment, officially secularized but still trying to make Catholics and Baptists conform to Episcopalianism.

@RAVerBruggen @michaelbd Which is to say that trying to balance constitutions old and new, cultural and legal, de facto and de jure, is not a new problem in American, but one that dates to the beginning of the republic, and will continue to its end.

@RAVerBruggen @michaelbd We don't have successful balancers right now, but I think you can see what they would look like -- a conservatism friendlier to minorities, a liberalism friendlier to the religious. And maybe at some point we'll get them, and a certain de-polarization will be achieved.

@RAVerBruggen @michaelbd Or maybe not. But at the very least I agree with Richard Aldous's review, that Caldwell's caustic dismissal of Reagan's temporarily-successful balancing act is a choice for unwarranted despair.
wsj.com/articles/the-a…