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Vermeule’s Gleeful Illiberal Legalism
Few have been brave enough to flesh out what the Ahmarist, or “anti-Frenchist,” vision of the common good should be. Some have said articulating specifics is beside the point, that Ahmarists’ refreshing achievement is unapologetically asserting a common good exists, even if they decline to say what, exactly, it is. And then, there are guys like Adrian Vermeule, writing in The Atlantic, brave enough, at least, to flesh out a vision of sorts. Vermeule calls it “common-good constitutionalism”, which he describes as “an illiberal legalism that is not ‘conservative’ at all, insofar as standard conservatism is content to play defensively within the procedural rules of the liberal order.” When Vermeule writes,
[U]nlike legal liberalism, common-good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, [emphasis added] a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits. Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them—perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires…
it’s hard not to think of abusive priests who talk their victims – and perhaps even themselves – into believing victims should thank their abusers for lessons in authentic desire.
We should suffer from a horror of political domination. A hierarchy that doesn’t is ripe for abuse. No mere mortals are cut out to be perfect parents, even to flesh of their flesh, much less to subjects mostly strangers to them.
***
Mothers aren’t supposed to mention this, and conservatives, who regularly defend the good of punishment, aren’t supposed to admit this, but not all our instincts to punish children are wholesome ones.
Ideally, punishment is for discipline, and only for discipline. Discipline does not regard the punished as objects, but uses punishment to goad immature subjects into habits of maturity. When we punch a hole in a wall, or snap a vacuum cleaner wand clean in half (and I’ve done both since becoming a mom), the objects we break learn nothing. They merely serve as outlets for our frustration. Our children are people, not outlets. And yet… I’ve lost count of the times my frustration, not my childrens’ need for discipline, has sparked my instinct for punishment. I strive to control this spark, of course – not to avoid disciplining my children, but to ensure I give them discipline and not abuse. Still, I never would have guessed, before becoming a parent, how hard controlling it would be.
An all-good, all-loving God may wield parental authority that’s wholly benign, but parental authority in the hands of fallible mortals is not. It has a dark side, a side not to be trusted around too much power.
***
Susannah Black at Mere Orthodoxy defends Vermeule by qualifying,
[O]f course a false “common good” may be used as a rhetorical tool to support the abuse of individuals, their coercion for the good of some other person or group. But the true common good simply never can.
To which we may as well add that no true Scotsman ever does whatever it is that no true Scotsmen do.
Black elaborates,
There is in reality no competition between individual good and the good of the community: we are members of each other in reality… seeking to care for each person while, and by, caring for the community… This cuts, entirely, both ways: it is not good for a community if any member of it should be abused, unjustly ruled, exploited.
I believe in the Christian apocalyptic vision. I await a time-out-of-time when Christ will rule, and, with all subject to Him, be All in All. Contrary to COVID-19 headlines, though, the apocalypse is not now. Now we see in a mirror dimly. We do not see face to face. We do not see the true common good – and it’s arrogance to think we can.
We’re not wholly blind to true common good, of course. Still, we lack enough vision to be entrusted with great power over our fellow mortals. In Christ, who personifies reality, we are all members of each other and there is no competition between individual and community good. In worship, we come together for a foretaste of this reconciliation, as members of each other, without conflict. But political power isn’t worship, regimes aren’t the Messiah, and it’s reasonable to fear rulers – or would-be kingmakers – who seem to presume otherwise.
***
Matt McManus divides libertarians into two types, egalitarian and hierarchical. That is, McManus observes some people are libertarian because they believe people aren’t morally unequal enough to justify one dominating another, while others are libertarian because they believe people are morally unequal, and freedom (particularly economic freedom) gives the superior liberty to dominate. The latter respect autonomy so that the autonomy of the strong may flourish, untrammeled. The former respect autonomy even – perhaps especially – in the weak. The latter needn’t have a horror of domination. The former absolutely must. I am among the former, what Black would apparently call a “right liberal”.
Black contends that liberals, on the right or left, have “give[n] up on any non-liberal vision of government, any good communitarianism.” In this formulation, Black equates communitarianism with illiberalism, which puzzles me, since Black herself asserts, “There is in reality no competition between individual good and the good of the community.” If there is, in reality, no competition, then why would it be necessary to embrace illiberalism to achieve communitarianism? Why should it be impossible to respect both others’ individual autonomy and the bonds they share with their community? (Is it even possible to respect another’s autonomy if you have no respect for the bonds he shares with his community? Those bonds, after all, are his. They are not yours to dominate.)
That said, no inherent competition between individual and community good is necessary for fallible humans to treat them as rival goods. It’s obviously quite tempting for “let’s not scandalize the community” to become the excuse we use to ignore wrongs done to individuals within it. These wrongs may ultimately hurt the community, too, but there is a great deal of ruin in a community. Communities can spend a long time rotting from the inside out as abuse goes ignored in order to keep up appearances.
For this reason, Vermeule’s insouciant assertions that “strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate” and a common-good constitutionalism should not
minimize the abuse of power (an incoherent goal in any event), but instead to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well
are horrifying, not because we must judge the goodness of government solely by whether it minimizes abuse of its powers, but because they give rhetorical cover to strongmen who have no qualms about abusing power for the sake of a so-called “common good”.
Black, who intends to defend Vermeule, at least partially, against his critics by pleading,
One can disagree with Vermeule on other bases [than his favoring strong government]. Feel free to do so: on the basis of the belief there should be no coercion in religion, for example, as a substantive principle.
only adds to the horror, since such a plea admits Vermeule is perfectly fine with coercion which successfully masquerades as the one true faith.
***
Vermeule’s framing of common-good constitutionalism is not repugnant because it touts, in Black’s words, “The good of energy in the executive, of a wise ruler, and of well-exercised authority,” but because it delights in dismissing concerns that abuse of power is a problem, when all of human experience, from the great arcs of history, the meta-narrative of Christian salvation, down to the pettiest instincts flaring in our own hearts, tells us that it is.
I admire and respect a great many souls who oppose libertarianism or “right liberalism” in various ways. Many of them are fellow Christians, whose opposition comes from their Christian convictions. Some fear the social-justice left most of all. Some fear that economic-liberty advocacy is deluded to believe it advocates any sort of liberty at all, rather than just the tyranny of Mammon. What all these souls have in common, though, is genuine horror at abuse of power. I may worry, for example, that a guy like Rod Dreher is too naive about authoritarian impulses on the illiberal right, but I have no doubt Dreher is a soul viscerally horrified by abuse of power – and that matters. Vermeule? Not so much. For all I know, Vermeule may not delight in abuses of power himself, but he won’t go out of his way to remind the powerful that they shouldn’t.
Published in General
Maybe the term that needs to be defined here is “say.” Vermeule did not use my exact words. You got me there. I give his words far more respect than you in that I’m willing to apply his general principles to specific circumstances rather than reading into them a liberal concern for unrestrained power that Vermuele clearly detests.
No, you’re just making things up about me too now. Read my comments in thread. I don’t have an affinity, nor do I think him a fascist. Weird, I know. Weirder still, my interpretations to the extent I’ve done so have relied on actual quotes.
I hereby give up on you Dennis. Even if there are comments I haven’t read yet, I’m out. Stay safe and go with God.
That went south fast.
I’m still sincerely interested in exploring the fascism angle. If Vermeule is a fascist and I missed it then I’d like to figure out how I missed it.
Ed, I think you often make rational and sensible arguments, and then sometimes you go off in a direction that I think is just confused. Okay, so let’s summarize. You object to the word “fascist” because there are items in the definition of “fascism” that Vermeule does not specifically call for in his piece, although I find it very easy to connect the dots from what he does specifically and expressly say to those other fascist consequences. But you refuse to do that. Okay. And, if it makes you happy, I will drop the term “fascist” and use the terms “tyrant” or “dictator.” Rhetorical point to you, if it makes you happy.
Then you claim that Vermeule is only giving some general approach to how the judiciary should apply the Constitution, and one cannot ascribe specific meaning to this approach because Vermeule doesn’t expressly say what he means. If you actually believe that Vermeule’s article doesn’t really mean anything that’s fine with me, but it leaves me wondering why you are so vigorously defending a position that is, by your own account, meaningless.
And you demand specific quotes, without which you apparently deem any conclusions about Vermeule’s position illegitimate. So let’s take a look at a specific quote, taken from the OP:
A couple of noteworthy items in this quote. First, the players are the “ruler” and his “subjects.” Not “leader” and “citizens.” Not “Executive/Legislature/Judiciary” and the “voters.” Do you recognize that Vermeule is using the language of monarchy here, rather than the language of democracy? Do you see any way that this approach can be squared with our existing structure of government?
Second, Vermeule sees no problem with the Ruler acting in a manner that the subjects “experience” as being coercive. In fact, he says that’s a good thing, because over time it will “encourage subjects to form more authentic desires.” The poor stupid “subjects” are suffering from what the Marxists called “false consciousness.” The subjects have “inauthentic” desires. They need to be re-educated. Can you square this conception of government with free and democratic elections? How can people suffering from “inauthentic desires” be allowed to vote? I know you will say that Vermeule doesn’t actually say that he wants re-education camps for those foolish subjects who need to be “encouraged” to form more “authentic desires,” but aren’t you aware that throughout history such camps are the next step in stamping out false consciousness? That, or just send out the Secret Police to make all the foolish subjects who stubbornly refuse to be re-educated disappear in the middle of the night.
But that’s okay because the “subjects will come to thank the ruler.” Yep. Long live Big Brother.
Oh ffs! I give up. Vermeule doesn’t call for any of the items in the definition of fascism. None. Nor is he calling for a dictator. Or a tyrant.
But you and Dennis are right. It’s 100% clear that Vermeule is a fascist, and it’s just pedantry and sophistry on my part to claim otherwise. Yup.
Larry, I didn’t say any of that.
As for ascribing specific meaning, ok I guess, but making crazy inferences is not that. I believe government is a good thing. Wait now, I didn’t specifically say that I don’t believe that fascist government to be good, so I guess it’s fair game for you to to ascribe that to me anyway. Just connecting the dots and all that.
Not quite, Larry. I ask (not demand) for quotes which support your conclusions about what Vermeule is calling for. Otherwise it’s all in your head. I can’t believe I have to defend citing quotes from a person in order to support characterizations about that person – especially a characterization like calling someone a fascist.
Ah! Finally an example we can, you know, actually discuss.
Point to you Larry. Ruler and subject are indeed the language of monarchy. Alert the Brits: they’re living under fascism.
Actually, I do see how this language can square with democracy. Also, although he uses this language in this particular passage, he doesn’t use it throughout. It’s unclear at best, but feel free to connect all the dots you want.
I think this is a big difference between conservatives and libertarians. Yet, that doesn’t make conservatives fascists.
There is a lot I find to be coercive that is nonetheless legitimate. Tax on disposable plastic bags; banning plastic straws; regulating Big Gulps; estate tax.
As for law being a teacher: yeah I already covered that earlier. I get it that libertarians only view it as a one way street. I don’t view it that way. It’s a big issue all on its own that Ricochet has spent many pixels on. We won’t solve it here. Can you acknowledge that people who think law can be a teacher are not inherently fascists (or dictators or tyrants)? Can you acknowledge that even the founders did not take an expansive view as they seemed okeedokee with things like obscenity laws and even state religions? Or were they fascists too?
I offered to abandon the word fascism, but apparently that wasn’t good enough. You are going to keep harping on it. Well, if you gotta then you gotta. As for your counter-argument, I have to respectfully call it kind of silly. The Brits have a symbolic monarchy, but that is not the source of governmental power in the UK. The Brits also have a democratically elected Parliament. A symbolic monarch, or even an elected head of state (distinct from the head of government), is not what Vermeule wants. It’s not how I read him anyway. When he talks about a “ruler” who imposes legal strictures on his “subjects,” I don’t think he’s talking about Queen Elizabeth. If you go back far enough in English history (pre-Magna Carta), you will find the kind of absolute monarch that seems (to me) to be the kind of “ruler” Vermeule desires.
Now I suppose you can say, “But Vermeule didn’t expressly say that. You’re just drawing that conclusion.” It’s just – how did you put it? – “all in your head.” You can believe that if you want. But I think it’s right there on the page in plain English. Okay, maybe I’m crazy. Maybe you’re right that Vermeule doesn’t actually mean anything, and there are no conclusions to be drawn from what he writes. But if that’s the case, isn’t this whole discussion kind of silly?
In my humble opinion the examples you cite are pretty good examples of laws that are not legitimate, but you are correct that legitimacy is the question here. How do we distinguish between laws that are legitimate and laws that are not? That’s the issue. Our current Constitution enumerates certain rights on which government cannot infringe. If you believe the Ninth Amendment, it was also intended to protect certain unenumerated rights, but the courts don’t seem to believe in the Ninth Amendment, so we’ll leave that aside. My point (and the point of several other people who have commented in this thread) is that Vermeule doesn’t seem to recognize (either expressly or by implication) that there are any constraints on what a government can do legitimately, so long as the ruler is “ruling well.”
Now you can say, “Vermeule doesn’t have to. The constraints might be there and he’s just not telling us. You can’t prove by his silence that he doesn’t recognize any constraints on legitimate government.” Maybe not. But that is, after all, the whole point of the subject under discussion. If you are going to tell me that Vermeule has nothing to say about the central question raised by the subject he is writing about, then my conclusion is that Vermeule is just an idiot and, again, why are we talking about this?
I, on the other hand, think that Vermeule is saying something, and I think I understand it. Vermeule may be too much of a coward to say straight out that he is calling for a dictatorship, but I think that call is there. It permeates what he has written, and is easy to see. You say you don’t see it, and it’s all in my head. That’s fine. But the article either means something or it means nothing, and if it means something then I really don’t like it. Really, really don’t.
Heh, right because “dictator” and “tyrant” are totally not loaded words too.
No, that’s the thing. It’s not right there on the page in plain English. If it were then you wouldn’t have to add so much on your own.
I didn’t say either of these things. I don’t think either of these things.
Of course the essay means something. What I said, and think, is that Vermeule’s essay doesn’t mean what you claim it does.
Speaking of meaning, I think words actually do convey meaning. So your offer to stop using fascism and to use dictator or tyrant instead is really kind of silly in light of the actual objections I made. All of those are extreme characterizations of Vermeule that would either require some fairly solid basis in what Vermeule actually said and called for (which isn’t there), OR would require a fairly radical and limited view of legitimate government authority that would lump blue laws in with fascism (yet allows for some distinction between pre-magna carta kings and post magna-carta kings even before common suffrage and before the House of Commons became paramount).
And my point is that your point is not actually in evidence. You’re speculating. Grossly, IMO. Even Vermeule addresses constraint, though. Hierarchy, subsidiarity, tradition, law, judiciary. Yet you keep talking in the most extreme terms (any, none) as if it’s right there in plain English – but it isn’t right there in plain English.
No, constraint is your whole point but was never Vermeule’s point. That he was making a different point doesn’t allow you to declare that you just know what Vermeule really must think about your point.
Permeates. Easy to see. So you say. Must be that he’s a coward for not openly calling for a dictatorship. Must be. If that’s what it takes for you to make sense of Vermeule then no wonder we never get anywhere in our discussions.
Larry, I hereby give up on you too. Be sage and go with God.
No, really, we are not. I am not.
Take zoning, for example. Whatever my opinions on the helpfulness of strong local zoning laws, I know why they exist, and are permitted under our current arrangement.
What someone like French, or Larry, or I, would accept, though, is that there has been a move – for understandable reasons (like slavery, or Jim Crow laws – even discriminatory zoning!) – to grant individuals more federal constitutional protection against local governments than there used to be. You may feel this has been a wholly bad move. That said, even someone who did think it wholly bad would have to deal with the fact that this is how constitutional law is done now, and even efforts to change it back have to work with what we’ve got.
To make a larger point, one reason I put in a good word, from time to time, for anarcho-capitalists, whose vision of governance isn’t of a state as such, but a network of overlapping and subsidiary firms, is because such a network does allow for, basically, arbitrarily strong local governance for those who wish to live under it. How much difference, after all, need there be between a largish HOA with strict community rules and a smallish municipality with strict community rules? Not much difference at all, apparently, given how zoning actually works in many middle-class suburbs. The main difference is that zoning has been around a while now, while HOAs are often still fly-by-night creations that, in many cases, perversely result from suburbs’ strong zoning (zoning boards who won’t approve non-HOA construction, because they think (often incorrectly, I’ve been told) that they can get a bigger tax base while providing fewer services).
Still, some HOAs or other forms of intentional community are formed on religious or other ideological grounds, and I say, more power to ’em – I wish ’em well! I can understand the appeal of living like that. I’m only half joking when I label myself “anarcho-coasean”: Coase recognized that government itself is a kind of firm, meaning there simply may not be much practical difference between a strongly subsidiary government and a functioning approximation of the anarcho-capitalist ideal.
The blanket accusation that libertarian leanings are the secret enemy of subsidiarity and the secret enabler of a centralized state simply does not work particularly well on all libertarian leanings: not all such leanings are, or need be, anti-communitarian.
I know this is getting far afield of your op Midge, but I think this is a misunderstanding of both Anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism in general. The difference between HOAs and municipalities is a moral difference. HOA rules are essentially covenants enacted by developers with a natural right to govern properties that they own. The rest is simply a matter of conveying certain rights to future owners but not others. A libertarian society would allow no end to this de-bundling of rights. That’s the an-cap “market in rules” allowing developers to sell different lifestyles and concepts of community.
That’s distinct from arbitrary county and city lines that determine to which tyrannical majorities a property owner will be subject. The property owners who were in place at the time a particular local ordinance was placed did not chose to live under that ordinance, they were forced. And while future owners might come in with their eyes open, another way of looking at that is that they inherit prior owners’ claims against the state. There’s no adverse possession logic that works here because there is no forum in which the prior owners could reclaim their right to govern their own property as they see fit from what amounts to an uncompensated regulatory taking.
Nor are HOAs and localities necessarily similar because they are both “small.” While local governments are relatively fixed in terms of their size, libertarian private property based communities would expand and contract according to the market. If neighborhood level rulemaking failed to produce desired outcomes property values would go down allowing developers to buy up enough land to create larger more efficient units, and vice versa, or smaller developers might harmonize their properties in some matters not others. I know some libertarians fetishize localism as much as some conservatives, but the point shouldn’t be that decision making in a free society would be centralized or decentralized, it should be that decision making will be as centeralized as is found to be efficient through a process of voluntary exchange.
Ultimately, Vermeule seems hostile enough to liberalism to be willing to abandon originalism, too.
The Founders were not pure liberals. They were not pure natural-rights scholars. As Coase might observe, they were deeply shaped (probably more deeply than they could have known) by the “unwritten constitution” of England’s common law – but they clearly weren’t content with the kind of common-law tradition that leaves general principles uncodified, merely deducible from case law, else why would they have bothered to write a constitution?
And, for that matter, they were not all Deists, or all traditional Christians, either.
They brought to the Constitution a mix of their various traditions. People willing to call themselves “originalists” don’t all have to agree on how to weigh the influence of these varying tradition: they must merely be able to make a good case for their judgment in weighting these things, and not stray so far afield that their claim to “originalism” becomes implausible. Vermeule, on the other hand, apparently wishes to stray far enough afield to break with any plausible claim to “originalism”, or at least he’s posturing that way for dramatic effect.
We’re all postmodern enough now to realize there’s an element of polite fiction to “originalism”, just as there is to “biblical literalism” or “biblical inerrancy”: no text is self-interpreting, and everyone brings the knowledge they have now (whether or not that knowledge was available to the scribes recording the original text) to the texts they comprehend, no matter how sincere their attempts to comprehend them in the spirit in which the texts were originally written. We can’t go back to the Edenic innocence which treats texts as self-interpreting.
Nonetheless, most conservatives seem capable of recognizing there’s a difference between a tradition (like originalism) which makes an effort to stay faithful to “commonsense” (informed by some combination of tradition and plain, rather than farfetched, reasoning) interpretations of a text, and using the fact that no text is self-interpreting as license to impose whatever interpretation we wish, no matter how fanciful. Roughly half the humor at the Babylon Bee is based on our ability to recognize this difference.
For Vermeule to propose a break with originalism, then, is for him to propose a break with the “commonsense” approach that has arguably been so successful for institutions like The Federalist Society, which in turn would be to break with what many have argued is Trump’s greatest policy success: the appointment of Federalist-Society judges. “Screw the ‘commonsense’ approach. We’re all postmodernists now, so we all may as well make the most of it, taking whatever license we can to impose whatever interpretation we wish,” is what Vermeule seems to be saying to me.
At least I’ve told you my point, and my understanding of the article. If you’ve explained your understanding I must have missed it. If you think that Vermeule has some point here, which has nothing to do with whether government action is legitimate or not, then why don’t you tell us what it is. If you are going to keep telling me and most of the other folks who have commented that Vermeule doesn’t mean what we all think he means, why don’t you tell us what you think he means?
By the way, under my own reading of Vermeule, I think the guy is correct. The only way you are ever going to get a society that resembles the kind of society Vermeule wants is to have a “ruler” with enough power and enough guns to force it down the throats of an unwilling citizenry. You don’t like calling that “ruler” a tyrant or a dictator. So use the term strongman or whatever term you want. Most people would not willingly live in Vermeule’s society. I certainly wouldn’t. It will have to be imposed by force. And even if you refuse to recognize that fact, Vermeule himself clearly does.
Yes, but I’ve come to wonder whether the moral difference is quite as large as we tend to think it is.
Yes, but two things:
Within any particular firm there is hierarchy, distinct from the open market. As Ronald Coase observed, firms exist to avoid marketing costs (more commonly termed “transaction costs” now), and the internal structure of a firm may be quite authoritarian. (In that sense, it’s not really so surprising that CEOs of large firms tend to be attracted to central planning: that’s often how they govern their own firms, after all!)
Coase also inquired, more deeply than economists had done before, into what does the law, from an economic perspective, actually do? In particular, how does law function, not as a political ideal, but in resolving nitty-gritty – even petty – property disputes? Coase realized that much Anglo-American law (specifically case law) exists to facilitate flexible de-bundling and re-bundling of rights. The model of government as a special kind of super-firm, whose existence lowers transaction costs by providing a stable means of bundling and unbundling rights, is therefore a Coasean model.
But municipalities do not incorporate along wholly arbitrary lines, first of all. And, as Tiebout and Fischel observed, one reason we have “tyrannical majorities” on stuff like zoning boards is because a house is a huge illiquid asset that doesn’t make the right of exit illegal, but does make it highly impractical for most of us most of the time, so “homevoters” compensate for this practical loss of exit by asserting voice.
People who buy into a HOA likewise may do it with their eyes open, while also inheriting a system they would not have otherwise chosen for themselves: they need housing somewhere around here, and in any given locale, there’s a limited number of HOAs to choose from – even when new housing stock, as it is in some regions, is all HOA (though perversely, often mandated so by municipal zoning!).
Neighborhood living is in some sense a club good. It will be so whether the club in question is run by a nominal government or not.
Fischel found that, on the ground, zoning boards, at least in smaller, non-destitute municipalities, actually do function as a forum through which locals can make side-deals to compensate themselves when others propose taking from their bundle of property rights. The process is not perfect. It is often corrupt. It is “clubby” and it sucks to be one of the locals with less clout in the club – as indeed it sucks in even private clubs.
I heartily agree with the bolded portion of what you said. Moreover, I thank you for continuing the zoning/HOA tangent: it is an interesting one.
One of the problems theorists face when trying to imagine an “all HOA” world is that HOAs as they exist now are, in large part, a bizarre outgrowth of municipal zoning. That said, the problems HOAs have, even as they exist now, shouldn’t have nothing to say about the problems purely private rules for housing would face.
Many homeowners compare their experience with their HOAs to running up against a particularly corrupt, petty zoning board, one which, especially if it’s owned by a larger firm with deep pockets, seems to provide them with even less recourse than municipalities do for having a dispute settled in their favor. When there’s abundant testimony from actual homeowners (many of whom feel like they did not have much of a choice in choosing a HOA: HOA housing stock was all that seemed available to them) that officially private “HOA zoning” is as bad or worse than municipal zoning, that should give us pause. Perhaps these people’s experience can be explained away, but at the very least it deserves an explanation.
Not all HOAs are created equal: some are quite well-run. We can hope that the well-run ones are more representative of what unfettered “libertarian private property based communities” would be like. I do hope, in fact – it’s why I lean the way I do. But I can’t hope as confidently as I would like to.
For the benefit of those who may have missed it, here is Professor Epstein’s take on Vermeule: The Problem with Common-Good Constitutionalism