In a widely-discussed op-ed from 2022, a pair of left-wing law professors argued that it was time to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” Part of their call to action was an intentional and flagrant defiance of the written law of the Constitution. But it went beyond that. They recognized that constitutionalism entails not merely obedience to a particular document, but a certain notion of political activity and its aims. They rejected a politics that obscures “direct arguments about what fairness or justice demands,” and centers instead on what people have at some point “agreed upon”—a politics that requires “extraordinary consensus” before radical changes can be made, and that “obstruct[s] a new future” that may be imagined by bold dreamers.

This sort of constitutional politics is the notion that political activity aims at protecting and managing the interactions between various elements of society as they are—that society is not a canvas on which dreamers can bring their visions to life, but a collection of real persons and institutions constituting many sources of authority that require an agreed-upon settlement on how their common life together is to be conducted.

The authors, however, inclined toward in what we might call comprehensive politics—the notion that political activity aims at an all-encompassing, systematic, and intentional ordering of social life to approximate as best as possible a perceived ideal of the whole.

These categories represent two opposed inclinations that underlie our political life. They are not themselves ideologies or theories, but primal and intuitive dispositions toward political activity—including governance, policy, rhetoric, the partisan struggle for power, and the activity of mass movements that seek to influence the patterns of social life on a large scale. They are answers (often unarticulated and unexamined) to the question “What is politics supposed to do?” Much of our political activity, rhetoric, and theories build up distinct edifices on one or the other of these inclinations, which tend to remain under the surface.

Tracing out this distinction in our political language, analysis, and practice helps to better understand the cause of much of our present social and political disorder, and it offers a degree of clarity to the often distorted and ambiguous vocabulary we use to describe politics. In attempting to delineate these inclinations, I do not offer anything particularly novel. The categories identified are a synthesis of different ideas found in many twentieth-century conservative and conservative-adjacent thinkers including Nisbet, Oakeshott, Hayek, Sowell, and others. But as conservatives today continue to try to find their intellectual footing, it is essential to reimagine and rearticulate ideas that help us understand the words we use and the world we inhabit. Only then can we wisely choose the manner in which we ought to engage politically.

Comprehensive and Constitutional Politics

Comprehensive politics is characterized by a tendency to focus on the aggregate social conditions of the whole. It is monistic, seeing social life as a fundamental unity: the overriding goal of political activity is to make the various parts of society conform to the vision or contribute to the mission of the whole. In the words of Robert Nisbet, this kind of political community seeks to bring “all lives, all ends, all values, and all means into total articulation with one another.”

Comprehensive politics implies a plasticity of human beings, who are the product of their broader social context. That context, in turn, is consciously molded by those who wield power or influence—either today or long ago, having set in motion a process that now unfolds according to design. This provides simple, monocausal explanations for unfavorable social conditions, which are the product of “capitalism,” “liberalism,” “global elites,” or “the Regime.” In short, things are bad because someone at some point arranged for life to be this way. Social order is the direct result of a social orderer.

Political activity, then, is seen as a straightforward contest between rival visions of the Good that are to be imposed on society. These visions are derived a priori, but need not display great coherence—they may be arrived at by reason and philosophy, by reconstructing a perceived golden age, or perhaps simply by the crude combination of basic human desires. Most center on the elevation of a particular value—equality, justice, piety, personal autonomy—as superior to and overriding all others. Politicians speaking in this idiom need not talk of trade-offs and least-worst scenarios, but of addressing root causes and proffering final solutions.

While comprehensive politics starts with a dream of what could be, constitutional politics starts with what is: the actual people, institutions, and authorities of any given society.

Comprehensive politics, therefore, elevates particular substantive outcomes over procedural rules and institutions. Political activity is to be judged by the extent to which aggregate social conditions match the preconceived vision of the Good Society. Procedural norms, constitutions, rights, divisions of power, and the rule of law can easily hinder this pursuit. At best, therefore, they are accorded a secondary status as constraints on the primary activity of politics.

Moreover, comprehensive politics may also transform procedural commitments into ideals to strive after. Democracy (itself a procedural practice for selecting governors) may morph into “Our Democracy”—a package of desired substantive policies and social outcomes that ought to be protected, even against the will of voters. Commitment to a constitution may slip into a pursuit of the never-fully-attained “ideals” or “Spirit” of the Constitution. A belief in equal treatment under law can morph into a quest to create by conscious choice a more comprehensive human equality. 

While comprehensive politics starts with a dream of what could be, constitutional politics starts with what is: the actual people, institutions, and authorities of any given society. Rather than focusing on a constructed vision of the whole to be evaluated and adjusted, it sees aggregate social conditions as the byproduct of multiple sources of authority, ones which often pull in different directions. To protect that kind of plural society, governance must also be the product of multiple sources of authority that have found consensus.

Human beings may be capable of changing over time, and such change may come largely from their social circumstances, but those circumstances are so infinitely complex—and the human capacity for understanding so limited—that they cannot be explained by single, purposive causes, or consciously manipulated to attain certain desired ends. The planner, innovator, revolutionary, or counterrevolutionary who attempts to do so may succeed in destroying fragile institutions and destabilizing social order, but he rarely winds up with the society he set out to build.

Constitutional politics, consequently, presents political activity as a process of settlement, and a seeking after consensual order, acceptable to the various parts of society. Politics has neither the ability nor the moral authority to function as the creator and intentional molder of a society. But it may establish procedures for living peacefully and productively together in a particular place. This notion of political activity allows for a great variety of other nodes of authority to flourish that need not all point one way.

Constitutional politics is not an attempt at “value-neutrality,” as some devotees of comprehensive politics suggest. The sort of rules, procedures, and institutions that characterize constitutional politics is neither “value-neutral” nor simply the product of one particular, cohesive, and coherent set of values. They can, rather, represent what Roger Scruton called “the residue of human agreement” that “grows from within the community as an expression of the affections and interests that unite it.”

A Distorted Vocabulary

The divide between comprehensive and constitutional politics does not line up with most of the political identifiers thrown around, and actually reveals tensions and ambiguities in the very words we use to define them.

It helps explain the shift in the meaning of “liberalism” from a doctrine largely centered on limited government and the rule of law to a movement devoted to a complete liberation and equalization in all things. This shift is not an inexorable “next step” in the logical unfolding of liberalism, as some argue, but the re-articulation of older, largely constitutional liberal values in the idiom of comprehensive politics.

The division also complicates the “conservative” label, dividing those who see civil life as guided by established patterns of activity that change only gradually from those who go around muttering “1788,” hoping to recreate society after their model of a supposed golden age.

The cross-cutting influences of various civil society institutions shape the character of people in a way that no “Regime” planning ever can, and they help develop the shared expectations citizens have of one another.

Likewise, a “populist” may be revolting against unaccountable elites who have sought to impose a particular model on society, or they may be revolting against “undemocratic” institutions that prevent the use of power in the service of their own preferred vision. A “libertarian” rejection of big government may be motivated by skepticism and distrust of planners, by a rigid moral outlook defined by permissiveness, or by a perceived mission to unleash the power of human creativity to transform the world.

Nearly every important political concept—“nations,” “social justice,” “capitalism,” “order,” “the common good,” to name just a few—is similarly susceptible to very different understandings depending on the inclination one takes.

The Ascendency of Comprehensive Politics

But while both inclinations have a foothold in our political tradition, and both maintain influence in public understanding, most of our public rhetoric and analysis on all sides today tends to reflect the assumptions of comprehensive politics. Our basic constitutional structure still exists, of course—to the annoyance of anti-constitutional op-ed writers—but we mostly no longer speak in the idiom of constitutionalism. Comprehensive politics has a natural appeal that has been augmented by a host of circumstantial factors over the last century: technological advancement, including the rise of mass communication; war, which of all political activities, most calls upon a comprehensive bridling of society; and the decline of religious belief, which left a spiritual void often filled by devotion to more earthly religions like that of the nation, humanity, or abstract principles. Perhaps most importantly of all, the incentives of mass democracy encourage comprehensive politics, as they call for grand visions, transformative promises, and identitarian appeals that can cut across local practices and prejudices to build up large-scale political coalitions.

A host of contemporary ills can be chalked up in part to the dominance of the comprehensive inclination, many of which serve only to further its entrenchment in our language and thought process: the expansion and centralization of the state, the adoption of “living” or “moral principles” approaches to the Constitution (which effectively negate it by making it a tool to be used by political movements), the increasing tendency to seek spiritual fulfillment in political activity, and even conspiratorial thinking, from “institutional racism” to the belief that everything is a “psyop”—these are just a few examples.

One of the most pervasive problems, however, is the tendency to diminish institutions and nodes of social authority (except for the state), seeing them as extensions of and secondary agents of broad political projects working toward the single end determined by the whole.

As Thomas Sowell describes it, his “unconstrained vision,” tends to construct a standard of “social responsibility” that requires “businessmen, universities, and others” to “discern the social ramifications of one’s acts” and make their decisions according to their aggregate calculations of social benefit, rather than according to the logic of their distinct activity. Civil society may be coopted in this way by direct political regulation, and by government incentives that purchase their submission. But the tendency is most pernicious when the notions and habits of comprehensive politics seep into the very identity of the institutions themselves, causing them to reconceive their mission in terms of broader political objectives. When this occurs, the institutions cease to be their own sources of social influence and authority and become instead foot soldiers in armies commanded by others. They do not uphold the values essential to their particular task but instead adopt values appropriate to the ascendent political cause they have attached themselves to.

This manifestation is one root of a host of contemporary phenomena, including ESG regulations, “virtue signaling” on the part of business and social institutions, “effective altruism,” woke churches and MAGA churches, ideological indoctrination in schools, and universities (and/or their students) that are committed more to political activism than the pursuit of truth.

In undermining the functional autonomy of these institutions, comprehensive politics takes away the source of real, stable social order that emerges from people’s own choices. The cross-cutting influences of various civil society institutions shape the character of people in a way that no “Regime” planning ever can, and they help develop the shared expectations citizens have of one another. When they become hijacked by sweeping political trends—and when the overriding political demands on these institutions inevitably fail to unify society or provide the kind of social order promised—we are left only with disorder and maladjustment.

Yet those who resist the current politicization of such institutions often themselves speak the language of comprehensive politics and are animated simply by a different, systematic vision of the whole. In doing so, they have further lost sight of the kind of political practice that can encourage the conditions of a free and stable social order.

In between the fringes that increasingly seem to drive discourse, there are plenty of people who desire normality. They do not dream of civil war, of executing their own “march through the institutions,” of rectifying the wrongs of colonialism, or of pushing every social boundary to achieve peak liberation. They want, by and large, normal lives focused on the things in front of them—families, schools, churches, communities, recreation—and they want a political and social order that allows them to pursue such goods. Politics is so universally conducted in the comprehensive idiom that such people are likely to be written off simply as “non-political”: politics, it seems, just doesn’t speak that language. The constitutional idiom, however, does speak the language of normality—of a social settlement that derives from and protects normal life. The great multitude of the supposedly “non-political” may, therefore, be the best possible avenue for the revival of constitutionalism.

 As the consequences of our comprehensive politics become more and more dire, it is the instinct of many to indulge even deeper the fantasy of total control. But for those who would prefer genuine order, freedom, and normality, it is all the more necessary to reinvigorate and reintroduce the language and practice of constitutional politics.