My close personal friend (well, I’ve met him in actual space and time, which makes us pretty close by 2020 standards) Hunter Baker, of Union University, has a useful article in Touchstone in which he discusses an issue a lot of us are thinking about these days — is liberal democracy failing? Is the experiment over?

Nevertheless, let me, without rehearsing all the relevant developments, simply say that many of those structural limitations have now been overcome, through either amendment, expansive court decisions, or shrewd use of the powers to tax and spend. As a result, a constitution designed to embody Cicero’s wisdom for harmonizing diverse interests and avoiding the excesses of the various classical forms of government has been substantially transformed into something much closer to an ordinary majority-rule democracy. When one notes the calls for the termination of the electoral college, the politicization of the Supreme Court, and the discrediting of federalism due to the South’s intransigence with regard to both slavery and civil rights, it becomes clear that we are reverting to the mean as our Ciceronian (and even Calvinistic, as I’ve written elsewhere) constitutional democracy becomes more typical.

Read it all here.