Constitutions Old and New

Duquesne University professor Patrick Lee Miller argues that we no longer live by liberal principles, nor will we be returning to them. The question is by which unwritten constitution will we live?

In this essay I describe our current constitution, that is the order of things which constitutes us. I aim to show how little our life together has to do with the document signed by Washington and the other Founding Fathers, but rather than calling for an impossible return to that document and its liberal principles, I will conclude with some proposals for another, future constitution that might renew our justice, wisdom, and power.

I. Red State Resistance

Consider South Dakota. It has a Republican supermajority. As one of the most conservative states in the Union, in fact, it has had a Republican supermajority since 1996. Yet it regularly fails to pass bills that oppose gender ideology. HB 1057 would have prohibited sex-change surgeries and drugs for children. SB 88 would have required teachers to inform parents when students express feelings of gender dysphoria. HB 1005 would have required students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their sex. These and other such bills failed to make it out of the legislature. Why?

The largest employer in South Dakota (seven times larger than the second) is Sanford Health. The company sells puberty blockers and performs gender-reassignment surgeries. Together with the Transformation Project—a trans-rights advocacy group that boasts donations from a national LGBTQ foundation as well as a famous pop singer—Sanford Health hosted the 3^rd Annual Midwest Gender Identity Summit in Sioux Falls. Sanford, the Transformation Project, and the ACLU have successfully lobbied the legislature to block dozens of bills opposing gender ideology. The campaign director of the ACLU boasted: “I think the fact that we have consistently stopped these bills has been a source of hope for folks, like if they can do it in South Dakota, we can do it in our state.”

Another such bill was HB 1217, which would have banned males from competing in women’s sports. Although 66% of registered voters in South Dakota believed that transgender athletes “should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender,” and although HB 1217 passed the legislature, it was vetoed by the Republican governor, who had been lobbied by Sanford. On the same day that she vetoed this bill, the company announced a $50 million expansion of the Sanford Sports Complex, “an athletic facility that stood to lose serious revenue if the NCAA pulled its games from the state in protest, as it had in similar situations in the past.”

Sanford is not alone in these efforts. The Chamber of Commerce chapters in South Dakota have reliably joined its lobby against bills that opposed transgenderism. Hochman quotes the local director of the Family Heritage Alliance in South Dakota, who is not alone in noticing the new progressive orientation of corporations against social conservatives. “In Arkansas, their biggest opponent is Walmart. Walmart kills social-conservative stuff. In other states, you know, it’s something else. So within our movement, we have a joke that every state has their Walmart. And for South Dakota, it’s Sanford.” But why has corporate America gone woke? Is it for profit? Yes … and no.  

II. Competing for Status within the New Civic Religion

There has no doubt been some money to be made by associating woke politics with the brand of some corporations, especially those whose customers are already woke. But what about Bud Light? Presenting Dylan Mulvaney as the face of Bud Light, one of the icons of Red America, can’t have been motivated simply by profit.

Something else is going on. In a word, status. The executive who made that decision is not a consumer of Bud Light, let alone a Republican. She is a typical member of theelite class that now manages every major institution in the country, from corporations to universities, from NGO’s to Hollywood, from the media to the civil service.

To gain status in this class, one must signal its values. The higher the cost of the signal, the more status one achieves in the class. The career of that Budweiser executive is not over because she alienated many of its most loyal customers. On the contrary, she’s being celebrated for her “bravery” and will end up with a corner office, if not at Budweiser, then at some other corporation. Failing that, she’ll land on her feet in an NGO, a school of marketing, or somewhere in the bureaucracy. Ultimately it doesn’t matter where she lands because positions within this class are more or less interchangeable. When members of this class make decisions within their institutions, they are not usually rewarded for accomplishing the official mission of their institution (e.g., selling beer), but instead for demonstrating fidelity to this class and its ideology (e.g., trans rights).

I’ve seen this through three decades in academia. The official mission of the university is to pursue truth through research and to disseminate truth through teaching. However, one is not rewarded for either. On the contrary, one is punished for both. Take again the example of sex and gender. Most major universities have programs or departments of “gender studies,” but very few employ experts in the science of sex and gender, namely evolutionary psychology. Indeed, this science is largely ignored, except when it must be scorned as antithetical to the purpose of “gender studies,” which is to show how “gender is socially constructed,” so that it may be deconstructed for political ends. Over the last thirty years I’ve watched this anti-scientific ideology go from the seminars of elite universities to the classrooms of public schools.