The Lost Culture of Constitutional Restraint

In times past, in the assemblies of both church and state, there was always an old hand who’d rise at the appointed moment and call for a point of order. He was usually a lawyer, often from the South, and in my memory, he wears a seersucker suit. His words would bring a collective groan, a ripple of impatience through the crowd. But he stood undeterred, and more often than not, he was right. His insistence on proper order, on what was fitting and lawful, stopped many a foolish decision, held power in check, and kept things fair. He didn’t rule by force, but by reason, by memory, by an enduring sense of proportion.

The Transformation of Power into Authority

The culture that produced such men wasn’t just one of legal procedure—it was something deeper, something lived-in and long-learned. It was a constitutional culture, not just of charters and by-laws, but of people shaping their common life through norms, customs, and habits that had proven their worth over time. Good order and discipline in a state was understood to be the result not of chance, but of the operation of wise laws and institutions, safeguarded by the vigilance and virtue of the people. This traditioned culture constrained power by transforming it into something greater: authority.

A great deal of it was fantasy, of course, but a necessary and collective one—we call it a constitution, which can be written (like in America) or unwritten (like in Britain). A healthy constitution—whether of a nation, a church, or a community—helps to ensure that power is exercised in proportion to the authority granted. Power alone is just force, crude and demanding, seeking only compliance. But authority is power rightly ordered, held in trust, tempered by restraint and respect for the whole body of the people. It doesn’t demand obedience by sheer might, but earns it through legitimacy. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “Authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom.” 

The old lawyer rising for a point of order didn’t command the room with physical might, nor did he appeal to ideology or personal ambition; he simply insisted on the recognition of what was already known to be right.

The Erosion of Constitutional Culture

Today, we live in an age increasingly given over to the exercise of raw power. The structures and traditions that once tempered power and made it into authority have either been abandoned or despised. Hannah Arendt saw this coming back in the 1950s:

Authority, resting on a foundation in the past as its unshaken cornerstone, gave the world the permanence and durability which human beings need precisely because they are mortals–the most unstable and futile beings we know of.  Its loss is tantamount to the loss of the groundwork of the world.

This loss of authority is evident in politics, where constitutions—both written and unwritten—are disregarded in favour of the strongman’s will, the mob’s appetite, or the bureaucrat’s decree. It’s evident in the church, where the discipline of tradition is replaced by reforming zeal, managerial efficiency, or desperation. In both cases, we see the same phenomenon: the displacement of wisdom by force, of memory by novelty, of deliberation by demand.

The Culprits: Populism and Perfectionism

Two forces have driven this decline. The first is populism, which comes in many forms but always seeks to tear down established norms in the name of “the people’s will”—though in practice, it’s often the will of a few who claim to speak for many. Plato recognised this in ancient Greece:

The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness...This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

Populism has no patience for restraint. It sees constitutional limits not as safeguards but as obstacles to be overcome or, worse, conspiracies to be defied. It values speed over steadiness, spectacle over substance. It speaks the language of democracy while undermining its very foundation. Such populism, in its reckless haste, nearly always tilts towards tyranny, as Plato understood well.

If populism discards constitutional culture in the name of passion, the perfectionist discards it in the name of ideological purity. The old virtues of prudence and compromise, which allow for governance among flawed human beings, are abandoned. The imperfect but workable solution is cast aside because it fails to meet some abstract ideal. In this way, the perfect becomes the enemy of the good—the pursuit of unattainable perfection leaves the achievable good in ruins. This is as true in religious institutions as in politics, where the yearning for a perfect church leads not to renewal but to fragmentation and disillusionment.

In both cases, the first victim, the first sign of impending disorder, is truth. Hannah Arendt again:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Such a way of thinking turns away from the deep and tangled nature of human life, forgetting that our sight is never clear enough to know right from wrong with certainty, nor to foresee the consequences of even our best intentions in a world wounded by sin. This is the mindset that Reinhold Niebuhr warned against: “The pursuit of perfection always leads to tyranny, because it refuses to acknowledge the limitations of human nature and the complexity of social life.” It’s the same argument that Edmund Burke levelled against the radicals of the French Revolution:

The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs.

Both populism and perfectionism weaken the culture of authority and replace it with something harsher: a culture of brute power.

From Authority to Power

The end result of these twin forces is the erosion of institutions and the rise of disorder. Where once there was a shared sense of how things ought to be done, there’s now only the clash of competing wills, unchecked by law, custom, or tradition. And when the idea of the “common good” is lost, all that remains are factions vying for dominance or the arbitrary rule of an autocrat. Each is essentially a retreat into infantilism.

A constitutional culture isn’t just about laws—it’s about character. It’s about a way of thinking and living that respects limits, values deliberation over impulse, and understands that civic wisdom comes through the hard work of cooperation and compromise. Such a culture isn’t created overnight, nor can it be maintained by legislation alone. It must be lived, practised, and passed down. Edmund Burke put it best:

Society is indeed a contract... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

The Path Forward

Constitutions are learned not just in the grand halls of government but in the small places: in the home, in the church, in the town meeting, in the habits of speech and conduct that shape our dealings with one another. It requires not only institutions but also people willing to uphold them—citizens worthy of them.

We’d do well, then, to remember the old lawyer in his seersucker suit, to recall that his interventions, though sometimes tedious, were the work of a culture that valued order over impulse, authority over mere power. But we’d do even better to remember and acclaim the constitutional culture that produced him. If we wish to restore that culture, we must begin again—not with sweeping decrees or bold revolutions, but with small acts of fidelity to what’s true, to what’s just, and to what’s fitting. We must learn again how to govern ourselves, how to hold power rightly, and how to recognize authority when we see it.

And when the time comes, as it always does, for someone to rise and call for a point of order, we must be ready not to groan, but to listen.