Max Longley is a writer in Durham, NC. He is the author of Quaker Carpetbagger (McFarland, 2020), For the Union and the Catholic Church (McFarland, 2015), and numerous articles.
Self-government by local communities, including some tiny confessional states, would be more consistent with ideals of diverse, self-governing communities.
After excluding less plausible interpretations like Roosevelt’s, I think the Old Testamentish version of the Founding is the most defensible: the Founders left us some good principles which later were often disregarded, but which brave men and women in later eras fought for, often with success.
Harvard Law School produces many of our future rulers, and it may be better for us if aspiring federal administrators learn from Vermeule at least the presumptive desirability of honoring local institutions. Yet Vermeule would only be teaching them a carefully-regulated localism whose contours would be subject to the decisions of the federal administrative state.
It would be nice if Somin would see migration (national and international) as a remedy for intolerable situations, a lesser evil, not a desirable thing in itself. Those who aren’t oppressed or impoverished but are tempted to leave their ancestral homes through ambition or restlessness, might stop and think.
Corporate rights was not a spontaneous development but the result of a sort of corporate civil-rights movement. Through litigation (generally well-financed) over two centuries, various corporations won decisions by which corporations evolved from government-created artificial persons, not even mentioned by name in the Constitution, into entities possessed of many of the same constitutional rights as flesh-and-blood human beings.
