As of late 2024, there is a global academic debate taking place over the extent to which liberal democracy is in recession, or crisis—these not being the same things. A prominent example of the debate can be found in the October 2023 volume of the Journal of Democracy, where the co-chairs of the Editorial Board directly contradict (page 8) the dire warning of V-Dem’s 2023 Democracy Report that the world has regressed back to 1986 levels of democracy. Yet, in debating the details of how to measure democratic strength, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees: if the resurgence of the far right across the Western world—in the world’s most established democracies—is not enough to seriously scare some academics into announcing a full-blown “crisis” of liberal democracy, it’s undeniable that we don’t have a very good idea of how strong “strong” democracies are, as measured by the indices.
The three most prominent democracy indexes in the West, for example, put Norway consistently at the top of the world’s democracies. So, Norway is in the “strong” category, and, on a 1-10 scale, it’s close to 10. The problem is, how do we know how strong Norway actually is? Given that the measure of this democracy in particular is relative to all others, we only know Norway is stronger than the rest. How strong strong is we still don’t know, because Norway sets the bar. But, what if the true scale of democracy should go from 1 to 13 or 15 instead of 10? Suddenly, when the question is framed this way, we see the forest: liberal democracies are far weaker than they should be, and we have little idea how quickly they may collapse until it’s too late.
My thesis is that the constitutionalisms, institutions, norms, and civic practices of liberal democracy are fundamentally incomplete. Accordingly, I want to push the scale of democratic strength to 13 or higher. The US Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the declarations of democracy currently in existence are not enough. Deliberative democracy actually needs a founding moment of its own. In the United States, the founding of democracy will take place within a Second American Revolution, where the work begun in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Civil War Amendments, the Wisconsin Idea at the University of Wisconsin, and the Civil Rights Movement, will be completed with the formation of an ideal constitution and an operating system for democracy, the system I call Wisconsin Idea 2.0. After all that work is done, we may yet write a Declaration of Democracy unlike any that currently exists. Should such a document be ratified by a large majority of the people, our posterity could finally say that deliberative democracy has had its Founding moment.
The Socratic Pursuit of Truth in Politics, Science, and Higher Education:
“So the Socratics were in pursuit of the truth, especially in the field of ethics, in the belief that knowledge of the truth about the world and its principles improves one’s life and makes one a better person; they understood that respect for the truth is the foundation of all morality, and they sought rational and valid arguments that stood a chance of yielding the truth of any matter […] They were not just inventing the discipline that we now call philosophy but also making sure that it took a Socratic direction.” (Page 58)
— Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy by Robin Waterfield
Whereas the life, trial, and death of Socrates in ancient Athens is a well-known foundation myth of Western philosophy, the example of Socrates serves just as well as a foundation for liberal democracy. Socrates’s method of open, deliberative-democratic debate and questioning still to this day comprises the core of political deliberation, the scientific method, and the model for teaching and learning in higher education. Socrates’s student, Plato, accordingly founded the Academy, the first higher-educational teaching and research institution in the world. The politically-motivated execution of Socrates in the context of a collapsing Athenian democracy likewise stands as a warning of how critical are free speech and open inquiry to the survival of liberal democracy.
It is obvious that the proper aim of liberal democratic politics should be the pursuit of truth in deliberation and policy-formation. As opposed to truth, parliaments and legislatures too frequently produce irrational policy through the forced compromises of party factions. In fact, taking truth seriously in liberal democracies requires a new theory of centrism, since none currently exists. The pursuit of truth through the unforced force of the better argument is what the academic term “deliberative democracy” stands for, which lends a profoundly different meaning to democracy understood as the mere aggregation of uninformed votes, also known as direct or "pure" democracy. True liberal democracy requires sophisticated institutional mediation, as well as extensive, ongoing deliberation, so that the best ideas are more likely to prevail.
Now, to recap the above briefly, liberal democracy is incomplete; completion requires an institutional system for deliberative democracy with the Socratic pursuit of truth as the aim of deliberation. Once we take the pursuit of truth seriously as the goal of liberal democratic politics, we have decided upon the foundational principle for a theory of political centrism.
The way to pursue truth in deliberation is by maximizing standpoint diversity, which is the ideological equivalent of the separation of powers, or countervailing-power system of government. In open democratic deliberation, worldviews and ideologies clash in a way that allows citizens to make up their own minds about who has the best ideas. Analogous to the separation-of-powers mechanism where “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” the distrust that partisans in deliberation have for each other needs to be harnessed into the service of truth by keeping the discussants honest and exposing them for falsity or error. Just as the branches of government are designed to perpetually balance each other, in other words, so standpoint diversity needs to continually balance perspectives in the sifting and winnowing process of discovering truth.
Once we reflect that the aim of liberal politics is truth, it becomes immediately obvious that the civic mission of all higher educational institutions should be to aid citizens in pursuing truth-for-self-government. We have come back now, at long last, to the aims of Plato’s Academy: seeking truth; and, cultivating virtuous citizens. The civic mission of public higher educational institutions in particular needs to be to design a nation-wide system of standpoint diversity and democratic inquiry. Additionally, scientific facts are essential for deliberation, and independent news media are essential for democratic communication. Public higher education can now be said to have a dual mission of fostering economic prosperity and facilitating the self-government of democratic citizens. In fact, once these points are spelled out, don’t they sound like common sense?
Dual, Real-Ideal Constitutionalism:
The ideal outcome of the pursuit of truth in civic deliberation would be a list of ideal policy solutions for the nation—literally a list of all of the best national policies at the current time. Such a list of ideal policies and their explanations, in the evolving form of, let’s say, a Wikipedia document, would be an ideal constitution. Producing an ideal constitution, then, can be seen as the primary activity of deliberative democracy and the precise, civic mission of higher education. In other words, if the aim of centrism is truth, the practice of ideal constitutionalism can be seen as a kind of truth-seeking byproduct. For practical purposes, we can describe the pursuit of truth and ideal constitutionalism interchangeably as the focus of centrism, with the ideal constitution having the added role of providing a baseline for centrism itself. A baseline of centrism is also a baseline of political accountability, which needs to be as scientifically objective as possible, as well as epistemically pragmatic, trans-ideological, and anti-foundational; this also is a new idea in the theory of liberal democratic centrism. The banister, as it were, of liberal democracies needs to be derived from a scientific and ideological view-from-nowhere, a view which looks inward to the national interest and the common good, as well as outward to foreign policy.
Whereas centrism is ordinarily understood to be a politically “moderate” activity based on squishy compromise—hence, the degrading ugliness of what’s called political “sausage-making,” true centrism is paradoxically radical and moderate at once; it epitomizes liberal democratic values of truth, science, justice, liberty, fairness, equality, proceduralism, the rule of law, and goodness. True centrism partakes in and adds profoundly to what Brookings Fellow, Jonathan Rauch, has aptly called the “constitution of knowledge.” Rauch has also written another book (that I like less) called Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy. Rauch’s books are useful in highlighting how realism and idealism are already built into our constitutional system—including the reasons why this dualism needs to be profoundly enhanced. As it stands, political “realism” is a de facto embrace of irrational policy outcomes; it’s no wonder why politics are so upsetting to so many people. We need a new type of politics that ennobles rather than demoralizes us.
Intentionally balancing realism and idealism is what is missing from liberal democratic constitutionalism as we know it. As I said above, constitutionalism itself is incomplete. We need an ideal constitution to balance, guide, and focus a running commentary on the activities of the real constitution—the US Constitution and its three branches of government. Thus, ideal constitutionalism can organize and focus centrist politics at the same time as it provides a baseline for government accountability.
About Political Realism:
Where political realism has always taken an aristocratic, disparaging view of ordinary voters, the thesis of this website is that liberal democracy is incomplete, particularly in its civic and deliberative-democratic dimensions. Common sense today says that we have entered a new political era, a watershed moment in history where it has become obvious that the people need to be included more in democratic processes. This is not a naive call for direct democracy; to the contrary, the people need to be included into the checks-and-balances system itself in ways that allow them to feel a sense of personal responsibility for political outcomes. Including citizens more in liberal-democratic proceduralism is actually a conservative, or “Burkean” thing to do. The citizens of liberal democracies need to have more skin in the game, for with freedom also comes responsibility. It is time for citizens to feel more of the weight of their political preferences on the common good, therefore, and to be included into the decision-making process in ways that allow them to take more genuine responsibility for society.
The title of Rauch’s book above highlights an anti-democratic contradiction in political-realist thinking going back to the Founders of the United States and beyond, ultimately to Socrates himself. To their credit, neither Plato, nor Socrates was in favor of pure, direct democracy; they wanted philosopher kings to rule. As Robin Waterfield writes in Plato of Athens, quoting Plato:
“Socrates’s political views were based on a simple premise, one that was shared by all his followers: ‘Socrates said that it was not those who held the scepter who were kings and rulers, nor those who were elected by unauthorized persons, nor those who were appointed by lot, nor those who had gained their position by force or fraud, but those who knew how to rule.’ In this single sentence, [Plato] dismisses in turn the claims of monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny to be legitimate constitutions, in favor of government by experts, however many there may be” (50).
Good Socratic leaders would not be tyrants because they would use “rational argument” to persuade citizens of what was in their best interest (50). Such rational persuasion by their betters is essentially the same thing John Quincy Adams had in mind with his ideal oratory, and all of the Founders were, likewise, aristocratic in their opposition to pure democracy. The checks-and-balances of the US Constitution, for instance, expresses the political realism of James Madison’s opposition to democracy. As William J. Cooper wrote in The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics, JQA was the last of the great, aristocratic liberal-democrats of the Founding generation; his presidency ended at the watershed of a more democratic stage in American politics. The democratic conundrum that remained unsolved from the Founders’s time until our own, is how to meaningfully integrate the people as a whole into the checks-and-balances system.
Today, the production of an ideal public-discourse—a formerly aristocratic ideal most fully embodied by John Quincy Adams, has been rehabilitated into a more politically palatable system of deliberative democracy. Just as the Socratic method was essential to good thinking in ancient times, so today the dialectic of real-ideal constitutionalism needs to form the basis of democratic reason. As Waterfield writes, Plato “believed that productive thinking of any kind had a conversational structure in that it proceeded by question and answer, by the to and fro of argument. In Republic, dialectic—the art of philosophical conversation—is said to be the ‘copestone’ of the education that the Guardians of the imaginary city are to have. […] The most famous kind of Socratic conversation involves short questions and answers, as Socrates seeks what follows from a given hypothesis and what conflicts with it” (52). Whereas Plato’s Guardians were to be educated in virtue and statecraft at the Academy, the US Founders imagined a national university that would do the same thing. It is no accident, however, that the Founders could not agree to fund a national university, let alone agree on what the national vision would be thereof. Deliberative democracy today needs to complete that national vision with an ideal constitution.
But, we did end up with a national university, after all: it’s called Harvard; it’s mission is to promote crass self-interest, and the admissions process is notoriously corrupt (as the joke goes, Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached). A true national university, by contrast—one befitting of liberal democracy, must aim to build a true centrism through the practice of ideal constitutionalism. Recall that the aim of centrism is truth. Such is the mission of the “national university” of democracy, which the Founders never could have imagined.
Political thinkers have made the mistake since ancient times of assuming that experts, aristocrats, or philosopher kings, will be less biased than ordinary people. We now know that type of aristocratic elitism is unwarranted. Socrates and Plato were sophisticated enough political thinkers to run up against the problem of expert judgment without knowing what to do about it: the problem with experts is, being smart and educated does not guarantee virtue and good judgment. While it may have seemed obvious in Plato’s day that the best should rule, the genius of liberal democracy is to recognize that good decisions and stable governments can only be ensured through legal proceduralism and checks and balances. We now know, thanks to research in social psychology, that intelligent and educated people are no less likely to be biased than anyone else; Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment has made the point famously. (And, for anecdotal evidence, we need look no further than Elon Musk, a highly-visible example of intelligence and bias combined, a brilliant person nonetheless so clearly flawed that he daily squanders his fortune and makes a mockery of his legacy.)
Aside from the plebeian-bias fallacy (as I’ll call it), then, there is another anti-democratic contradiction inherent in contemporary political realism, which is evident in the titles of Jonathan Rauch’s two books above, in the titles of Francis Fukuyama’s Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity and Liberalism and Its Discontents, and in the recent writings and podcasts of Charlie Sykes for The Bulwark, a well-known neoconservative operation whose mission is to defend democracy. Each of these thinkers argues convincingly in their turn for the importance of truth, trust, and a passionate centrism for liberal democracy, while refusing to build the deliberative democratic system that is our only hope for actualizing these core ideals. The problem is, political realism assumes voters are too dumb and unserious to participate meaningfully in politics; this contradiction in the realist’s attitude toward democracy is obvious in the way they will argue vigorously for the importance of free speech in creating a reality-based, or fact-based community, and yet they will deny the necessity of building a deliberative system of democratic reason—the point of which is precisely to produce a “reality-based community.” In fact, ideal constitutionalism is the civic practice of a reality-based community in probably the strongest sense imaginable.
So, political realists have some serious cognitive dissonance going on. Either we want democracy, or we don’t. If we want democracy, then we should make the best of it. Since political liberals claim to want democracy, therefore, it is time they begin taking democracy fully seriously by organizing nation-wide, public, deliberative-democratic systems.
Political realists claim to want social trust while being staunch defenders of free speech to the point where it makes a mockery of democratic reason—which is to say, a mockery of mainstream public opinion. At what point should the majority of citizens in a democracy be allowed to defend their democracy from illiberal attacks?
While the debate over the legal issues of this question rages on, Fox News has been fully unmasked as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, foreign governments from Russia, to China, to Iran meddle freely with democratic elections as they try—successfully—to undermine trust in government, the younger neocon generation of The Bulwark staff talks openly about the entire right-wing media ecosystem being to varying degrees a bogus spin-off of the liberal media, and the Republican Party has, for decades, been recognized for “asymmetric” politics by centrist observers (as if the asymmetry hasn’t been fully obvious since Watergate). The Bulwark’s own Mona Charen, of all people, has even found it necessary to attack the Wall Street Journal for blatantly supporting autocracy. If only these neoconservatives would now realize how flawed neoliberal economics is, and the extent to which those flaws undermine democracy, we might be getting somewhere.
The economic and democratic contradictions of centrist political realism are as obvious as this: reread the title of Jonathan Rauch’s book Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy. Now, try to square the notion that all of those obviously bad things are supposedly good things in politics, with the centrist truism that maintaining constitutional and democratic norms is crucially important to the health of liberal democracies. Elections in the United States are globally infamous for their dependence on money. It is no exaggeration to say that elections in the US are bought with money. How are citizens supposed to trust a political system, to trust in the morality of democratic norms, when corruption is touted by realists as a virtue of democracies? Citizens are really not that stupid. They know the system is corrupt, and trust in government, in media, and in public institutions has accordingly collapsed. It’s that simple. The emergence of fascism in America should not have come as a surprise to anyone.
So, the problem for liberal democracy—for the type of highly proceduralized, deliberative democracy that I advocate—is how to ensure that the checks-and-balances system produces the best decisions possible given that no one person, group, or party can be trusted with power. While the checks-and-balances system provides a necessary bulwark against autocratic capture of the system, it does not ensure a genuinely deliberative democracy with high levels of civic engagement and trust. As they stand today, the checks-and-balances systems of realist constitutions produce political gridlock and frustration as much as good policies. Gridlock, in the meantime, demoralizes citizens and inclines them to lose trust in government.
Back to Dual Constitutionalism:
In short, constitutional realism and democratic idealism need to be balanced. Ideal constitutionalism should take the idealistic place of “living constitutionalism” in the originalism-vs.-living-constitutionalism debate, since it’s clear that democracy, in the form of an authoritative will-of-the-people, should guide the overall trajectory of constitutional interpretation where originalism is insufficient.
And, how do we get an authoritative will-of-the-people? If we can produce an ideal constitution in the first place—which is a list of ideal policies for the nation, then citizens can vote on those policies individually. It would not be hard, in that case, to tally the votes for each policy on a sliding scale, and to determine exactly what the will of the people is. At that point, it would be unfailingly clear to Supreme Court justices, to politicians, and to civil servants exactly where majority opinion stands on any given issue. This is the way to get true government accountability.
Now, "constitutionalism" is the name for the core thinking and logistics system of our civilization. A thing that thinks must think from a certain point of view; for nation states, that point of view is called the national interest. An ideal constitution is a definition of the national interest. Genuinely ideal policies can only be decided by an objectivity-maximizing system of ideological standpoint diversity, which employs the best scientific information available in the deliberative process. For an ideal example of the kind of deliberation that results in ideal decision-making, we need look no further than Philip Tetlock’s “superforecasting” groups. In light of the above, it’s safe to say that the “revolutionary” potential of Tetlock’s work has been underestimated. Consider the following quotes from the Superforecasting book cover:
“For thousands of years, people have listened to those who foretold the future with confidence and little accountability. In this book, Tetlock and Gardner free us from our foolishness. Full of great stories and simple statistics, Superforecasting gives us a new way of thinking about the complexity of the world, the limitations of our minds, and why some people can consistently outpredict a dart-throwing chimp. Tetlock’s research has the potential to revolutionize foreign policy, economic policy, and your own day-to-day decisions.”
—Jonathan Haidt, New York University Stern School of Business
“The best way to know if an idea is right is to see if it predicts the future. But which ideas, which methods, which people have a track record of non-obvious predictions vindicated by the course of events? The answers will surprise you, and they have radical implications for politics, policy, journalism, education, and even epistemology—how we can best gain knowledge about the world. The casual style of Superforecasting belies the profundity of its message.”
—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
Tetlock’s superforecasting groups are the ideal deliberative, decision-making model because they are comprised of a uniformly intelligent class of people who are the least ideological and most curious people among us. Deliberative democracy, by contrast, needs to find a way to harness the distrust factor between the different ideological factions of society into the service of truth. To the extent that this can be done, the presently crippling psychological divisions of Jonathan Haidt’s “righteous mind” can be turned into a profound strength of the democratic thought process, or democratic reason. No authoritarian regime could stand a chance against democracy then.
For ideal constitutionalism, to decide domestic policy is simultaneously to decide foreign policy; a baseline of accountability within a nation is equally a baseline of accountability for those outside the nation. Thus, ideal constitutionalism is a profoundly detailed and transparent basis for cooperation among nations. As with laissez-faire democracy, economics, and education, secrecy is an outdated paradigm in national security. While secrecy will always be essential to security agencies like the CIA and the NSA, what the democratic nations of the world need more than ever is transparency, trust, and cooperation. Cooperation is the only sure basis for national security. Again, this is common sense. Ideal constitutionalism is the Janus head of foreign policy and national security.
The Socratic Method Continuously Juxtaposes Realism and Idealism:
Realism and idealism are interdependent modes and perspectives of reason; these terms describe the way reason functions. Accordingly, a deliberative balancing of realism and idealism—the Socratic method—is the through-line from Plato and Aristotle to democratic reason and the scientific method in our own time. The caricature of these philosophers is that Plato, with his Forms, was an idealist, whereas Aristotle, the natural scientist, was more realist. But, as David Estlund explains in the introduction to a recent book defending idealism in political philosophy, Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy, Plato and Aristotle were each both realistic and idealistic thinkers—the obvious reason being that thought cannot proceed one without the other. The extant philosophical inquiry into the nature of reason does not contradict my point. The metaphysical interdependence of realism and idealism holds true, furthermore, even though discussion of idealism has given way to “antirealism” in the philosophy of science. Consider the following two quotations from the entry “Scientific Realism” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Metaphysically, realism is committed to the mind-independent existence of the world investigated by the sciences. This idea is best clarified in contrast with positions that deny it. For instance, it is denied by any position that falls under the traditional heading of “idealism”, including some forms of phenomenology, according to which there is no world external to and thus independent of the mind. This sort of idealism, however, though historically important, is rarely encountered in contemporary philosophy of science.”
“It is not uncommon to hear philosophers remark that the dialogue between the forms of realism and antirealism surveyed in this article shows every symptom of a perennial philosophical dispute. The issues contested range so broadly and elicit so many competing intuitions (about which, arguably, reasonable people may disagree) that some question whether a resolution is even possible.”
— Chakravartty, Anjan, "Scientific Realism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/scientific-realism/>.
In spite of their interdependence, almost everyone wants to be a realist and almost nobody wants to be a (naive) idealist. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science tells us, like the Stanford Encyclopedia, that “scientific realism” is the name of the game. Experts in foreign policy—as the recent passing of Henry Kissinger reminds us—want to be realists; it is the “default position” in international relations according to the Oxford Handbook (page 6). The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy has a chapter on “Ideal and Nonideal Theory,” which explains how a debate still rages in the discipline Socrates founded over the value of idealism to understanding politics. Jonathan Rauch, like James Madison before him and every originalist to this day, has done his level best to make a virtue out of constitutional realism—as though that were the only option available. Secrecy is still the default mode in national security, rather than open-sourcing democratic cooperation. Much of the discipline of economics is still caught in the orbit of neoclassical general equilibrium theory, an economic type of Newtonian mechanics, whereas the economy we need has to be co-created.
Thankfully, however, we have entered a new era in political thought that is becoming increasingly visible in each of the above disciplines, and vice versa. Thus, the entry on scientific realism in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science argues for a “Socratic scientific realism,” which is a “wholly nonepistemic, purely axiological” realism (Lyons, 580). Axiology is the study of values in philosophy, which is why Bird’s entry, “Scientific Progress,” describes science as alternately “aiming” at knowledge, truth, or solving problems (Bird, 546), each of which is an ideal and a value. What animates science—the most “realist” of activities, in other words, is idealism.
The introduction to The Oxford Handbook of International Relations explains that realism and idealism are both essential to the study of political phenomena, for “We cannot answer the question of how we should act without some appreciation of the world in which we seek to act (the empirical) and some sense of what the goals are that we seek to achieve (the normative). […] Without idealism, realism is sterile, devoid of purpose; without realism, idealism is naive, devoid of understanding of the world in which one seeks to act” (7). Indeed, the “most distinctive feature of the Handbook,” the editors write, is its “reading of theory as both empirical and normative” (6). Recognition of the necessity of idealism, it seems, is making its way back into political science, if only to admit that political science is not very useful in improving the state of democracy in the world because, as a social science, it is duty-bound to be as realist and empirical as possible. By contrast, The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy represents a normative branch of political science that actually aims to change the world. Naturally, it is being attacked from the “mainstream” of the discipline for being “too idealistic” and ignoring “power and politics” (page 17).
Things get interesting, however, when we turn from the discipline of political science to political philosophy. Whereas in political science the charge of unrealistic utopianism gets leveled at advocates of normative deliberative democracy, the reverse is true in philosophy where ideal theory is accused of utopianism and irrelevance, and the call is for more normative theory. So, along the continuum of political work ranging from ideal theory to nonideal theory to applied deliberative democracy, are we to reject as “unrealistic” both deliberative innovations and highly abstract philosophy, say, theories of ideal justice of the type defended in Estlund’s Utopophobia? The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy has an essay on “Ideal and Nonideal Theory” which holds the key to this seeming paradox. As Stemplowska and Swift explain:
“The complaint that contemporary political philosophy fails to engage sufficiently with our actual empirical circumstances is typically formulated as a request for policies and institutions. But to issue even a specific policy recommendation to citizens generally, or to argue that a particular institutional arrangement is required, is not to recommend a specific action to any actually existing person. […] That is itself a form of idealization. We can know what we collectively should be doing without knowing what any of us individually ought to be doing, so even the kind of nonideal theory that delivers concrete action-guidance for ‘us’ remains unhelpfully ideal if it does that in the form of policies or institutional arrangements” (387-8).
The issue Stemplowska and Swift are getting at is idealism is always already present in our political and scientific projects, from the most abstract theories to the most concrete tinkering with the existing political system. One of the reasons why is obvious: political institutions and other types of organizations are themselves idealizations made real.
The US Constitution—based as it is on the realism of the separation of powers—is likewise an idealizing document with an host of liberal and republican ideas presupposed in its conception. Thus, in order to function in the real world, the Constitution requires further ideals and practical aims to guide its interpretation, what professor, George Thomas, has elegantly described as The (Un)Written Constitution. Alexander Hamilton clearly understood this dimension of the Constitution better than any of the other Founders, and, in hindsight, we can see it was inevitable that Hamilton would die in despair. For we have only just now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, begun to realize that the realism of the Constitution and the idealism of democratic reason must operate as one through the continual checking and balancing of the Socratic method.
Not even Alexander Hamilton could have imagined a system of dual, real-ideal constitutionalism.
Radical Centrism:
See the final section on the About page for a discussion "On No Labels, Third Parties, and Radical Centrism."