The document was absurdly, disastrously, and almost unbelievably utopian. Its American cheerleaders should take note of this defeat.
The document was absurdly, disastrously, and almost unbelievably utopian. Its American cheerleaders should take note of this defeat.
I n yesterday’s referendum, 62 percent of Chilean voters opposed the proposal for a new, far-left constitution, delivering a resounding defeat to the leftist political forces — including Chile’s 36-year-old president, Gabriel Boric — that had been working to scrap the South American nation’s old constitution since 2019. The New York Times reports:
Chilean voters rejected a 170-page, 388-article proposal that would have legalized abortion, mandated universal health care, required gender parity in government, given Indigenous groups greater autonomy, empowered labor unions, strengthened regulations on mining and granted rights to nature and animals.
In total, it would have enshrined over 100 rights into Chile’s national charter, more than any other constitution in the world, including the right to housing, education, clean air, water, food, sanitation, internet access, retirement benefits, free legal advice and care “from birth to death.”
And it would have eliminated the Senate, strengthened regional governments and allowed Chilean presidents to run for a second consecutive term.
The text included commitments to fight climate change and protect Chileans’ right to choose their own identity “in all its dimensions and manifestations, including sexual characteristics, gender identities and expressions.”
The proposal’s sweeping ambition, and decidedly leftist slant, turned off many Chileans, including many who previously had voted to replace the current text. There was widespread uncertainty about its implications and cost, some of which was fueled by misleading information, including claims that it would have banned homeownership and that abortion would have been allowed in the ninth month of pregnancy.
Of course, concerns from Chileans — a majority-pro-life electorate — about issues such as the new constitution’s legalization of late-term abortion were entirely reasonable. As it stands today, abortion is only legal in Chile if the mother’s life is at risk, if the baby wouldn’t survive outside the womb, or during the first twelve weeks if the pregnancy is the result of rape. (And those relatively narrow exceptions were only implemented in 2017 — before that, all abortions, no matter the reason, were banned.) The new constitution would have enshrined a total right to abortion at the national level, mandating that “women and all those capable of bearing children should be guaranteed the proper conditions for a pregnancy and the right to voluntarily interrupt any pregnancy.”
More to the point, the Times report author, who is transparently disappointed by the referendum’s result (“Chile is left, for now, with the same system of laws that has its roots in the brutal dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990,” he mourns), is being naïve when he uncritically echoes the idea that the constitutional overhaul would have “enshrined over 100 rights into Chile’s national charter.” Sure, those rights would have been in the text of the Chilean constitution. But writing them into law does not make them so. I can demand that we amend the U.S. Constitution to dictate that the sky is purple. But even with the support of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, the sky would not be purple. Reality can be shockingly anti-democratic at times.
In spite of the praise heaped upon it by progressive admirers in the West — “Chile proposes a new constitution steeped in science,” reads a July headline in Nature magazine — the draft Chilean constitution was absurdly, disastrously, and almost unbelievably utopian. This should have been apparent to any sane reader, leaving aside ideological or philosophical disagreements about issues such as abortion. Its authors really did think that if you just wrote rights down in the constitution — including expansive entitlements, from universal health care and Internet access to “the right to free time, physical activity, sex education, cybersecurity, the protection of personal data and ‘free and full legal advice’ for anyone ‘who cannot obtain it,’” according to an earlier report from the Times — they would become political reality. Given America’s protracted debates over the meaning of relatively straightforward-sounding rights — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”; “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed” — one can only imagine how the debates over a 388-article, 170-page constitution with more than 100 rights, including that to “free time,” would unfold.
At the end of the day, the Chilean Left has no one to blame but itself. This was progressives’ fight to lose. The last few months of growing doubt notwithstanding, proponents of a new constitution came into Sunday’s referendum with enormous political momentum: In 2020, on the heels of nationwide protests against the government the year prior, 78 percent of Chileans voted to scrap the old constitution and initiate the drafting of a new one. But either out of hubris or a simple inability to read the moment, reformers returned to voters with one of the most jaw-droppingly, catastrophically bad constitutional proposals in history.
To add insult to injury, Chile’s rejection of the new constitution is something of a historical anomaly. As the Times reports, “Over the past 230 years, 93 percent of the 179 national plebiscites on new constitutions have been accepted, according to an analysis by Zachary Elkins and Alex Hudson, two political scientists.” This was an exceptional failure, but a deserved one. From the conservative perspective, Chile’s refusal to embrace a regime of abortion-on-demand and rights such as “freedom of gender identity” — mandating that the state “adopt measures to ensure that people of diverse genders are represented both in its own institutions and in public and private spaces” — is salutary. But on an entirely non-ideological level, Sunday’s vote was a win for basic sanity. American backers of the new constitution — including, among others, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib — should take note.