K.I.S.S.:

In 2018, Social Convergence, a new left-wing coalition led by Gabriel Boric, emerged. Amid widespread civil unrest breaking out in 2019, Boric's campaigning paved the way for the 2020 referendum, in which the public agreed a new constitution was needed. In 2021, a constitutional convention was set up to draft the new constitution. The convention's members were mostly elected, though it also contained several independent representatives from civil society and there were also seats reserved for indigenous representatives. In March 2022, Boric was elected as Chile's president, which seemed to give further momentum to the constitutional process.

But the constitutional convention quickly lost its way. The process was captured by left-wing activists. And conservatives were largely frozen out or alienated by the process.

The fundamental error made by the convention was that it behaved as if it were drafting policy, rather than a constitution. The representatives in the convention imagined Chile as they would like it to be, for now and for eternity, instead of drafting a constitution that would allow Chileans the freedom to decide for themselves what policies they should adopt in future.

The convention included an extraordinary number of new social rights, which ought really to have been policies rather than constitutional clauses. For instance, there were clauses guaranteeing gender quotas for public offices and the right of indigenous people to veto aspects of national policy. It also tried to enshrine certain 'rights' on behalf of nature and to recognise animals as sentient beings.

Some of these policies may be laudable on their own terms - some less so. But if enshrined in a constitution, they would undermine the very purpose of a democratic constitution, as they would bind future Chilean parliaments to a certain set of policies. In other words, the proposed new constitution would have actually restricted the democratic rights of citizens.

At some point, the constitutional convention lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Most of the left-wing participants failed to notice (or did not care) that they were not carrying much of the country with them through the process. They mistook the widespread public dissatisfaction with the political right (caused by years of economic turmoil) for popular support for left-wing social policies. Conservatives generally looked on the convention as either a bit of a joke or as something sinister, thanks to its support for liberal social policies on abortion and the family.

There was a sense that President Boric and the convention thought that they might be able to change the character of the country through the constitution. They wanted to bake in their ideas of progressive social change, by making them a part of the constitutional make-up.

Underlying this was a sentiment that the people were not really to be trusted with democracy. Ironically, in this sense, the proposed constitution was something of a left-wing mirror image of the old Pinochet-era constitution. Boric and his allies ended up proposing that their own political ideals should become fundamental laws that would be put beyond democratic contestation.

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