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The high expectations surrounding Chile, population 19 million, now reflect just how distinct its history and present are. It was the first country in the region to elect a Marxist as president (Salvador Allende in 1970), but also one of the last countries to transition fully to democracy. Its economic reforms made it the toast of neoliberals (Chile has been called “The Tiger of South America”), putting the country on a wealthier plane than Argentina, Brazil, or my home country of Uruguay.

I arrived in Chile in 2003 to take an academic job. Chile wasn’t my first choice, but the economic situation was too dire then in Uruguay and Argentina. Settling in Santiago, I immediately appreciated the higher incomes, the controls on inflation, the growth and sober political leadership. But as I built a family and life here, I’ve come to see Chile as both a challenge to the conventional wisdom that economic growth strengthens democracy, and as a paradox of rising expectations that has yet to be resolved.

The heart of the contradiction is that the economic reforms in Chile—which brought many Chileans out of poverty, enriched some middle-class people, and made some Santiago neighborhoods as glossy as Manhattan—have also stratified society and destabilized democracy. As some Chileans’ economic situation improved and the image of the country as a wealthier place went global, people expected better healthcare, retirements, and other services than governments could deliver. And meeting higher expectations—for more education or a better quality of life—cost more money and produced more debt, leaving Chileans increasingly vulnerable to the international economic shocks of recent years.

The growing spread between expectations and reality has led to rising public anger—and more of a focus on the failures of Chile’s still young democracy and its inflexible constitution.

Chile’s political system provided stability, but not representation or vehicles for change. Chile was divided into 60 districts, each of which elects two members to Congress. That setup effectively made elections predictable; with proportional representation, almost every district elected one member of the ruling party, and one member of the opposition. There was no room for a third party or outside political force to win representation. Over the years, political parties, knowing they didn’t need to talk to voters, lost touch with the street, and politicians became older than the national population. Most Chileans stopped bothering to vote (for example, in the last presidential election of 2017 less than half of registered citizens voted).

A popular explosion of anger was inevitable. The ignition could have been anything. It turned out to be an October 2019 decision by the government to increase the price of subway fares by the equivalent of six American cents. Here was a clear case of an unaccountable government adding to the burdens of citizens. Protests were started by high school students at a subway station, and soon took over the streets, with university students, unions, and unorganized people participating. Police and citizen violence ensued. (One of my students was among the first to be shot.) By November, the military and its tanks were in the streets. I was afraid of a societal collapse.

Protestors were demanding more than a rollback of the subway fare; they wanted a democratic change in the system, and among their requests was a public vote on a new constitution. The inherited charter feels more like a straitjacket rather than a consensual agreement.

The government dealt with the upheaval as a foreign-import movement that tried to destabilize the country. Yet, the public embraced the call with such force that the authorities, who had long protected the system, couldn’t say no.

The pandemic slowed the protests, but the drive for constitutional change continued. In an October 2020 plebiscite, 78 percent of voters supported a new constitution, and 79 percent voted for a completely elected constitutional convention as the way to do it (instead of a mixed body of parliamentarians and elected citizens).

That verdict raised hopes that real change was coming to Chile, and global headlines ensued. But it was only the beginning of a long journey across a democratic minefield, and a new constitution remains far from assured.

One of the main obstacles is all of the different votes that will take place before a constitution can be drafted and presented to voters for ratification.

As I am writing this note, the first complication is evident: COVID. If parliament approves the government’s measures, elections for the convention will be delayed by more than a month to mid-May. Concurrent with Chile’s municipal elections, there will also be a national vote to elect the 155 members of the convention—138 will be elected by districts, and 17 elected by Chile’s Indigenous people in a nationwide constituency.

The election is full of novelties. There are about 1,400 candidates for these convention posts; refreshingly, 80 percent are first-time candidates for office, and nearly half are younger than 40. The slates emphasize independence; among the groups running are “Independents Like You,” “Independents for Chile,” and even “Independents Without Godparents” (a way of saying they belong to no one).

This election also opens the door for a truly revolutionary change. Candidacy lists must be headed by women and then gender is alternated (woman-man-woman-man, etc.). Moreover, parity is a requirement in the results. (If, in a given district of four members, four men are elected, the two men with the least votes will lose their positions in favor of the two women with the highest vote totals in their respective lists.) If this whole process arrives at a safe harbor, Chile will have the first gender-equally drafted constitution in human history at the national level.

The members of the convention will have one year—from mid-2021 to mid-2022—to draft a new constitution. Once they are done, there will be a plebiscite to approve or reject it.

A new democratic constitution could be a game-changer for Chile, especially if it’s short, simple, and allows enough flexibility for elections and democratic politics to spark change within the system. But the situation is risky, and the final outcome on a constitution is deeply uncertain—because of all the elections that are set to happen between now and the 2022 plebiscite.

The May elections for the convention members will coincide with local elections. Then, an already intensive electoral year must be compressed even further. During this year Chileans will also have a second-round vote in elections for regional governors. In July, we will have national primaries. In November comes the general election (for Congress and the Executive). In December is the run-off for the presidency.

Every single one of these elections has the opportunity to raise new conflicts and open up new debates that could undermine support for the process of creating a new constitution. Officials elected in 2021—from the national president to local mayors—may be wary of changing the governing system of the country in 2022. The right wing is already opposed to deeper changes.

And the political inexperience of the convention delegates—so appealing now to a country starved for change—could become a liability. These newcomers might be inclined to draft a document that is ideologically polarizing or makes too many mistakes. The young convention delegates might also be outmaneuvered by more experienced officeholders and interest groups in the 2022 contest over a new constitution. The people themselves—after so many elections, the pandemic, and the popular uprising—could became wary and reject further change.

Conflicts on the streets could also change the political context. Police violence remains a big and polarizing issue; so is illegal immigration and asylum seekers, who are mostly from Venezuela and Haiti. And the country has no single unifying figure, or institution, that has credibility with all the political players. Chile is a minefield, and every step could bring an explosion.

My hopes for this process are fewer than my fears.

I fear greater social conflict in the year ahead. I fear that if our constitutional project fails, Chile will waste this unique high-profile opportunity to remake itself. And I fear that, if adopted, a new constitution will be badly flawed—and might ultimately disappoint Chileans when it doesn’t solve all of our structural problems.

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Wilson was a fine teacher who demonstrated in lavish detail that corruption had social functions and reformers had human limits. I was fresh to liberal-radical thought, fascinated by human contradiction, and as yet unaware that the perverse consequences of transformative ideals and the futility of reform efforts were themes in which conservatives specialized. The point wasn’t made so crisply until 1993, by Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction. So what? I had no idea what Wilson’s politics might be and no particular interest in them. What mattered was that he evidently knew his stuff, that he had a refreshing skepticism toward the judgment of do-gooders, and that the stuff he knew was deeply relevant to my own preoccupations with how the world could, and could not, be changed.

It turned out, over the decades, that Wilson had a larger intellectual project: to affirm human universals in a skeptical, relativist age. He was right that morality was, in our time, disguised in the language of personality. The same year that the skeptical Hirschman cautioned against the clichés of the conservative impulse, Wilson published his magnum opus, The Moral Sense. Wilson wanted to make morality speakable in a culture abandoned to shallow self-seeking and to proclaim moral universals that transcended cultural difference. He took up one of the great themes of the Scottish Enlightenment, what its frequently misunderstood exemplar Adam Smith called “moral sentiments,” and tried to found, or refound, conservative thought on the lost virtue of virtue.

I have no quarrel with universalist projects and only respect for the view that their costs as well as their benefits must be reckoned with. I have argued myself that the idea of the left is a universalist idea, if a difficult one. But as the skeptical Wilson should have known, in every universalist project there is a blind spot, a territory that goes without scrutiny.

Although Wilson was aware of how behavior can be shaped by the physical environment (this was the point of his famous “Broken Windows” article, with George Kelling, on the importance of policing low-level crime), he seemed oblivious to how behavior can be shaped by the moral environment in a culture dominated by the acquisitive impulse. The moral problems that drew him were reserved for the field of controversy known as the culture wars. “Once,” he wrote in The Moral Sense, “the issues were slavery, temperance, religion, and prostitution; today they are divorce, illegitimacy, crime, and entertainment.”

Really? Why not war, and racial terror, and the unnecessary misery of so much of the human race? Why not the defilement of our one and only earth? Why not the moral ugliness of plutocratic contempt for the lower orders? Why not the destructiveness, creative and not, of an economy predicated on channeling wealth upward and responsibility down?

In a 1981 essay entitled “’Policy Intellectuals’ and Public Policy,” Wilson maintained that the two “most powerful and enduring ideas in American political culture,” alternating in their dominance throughout the nation’s history, are, first, “that part of our Puritan heritage that attached a high value to the rationalization and moralization of society,” and second, natural rights, “expressed today as a desire to maximize individual self-expression and the claims that the individual may make against society.” When I read these words, I don’t recognize the country I live in.

Wilson’s blind spot widened in a 1985 essay called “The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy,” in which he committed this careless sentence: “All that is interesting in human behavior is how it changes in response to changes in the costs and benefits of alternate courses of action.” Here was the Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations–the human being as nothing but calculator of costs and benefits–minus the Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. At the root of policy failure, Wilson now thought, was bad character–not the bad character of agents of dispossession but the bad character of the undeserving poor.

About the “broken windows” and other criminological ideas that Wilson developed, I am not expert, and so demur from judgment. I understand that there is an argument about causes and correlations, and leave it to others to evaluate. But how may we speak about the great crimes of our time without taking note, as Wilson did not, of the commandeering of wealth by irresponsible financial elites? How a prophet of the moral sense could write about the political and intellectual tendencies of the last 30 years without staring straight at the rise of a plutocracy whose high-flying corruptions, self-dealing arrogance, and criminal negligence brought the world financial system to its knees, I do not understand.

As Wilson’s commitment to conservative orthodoxy grew, his critical edge was blunted. Scientists were as dismissible as straightforwardly ideological elites. Corporate elites who underwrote climate-change denial had been transmogrified into sage neutrals devoid of interests. So it came to pass that in later editions of his textbook, American Government (written with John J. DiIulio, Jr.), he was writing passages like this: “Science doesn’t know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all.” If key political controversies could be reduced equally to conflicts among elites, then what stood in the way of the brainless politics of Sarah Palin?

The James Q. Wilson I studied with would have shuddered.

Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology and Chair of the Ph.D. Program in Communications at Columbia University, is the author of 15 books, of which the latest is Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street.

*Photo courtesy of Gastev.

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