Chile Takes a Second Run at National Suicide

Chile’s socialists and communists, the champions of the movement for a new constitution, aren’t going away. Neither are social democrats who campaigned against the latest draft but continue to insist that the country’s charter of rights must be rewritten. The left—center and extreme—will want to keep repeating some version of the exercise that lost last week until they get the guarantee of a bigger welfare state. Yes, it could be less bad than the first draft. But that’s not a vote of confidence.

The modern record of constitutional rewrites in Latin America is disastrous. It’s hard to think of a single instance in which the outcome hasn’t been a blueprint for limitless government assigned to deliver utopian solutions to every human problem. Nevertheless, Chile’s center-right promised to go along with the farce of giving the left a mulligan and now they’re stuck.

It’s not what was agreed in Article 142 of the 2019 amendment to allow for the process of a rewrite. In reference to the constitutional assembly’s final text, it says: “If the question raised to the citizens in the ratifying plebiscite is rejected, [the current constitution] will remain in force.” In other words, the issue is dead.

Yet Congress is already working on a new law, and this one will skip a referendum on whether the nation still wants a new constitution. All that will be left for socialists is to try and try again until they get their collectivist ideals written into the highest law of the land.

There’s plenty of precedence for this strategy of perpetual do-overs—and not only in the developing world. The European Union constitution was twice defeated—by France and the Netherlands—in 2005 referenda. But big-state architects, dreaming of their Franken-bureaucracy in Brussels, refused to accept defeat. They retreated to “a period of reflection,” made revisions, and renamed the project the Lisbon Treaty.

When Ireland turned it down in 2008, changes were made to address Irish concerns. The countries where voters had approved the earlier document didn’t organize new referendums. Only the nation that had yet to give the right answer was asked to reconsider. When Irish opponents of the treaty lost in the 2009 referendum, the voting stopped.

Rigging the democracy game, with the help of violence, is the forte of the Latin American left. The 2016 referendum in Colombia, which rejected the government’s amnesty for FARC narcoterrorists, was unilaterally annulled by President Juan Manuel Santos—even though he had promised the electorate would have the last word. He promptly took the rejected deal to Congress, which he controlled, moved a few commas and had it rubber-stamped. Colombia’s political and economic elite went along with him.

In 2006-07 Bolivian strongman

Evo Morales

didn’t have the necessary two-thirds majority inside the constituent assembly to move the draft of a new socialist constitution to a referendum. His solution was to relocate the assembly to a different Bolivian city and employ force to keep opposition members out during the vote.

The intellectual author of that Bolivian power grab under the guise of democracy is former Bolivian Vice President

Álvaro García Linera.

The Chilean press reports that Chilean President

Gabriel Boric

is a follower of the Bolivian Marxist and former guerrilla.

Mr. Boric and his ilk claim that the current constitution is an artifact of the rule of Gen.

Augusto Pinochet,

and therefore must be shredded. But it has been heavily amended by left-of-center governments since the country returned to democracy 33 years ago. It’s far different than it was in 1980, and certainly not lacking in political rights. In 2005, during the presidency of

Ricardo Lagos,

a large overhaul of the document ended senators-for-life and senatorial appointments.

This isn’t to minimize the public’s grievances about inadequate old-age subsidies for those who don’t work in the formal economy or about the state’s inferior record on health, education and personal security. Life has gotten more difficult under Mr. Boric. Naturally many people want the government to help them.

Yet opening the Pandora’s Box of constitution-writing is no way to solve these problems. Making people better off requires new and innovative changes to public policy, which is made through legislation.

Some believe that promising to offer a next time was the only way to win on Sept. 4 and that social democrats can contain the passions of the weakened Mr. Boric and the extreme left. Perhaps. But the likeliest outcome is a less free, more populist Chile, which will damage economic mobility and living standards.

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.