Toward the end of the classic movie The Princess Bride, the body of the hero Westley, who has apparently been killed after being tortured at the command of the evil Prince Humperdinck, is taken by his friends to Miracle Max, an eccentric old professional miracle worker (played with wonderful wit by Billy Crystal), in hopes that Miracle Max can revive him.

After his friends ask Miracle Max whether he can bring Westley back from the dead, Max does a series of tests on Westley’s body and pronounces him only “mostly dead.” Eventually, after a great deal of back and forth, Max confirms that he can in fact be revived, which Max eventually (barely) manages to do.

I thought of this scene recently when considering some of the debates that some leading thinkers on the Right are having over whether the Constitution is alive or dead. These debates quickly become emotionally fraught. The celebrants of the living Constitution, still ruling American society after all these years, accuse others of relishing its death, a charge that the latter group denies.

Auron MacIntyre (author of the excellent new book The Total State) is among many on the Right who increasingly argue openly that the Constitution is dead—an argument echoed in a viral video by Wade Stotts, who cites MacIntyre, former Claremont Lincoln Fellow and New Founding CEO Nate Fischer, and neoreactionary political philosopher Curtis Yarvin in support of his thesis.

Even at the Claremont Institute, my employer, whose goal is “to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life,” there is a realism among many scholars about “what time it is” in 2024 America.

“Scholars at Claremont have long subscribed to the belief that the American republic has been dismantled, the Constitution corrupted by left-wing ideas, a viewpoint that is increasingly in step with that of the broader American right,” observed the New York Times in a recent profile of Claremont. My colleague Charles Kesler has discussed The Crisis of the Two Constitutions, and he, along with my colleague Christopher Caldwell, who sees the dictates of the Civil Rights Act, which he has referred to as America’s second Constitution, as increasingly trumping its original Constitution, have suggested that the contradictions of our current constitutional system have thrown it into grave, perhaps irresolvable crisis.

Critics have defined the Constitution’s death in different ways. Some see it as dead because of John Adams’s statement that said our Constitution was “only fit for a moral and religious people,” a statement clearly no longer describing America in any meaningful sense. Others see the existence of our written Constitution as itself a sign of civilizational weakness. Stotts quotes de Maistre’s claim that the truly fundamental things believed by a society do not have to be written in constitutions, which evolve organically out of the lives of a particular people. It is only when there is a fight over principles that a written Constitution is necessary. Or as Stotts puts it: “a healthy society doesn’t need a law about transing kids,” referring to our current post-constitutional order as “lawmakers chasing societal decay with a legislative pooper scooper.” And there is quite a bit to be said for this analysis.

Yet whether we are in in our Fourth Regime, as Curtis Yarvin asserted in his article The Iron Polygon, based on FDR’s usurpation of power in the New Deal, or in our Fifth, the Civil Rights regime, as Macintyre (and implicitly, Caldwell) argue, the age in which we were actually governed by the precepts of the original Constitution would seem to have long passed.

And yet, like Westley before Miracle Max, our Constitution is only mostly dead and that reality indicates a course of prudential statesmanship as we seek a path forward. As even Stotts notes in his Constitution-skeptical take, “traces of American traditions” still survive. And rather than consign the whole constitutional order to the ash heap, prudential statesmanship would suggest attempting to fan its dying embers into a vital flame. We will not be able to recreate the entire original constitutional system—one suspects many Americans would recoil at living under it—but even saving key parts of it as a newly revivified constitutional culture would be a substantial victory, and one worth fighting for.

The notion, after all, that the Constitution is dead prevails only among the elite Right (and implicitly, of course, among the Left, who treated it as a dead letter from the moment it impeded their political program). Ask the average GOP voters and he or she would be quick to declare the Constitution very much alive and worth defending. As would, even if given truth serum, most GOP elected officials. Publicly casting that aside based on the assertion that today’s conservative intellectuals have some sort of esoteric wisdom about good governance that is superior to the Constitution would seem a fool’s errand.

More importantly, if we acknowledge the Constitution to be a dead letter, it is unclear as to what sort of political regime would replace the existing order and whether it would be any better. Given the degradation of the American people and their moral outlook, industry, and much else, in recent decades, it seems likely that a new Constitution designed by contemporary America, half of which thinks Joe Biden should be president, would be far worse than even the shadow of the Constitution devised by our Founders.   

So how should we think about our “mostly dead” Constitution? As the late Justice Jackson (channeling Abraham Lincoln) observed, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” We should not let autistically literal constitutional interpretation handcuff us in our political struggle against the Left, which has clearly, regardless of their official statements, given up on the document entirely. But neither should we casually cast it aside. Instead we should treat the Constitution as an aspirational ideal that we are trying to bring society back to, and particularly embrace the parts of it most useful in strengthening our current political project.

So given that our Miracle Max Constitution is only mostly dead, in the political realm, it seems unwise of us to eulogize the patient when there is a chance it can, even in part, be revivified. Like Westley, it will likely be in a weakened state if revived at all, but even in this weakened state, it can, like Westley, ultimately triumph over the evil forces arrayed against it.

There is no shortcut to constitutional revival, however. It will be a painstaking task of public education and legal and political struggle, one that will require the type of leaned yet practical statesmanship that Claremont seeks to exalt. But there is no other, quicker way to victory.

As Miracle Max tells Westley’s companions who want him immediately restored to perfect health: “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.” And in seeking to restore constitutional governance to America, we cannot afford any rotten miracles.