Interesting and you ask yourself why 38% would have voted for it?
The document was absurdly, disastrously, and almost unbelievably utopian. Its American cheerleaders should take note of this defeat.
NRO quotes from the NY Times:
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.
Right. 170 pages. What could go wrong? Below from NRO, and note at the end which American politicians supported it:
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....
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.
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