If you reframe this as instrumental vs terminal goals, it’s obviously true. If you don’t care about the constitution per se, but only as a means to power and to enabling your policies, and your timeframe is much longer than your opposition, then it’s trivially useful to seek power now and use it over the long term.
But it’s not at all clear that these conditions hold for any humans in the real world. We don’t really have values or goals that are all that well-defined, and we like to think we’re more long-term-oriented than our opposition, but we’re mostly fooling ourselves.
If you reframe this as instrumental vs terminal goals, it’s obviously true. If you don’t care about the constitution per se, but only as a means to power and to enabling your policies, and your timeframe is much longer than your opposition, then it’s trivially useful to seek power now and use it over the long term.
But it’s not at all clear that these conditions hold for any humans in the real world. We don’t really have values or goals that are all that well-defined, and we like to think we’re more long-term-oriented than our opposition, but we’re mostly fooling ourselves.