A culture of reverence for the U.S. Constitution shields the founding document from criticism, despite its many shortcomings. We need an alternative vision that provides meaningful freedom at home and embraces self-determination abroad.
By Aziz Rana
July 22, 2024
Source: Dissent Magazine
The U.S. Constitution is profoundly undemocratic, as generations of abolitionists, socialists, labor activists, and Black radicals have loudly proclaimed. Just as it did a hundred years ago, the document creates an infrastructure for minority rule—a specific and very American brand of white authoritarianism. This is because the Constitution organizes representation around states rather than the principle of one person, one vote. And it fragments and undermines popular authority through endless veto points. The consequences today are numerous: presidents elected who lose the popular vote; a Senate that gives vastly more power to voters in Wyoming than in California; an impassible route for constitutional amendments; a tiny, lifetime-appointed Supreme Court that repudiates popular policies, including the right to abortion, and elevates the president above the law—abetting a culture of impunity.
Despite these problems, in some corners the document inspires an almost religious devotion. Politicians of both major parties routinely praise its genius. This eighteenth-century text, so the argument goes, highlights how the United States has been engaged in what Barack Obama called “an improbable experiment in democracy” from its founding, grounded in principles of equality, self-government, and personal liberty. It is the key to what makes America exceptional and the reason the country offers a universal model of what Abraham Lincoln called “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
How did Americans get to a place where their national story is so fundamentally wrapped up with a constitution that fails them? And given this culture of reverence, how should the American left orient itself toward the document? Especially at a moment when the disconnect between nationalist narrative and institutional reality seems unbridgeable, it is essential for left voices to disavow constitutional veneration. But such a position will require more than rejectionism. It will mean articulating an alternative vision for constitutional politics. Just as critical, this vision will have to extend beyond matters of procedural design to tell a genuinely democratic and anti-imperial story of American possibility.
When scholars talk about reverence for the Constitution, they often say that things have always been this way. And it’s true that Constitution worship goes back nearly to the country’s founding. In 1838, a young Lincoln famously called on every American to “pledge [their] life” to the Constitution, with the hope that it would “become the political religion of the nation.”
But even if bathed in quasi-religious language, Americans’ relationship to the text was very different in the nineteenth century. The Constitution now is inexorably joined to what Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal famously labeled in 1944 the “American creed”—the idea that the United States stands for the promise of equal liberty for all. Black and anti-slavery radicals voiced this narrative during and after the Civil War, but it faced systematic pushback and real marginalization by white opponents of racial equality.
As recently as 1900, the more entrenched national story, promoted by President Theodore Roosevelt and famed historian Frederick Jackson Turner, revolved around Euro-American continental conquest and settlement. As Roosevelt titled his 1889 work, the mission was “the winning of the West.”
For nineteenth-century politicians, the Constitution enabled this ongoing conquest, partly through its compromise on slavery. Northern elites like Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, who opposed slavery, nonetheless accepted that while the Constitution allowed the government to prevent the extension of slavery into new territories, slavery “as far as it existed” at the founding, was not, in Webster’s words, “to be disturbed or interfered with by the new general government.” Such compromise was permissible because it ensured the nation’s existence, promoting shared goals of prosperity, independence, and territorial growth—goals vital in any region.
These understandings are antithetical to the current American story. A national narrative built around accommodating slavery to facilitate the expropriation of Native lands would be seen as deeply immoral today. But in the mid-nineteenth century, Webster’s constitution of compromise circulated far more broadly within elite Northern political culture than anything resembling Obama’s reading.
By 1900, discussions of the Constitution focused on many of the same anti-democratic ills that are currently part of political debate. The Civil War had underscored the explicit failures of the founding compromise. The effects of industrialization and resulting class conflict also raised fundamental issues about the legitimacy of the prevailing order. The system’s endless veto points made it nearly impossible for the poor to use elections to better their lot, while business elites wielded outsized power at virtually every level of government.
Even Euro-Americans who accepted as given their society’s racial hierarchy increasingly questioned the Constitution. These years saw the growth of a substantial cottage industry of constitutionally skeptical scholarly and journalistic writing contending that the document was nothing less than “a class instrument directed against the democracy,” as the Progressive era historian Vernon Parrington wrote. In the early twentieth century, it would have been easier to imagine the old text being rewritten than to conceive of a twenty-first-century America that deifies the Constitution as embodying commitments to “colorblind” equal liberty.
What changed? Such questions are rarely asked, and when they are the answers almost never look to the outside world. Since the United States is so distinctive, its development, some assume, cannot be a product of international processes and comparative practices. In truth, however, alongside domestic developments, the modern veneration of the Constitution is directly related to the rise of the United States from regional power to the world’s dominant global force, over the course of two world wars, international decolonization, and the Cold War.
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the collapse of the old European imperial powers as well as the rise of national resistance movements across the Global South. In this brave new world, both formerly colonized peoples and Western governments needed to reconstruct their national stories and positions. Emerging states sought to foster identities and institutions that were politically coherent and legible at the international level. Similarly, in an effort to gain influence and moral authority, the United States and the European imperial powers had to recast their country’s narratives in ways that resonated around the world.
In this context, constitution-writing became central to America’s global identity. To an important degree, constitution-writing—conceived of as a foundational activity in the construction of a self-controlling and self-representing polity—had already attained a symbolic status in American life. When the United States adopted its federal Constitution in the late eighteenth century, constitution-writing projects were historical anomalies. The document marked the United States as an experiment distinct from most European polities.
Constitution-writing proliferated globally through the slow disintegration of the imperial model and the emergence of newly independent nation-states. In a world in which the challenges and needs of new polities moved to the forefront of global discussions, American foreign policymakers came to understand and to position the United States as the original constitutional, anti-imperial paradigm—the first among equals, both temporally and substantively. In joining creedal ideals with veneration specifically for the 1787 Constitution, governing elites developed a uniquely American account of liberal nationalism, attuned to the ideological needs of global primacy in an age of decolonization and rising non-white political power.
Politicians and commentators began to distinguish U.S. global dominance from the old imperial orders. Officials explained their presence on the world stage not as the basis for extraction and conquest, but as a projection of the basic values and ideals of constitutionalism itself. American international police power was justified because of the country’s organizing principles, centered on constitutional democracy and independence, which it aimed to spread around the world.
Whenever the country intervened militarily abroad or asserted its economic and political might, it did so in the service of noble ends. Constitutionalism provided both an ideological basis for international arrangements under American supervision as well as the model for how foreign states should themselves be domestically structured. For this reason, it was inappropriate to compare the United States to other empires; its interests matched the world’s interests.
Of course, many countries have narratives of exceptionalism. European powers justified their nations’ global authority with claims of special historic destiny and the gifts that they alone could offer the world.
But the unique American fusion of this narrative with creed and Constitution resonated globally. At the same time, the narrative was flexible enough to accommodate domestic social struggles, especially over race. Cold War–era Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, which declared “separate but equal” schooling inherently unequal, reinforced domestic associations of the Constitution—and the federal judiciary—with key civil liberties and civil rights victories.
Equally significant, the historical contingencies of the mid-twentieth century—for instance, the strength of the labor movement—created supermajorities behind the New Deal and the postwar political settlement, which defused class conflict and entrenched a limited welfare state. Such developments, however exceptional within the context of American history, calmed worries that the constitutional order was an immovable roadblock to even minor social improvements.
Over time, these international and domestic factors fostered a romance around the Constitution, a heartfelt and genuine belief among politicians and many citizens—on both center-left and center-right—in the genius of the American system. Critically, these voices, from John McCain to Obama, did not proceed cynically, reaching for venerative arguments simply as a veil to justify assertions of power. They worked and sacrificed for this vision, and it gave their lives a larger meaning.
There were other ideological pillars of this constitutional creed: an anti-totalitarian account of individual liberty and market capitalism; an embrace of American checks and balances, with the Supreme Court at the forefront; and a commitment to U.S. global leadership and primacy. On the face of it, all of these were disparate ends, which need not go together and might well be in profound tension. But the narrative that developed around the Constitution cohered these ends into a single, pervasive American story.
This story explained why the Constitution promoted a just political, economic, and social order, and why its principles should be replicated everywhere. The Constitution became the normative core of what magazine magnate Henry Luce famously dubbed the American Century. When Obama stood in Philadelphia before a picture of James Madison accompanied by the words “Writing the Constitution” during his 2020 Democratic National Convention speech, it was this interrelated set of commitments that he invoked as the bulwark against Trumpism.
Today there is a striking gulf between how most societies approach their constitutions and how Americans treat their text. In the last two centuries, some 220 countries have appeared on the world stage, and they have produced a remarkable 900 written constitutions. The sheer numbers are telling: for the most part, constitutions are treated instrumentally, in service of a polity’s needs. When legal-political orders break down or social upheaval brings new alliances to power, old documents are jettisoned, and new ones written.
By contrast, it can be hard for twenty-first-century Americans to conceive of their national project without the original text. And this can place left activists in an uncomfortable position. Maintaining contact with society seems to require participating, however ambivalently, in the dominant devotional culture. Indeed, one saw this dynamic at play even in Occupy Wall Street, which launched on September 17, or Constitution Day, commemorating the day in 1787 that the drafters signed their document.
This participation must be resisted at all costs. Most obviously, it ignores how today’s institutional problems are not simply unintended and contingent but are at least in part a product of the framers’ hostility toward real democracy. Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others infused the constitutional order with veto points precisely to contain the central political tool that poorer citizens had to pursue their needs: the power of the vote. These features also fit hand in glove with the long history of racial subordination: white elites have benefited greatly from both state-based representation and the various checks embedded throughout the constitutional system, which create partisan incentives at the national level to avoid meaningful reform. The framers placed this constitutional system largely beyond popular revision through an incredibly elaborate amendment process. The result is a system that disadvantages those with the fewest resources, while allowing those with power to use a fragmented political system to quietly preserve their interests.
Any call to remain true to the Constitution amounts to an invitation to hold firm to the very arrangements that have facilitated, both today and in the past, the conditions that the left seeks to transform. Even if the goal is making Trump and Trumpism no longer politically viable, the Constitution is not our friend. It is the mechanism that put Trump into office in 2016 after losing the popular vote, and it repeatedly elevates the worst tendencies in political life.
The flaws of constitutional culture extend well beyond technical debates. For starters, they feed a climate of deep disillusionment, in which the public holds out the hope that the political class can resolve key concerns, only to be disappointed time and again. One can see this dynamic in the general paralysis that marks every new act of military-style gun violence, whether that violence targets school children or the political class itself, including Trump. Institutional blockages spread a destabilizing sense of collective helplessness, reinforcing the experience of American violence as ubiquitous and untamable.
And when the governing system isn’t reduced to paralysis, constitutional meaning is overwhelmingly shaped by the interests and whims of federal judges. Even when critical of the right-wing Supreme Court, debates about interpretation tend to take their lead from the issues these same judges choose to address and what they write and care about. This approach misses the fundamental issue: all of the judges, whether liberal or conservative, are members of a governing elite that by training and professional acculturation has become deeply invested in the existing constitutional state. There are profound differences in how liberal and conservative judges venerate the Constitution, with major consequences for contemporary politics—especially in the age of Trump. Yet for all the meaningful conflicts within the judicial elite, deeper structural flaws are excised from public debate.
Whether living constitutionalist or originalist, all the judges are institutional players who have drunk deeply from the well of U.S. exceptionalism. This is a longstanding problem. But given today’s real institutional crises, it is especially troubling to have a political culture that hands the reins of constitutional authorship, memory, and knowledge to such officials—and to a small class of lawyers who revere them—to the exclusion of nearly everyone else.
This state of affairs not only circumscribes domestic reform conversations. It also reinforces the global terms of American international police power. That shared constitutional story takes for granted an inherent American anti-imperialism. Despite this prevailing narrative, the twentieth-century ties between market capitalism, global primacy, and constitutionalism were cemented in ways that repeatedly entailed real repression both at home and overseas.
When U.S. security interests—read as the world’s interests—were at stake, legal constraints were often set aside in the name of preserving constitutional democracy. In this way, U.S. primacy was ideologically grounded in what amounted to a form of imperial constitutionalism. Constitutional veneration created the terms for inclusion and rights protection, and it could in key moments push back against specific abuses. Indeed, the centrality of constitutionalism to national self-understanding is part of why the United States played such a key role in the establishment of everything from the UN Declaration of Human Rights to the Geneva Conventions. But that same constitutional culture also, perhaps counterintuitively, buttressed an overarching account of American power and purpose that legitimated an ever-expanding security state along with continuous interventionism. Since only the United States could safeguard the world, American-backed violence was routinely repackaged as essential for the enjoyment of constitutional principles at home and abroad.
The result has been a vision of constitutionalism that has gone hand in hand with unchecked and coercive power. Indeed, from the Philippines after 1898 to Vietnam and Latin America during the Cold War to Israel/Palestine today, U.S. officials have time and again proclaimed intense violence against civilians as in line with its vision of constitutionalism. As the historian Geoffrey Robinson writes, even in the extreme case of 1960s Indonesia, the U.S. government defended Suharto’s brutal takeover “as ‘constitutional’ and ‘bloodless,’ as though it were quite unrelated to the violence that preceded it and was still going on in some parts of the country.”
When this narrative has proved implausible, officials typically treat constitutional violations as unfortunate necessities or mere aberrations. One can see this now in the context of Gaza. Officials have repeatedly responded to the presentation of evidence that the United States is facilitating mass violations of international law with displays of outrage at their critics. The very idea that American behavior could itself be a basic threat to the rule of law is treated as insulting. For those like Joe Biden, just as with George W. Bush during the “war on terror,” military action and support preserve an overarching “rules-based order,” grounded in American-style constitutionalism. This is the case even though the practical effect of U.S. behavior is a systematic tearing down of those rules.
If it’s clear that the left must break from the culture of constitutional veneration, what is the alternative? Simply ignoring or rejecting the constitutional domain won’t work. There is an understandable sense that constitutional matters feel abstract and technical, far removed from the material and moral concerns—over race, the economy, and war—that reverberate in American life. Talking about them can appear to be a proceduralist distraction. But the current rules of the constitutional game place a massive thumb on the scale when it comes to what issues are debated and what policy outcomes result. The material and moral changes Americans want cannot be separated from the underlying structure of legal-political institutions. They depend on alterations to the democratic infrastructure of the country.
All of this suggests that it is vital for movements and activists to see the material and moral and the constitutional as two sides of the same coin—and to have a clear constitutional politics. At some point in the future, this constitutional politics may even concern things as seemingly remote from the present day as holding a new convention and rewriting the document. Even in our moment, it is vital to determine how to engage with these flawed institutions. For instance, although one may be rightly opposed to the power the judges currently wield, activists still must determine when and how to use the courts, if only to hold those in power to their own rules. Movements also need to consider which reforms to the current constitutional landscape—and which legal-political pathways (legislation, amendment, and so on)—can help to cultivate a new social order. In other words, movements must reclaim ownership over the Constitution.
During the twentieth century, left constitutional alternatives—especially those tied to socialist democracy and anti-colonial politics—were written out of the national narrative. In the official story, constitutionalism meant embracing the 1787 Constitution and a Madisonian inheritance. Perhaps for that very reason, these forgotten left traditions offer a striking guide to both the limitations of that inheritance and the potential pathways to a different system.
Take the Socialist Party of America (SPA), which in the early twentieth century placed extensive emphasis on constitutional change. Their end goal was nothing less than overcoming capitalism itself. Party activists and allied reformers, including Eugene Debs, Crystal Eastman, and even W.E.B. Du Bois, sought a society in which mass publics could intervene continuously to ensure that both the economy and state met popular needs. Socialists had no desire to fetishize some new fundamental law, but they understood that without clear constitutional politics their broader agenda would be nearly impossible to implement.
With respect to the institutions of representative government, socialist constitutional ideas are an archive of possibility. SPA reforms included eliminating the Senate and the Electoral College; breaking up the system of state-based representation; extending voting rights; implementing proportional representation across government (today, for instance, this could entail having multimember House districts); constraining presidential power; reforming the bench; and simplifying the amendment process so that constitutional questions need not be funneled into the courts.
The aim of these reforms was to create a legal-political system that empowered the many rather than the few, and that based constitutionalism in legislative and popular majorities. These majorities would be entrenched through strong intermediate institutions, like unions, that protected constituents and amplified their needs. For this reason, socialists viewed measures that safeguarded striking and voicing political dissent, and that ensured socioeconomic rights, as democracy-enhancing reforms—of a piece with alterations to the electoral system.
Black and Indigenous activists—including Du Bois, radical labor figure James Boggs, the Black Panther Party’s Afeni Shakur, and Hank Adams and others involved in the Trail of Broken Treaties—contended that real changes to the state and the economy would not endure unless Americans also revised the society’s colonial infrastructure. In 1970 the Panthers engaged in a constitution-writing exercise, the People’s Revolutionary Constitution Convention, in which they sought to incorporate a set of explicitly decolonial and anti-imperial commitments into a new document worthy of a multiracial democracy.
Such demands at the time involved ending the colonial status of existing territories; sharing real sovereignty with Native nations; paying reparations, at home and abroad; expanding socioeconomic rights and wealth transfers, including through public and universal provision of food, housing, child care, medical care, reproductive rights, non-exploitative work, and a guaranteed income; demobilizing and reimagining the military and policing; decriminalizing the border; and providing legal and political avenues for the remedy of both historic colonial crimes and ongoing state violence.
One of the great struggles of earlier left constitutional politics concerned the difficulty of linking these two projects—democracy and decolonization. In the years leading up to the New Deal, the former project vied for political preeminence. But the latter has never received anything close to majority support. For many Americans, the idea of a colonial accounting is seen as a zero-sum threat to status, wealth, and even physical safety.
These fears ignore the actual content of what Black and Indigenous activists sought—an inclusive society for all in which everyone could achieve meaningful freedom and protection from violence. As Boggs declared of the United States, white and non-white communities were permanently and mutually entangled. Decolonization could not proceed through removal or separation; it entailed “tackling” together “all the problems of this society, because at the root of all the problems of black people is the same structure and the same system which is at the root of all the problems of all people.”
Figures like Du Bois and Boggs aimed to build a broad and coalitional majority on behalf of both decolonization and democracy. Such a project is no doubt deeply challenging, even more so when thinking globally about obligations to those subject to U.S. power. But despite these difficulties, a number of figures have risked safety and status to further these efforts during all the great U.S. transformations, including Thaddeus Stevens during Reconstruction, Eugene Debs in the Gilded Age, and New York City politician Vito Marcantonio in his fight for Puerto Rican independence and against Cold War orthodoxy. They believed that the only path forward entailed the establishment of equal and effective freedom for everyone.
The central constitutional need today is perhaps not even directly about legal or political process. Even minor constitutional improvements—like making Washington, D.C., a state—are rendered impossible by the institutional veto-power of a right-wing minority. The only way out of this bind is a dramatic extension of the mass base and organizational authority of the left. This means that along with clarity about legal-political reform ideas and strategies, current efforts must prioritize strengthening the power of left constituencies, especially cross-racial and working-class groups.
Take expanded voting rights and initiatives like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which deepen the capacity of workers to join unions and to strike. Both heighten the bargaining power and social position of working people and broaden the sites where they can exercise self-governance. These levers are best understood as pragmatic reforms with revolutionary implications—small-scale shifts that can alter how contests with employers proceed, what types of legislation are possible to enact, and, critically, who exercises real decision-making. The question of which specific lever to pursue—whether directly or indirectly focused on constitutional design—in any given moment will inevitably be a matter of political judgment tied to time and place. The answer depends on a combination of factors, including organizational strength, the viability of reform success, and, most important, the capacity of that lever to open up even greater transformative space.
Such strategic assessment requires appreciating that the greater the capacity mobilized coalitions develop in one setting—whether at the ballot or in the workplace—the more likely it is that those coalitions will have the ability to protect essential rights from attack or to pursue their interests in other domains. These efforts aim to create a “government behind the government,” a large-scale institutional infrastructure that projects political power and promotes a left cultural world. In this context, left ideas—including those around constitutional transformation—spread as an organic part of the everyday experiences of working people. Indeed, it is not a surprise that the precondition in recent decades for many of the large-scale projects of constitution-writing around the world was precisely such parallel left power—vibrant union, church, and party institutions. These institutions linked people’s concrete material demands and organic sense of the world around them, to a vision of a transformed governing order.
It is only through building this sort of power that the left can challenge the presumptive nationalism of conventional constitutional reform discussion, where the focus is on technical matters around a single country’s internal processes, independent of what officials may or may not do on the global stage. That nationalist horizon is especially troubling given that the existing culture of U.S. constitutional veneration is profoundly imperial, promoting an intuitive linkage between defenses of democracy and of American discretionary power. A competing internationalist vision of constitutional transformation would promote issues like immigrant freedom—such as basing the vote on residency not citizenship—and security state reform as basic constitutional principles. Defending these policies are not legal-political sideshows. They are essential to creating a constitutional culture distinct from the dominant one of the American Century, and to promoting an organic left world in which awareness of the ties binding foreign and domestic are simply part of the political drinking water.
Ultimately, in the United States only mass movement and left power building can overcome the obstacles thrown up by a sclerotic legal-political system. Virtually any desired change to the constitutional order—reforms to House districting, Senate structure, Supreme Court composition—is stymied by the existing rules. This means that real legal-political shifts will almost inevitably proceed by breaking from at least some of those rules. An easy case would be abandoning the Senate filibuster. But there are a number of harder cases. For example, although a simplified amendment process is essential to reducing the Supreme Court’s dominance over constitutional politics, such a change may only be possible by deviating from the explicit terms set out in Article V of the Constitution (which governs how to amend the document).
Indeed, democratization and constitutional rupture have tended to go hand in hand in the United States because significant moments of democratic struggle—whether during Reconstruction, the New Deal, or the civil rights movement—faced violent resistance from the right, buttressed by the existing rules. This is the unavoidable truth of the American constitutional experience, largely occluded by the twentieth-century culture of veneration. Each of those periods were times of intense political conflict.
Today, activists need to think deeply about the type of majority coalition that can authorize such change. Trump could be defeated at the polls in November or even face real criminal consequences, but both outcomes are on shaky ground partly due to the legal-political structures. They have allowed right-wing judges to encase Trump in a cocoon of impunity. At the same time, the interplay of constitutional and sub-constitutional election rules has left the Democratic Party beholden to the psychology of an isolated sitting president, bereft of the flexibility other systems provide for building unified fronts against the far right.
Still, if and when Trump exits the political stage, that will not be the end of Trumpism. The prevailing state of American conservatism means that real change will likely require both taking apart the right in its current form and repudiating the institutional mechanisms it employs to project unrepresentative power. Such circumstances beg the question of when and how to diverge from existing rules. Ultimately, any such break can only be justified if it is in service of deeper democratic norms and commitments. This underscores the critical need for building a transformative left majority. Since decisions about rupture are matters of political ethics and judgment, their legitimacy rests on whether reform movements enjoy real popular authority for their actions.
There remains a pervasive, and no doubt understandable, wish—especially in liberal circles—that change in the United States could proceed without the hard forms of organizing and political struggle required to generate such legitimacy. But the country faces a stark choice: to persist on its present course or to collectively press ahead for genuine reform, with all the real risks that may entail. We should be clear-eyed in assessing these risks, and only pursue rupture when mass politics can validate and deepen specific efforts.
As a note of caution, for instance, a constitutional convention right now does not seem wise due to a combination of factors, beginning with the emboldened nature of the far right. In addition, Article V, which governs conventions, places great emphasis on the states for ratification, and it is hard to imagine a transformative left agenda succeeding within those procedural terms. But that does not mean that such possibilities should be permanently banished or that activists should not think about how they would stage a truly democratic convention and ratification.
In fact, thinking about how such a project should proceed is essential if for no other reason than that the right—through initiatives like the Convention of States—has a massive head start. The Convention of States has succeeded in getting nineteen of the thirty-four states required under Article V to agree to convening a constitutional convention and has clear ideas of how to arrange that convention to lock in right-wing ends. Those regressive goals include changes allowing a “simple majority of the states” to nullify federal decisions. This would empower state-level Republican officials to reject policies they oppose—a further anti-democratic backstop for when their views become so unpopular that even the current constitutional order cannot overcome popular sentiment.
A common liberal rejoinder to left critiques of the Constitution is the idea that constitutional fidelity has generated ameliorative change in the past. To abandon it now, so the argument goes, is to court irrelevancy or, worse, right-wing extremism. But it is also vital to appreciate that past reforms were deeply connected to contingent historical conditions—from the New Deal and its working-class supermajorities to the Cold War and global decolonization. These contingent conditions pushed the center-right toward accommodations on issues of race and the economy in ways that diverge dramatically from the long history before and after. Simply put, the unusual circumstances that generated the mid-twentieth century settlement are gone. And today it is precisely the existing arrangements that empower forces of extremism.
If anything, American politics now is littered with the costs of that earlier compact—from the failure to address deep-rooted legal-political flaws to the entrenchment of a discretionary and interventionist security apparatus. Our times require facing squarely the institutions and the broader constitutional culture forged during the American Century. Trumpism makes this evident at home, just as U.S. support for extreme violence makes it evident abroad. Since both projects—constitutionalism and global primacy—were fused together, it is not surprising that they are also breaking down together.
The political lessons liberals and centrists learned about pragmatism may no longer speak to the present, when the United States lacks the political resources and institutions to address our prevailing crises. Simply reaffirming the old-time religion amounts to an exercise in nostalgia. We need an expansive constitutional vision for the country, one capable of reconstructing the domestic and global face of American statecraft and power. The aim is a society that extends meaningful freedom to all at home and embraces actual self-determination for all abroad. Thinking about how to generate large-scale systematic change and working to bring it about might sound utopian, but it is in reality the most pragmatic agenda—even if the end goal remains distant from our present moment.
The obvious weaknesses of the current Constitution create more space for articulating a left constitutional alternative than perhaps at any time since the 1930s and 1940s. There is an opening to break from constitutional devotion and to think in the most fundamental terms about the society Americans want. If the country is now adrift, this is partly due to a narrowing of horizons. For that reason, a truly emancipatory and anti-imperial constitutionalism may be what our moment demands.
This essay is drawn from the newly published book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them. Reprinted with permission from the University of Chicago Press.
Aziz Rana teaches law at Boston College. He is the author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them and The Two Faces of American Freedom.
The U.S. Constitution is profoundly undemocratic, as generations of abolitionists, socialists, labor activists, and Black radicals have loudly proclaimed. Just as it did a hundred years ago, the document creates an infrastructure for minority rule—a specific and very American brand of white authoritarianism. This is because the Constitution organizes representation around states rather than the principle of one person, one vote. And it fragments and undermines popular authority through endless veto points. The consequences today are numerous: presidents elected who lose the popular vote; a Senate that gives vastly more power to voters in Wyoming than in California; an impassible route for constitutional amendments; a tiny, lifetime-appointed Supreme Court that repudiates popular policies, including the right to abortion, and elevates the president above the law—abetting a culture of impunity.
Despite these problems, in some corners the document inspires an almost religious devotion. Politicians of both major parties routinely praise its genius. This eighteenth-century text, so the argument goes, highlights how the United States has been engaged in what Barack Obama called “an improbable experiment in democracy” from its founding, grounded in principles of equality, self-government, and personal liberty. It is the key to what makes America exceptional and the reason the country offers a universal model of what Abraham Lincoln called “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
How did Americans get to a place where their national story is so fundamentally wrapped up with a constitution that fails them? And given this culture of reverence, how should the American left orient itself toward the document? Especially at a moment when the disconnect between nationalist narrative and institutional reality seems unbridgeable, it is essential for left voices to disavow constitutional veneration. But such a position will require more than rejectionism. It will mean articulating an alternative vision for constitutional politics. Just as critical, this vision will have to extend beyond matters of procedural design to tell a genuinely democratic and anti-imperial story of American possibility.
When scholars talk about reverence for the Constitution, they often say that things have always been this way. And it’s true that Constitution worship goes back nearly to the country’s founding. In 1838, a young Lincoln famously called on every American to “pledge [their] life” to the Constitution, with the hope that it would “become the political religion of the nation.”
But even if bathed in quasi-religious language, Americans’ relationship to the text was very different in the nineteenth century. The Constitution now is inexorably joined to what Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal famously labeled in 1944 the “American creed”—the idea that the United States stands for the promise of equal liberty for all. Black and anti-slavery radicals voiced this narrative during and after the Civil War, but it faced systematic pushback and real marginalization by white opponents of racial equality.
As recently as 1900, the more entrenched national story, promoted by President Theodore Roosevelt and famed historian Frederick Jackson Turner, revolved around Euro-American continental conquest and settlement. As Roosevelt titled his 1889 work, the mission was “the winning of the West.”
For nineteenth-century politicians, the Constitution enabled this ongoing conquest, partly through its compromise on slavery. Northern elites like Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, who opposed slavery, nonetheless accepted that while the Constitution allowed the government to prevent the extension of slavery into new territories, slavery “as far as it existed” at the founding, was not, in Webster’s words, “to be disturbed or interfered with by the new general government.” Such compromise was permissible because it ensured the nation’s existence, promoting shared goals of prosperity, independence, and territorial growth—goals vital in any region.
These understandings are antithetical to the current American story. A national narrative built around accommodating slavery to facilitate the expropriation of Native lands would be seen as deeply immoral today. But in the mid-nineteenth century, Webster’s constitution of compromise circulated far more broadly within elite Northern political culture than anything resembling Obama’s reading.
By 1900, discussions of the Constitution focused on many of the same anti-democratic ills that are currently part of political debate. The Civil War had underscored the explicit failures of the founding compromise. The effects of industrialization and resulting class conflict also raised fundamental issues about the legitimacy of the prevailing order. The system’s endless veto points made it nearly impossible for the poor to use elections to better their lot, while business elites wielded outsized power at virtually every level of government.
Even Euro-Americans who accepted as given their society’s racial hierarchy increasingly questioned the Constitution. These years saw the growth of a substantial cottage industry of constitutionally skeptical scholarly and journalistic writing contending that the document was nothing less than “a class instrument directed against the democracy,” as the Progressive era historian Vernon Parrington wrote. In the early twentieth century, it would have been easier to imagine the old text being rewritten than to conceive of a twenty-first-century America that deifies the Constitution as embodying commitments to “colorblind” equal liberty.
What changed? Such questions are rarely asked, and when they are the answers almost never look to the outside world. Since the United States is so distinctive, its development, some assume, cannot be a product of international processes and comparative practices. In truth, however, alongside domestic developments, the modern veneration of the Constitution is directly related to the rise of the United States from regional power to the world’s dominant global force, over the course of two world wars, international decolonization, and the Cold War.
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the collapse of the old European imperial powers as well as the rise of national resistance movements across the Global South. In this brave new world, both formerly colonized peoples and Western governments needed to reconstruct their national stories and positions. Emerging states sought to foster identities and institutions that were politically coherent and legible at the international level. Similarly, in an effort to gain influence and moral authority, the United States and the European imperial powers had to recast their country’s narratives in ways that resonated around the world.
In this context, constitution-writing became central to America’s global identity. To an important degree, constitution-writing—conceived of as a foundational activity in the construction of a self-controlling and self-representing polity—had already attained a symbolic status in American life. When the United States adopted its federal Constitution in the late eighteenth century, constitution-writing projects were historical anomalies. The document marked the United States as an experiment distinct from most European polities.
Constitution-writing proliferated globally through the slow disintegration of the imperial model and the emergence of newly independent nation-states. In a world in which the challenges and needs of new polities moved to the forefront of global discussions, American foreign policymakers came to understand and to position the United States as the original constitutional, anti-imperial paradigm—the first among equals, both temporally and substantively. In joining creedal ideals with veneration specifically for the 1787 Constitution, governing elites developed a uniquely American account of liberal nationalism, attuned to the ideological needs of global primacy in an age of decolonization and rising non-white political power.
Politicians and commentators began to distinguish U.S. global dominance from the old imperial orders. Officials explained their presence on the world stage not as the basis for extraction and conquest, but as a projection of the basic values and ideals of constitutionalism itself. American international police power was justified because of the country’s organizing principles, centered on constitutional democracy and independence, which it aimed to spread around the world.
Whenever the country intervened militarily abroad or asserted its economic and political might, it did so in the service of noble ends. Constitutionalism provided both an ideological basis for international arrangements under American supervision as well as the model for how foreign states should themselves be domestically structured. For this reason, it was inappropriate to compare the United States to other empires; its interests matched the world’s interests.
Of course, many countries have narratives of exceptionalism. European powers justified their nations’ global authority with claims of special historic destiny and the gifts that they alone could offer the world.
But the unique American fusion of this narrative with creed and Constitution resonated globally. At the same time, the narrative was flexible enough to accommodate domestic social struggles, especially over race. Cold War–era Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, which declared “separate but equal” schooling inherently unequal, reinforced domestic associations of the Constitution—and the federal judiciary—with key civil liberties and civil rights victories.
Equally significant, the historical contingencies of the mid-twentieth century—for instance, the strength of the labor movement—created supermajorities behind the New Deal and the postwar political settlement, which defused class conflict and entrenched a limited welfare state. Such developments, however exceptional within the context of American history, calmed worries that the constitutional order was an immovable roadblock to even minor social improvements.
Over time, these international and domestic factors fostered a romance around the Constitution, a heartfelt and genuine belief among politicians and many citizens—on both center-left and center-right—in the genius of the American system. Critically, these voices, from John McCain to Obama, did not proceed cynically, reaching for venerative arguments simply as a veil to justify assertions of power. They worked and sacrificed for this vision, and it gave their lives a larger meaning.
There were other ideological pillars of this constitutional creed: an anti-totalitarian account of individual liberty and market capitalism; an embrace of American checks and balances, with the Supreme Court at the forefront; and a commitment to U.S. global leadership and primacy. On the face of it, all of these were disparate ends, which need not go together and might well be in profound tension. But the narrative that developed around the Constitution cohered these ends into a single, pervasive American story.
This story explained why the Constitution promoted a just political, economic, and social order, and why its principles should be replicated everywhere. The Constitution became the normative core of what magazine magnate Henry Luce famously dubbed the American Century. When Obama stood in Philadelphia before a picture of James Madison accompanied by the words “Writing the Constitution” during his 2020 Democratic National Convention speech, it was this interrelated set of commitments that he invoked as the bulwark against Trumpism.
Today there is a striking gulf between how most societies approach their constitutions and how Americans treat their text. In the last two centuries, some 220 countries have appeared on the world stage, and they have produced a remarkable 900 written constitutions. The sheer numbers are telling: for the most part, constitutions are treated instrumentally, in service of a polity’s needs. When legal-political orders break down or social upheaval brings new alliances to power, old documents are jettisoned, and new ones written.
By contrast, it can be hard for twenty-first-century Americans to conceive of their national project without the original text. And this can place left activists in an uncomfortable position. Maintaining contact with society seems to require participating, however ambivalently, in the dominant devotional culture. Indeed, one saw this dynamic at play even in Occupy Wall Street, which launched on September 17, or Constitution Day, commemorating the day in 1787 that the drafters signed their document.
This participation must be resisted at all costs. Most obviously, it ignores how today’s institutional problems are not simply unintended and contingent but are at least in part a product of the framers’ hostility toward real democracy. Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others infused the constitutional order with veto points precisely to contain the central political tool that poorer citizens had to pursue their needs: the power of the vote. These features also fit hand in glove with the long history of racial subordination: white elites have benefited greatly from both state-based representation and the various checks embedded throughout the constitutional system, which create partisan incentives at the national level to avoid meaningful reform. The framers placed this constitutional system largely beyond popular revision through an incredibly elaborate amendment process. The result is a system that disadvantages those with the fewest resources, while allowing those with power to use a fragmented political system to quietly preserve their interests.
Any call to remain true to the Constitution amounts to an invitation to hold firm to the very arrangements that have facilitated, both today and in the past, the conditions that the left seeks to transform. Even if the goal is making Trump and Trumpism no longer politically viable, the Constitution is not our friend. It is the mechanism that put Trump into office in 2016 after losing the popular vote, and it repeatedly elevates the worst tendencies in political life.
The flaws of constitutional culture extend well beyond technical debates. For starters, they feed a climate of deep disillusionment, in which the public holds out the hope that the political class can resolve key concerns, only to be disappointed time and again. One can see this dynamic in the general paralysis that marks every new act of military-style gun violence, whether that violence targets school children or the political class itself, including Trump. Institutional blockages spread a destabilizing sense of collective helplessness, reinforcing the experience of American violence as ubiquitous and untamable.
And when the governing system isn’t reduced to paralysis, constitutional meaning is overwhelmingly shaped by the interests and whims of federal judges. Even when critical of the right-wing Supreme Court, debates about interpretation tend to take their lead from the issues these same judges choose to address and what they write and care about. This approach misses the fundamental issue: all of the judges, whether liberal or conservative, are members of a governing elite that by training and professional acculturation has become deeply invested in the existing constitutional state. There are profound differences in how liberal and conservative judges venerate the Constitution, with major consequences for contemporary politics—especially in the age of Trump. Yet for all the meaningful conflicts within the judicial elite, deeper structural flaws are excised from public debate.
Whether living constitutionalist or originalist, all the judges are institutional players who have drunk deeply from the well of U.S. exceptionalism. This is a longstanding problem. But given today’s real institutional crises, it is especially troubling to have a political culture that hands the reins of constitutional authorship, memory, and knowledge to such officials—and to a small class of lawyers who revere them—to the exclusion of nearly everyone else.
This state of affairs not only circumscribes domestic reform conversations. It also reinforces the global terms of American international police power. That shared constitutional story takes for granted an inherent American anti-imperialism. Despite this prevailing narrative, the twentieth-century ties between market capitalism, global primacy, and constitutionalism were cemented in ways that repeatedly entailed real repression both at home and overseas.
When U.S. security interests—read as the world’s interests—were at stake, legal constraints were often set aside in the name of preserving constitutional democracy. In this way, U.S. primacy was ideologically grounded in what amounted to a form of imperial constitutionalism. Constitutional veneration created the terms for inclusion and rights protection, and it could in key moments push back against specific abuses. Indeed, the centrality of constitutionalism to national self-understanding is part of why the United States played such a key role in the establishment of everything from the UN Declaration of Human Rights to the Geneva Conventions. But that same constitutional culture also, perhaps counterintuitively, buttressed an overarching account of American power and purpose that legitimated an ever-expanding security state along with continuous interventionism. Since only the United States could safeguard the world, American-backed violence was routinely repackaged as essential for the enjoyment of constitutional principles at home and abroad.
The result has been a vision of constitutionalism that has gone hand in hand with unchecked and coercive power. Indeed, from the Philippines after 1898 to Vietnam and Latin America during the Cold War to Israel/Palestine today, U.S. officials have time and again proclaimed intense violence against civilians as in line with its vision of constitutionalism. As the historian Geoffrey Robinson writes, even in the extreme case of 1960s Indonesia, the U.S. government defended Suharto’s brutal takeover “as ‘constitutional’ and ‘bloodless,’ as though it were quite unrelated to the violence that preceded it and was still going on in some parts of the country.”
When this narrative has proved implausible, officials typically treat constitutional violations as unfortunate necessities or mere aberrations. One can see this now in the context of Gaza. Officials have repeatedly responded to the presentation of evidence that the United States is facilitating mass violations of international law with displays of outrage at their critics. The very idea that American behavior could itself be a basic threat to the rule of law is treated as insulting. For those like Joe Biden, just as with George W. Bush during the “war on terror,” military action and support preserve an overarching “rules-based order,” grounded in American-style constitutionalism. This is the case even though the practical effect of U.S. behavior is a systematic tearing down of those rules.
If it’s clear that the left must break from the culture of constitutional veneration, what is the alternative? Simply ignoring or rejecting the constitutional domain won’t work. There is an understandable sense that constitutional matters feel abstract and technical, far removed from the material and moral concerns—over race, the economy, and war—that reverberate in American life. Talking about them can appear to be a proceduralist distraction. But the current rules of the constitutional game place a massive thumb on the scale when it comes to what issues are debated and what policy outcomes result. The material and moral changes Americans want cannot be separated from the underlying structure of legal-political institutions. They depend on alterations to the democratic infrastructure of the country.
All of this suggests that it is vital for movements and activists to see the material and moral and the constitutional as two sides of the same coin—and to have a clear constitutional politics. At some point in the future, this constitutional politics may even concern things as seemingly remote from the present day as holding a new convention and rewriting the document. Even in our moment, it is vital to determine how to engage with these flawed institutions. For instance, although one may be rightly opposed to the power the judges currently wield, activists still must determine when and how to use the courts, if only to hold those in power to their own rules. Movements also need to consider which reforms to the current constitutional landscape—and which legal-political pathways (legislation, amendment, and so on)—can help to cultivate a new social order. In other words, movements must reclaim ownership over the Constitution.
During the twentieth century, left constitutional alternatives—especially those tied to socialist democracy and anti-colonial politics—were written out of the national narrative. In the official story, constitutionalism meant embracing the 1787 Constitution and a Madisonian inheritance. Perhaps for that very reason, these forgotten left traditions offer a striking guide to both the limitations of that inheritance and the potential pathways to a different system.
Take the Socialist Party of America (SPA), which in the early twentieth century placed extensive emphasis on constitutional change. Their end goal was nothing less than overcoming capitalism itself. Party activists and allied reformers, including Eugene Debs, Crystal Eastman, and even W.E.B. Du Bois, sought a society in which mass publics could intervene continuously to ensure that both the economy and state met popular needs. Socialists had no desire to fetishize some new fundamental law, but they understood that without clear constitutional politics their broader agenda would be nearly impossible to implement.
With respect to the institutions of representative government, socialist constitutional ideas are an archive of possibility. SPA reforms included eliminating the Senate and the Electoral College; breaking up the system of state-based representation; extending voting rights; implementing proportional representation across government (today, for instance, this could entail having multimember House districts); constraining presidential power; reforming the bench; and simplifying the amendment process so that constitutional questions need not be funneled into the courts.
The aim of these reforms was to create a legal-political system that empowered the many rather than the few, and that based constitutionalism in legislative and popular majorities. These majorities would be entrenched through strong intermediate institutions, like unions, that protected constituents and amplified their needs. For this reason, socialists viewed measures that safeguarded striking and voicing political dissent, and that ensured socioeconomic rights, as democracy-enhancing reforms—of a piece with alterations to the electoral system.
Black and Indigenous activists—including Du Bois, radical labor figure James Boggs, the Black Panther Party’s Afeni Shakur, and Hank Adams and others involved in the Trail of Broken Treaties—contended that real changes to the state and the economy would not endure unless Americans also revised the society’s colonial infrastructure. In 1970 the Panthers engaged in a constitution-writing exercise, the People’s Revolutionary Constitution Convention, in which they sought to incorporate a set of explicitly decolonial and anti-imperial commitments into a new document worthy of a multiracial democracy.
Such demands at the time involved ending the colonial status of existing territories; sharing real sovereignty with Native nations; paying reparations, at home and abroad; expanding socioeconomic rights and wealth transfers, including through public and universal provision of food, housing, child care, medical care, reproductive rights, non-exploitative work, and a guaranteed income; demobilizing and reimagining the military and policing; decriminalizing the border; and providing legal and political avenues for the remedy of both historic colonial crimes and ongoing state violence.
One of the great struggles of earlier left constitutional politics concerned the difficulty of linking these two projects—democracy and decolonization. In the years leading up to the New Deal, the former project vied for political preeminence. But the latter has never received anything close to majority support. For many Americans, the idea of a colonial accounting is seen as a zero-sum threat to status, wealth, and even physical safety.
These fears ignore the actual content of what Black and Indigenous activists sought—an inclusive society for all in which everyone could achieve meaningful freedom and protection from violence. As Boggs declared of the United States, white and non-white communities were permanently and mutually entangled. Decolonization could not proceed through removal or separation; it entailed “tackling” together “all the problems of this society, because at the root of all the problems of black people is the same structure and the same system which is at the root of all the problems of all people.”
Figures like Du Bois and Boggs aimed to build a broad and coalitional majority on behalf of both decolonization and democracy. Such a project is no doubt deeply challenging, even more so when thinking globally about obligations to those subject to U.S. power. But despite these difficulties, a number of figures have risked safety and status to further these efforts during all the great U.S. transformations, including Thaddeus Stevens during Reconstruction, Eugene Debs in the Gilded Age, and New York City politician Vito Marcantonio in his fight for Puerto Rican independence and against Cold War orthodoxy. They believed that the only path forward entailed the establishment of equal and effective freedom for everyone.
The central constitutional need today is perhaps not even directly about legal or political process. Even minor constitutional improvements—like making Washington, D.C., a state—are rendered impossible by the institutional veto-power of a right-wing minority. The only way out of this bind is a dramatic extension of the mass base and organizational authority of the left. This means that along with clarity about legal-political reform ideas and strategies, current efforts must prioritize strengthening the power of left constituencies, especially cross-racial and working-class groups.
Take expanded voting rights and initiatives like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which deepen the capacity of workers to join unions and to strike. Both heighten the bargaining power and social position of working people and broaden the sites where they can exercise self-governance. These levers are best understood as pragmatic reforms with revolutionary implications—small-scale shifts that can alter how contests with employers proceed, what types of legislation are possible to enact, and, critically, who exercises real decision-making. The question of which specific lever to pursue—whether directly or indirectly focused on constitutional design—in any given moment will inevitably be a matter of political judgment tied to time and place. The answer depends on a combination of factors, including organizational strength, the viability of reform success, and, most important, the capacity of that lever to open up even greater transformative space.
Such strategic assessment requires appreciating that the greater the capacity mobilized coalitions develop in one setting—whether at the ballot or in the workplace—the more likely it is that those coalitions will have the ability to protect essential rights from attack or to pursue their interests in other domains. These efforts aim to create a “government behind the government,” a large-scale institutional infrastructure that projects political power and promotes a left cultural world. In this context, left ideas—including those around constitutional transformation—spread as an organic part of the everyday experiences of working people. Indeed, it is not a surprise that the precondition in recent decades for many of the large-scale projects of constitution-writing around the world was precisely such parallel left power—vibrant union, church, and party institutions. These institutions linked people’s concrete material demands and organic sense of the world around them, to a vision of a transformed governing order.
It is only through building this sort of power that the left can challenge the presumptive nationalism of conventional constitutional reform discussion, where the focus is on technical matters around a single country’s internal processes, independent of what officials may or may not do on the global stage. That nationalist horizon is especially troubling given that the existing culture of U.S. constitutional veneration is profoundly imperial, promoting an intuitive linkage between defenses of democracy and of American discretionary power. A competing internationalist vision of constitutional transformation would promote issues like immigrant freedom—such as basing the vote on residency not citizenship—and security state reform as basic constitutional principles. Defending these policies are not legal-political sideshows. They are essential to creating a constitutional culture distinct from the dominant one of the American Century, and to promoting an organic left world in which awareness of the ties binding foreign and domestic are simply part of the political drinking water.
Ultimately, in the United States only mass movement and left power building can overcome the obstacles thrown up by a sclerotic legal-political system. Virtually any desired change to the constitutional order—reforms to House districting, Senate structure, Supreme Court composition—is stymied by the existing rules. This means that real legal-political shifts will almost inevitably proceed by breaking from at least some of those rules. An easy case would be abandoning the Senate filibuster. But there are a number of harder cases. For example, although a simplified amendment process is essential to reducing the Supreme Court’s dominance over constitutional politics, such a change may only be possible by deviating from the explicit terms set out in Article V of the Constitution (which governs how to amend the document).
Indeed, democratization and constitutional rupture have tended to go hand in hand in the United States because significant moments of democratic struggle—whether during Reconstruction, the New Deal, or the civil rights movement—faced violent resistance from the right, buttressed by the existing rules. This is the unavoidable truth of the American constitutional experience, largely occluded by the twentieth-century culture of veneration. Each of those periods were times of intense political conflict.
Today, activists need to think deeply about the type of majority coalition that can authorize such change. Trump could be defeated at the polls in November or even face real criminal consequences, but both outcomes are on shaky ground partly due to the legal-political structures. They have allowed right-wing judges to encase Trump in a cocoon of impunity. At the same time, the interplay of constitutional and sub-constitutional election rules has left the Democratic Party beholden to the psychology of an isolated sitting president, bereft of the flexibility other systems provide for building unified fronts against the far right.
Still, if and when Trump exits the political stage, that will not be the end of Trumpism. The prevailing state of American conservatism means that real change will likely require both taking apart the right in its current form and repudiating the institutional mechanisms it employs to project unrepresentative power. Such circumstances beg the question of when and how to diverge from existing rules. Ultimately, any such break can only be justified if it is in service of deeper democratic norms and commitments. This underscores the critical need for building a transformative left majority. Since decisions about rupture are matters of political ethics and judgment, their legitimacy rests on whether reform movements enjoy real popular authority for their actions.
There remains a pervasive, and no doubt understandable, wish—especially in liberal circles—that change in the United States could proceed without the hard forms of organizing and political struggle required to generate such legitimacy. But the country faces a stark choice: to persist on its present course or to collectively press ahead for genuine reform, with all the real risks that may entail. We should be clear-eyed in assessing these risks, and only pursue rupture when mass politics can validate and deepen specific efforts.
As a note of caution, for instance, a constitutional convention right now does not seem wise due to a combination of factors, beginning with the emboldened nature of the far right. In addition, Article V, which governs conventions, places great emphasis on the states for ratification, and it is hard to imagine a transformative left agenda succeeding within those procedural terms. But that does not mean that such possibilities should be permanently banished or that activists should not think about how they would stage a truly democratic convention and ratification.
In fact, thinking about how such a project should proceed is essential if for no other reason than that the right—through initiatives like the Convention of States—has a massive head start. The Convention of States has succeeded in getting nineteen of the thirty-four states required under Article V to agree to convening a constitutional convention and has clear ideas of how to arrange that convention to lock in right-wing ends. Those regressive goals include changes allowing a “simple majority of the states” to nullify federal decisions. This would empower state-level Republican officials to reject policies they oppose—a further anti-democratic backstop for when their views become so unpopular that even the current constitutional order cannot overcome popular sentiment.
A common liberal rejoinder to left critiques of the Constitution is the idea that constitutional fidelity has generated ameliorative change in the past. To abandon it now, so the argument goes, is to court irrelevancy or, worse, right-wing extremism. But it is also vital to appreciate that past reforms were deeply connected to contingent historical conditions—from the New Deal and its working-class supermajorities to the Cold War and global decolonization. These contingent conditions pushed the center-right toward accommodations on issues of race and the economy in ways that diverge dramatically from the long history before and after. Simply put, the unusual circumstances that generated the mid-twentieth century settlement are gone. And today it is precisely the existing arrangements that empower forces of extremism.
If anything, American politics now is littered with the costs of that earlier compact—from the failure to address deep-rooted legal-political flaws to the entrenchment of a discretionary and interventionist security apparatus. Our times require facing squarely the institutions and the broader constitutional culture forged during the American Century. Trumpism makes this evident at home, just as U.S. support for extreme violence makes it evident abroad. Since both projects—constitutionalism and global primacy—were fused together, it is not surprising that they are also breaking down together.
The political lessons liberals and centrists learned about pragmatism may no longer speak to the present, when the United States lacks the political resources and institutions to address our prevailing crises. Simply reaffirming the old-time religion amounts to an exercise in nostalgia. We need an expansive constitutional vision for the country, one capable of reconstructing the domestic and global face of American statecraft and power. The aim is a society that extends meaningful freedom to all at home and embraces actual self-determination for all abroad. Thinking about how to generate large-scale systematic change and working to bring it about might sound utopian, but it is in reality the most pragmatic agenda—even if the end goal remains distant from our present moment.
The obvious weaknesses of the current Constitution create more space for articulating a left constitutional alternative than perhaps at any time since the 1930s and 1940s. There is an opening to break from constitutional devotion and to think in the most fundamental terms about the society Americans want. If the country is now adrift, this is partly due to a narrowing of horizons. For that reason, a truly emancipatory and anti-imperial constitutionalism may be what our moment demands.
This essay is drawn from the newly published book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them. Reprinted with permission from the University of Chicago Press.
Aziz Rana teaches law at Boston College. He is the author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them and The Two Faces of American Freedom.
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