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THE CONSTITUTION AND THE AMERICAN LEFT  
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Azia Rana
July 19, 2024
Dissent
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_ 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. _

Former President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2020 Democratic
National Convention (DNC), Dissent

 

_This essay is drawn from the newly published book
[[link removed]],_ The
Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That
Fails Them_. Reprinted with permission from the University of Chicago
Press. _

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 xxxxxx 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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]] “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
[[link removed]] 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.

_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._

_DISSENT is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it
quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual
journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has
published articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A.
Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin,
Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua
Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and
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