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CONSTITUTIONAL COLLAPSE  
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Aziz Rana
March 21, 2025
Sidecar, blog of New Left Review
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_ Trump/Musk are pursuing the collapse of the American constitutional
model, fundamentally altering the terrain on which the US left
operates, requiring an oppositional politics the country has not seen
since the time of FDR. _

Elon Musk with then-president-elect Donald Trump on a private plane
in November 2024, Office of Speaker Mike Johnson

 

For constitutional lawyers, Trump’s return to power has been a
vertiginous experience. The systematic violation of legal process and
longstanding constitutional norms has proceeded faster than one can
keep up with, resulting in over a hundred lawsuits and counting. Trump
has issued a flood of executive orders that explicitly violate
congressional law as well as the written text of the Constitution, on
everything from the denial of birthright citizenship, to crackdowns on
efforts at racial, gender and sexual orientation-based inclusion, to
the destruction of legislatively authorized government agencies. At
the same time, Elon Musk has boasted that he is pursuing a
‘corporate takeover’ of the federal government, aiming – through
mass firing, the selling off of government assets (including ‘443
federal properties’, potentially along with countless works of
public art) and the dismantling of vital services – to privatize
‘anything that can reasonably be privatized’: all in violation of
congressional and constitutional prohibitions on private citizens,
unconfirmed by the Senate, carrying out the work of senior government
officials.

These developments have led some commentators
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draw analogies between the American experience and that of post-Soviet
Russia in the 1990s. That period entailed the Russian state’s near
complete privatization and a massive redistribution of wealth into the
hands of a small number of kleptocrats, exempt from any sanctions
except those that their rivalries could impose on each other. But
there is perhaps a deeper connection to Russian history: the US
constitutional project in the twentieth century was forged through and
gained meaning from its antagonism with the Soviet Union. The basic
American terms – linking racial liberalism to a limited social
welfare state – were consolidated over the course of three critical
decades, from the 1930s New Deal to World War II, the Cold War and the
civil rights revolution of the 1960s.

Today, the Soviet Union is long gone. And now Trump (an elected
billionaire), Musk (an unelected and far wealthier billionaire), and a
small coterie of loyalists are pursuing a collapse of that competing
American constitutional model. Their effort does not clarify what is
to come. But it fundamentally alters the terrain on which the US left
operates, and will require a type of oppositional politics the country
has not seen since the years that ushered FDR into power.

*

To understand what is unfolding, it is necessary to grasp the content
of the US constitutional order
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This includes a series of ideological and institutional components, in
line with what Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 famously
labelled the ‘American creed’ – the idea that the United States
stood for the promise of equal liberty for all. At a time of global
rivalry with the Soviet Union over a decolonizing world, national
elites explicitly rallied to this creedal constitutional frame. Its
constitutive elements encompassed a reading of the Constitution as
committed to the steady amelioration of racial inequality grounded in
principles of anti-discrimination; an anti-totalitarian account of
civil liberty and speech rights; a defence of market capitalism,
partially hedged by a constitutionally entrenched regulatory and
social welfare state; an embrace of institutional checks and balances,
with the federal courts, particularly the Supreme Court, as the
ultimate arbiter of the law; and a commitment to US global primacy
organized through robust presidential power.

This iteration of American constitutionalism had both a domestic and
international face. Domestically, it created a set of shared
institutional and cultural practices. Republicans and Democrats
understood themselves as jointly stewarding an American hegemonic
project against the Soviet Union. Officials could toast their
electoral foes across the partisan aisle, because whatever their
internal differences, politicians and judges both had drunk deeply
from the well of American exceptionalism. Whatever the election
outcome, both sides were bound, above all, by a common national
narrative. This narrative – deepened by suffering and victory during
World War II and tested through ongoing rivalry with the Soviets –
assumed the genius of the constitutional founders, the near-ideal
quality of American institutions, and the unfolding internal progress
of American society.

Internationally, this narrative also allowed the US to project
authority on the global stage – propagating the mythology that its
constitutional commitments to equal liberty were interests shared by
everyone around the world. The result was an American postwar order
marked by two interconnected features – a focus on rules-based
legality, alongside the continual American defection from those rules,
whether in Vietnam or Gaza today. National elites saw US-generated
multilateral institutions as an expression of underlying American
constitutional values, and therefore critical to uphold. But they also
viewed global security as requiring the US to serve as an
international backstop. In effect, this created an endless balancing
act between promoting the rule of law and disobeying it through
military actions and interventions, covert and overt. Resulting
violations were justified as necessary to preserve collective
stability – no matter that things looked very different for those in
the crosshairs, especially in the previously colonized world.   

That a distinct twentieth-century US constitutional order emerged in
parallel with the Soviet Union is often elided, thanks in part to the
peculiar features associated with American institutions and its
national narrative. For starters, the US Constitution is notorious for
being perhaps the hardest
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the world to amend. Constitutional change does not typically occur
through formal alterations to the 1787 document, let alone through its
wholesale replacement, but through shifts in court-based
interpretations of the existing text along with the implementation of
landmark pieces of legislation that establish new terms for collective
life. Indeed, the present order was consolidated through the passage
of key mid-century bills – the Social Security Act, the National
Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the
Medicare Act – in conjunction with Supreme Court rulings that upheld
their constitutionality. Together, Congress and the courts broke
substantially from the preceding racial and economic order. Yet,
crucially, this meant that there was no rewritten twentieth-century
Constitution separate from an earlier one.

At the same time, the shared story about these legal shifts was that
they represented the fulfilment of an inherently liberal national
essence. In truth, the consolidation of this order had been a
contingent product of domestic and global mid-twentieth-century
developments, diverging markedly from the long-established structures
of explicit white-settler supremacy in the United States. But that
reality did not fit with the emerging national narrative – which
presented the US as committed, from its founding, to the egalitarian
principles of the Declaration of Independence, and thus on an
ineluctable path to this new model.

*

During his first two months back in office, Trump has placed
existential pressure on every element of this twentieth-century
compact. While his attacks on ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’
(DEI) use the official language of anti-discrimination, his executive
orders and Justice Department threats go further than merely
presenting white majorities as the real groups in need of protection.
They repudiate the Cold War liberal premise of racial inclusion as a
constitutional cornerstone. This repudiation of non-white presence
itself is what is at stake culturally and legally when Black senior
officials are fired, universities and companies are attacked for their
efforts at effective desegregation, and even government websites are
scrubbed of references to women and racial minorities.

Since the 1960s, racial liberalism has been perhaps the central
legitimating component of American constitutional life. For many
Americans, white and non-white, the legal uprooting of segregation was
definitive proof of the country’s underlying egalitarian promise.
Decisions like _Brown v. Board of Education_, which declared
‘separate but equal’ inherently unequal in 1954, convinced elites
and publics alike that US institutions, the Supreme Court chief among
them, could steer the ship in the direction of progress. Abroad, these
same changes were used to underscore the difference between American
hegemony and old European racial domination, and thus the worthiness
of US leadership over a largely non-white world. Trump’s attack on
USAID is telling in this context, because the agency was a critical
Cold War institution, founded in 1961, which linked the internal
American story of racial progress to a global one of US-led material
prosperity for all. Its destruction, alongside the threat of
withdrawal from multilateral bodies that the US itself established, is
a direct challenge to the global face of the American constitutional
project.

All of this makes clear that it is not just racial liberalism under
assault. Trump officials are unleashing presidential power in ways
that use the order’s internal tensions to collapse core
constitutional arrangements. We can see this with Trump’s efforts to
withhold funds, remove security clearances, ban ‘pro-diversity’
speech, or deport and potentially prosecute individuals for protest.
Of course, the mid-twentieth-century order itself was always marked by
McCarthyite tactics and the failure to live up to inclusive ideals –
whether through Japanese internment or the rights abuses during the
‘War on Terror’. Yet after the winding down of the 1950s Red
Scare, McCarthyism – as a project of stoking generalized fear –
was treated by political elites as essentially ‘un-American’ and
unconstitutional.

Such repressive practices never disappeared, but they were typically
restricted to relatively contained disfavoured groups, such as Black
radicals or Arab and Muslim critics of US foreign policy (particularly
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of Palestinian origin). In this way, Biden’s own support for
crackdowns on protest against the war on Gaza was of a piece with this
chequered post-Red Scare history. By contrast, Trump’s
administration, aided by dormant McCarthy-era and even 1790s security
provisions, has begun using Palestine-related activism to pursue a
sweeping suppression of noncitizen speech. It is also treating that
activism, as well as campus curricula and institutional practices
around ‘DEI’, as pretexts for an unprecedented assault on the
internal self-governance and academic freedom of universities. This
assault is part of an emerging attack on the broader organizational
life of the American centre and left – now targeting
Democratic-aligned law firms and potentially soon to include civil
society groups and fundraising platforms.

Trump officials’ deployment of unilateral presidential power to
dismantle the administrative state, potentially along with the major
social welfare achievements of the mid-twentieth century, operates in
a similar manner. It pushes on instabilities in the established
constitutional relationship between capitalism and regulation,
presidential and judicial power, in ways that make it increasingly
impossible for the old order to hold. American constitutional
statecraft has always displayed a classic dualism. The mid-century
compact was defined by both an imperial Supreme Court _and_ an
imperial presidency. In effect, the shared elite commitment to
American global dominance meant that the courts deferred to the
president on matters of national security, allowing presidents to
enjoy remarkably coercive authority overseas or at the border and to
operate in the foreign domain as an almost unchecked lawmaker.

Such deference was the product of a series of court decisions dating
from World War II and the Cold War in which the judges largely
refrained from interrogating security practices, such as communist
deportations or the initiation of the Vietnam War. This did not mean
that the courts never checked executive action in foreign affairs, but
it did mean that those moments of constraint operated against a
backdrop of general permissiveness. This deference ‘over there’
was combined with the courts’ exercising extensive controls on
issues considered domestic, to the extent that the federal judiciary
effectively served as a policymaking body whose final decisions
vis-à-vis the other branches were accepted without question. This
balance persisted because both courts and presidents largely accepted
that basic foreign/domestic division.

But as the US federal judiciary grew increasingly conservative, the
relationship between the presidency and the judiciary took on a new
dimension. Courts in the domestic arena began using that extensive
policymaking authority to chip away at economic regulation, and they
did so by expanding presidential power even at home. For decades,
conservative lawyers developed legal arguments about why legislatively
created agencies were a threat to a ‘unitary executive’ – the
internal authority of the president to decide what happens within the
executive branch, regardless of legislative directive. Recent court
decisions may not have dismantled the established agencies. But they
did two things at once: they gave judges more authority over agency
processes and determinations, undercutting longstanding regulatory
achievements. And they challenged whether New Deal-style legislation
could limit unilateral presidential say-so over the civil service. In
effect, conservative jurisprudence was quietly undermining the
foundations of the mid-century administrative state, giving right-wing
judges greater power to undercut agencies and future right-wing
presidents greater power to do the same.

And so, much as in other domains, Trump’s executive orders –
unilaterally dismantling federal institutions regardless of
congressional law or court injunctions – exploit instabilities
present in the constitutional system. As those around Trump understand
all too well, once agencies are shuttered, the staff are fired and the
buildings sold off, it will be extremely difficult to reconstitute the
previous administrative framework. Recent years may have been marked
by small-bore conservative judicial attacks on federal agencies, aided
by the piece-meal application of theories of executive power. Now,
Trump and his team are running with those theories, applying the
sledgehammer of an unconstrained imperial president – familiar from
overseas interventions – to the routine operation of domestic
statecraft. This is global authoritarianism come home.

*

How did the US get here? First of all, it is vital to appreciate that
American legal-political institutions are infamously undemocratic.
They are organized around a state-based system that assigns
representation geographically rather than to actual people, and
entails extensive veto points that fragment the power of the vote.
This fragmentation is achieved through the Electoral College, the
Senate, the structure and appointments process of the federal
judiciary, and the capacity of the states to gerrymander districts,
limit voting rights, or otherwise thwart popular national agendas. As
we have seen, it was only under the extraordinary circumstances of the
mid-twentieth century that the New Deal’s limited welfare state and
racial liberalism were constitutionalized. It required a remarkably
high degree of labour organizing and power against the backdrop of the
Great Depression. And later, it relied upon the spectre of the Soviet
Union, so that political elites were willing to pursue cross-party
compromise on behalf of racial reforms, understood by centre-left and
centre-right alike as a national security imperative.

But as the Cold War conflict retreated and, especially once the Soviet
Union collapsed, there was less pressure on an increasingly emboldened
right to remain committed to the mid-century constitutional compact.
This compact had always been stridently opposed by American
ethno-nationalism – a powerful and persistent force in collective
life, which did not simply disappear following the civil rights
achievements of the 1960s. While we tend to focus on how the Cold War
entailed the violent suppression in the US of socialists and other
left activists, the perceived need to rally against the Soviet Union
also induced right-wing national politicians to contain the far right,
in particular by engaging in a delicate dance with American white
nationalism – using ‘dog whistles’ to signal affinity while
still excluding certain explicit ideological positions.

Yet once the USSR was gone, we therefore witnessed the gradual
emergence of a reactionary right willing to defect systematically from
the existing economic and racial compact. Strategically, the right
became focused on using the instruments of minority rule in the
existing constitutional order to project power, regardless of whether
it represented a popular majority. Over time, institutional advantages
in state-based representation meant that it could capture the Supreme
Court, the Senate and even the presidency twice, despite losing the
popular vote. More profoundly, it built a culture within Republican
Party officialdom and its voting base that saw multi-racial democracy
as an almost existential threat.

At the same time, the constitutional order was suffering under the
weight of its own ideological and institutional limitations. The last
two decades were marked by a series of social crises – chief among
them the financial meltdown and its rippling after-effects – which
called for constitutional renewal. Yet the politicians of the 2000s
and 2010s, whether Bush and McCain or Obama, the Clintons and Biden,
were beholden to the old compact – centred on the genius of American
institutions, faith in market liberalism, the moral value of global
interventionism and the need for only minor racial reforms. The issue
of course was that these commitments had helped to generate many of
the country’s endemic problems and they certainly could not resolve
them now.

Meanwhile, the sclerotic nature of the constitutional system meant
that even when Democrats enjoyed control over the levers of
government, it became nearly impossible to address such matters.
Without the popular support of the New Deal era or the bipartisan
commitments to racial liberalism, virtually any significant Democratic
initiative was dead on arrival. Even if it passed the House of
Representatives, getting through a Senate with a filibuster required
60 out of 100 votes. But the Senate, due to the overrepresentation of
rural areas and small population centres was already massively tipped
in favour of the Republican minority. For Democrats getting 60 votes
therefore meant winning a supermajority on top of a supermajority. The
tools that forged the creedal constitutional compact were no longer
operative, and the resulting stalemate intensified the widespread
political disaffection.

The result was a near-ideal set of circumstances for the rise and now
the return of Trump. The preservation of a rigid twentieth-century
constitutional order, long past the historical moment that spawned it,
not only undermined necessary reforms and stoked frustration with
presidential incumbents; it also allowed Trump to gain office in 2016
without winning the popular vote and then to reconstruct the Supreme
Court along lines that were wildly out of step with public opinion.
When Trump tried to overturn the election result in 2020, the existing
institutions made it exceedingly difficult to impose any sanctions on
him, whether through impeachment, prosecution or removal from future
ballots. In reality, the institutions themselves had never done the
central work of facilitating reform or of heading off succession
crises; they had always depended on a high degree of elite cultural
cohesion – whether during the early republic or the Cold War civil
rights era. And now that cohesion was entirely gone.

The failures of the Supreme Court – which mid-century elites had
envisioned as inculcating shared values and containing conflict –
drive home the point. The Court, almost nakedly partisan, instead
played a crucial role in this breakdown, from unleashing right-wing
vote suppression to giving Trump near-blanket immunity for his efforts
to overthrow the 2020 election. And even before that, its decisions
opened the electoral floodgates to corporate money. The result today
is that someone like Musk can use his unlimited wealth to
single-handedly alter the electoral incentives of politicians,
especially within the Republican Party, since his primary campaign
spending can knock out targeted enemies at will.

*

Trump is thus well-situated to attempt a dismantling of the US’s
constitutional order. Unlike perhaps any politician in modern American
history, including 1930s FDR, he enjoys a remarkable ability to impose
party discipline on Republican politicians – a power Musk’s
pocketbook only intensifies. Trump may not be able to get an endorsed
candidate elected, but his connection to his electoral base means that
disfavoured candidates will almost certainly be cast out. In addition,
he seems driven by petty grievances and a personal desire for revenge;
hence the focus on pardoning his supporters and targeting anyone that
previously attempted to sanction him. This has enshrined the value of
personal loyalty and ensured that his most zealous supporters enjoy
significant policy influence. The upshot is a second term dominated by
far-right ideologues like Russell Vought of Project 2025, or Ed Martin
now at the Justice Department, who are far less motivated by electoral
calculations than the typical Republican official.

Similarly, Musk seems devoted to the accumulation of personal power
and self-enrichment, and driven by the related aim of eliminating the
US administrative state’s constraints on private business. His
attempts to fire federal employees _en masse_ is noteworthy in this
sense. While the New Deal never systematically contained ‘at will’
employment in the private sphere, it initiated federal employment
protections that restricted the forms of employer domination
experienced elsewhere. Musk’s aim is to end that constraint and
reduce all employment, public or private, to employer diktat. Although
these are clearly long-standing right-wing goals, Musk too is
operating in ways only tangentially driven by electoral calculations.
The party for Musk seems mostly a useful tool for freeing business
from democratic oversight.

This confluence of factors has produced a willingness to push far
beyond the typical barriers that have restrained Republicans in the
past. Yet the administration is nonetheless facing serious headwinds.
For starters, despite Trump’s talk of a mandate, he remains
historically unpopular, failing to reach 50% support in the November
election. His victory was essentially by default – a rejection of
the incumbent in a vote with lower turnout than in 2020. And despite
the rhetoric from Republicans that Trump is making good on his
electoral promises, in truth he denied that he was pursuing key
elements of this constitutional rupture when running for office –
declaring on the debate stage that ‘I have nothing to do with
Project 2025’. For many voters, Trump was seen in 2024 as a
‘moderate
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and not particularly ideologically committed – a perception that
aided his campaign.

While he may have a powerful base, it still remains a minority of
Americans. There is nothing even approaching majority support for this
far-right project. Indeed, the last decade has seen the deregulatory
vision of the neoliberal age fall increasingly out of favour.
Implementing an extreme version of it is only viable in the short term
because of the discipline Trump and Musk can impose on the party.

But the clock is ticking, both because of Trump’s age and because of
the two-term limit (the president’s narcissism means he seems to
have no interest in a succession plan). Indeed, a likely medium-term
outcome of the Trumpist assault is Democratic success in the 2026
midterms and a return to presidential power in 2028, given the
prevalence of anti-incumbent sentiment. As long as the United States
has more-or-less competitive elections, there is no clear pathway for
Trump, Vought, Musk, Martin and others to consolidate a new
constitutional order that replaces the old one. This is perhaps one
reason why Trumpists are ramping up the machinery of the state to
attack the institutional infrastructure of the Democratic Party –
its lawyers, its get-out-the-vote capacity and its NGO networks. Along
with punishing Trump opponents, one aim may be to restrict Democratic
electoral strength in ways that 2010s voter suppression efforts were
ultimately limited in achieving. While it is too early to predict how
this will play out, it is clear that the Trumpist base is not remotely
large enough to authorize and re-authorize such actions through
competitive elections.

This is not, however, to deny the potential effects of the ongoing
attack on the existing constitutional order. If Vought and Musk
succeed in dismantling large parts of the state’s regulatory and
social welfare apparatus, it will likely be impossible to reconstitute
in its previous form. Given the Trumpist control of the Supreme Court,
one can therefore imagine a mixed outcome, in which some of the
administration’s actions are ultimately deemed unconstitutional
while others are allowed to stand. Although this result may be enough
to satisfy centrists that the old order remains, the situation on the
ground will nonetheless be that of decimated regulatory capacity plus
the further gutting of racial reforms and basic rights for
noncitizens. Crucially, whereas core tenets of racial liberalism and
civil liberty had once been part of a shared elite compact, they may
now well stand or fall with each election season.   

Such an outcome speaks to how the Trumpist constitutional assault is
at root a cultural assault on the basic creedal assumptions forged
during the twentieth century. Far right politics in the US embraces a
vision of explicit and Christian ethno-nationalism alongside an
intense, acquisitive individualism. Normalizing such views is a
critical part of the overall politics. One can see it in White House
made or promoted videos that revel in cruelty toward immigrants or
that turn the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians into a joke about Trump
Towers in Gaza.

Indeed, the concrete attacks on the administrative state and on the
universities are very much of a piece with this aim to reconstitute
collective life on far-right terms. Even after extensive
privatization, the Trumpist state would still have a role to play, but
as a site of coercive power against perceived enemies and outsiders,
and as fount for the corrupt subsidization of kleptocratic insiders.
The Trumpist university would also have its function, but as an even
more extreme neoliberal engine of return on investment and tied to the
cultural promotion of ‘Western civilization’.

 *

What are the implications for the left? A common response to Trump’s
actions has been to rally around the Constitution and even around
faith that the courts will save the country. One sees this in the
assertion that by refusing to abide by court orders Trump has sparked
a ‘constitutional crisis’ or ‘constitutional stress test’ –
the implication is that everything could still revert to normal so
long as the officials listen to the judges. Against this notion, we
must reaffirm the fact that the constitutional system is what set the
stage for Trump’s rise, return and current assault. Given the degree
to which the federal bench is now shaped by the right, any revival of
faith in judges has more than a whiff of the establishment Democratic
desire to convince enough good Republicans to follow their better
natures and to defect from Trump – a project which has failed
repeatedly.

The reason to oppose Trump’s violation of court orders is not out of
a general faith in judges or constitutional norms. The paralyzed
nature of the constitutional system, complete with an unworkable
amendment process, meant that many of the country’s democratic
achievements – from Reconstruction to the New Deal – themselves
required some degree of norm-breaking. The great social movements of
the past, from abolition to civil rights, labour to women’s
suffrage, famously called for the defiance of unjust court judgments
that sustained slavery, segregation and disenfranchisement, or
criminalized union organizing. Considering the current right-wing
control over the courts, the left may find itself in a similar place
in the coming years, calling for civil disobedience of judicial
authority.

The left should nonetheless strongly back litigation efforts and
condemn Trump’s defiance of the courts, but on different grounds.
These efforts are one tool, albeit limited, to protect the most
disenfranchised from unchecked violence. And more broadly, Trumpian
defiance evinces the administration’s general commitment to impunity
– whether in seeking to overthrow elections, engage in massive
graft, fire workers at will or target political enemies. No democratic
system, liberal or socialist, can operate if a powerful clique can
systematically exempt itself from the law while using the machinery of
the state to spread fear and intimidation. 

The example of the New Deal also underscores the necessity for the
American left to build the type of mass base that can authorize
significant shifts in the constitutional order. Even before Trump’s
current assault, that order had failed as a mechanism for addressing
the interlocked crises of our era: economic, ecological, racial. Any
real prospect of positive change will require a durable majority –
even if it falls short of the supermajorities we saw in the first half
of the twentieth century. This is an essential prerequisite for
norm-breaking from the left, but on behalf of democracy.

*

It is certainly possible that Democratic weakness will lead to another
Republican victory at the next election. Yet if the Democrats do find
themselves back in power, their victory may prove as hollow as
Trump’s: a win by default, for the non-incumbent. While they may
arrest the worst elements of the American far right in the short term,
without any genuine transformations within the party itself they will
simply replay the cycle of disaffection and anti-incumbency.

Unfortunately, there is nothing about today’s Democratic Party that
suggests it understands the task ahead, or that it is capable of
operating as an organized and integrated opposition. The recent
defection of Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority leader, from the
efforts across the party’s elected leadership to refuse to aid Trump
in passing a budget, speaks to a lack of internal coherence and
fortitude. The Democratic establishment seems to make decisions based
on its immediate electoral horizons, regardless of the wider political
context. Whereas Trump and his loyalists act like a vanguard,
Democratic officialdom has been so conditioned by the strictures of
the old constitutional compact that they appear signally incapable of
deviating from it.

This creates a potential opening for the American left. While centrist
Democrats try in vain to uphold the old constitutional order, and the
far right fails to replace it with anything beyond predation and
xenophobia, the role of democratic-socialist forces could be to
advance a viable alternative. Such an effort must take many forms. It
requires defending those especially vulnerable to Trumpist assault –
noncitizens, transpersons and activists on behalf of Palestinian
rights, among others. Centrist politicians and commentators have been
notably willing to cast aside all these groups – in part out of
genuine ideological suspicion, in part out of sheer electoral
opportunism. But a longstanding lesson of political opposition under
authoritarian conditions – whether in the segregation-era American
South or outside the United States – is that a critical means for
building cross-group trust and solidarity, including for election
season, is a willingness to stand on principle. This means taking
risks even when it is not in your immediate self-interest. And the
failure of many Democrats to do just that is its own opening for
leftwing formations. 

Secondly, the left must pursue the kind of institution-building that
can lay the basis for transformative changes, to the Constitution and
to society at large. This entails protecting and expanding
meaning-making institutions – labour and tenant unions, party
formations of all kinds, those sites in universities of academic
freedom and worker empowerment, to name just few – which incorporate
values of democracy and solidarity into everyday life. We can take
party politics as an example. Parties, both in the American past and
in various parts of the world, have long acted as social communities
– providing a range of services and programmes, and integrating
individuals into their broader social settings. But in the US, the
party is not a genuine membership organization, let alone a social
community. It is exclusively a vehicle for elites connected to the
official apparatus to run for and hold office. Americans rarely
interact with the party except during election season, when vast sums
are spent for the benefit of prospective office-holders.

Kamala Harris managed to raise over one billion dollars
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defeat. Imagine if a party instead employed its vast resources to
build institutions at the local level. There are obviously US federal
election rules, aimed at limiting the direct buying of votes –
although these rules have made it exceedingly easy for corporations
and billionaires effectively to do the same. But one could still think
creatively about the broader communal infrastructure in which a party
operates. The Black Panthers no doubt made numerous strategic and even
ethical errors, but they understood themselves as an oppositional
formation rooted in civil society. Among their most lasting concrete
achievements were the provision of services to some of the country’s
most marginalized members (through children’s breakfasts, health
care clinics, ambulances, clothing, busing, prisoner support and
education centres). These were responses to actual social need, as
part of an attempt to integrate constituents on the ground into the
institutional framework of the party. They sought to create, in the
words of the historian of populism Lawrence Goodwyn, a parallel
‘movement culture
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in opposition to the received one.

It is a lesson that the left might heed, given the far-right’s
parallel attempts to hegemonize an oppositional culture. If Trump’s
electoral success is due in part to the far right’s ability to
create a lifeworld shaped around his persona, the left must pursue a
countervailing project. Its aim should be to transform the world
people organically experience through mediating institutions: at work,
at school, in their neighbourhoods. They should be contesting reality
on this basic level.

The problem, of course, is that the current political terrain –
shaped by the long-term containment of labour and the wealth and power
of the billionaire class – is highly inhospitable. Left activists
inside and outside the Democratic Party also face constant attacks
from their more powerful and coordinated centrist opponents, from the
manoeuvres to defeat Sanders’s presidential campaigns to the
repression of campus protests over Gaza. The battle is an uphill one.
But the fact remains that neither the centre nor the far right can
offer a pathway out of America’s institutional decay. A left
cultural world has been built before, in the US and elsewhere, and
there is no alternative to building it again.

AZIZ RANA is the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law
and Government. He joins Boston College from Cornell Law School, where
he was the Richard and Lois Cole Professor of Law. He is the author
of _The Two Faces of American Freedom _(Harvard University Press)
and _The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a
Document that Fails Them (_University of Chicago Press). He has
written essays and op-eds for such venues as _n+1_, _Dissent_, _The
Boston Review_, _The Washington Post_, _The New York Times_, _ New
Labor Forum_, _Jacobin_, _The Guardian_, _The Chronicle of Higher
Education_, _The Nation_, _Jadaliyya_, _Salon_, and _The Law and
Political Economy Blog and is an _is an editorial board member
of _Dissent_, _The Law and Political Economy Blog_, and_ Just
Security_.

SIDECAR, the NLR blog, Launched in December 2020, aims to provide a
space on the left for international interventions and debate. A
buzzing and richly populated left-media landscape has emerged online
in the past decade, but its main English-speaking forms have been
largely monoglot in outlook and national in focus, treating culture as
a subsidiary concern. By contrast, political writing on Sidecar will
take the world, rather than the Anglosphere, as its primary frame.
Culture in the widest sense – arts, ideas, mores – will have full
standing. Translation of, and intellectual engagement with,
interventions in languages other than English will be integral to its
work. And while New Left Review appears bi-monthly, running articles
of widely varied length, Sidecar will post several items a week, each
no longer than 2,500 words and many a good deal shorter. Donate to
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