It Was the Day Before the Election...

Four new audio articles to celebrate

The Democratic Constitution Blog is celebrating two important milestones. First, we’ve reached one hundred subscribers. A sincere thanks to everyone who supports the blog and engages with its ideas! Also, the Democratic Constitution Podcast is now on Apple Podcasts. Hopefully, this will make it easier for people to find all our interviews and historical summaries. With one day to go until the elections, we’ve turned four relevant Election Day articles into audio articles: Ian Forgie’s “Fighting for True Democracy: A Socialist Primer on the Constitution’s Structural Provisions” and Daniel Lazare’s “A Perfect Storm?” and “The Crisis of Democracy and the 2024 Election,” and Luke Pickrell “Electoral College Redux.”

From Ian: “This organization of government is celebrated in American high school civics classes as the genius of the “Founding Fathers,” who designed interlocking and interdependent branches of government into a system of checks and balances to ensure that no one branch could achieve dictatorial powers.  This framing is a lie.  The Framers designed the Constitution to obstruct the exercise of majoritarian rule, which they feared would result in the erosion of the privileges of landholders, deterioration of the racial caste system, and redistribution of wealth.  While the people may elect the House on broadly democratic lines, the House can do nothing without the Senate’s approval.  If something offensive to elite interests should sneak past the Senate, the President can, and frequently does, veto it.  If, by some miracle, such a bill evades presidential veto, the courts are there as a final veto opportunity, a veto which can be exercised whenever elites sufficiently dominate the Supreme Court.  In short, no policy sufficiently offensive to elite interest, as socialist demands must and will be, can be plausibly expected to survive in the current system.  If we want to build a better society, socialists must demand a democratic Constitution.”

From Dan: “Ultimately, the real problem with the US electoral system is that it is organic.  Instead of sitting down and designing a system that is fair, efficient, and democratic, which would be the rational thing to do, Americans have made do with a structure that evolved out of bits and pieces of constitutional text, judicial decisions, and local practice.  It just happened, and once it did, it was effectively unchangeable.  Like so much else in American society — a malapportioned Senate, an undemocratic Electoral College, a gerrymandered House, an autocratic Supreme Court, etc. — it is impossible to fix.  So Americans can only stand by and watch as the system careens downhill.”

From Luke: “The Democrats and mainstream media have been quiet about the Electoral College. If we get a 2016 repeat, seeing what they say will be interesting.  In the meantime, it’s worth shouting out the people who have said something recently about the Electoral College: David Dayen in the American Prospect, Bobby Harrison in the Mississippi Times, Gerald Horne on Democracy Now!, David Horsey in the Seattle Times, Johnson in the Washington Post, and three folks for the Guardian.”

All four recordings are available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We hope to record audio versions of all our articles in the future.