Breaking the Silence

Jacobin's July 4 issue has a lot to say about the Constitution. Is it enough?

Two years ago, Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin and current editor of The Nation, sat down for a chat with Bernie Sanders. The two talked about Joe Biden, Sanders’s previous presidential runs, and the Vermont senator’s decades-long fight for a “political revolution.”

The interview left me frustrated. Sunkara knows that America’s political system is undemocratic. In his 2019 book, The Socialist Manifesto, he criticized the Constitution and called for a unicameral legislature. Yet, he said nothing about the framers’ creation during the interview. Worse, Sunkara painted Sanders as some sort of democratic champion, arguing that “rather than accepting the narrow parameters of existing U.S. politics, Sanders has always believed that ordinary people can change those parameters.” That’s true to some extent. But when it comes to the most important parameters of lawmaking—the ones laid out by the Constitution—Sanders says nothing. His silence continues to mislead the public.

At the time, I said that Sanders was a lost cause. I still think that’s true. Of Sunkara and the big-timers around Jacobin more broadly, I concluded that the jury was still out, and that maybe constitutional critics of old—including Seth Ackerman, who published “Burn the Constitution” in the second issue of Jacobin in 2011—would speak up again when a larger democracy movement got going.

Flash forward to today, and Sunkara is still absent. But Ackerman has broken his fifteen-year silence. His latest article, “Burn the Constitution Once Again,” gets the lead in Jacobin’s 62nd issue (it’s a good thing it does, since Astra Taylor’s quest to “fix” the Constitution is less than inspiring. If anyone is suffering from a severe case of constitutional-bind syndrome, it’s her).

Ackerman’s sequel is a welcome addition to the struggle for democracy in the United States. It doesn’t add anything new to the conversation—perhaps because we have reached the point where critiques of the Constitution form a self-referential loop. But that’s okay. I only wish Ackerman would pair his destructive rhetoric—“burn”—with a positive vision: scrap the existing Constitution and convene a constituent assembly to draft a democratic replacement.

Toward the end, Ackerman notes that there was a “brief moment in US history” when the Left critiqued the Constitution’s undemocratic features: “During the Progressive Era, the Socialist Party branded the Constitution a menace to democratic government, and a number of progressive intellectuals, including Charles A. Beard, Vernon L. Parrington, Carl L. Becker, and J. Allen Smith, lucidly recognized the document’s reactionary constraints and sometimes called for their overthrow.” All true. Many other people, including Eugene V. Debs and W.E.B Du Bois, had their qualms.

Five years after Ackerman’s first article, Aziz Rana began work on what would become The Constitutional Bind, a detailed examination of how and why the Left’s constitutional critique was diluted following World War I and essentially absent during the Cold War. Rana’s book was published in 2024, the same time that DSA was hashing out the details of its Workers Deserve More Program, which explained that the organization’s goal was to “put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution that establishes civil, political, and democratic rights for all, is based on proportional representation in a single federal legislature, and ends the role of money in politics.” Though his book was published too late to reflect it, Rana himself understood what was happening: After a century-long lull, the Left was rediscovering the Constitution in real time.

There’s a certain synchronicity to all of this. In the same article where I criticized Sanders and Sunkara, I praised DSA for “making waves” with the new Workers Deserve More Program. Returning to the topic two years later, I can praise DSA again for producing an updated program that’s more constitution-coded than the first. The latest version of Workers Deserve More has yet to be made public. Still, it’s already catching the right kind of heat for demanding the abolition of the Senate and the replacement of the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. DSA members should agitate around this new program, and all DSA-endorsed politicians should be expected to uphold its principles.

Of course, all of the usual problems remain. Jacobin may be saying a bit more about the Constitution, but there’s still no outlet of significant influence that puts the Constitution front and center (the Democratic Constitution Blog is far too small). DSA’s program might talk the talk, but few people are actually pushing for endorsement rules that mandate criticism of the Constitution, facilitating teach-ins about the undemocratic political system, or carrying signs demanding a democratic constitution. (I’ll insert a shameless plug for two upcoming events: my presentation to East Bay DSA and my conversation with Aziz Rana, both on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the case for a democratic constitution.)

Yet these are, in a sense, good problems to have—or at least they are higher-order problems that reflect a slow but real development. The terrain of discussion has changed dramatically since 2011. We’re past the point of arguing against constitutional reverence; that’s fading fast. The Constitution is undeniably a practical and political problem. This is the new starting point.

So welcome back, Seth, and keep it up, DSA. The movement for a democratic constitution has grown much stronger over the past fifteen years, and we need every voice available to help carry it forward.