'If you ignore the Constitution, you're essentially participating in a political struggle at a massive disadvantage'

Part two of Aziz Rana's interview on NPEC's Class podcast

Published initially on NPEC’s Class website, where you can also find part one.

Transcript:

Luke: What makes the Constitution unique or stand out as a problem? Why should socialists care about the Constitution when so many other things are going on?

Aziz: I think the first thing to say is my position is not that the Constitution is the exclusive causal reason why the US has the variety of problems that it has, or even necessarily the Constitution and its issues are the most important or most significant problems facing the country.

But there are two other key points. The first is what the Constitution does. Silently, it establishes a background set of rules that then shape the terrain within which any political contest takes place. These rules strengthen specific sides in the context of political struggle.

These rules systematically strengthen the side of business and racial elites, and they also create obvious incentive structures for how our political class operates in the context of political disputes. And, you know, you can think of it in lots of different ways. So, one way is that in the context of COVID, for instance, Mitch McConnell is sort of like the majority leader in the Senate. There’s a general sense that the country's facing a health pandemic, and there's mass support for addressing and passing a bill to deal with that health pandemic. But McConnell doesn't do that, even though there's an election coming up. Instead, he puts all of his political capital into replacing Ginsburg with a Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice.

And you can think of the entire incentive structure of the governing system entrenching power through minority institutions in a way that fundamentally disconnects the political class from the society writ large. So that's just one indication of it. And what that speaks to is that if you are committed to the types of, you know, basic changes, like the types of socialist changes to the nature of our economy, to transforming who actually enjoys something like meaningful democracy in the workplace, you cannot ignore the Constitution.

If you ignore the Constitution, you're essentially participating in a political struggle at a massive disadvantage. You're not only dealing with the disadvantage of material resources that have always marked left struggles against the right, but you're also dealing with the disadvantage of a state framework that provides massive benefits to the other side.

So that’s a key reason why it's important to talk about the Constitution. The other key reason is that the Constitution in the US plays a different role than it does in many societies around the world. So, like many societies worldwide, constitutions are just rules for governing. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're not so good. If they don't seem to serve the public's needs or if a new kind of political coalition comes into authority, you might have new constitutional texts written and then ratified through some kind of national referenda process.

The average lifespan of a constitution around the world is about 20 years. There have been over 200 countries in the world at various times. They've collectively written something like 900 constitutions. In the US, the Constitution (and this is one of the decisive things about the story of the US's rise to global power in the 20th century) has become not just a set of rules for government that can or cannot be jettisoned but has become deeply embedded in national identity and in the meaning of the American global project, the meaning of the American century. And it means that the text is imbued with all of these other ideological commitments.

That infrastructure is something that has deeply limiting effects on our political conversations. So, to be able to cut through the ideology of the American project, I think that we have to think concretely about the good and the bad things of our constitutional system; to have a disenchanted account of what our constitutional project looks like is an essential step in the type of socialist change that many of the folks that are listening might be committed to. 

Luke: The constitutional bind is a sort of divided centrist mindset that 1) sees the Constitution as a problem and 2) also holds this idea that the Constitution is special and unique and is perhaps the solution various problens.

Aziz: Yeah, so this is one way of framing discussions to start the book's first chapter. The opinion page of the New York Times can give you the sense that the Constitution is both the problem. Then, anytime Trump says anything, it's like, oh, my God, the Constitution is the thing that's going to save us.

You have effectively the same kind of liberal political figures and commentators that swing wildly between both of these perspectives. And I think what that speaks to is a kind of deep-seated recognition of the bind that the country's in. One of the various binds of the book's title is the sense that the Constitution places a kind of catch-22 over addressing all of the types of problems that we've articulated. Even simple things like making DC a state can't be done because of the structure of representation that's embedded in the constitutional system, which makes it a non-starter.

Because of the American right's disproportionate power in the constitutional system, you know, they're non-starters, and that highlights something about the American experience, which is all of the truly great democratic advances in this country came with an intense amount of political organizing. In some really significant contexts, extra-legal political action, even things like the move toward the 14th Amendment in the context of reconstruction that takes place during military rule in the South and aggressive practices to deviate from the terms of Article 5 that would typically revise the Constitution to ensure that amendment ends up getting ratified. You can tell a similar story about the New Deal. You can tell a similar story about the Civil Rights Movement. And so, one of the things that divided the liberal mind that you were referencing speaks to is a profound fear about what it entails to address these basic constitutional challenges.

There is an understandable worry about norm breakdown - tit-for-tat exchanges between Democrats and Republicans that end up collapsing something like a meaningful constitutional system of any sort. The response is a kind of nostalgia. It's a wishful fulfillment that we can somehow go back to some period when there was a compact settlement. I think that what this highlights is that the only solution is building a political majority that has the democratic legitimacy to authorize some of the the norm breaking, but on behalf of democracy that might be entailed in terms of transforming or altering our basic constitutional system.

It's not a project at the end of the day for liberal commentators or liberal commentator law professors. And you can even think about how constitutional change, meaningful constitutional change, has proceeded elsewhere: Brazil in the context of the move against authoritarianism in the 80s; South Africa and its decolonial project in the 90s; the constitutional change that took place in Kenya in 2010; and, even though it ended up failing, the efforts to have a new constitution in Chile. These were all the product, in various ways, of a mass political movement that came to understand constitutional change as central to the bread-and-butter objectives of coalitions on the ground, coalitions of labor activists, and other kinds of activists as well. They were able to authorize constitutional alterations even if they didn't abide by the exact process of the pre-existing system.

How do you build the power within social constituencies so that they can collectively push transformative changes?

Luke: How does our current moment compare to other periods of constitutional critique? Is it possible to say that our moment is in some way unique? Is there reason to think that this period could realize some structural changes? 

Aziz: These are all really the central questions at the moment. We're in a very different time than when Daniel Lazare wrote The Frozen Republic. In the '90s and 2000s, individual commentators, intellectuals, and academics articulated these critiques, which had longstanding critiques in the American left, going back to abolitionism.

We're clearly at a time when the unfolding crises (both at home and abroad, about the relationship between American political and economic institutions and American power) are making it very clear that our constitutional system has some fundamental flaws that require systematic change.

That's distinct from 20 years ago, 30 years ago. If anything, the parallel that it does have is to the early 20th century, where, in a way, there was a moment before the consolidation of American primacy and global hegemony. It was at a time when the US project of territorial settlement had essentially become complete, with the closing of the frontier, heightened industrialization, and demographic changes concerning race and immigration. There were profound questions about the future nature of the American project.

There are positives and downsides in terms of thinking about the comparison between this moment and that moment when the SPA was writing the 1912 platform. The plus is that we're living in an able moment, perhaps for the first time in American history, to take on both sides of that coin that I was talking about, to think seriously about what democratization would mean, and think seriously about what decolonization would mean. You could create something like a truly multiracial democracy. The profound limitations of the early 20th century were the extent to which white supremacy and various types of settler colonial assumptions were so deeply embedded in the drinking water of the country. At that time, it would have been much more conceivable to imagine a country a hundred years hence with a new constitution that was still definitionally explicitly a white republic.

There's another thing that's tied to it, which is that, unlike the time when the Black Panthers were writing their people's revolutionary constitution in 1970, and more like 1912, I think it's plausible to imagine a majority that can be built around pretty fundamental changes to the constitutional system, in a way that hasn't been the case for a hundred years.

The downside by comparison with the first four decades of the 20th century is that you have both the flowering of left ideas (the potential for a left mass base around a multiracial class conscious politics committed to genuine democracy), but in a context in which the classic institutions of the left are weaker than they've been in many decades because of the systematic attacks on those institutions, including but not limited to labor over the last half-century.

Unfortunately, the project for the present is a medium-term to long-term project. We must do what the great historian of populism, Lawrence Goodwin, discussed when talking about the rise of the populist movement: how do you push people from the received culture within which they typically operate to a movement culture? How do you make ideas of left transformation an organic part of how people understand their neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and communities? This infrastructural rebuilding would then go hand in hand with some of the more immediate and direct interventions when it comes to political policy.

This is tough because it feels like we're dealing with so many crises in the immediate term. We are required to address crises at the moment while thinking about creating the institutional base for these types of transformative changes in the medium to long term.

Regardless of your historical moment, to be a person of the left in the United States (and especially to be a person of the left in a country that is a global hegemon) is to press from the very heart of an imperial project for freedom as self-rule for everyone at home and abroad. We're collectively engaged in a profound ethical and political struggle that requires all of our commitments, just as it did for those who came before us.