It's Up to Us

Jill Lepore's We the People wins a Pulitzer

Hi everyone. Thanks for bearing with me during a drought of blog content. I’ve been writing a few longer articles for Marxist Unity Group’s publication, Light and Air. I’ll share them here when they’re published. There should also be an article in this morning’s Jacobin about the Supreme Court blessing us all with its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Thank you, robed overlords, for your infinite wisdom.

I’m hoping that MUG will focus more of its agitation on the need for a democratic constitution. Hopefully, we will have a workshop at the Spirit of Mandela coalition’s July 4 Mobilization Against Genocide about the problems with our current constitution and the need for a democratic alternative.

The workshop format will be interesting. Mock constitutional conventions happen now and then, but mostly through universities. I immediately thought of the Black Panther Party’s 1970 Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention (RPCC). The Wikipedia page is detailed. Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind also devotes several pages to the event. But I don’t remember any of the major histories on the Panthers—Bloom and Martin’s Black Against Empire comes to mind—mentioning the convention. Rana connects the idea of convention to the sentiment expressed by James Boggs that same year: “The Black Power movement must recognize that if this society is ever going to be changed to meet the needs of black people, then Black Power will have to resolve the problems of the society as a whole and not just those of black people” (emphasis added). Since black and white Americans were “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality” (Martin Luther King’s phrase), the national political system had to change.

Rana also has a useful critique of the convention, which, unlike the Socialist Party America’s 1912 Platform, said nothing about the constitution’s structures. The final document was full of positive rights, but silent on the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the president. Still, the Panthers and the coalition of organizations that joined them at the RPCC clearly saw the Constitution—further proof, perhaps, that the story of Cold War America isn’t so much how the Left forgot about the Constitution, but how they decided not to make a big deal out of it (aside from a three-day gathering in Philadelphia).

But this post isn’t about what the Panthers did—and didn’t say—about the Constitution. It’s a brief musing on Jill Lepore winning the Pulitzer Prize in history for We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. I heard the news from two sources: my mother, who sent me an early-morning text, and the author and journalist Adam Hochschild, who was talking with a group of history students about participating in Mississippi Freedom Summer, the time I.F. Stone offered him a job (and teased him for turning it down), and the pleasure of reading a well-written book.

That’s when Lepore came up. Now, I think Hochschild is a much better writer than Lepore. That’s both a semantic and political judgment. Daniel Lazare wrote a valuable review of We The People, and I agree with his analysis (and his well-chosen George Orwell quote): Lepore uses a lot of words to cover up the fact that neither she nor anyone else in her orbit knows what to do about our undemocratic and frozen political system.

It’s one thing to read a book that’s a little too long and a bit too florid. But it’s a special kind of frustration to read one that does all of that and dances around the fundamental problem. At that point, Lazare is right: psychoanalysis comes to mind. One response to Lazare’s review took issue with the psychoanalysis motif because “there’s no mystery in Lepore’s failure to confront what lies ahead… America’s crisis is indeed too painful for most of us to face.” But that’s exactly the point: psychoanalysts love subconscious obstacles.

Now that We The People has won a Pulitzer, what does that say about all of us? Do we also find it too difficult to confront the reality of a constitution that can no longer be changed—to admit that it’s broken, that the master’s tool can’t dismantle the master’s house, and that half the adults in the room don’t know what to do while the other half don’t want to do anything?

I’m letting myself have a bit of fun. Of course that’s not what it means. I’m writing this article, and you’re (presumably) reading it. We can face it.

Will Lepore snap out of it, ditch Article V, and start talking about the need for a popular assembly to write a new constitution from the ground up? Maybe. If anyone has her ear and wants to send her this article—assuming I’ve spoken nicely—that would be appreciated. But none of us should wait around for her to say out loud what she already knows.

Lepore’s victory will surely boost sales of We The People. The book’s existence—coupled with its critical success—is another signpost of growing dissatisfaction with the Constitution. But as I argued when the book was published, Lepore’s either/or conclusion only obscures the problem.

The professionals aren’t coming to the rescue—even if they come armed with a Pulitzer. It’s up to us to win a democratic constitution.