Making Waves
Bhashkar Sunkara's interview with Bernie Sanders was disappointing; that's OK because DSA is on the move. By Luke Pickrell
Bernie Sanders will be remembered as a consequential figure in American politics. His two presidential campaigns resonated with millions of people who lived through the Great Financial Crisis and Recession, the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Occupy movement, and the ongoing protests against police brutality. He put the word “socialism” back on the political map, resulting in a significant influx of people into the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) that transformed the decades-old organization into the country’s largest and most dynamic arena of left political struggle.
Bhashkar Sunkara has also significantly impacted the American left. In 2010, Sunkara founded Jacobin, a socialist magazine with a paid print circulation of 75,000 and over three million monthly online visitors. In 2016, Columbia Journalism Review called Jacobin the “most successful American ideological magazine to launch in the past decade.” Earlier this month, Sunkara, now President of The Nation, spoke with Sanders about the Biden Administration, his previous presidential runs, and his 60-year fight for “political revolution.” The conversation caught my attention for two reasons. First, Sanders’ invocation of a democratic socialist “tradition” has influenced many people in DSA. Second, despite glaring inconsistencies in his definition of democracy, Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto, published during Sanders’ second presidential run, criticizes the Constitution and calls for a unicameral legislature. I decided to see what both had to say about our political presence and was curious if democracy and the Constitution would be discussed.
Introducing the conversation, Sunkara writes, “Rather than accepting the narrow parameters of existing U.S. politics, Sanders has always believed that ordinary people can change those parameters.” This statement leaves out something important. Yes, Sanders invigorated many people by denouncing inequality and proposing an active welfare state. His ideas pushed the boundaries of political discourse in the U.S. and imagined a more politically empowered and engaged working class. However, Sanders never put forward a political vision that escaped the confines of the Constitution.
Early 20th-century American socialists, including Sanders’ role model and Socialist Party of America (SPA) leader Eugene Debs, focused their political agitation on the malapportioned Senate, the unelected federal judiciary, the indirectly elected President, and the necessity of writing a new constitution through a democratically elected assembly in opposition to an Article V convention. Fellow SPA member Victor Berger exemplified breaking free of the narrow parameters of existing U.S. politics when he called for a sovereign House elected by universal and equal suffrage. Meanwhile, Sanders has always played by the Constitution’s rules.
Bernie understands that millions want to move the country in a “fundamentally different way.” He knows all the problems Americans face and understands that questions of wealth and power must be addressed from a systemic perspective. Laws must change, and everything else is “nibbling around the edges.” Sanders’ aim is true again in asserting that “a decent standard of living to all people” is correct “from a moral perspective, from a policy perspective,” and from a “political perspective.” Universal healthcare, affordable education, a higher minimum wage, and reduced military spending — as Sanders recognizes, none of these things are a “utopian vision.” However, believing these goals can be realized through the undemocratic Constitution is fantastic. Fundamental change isn’t possible until we live in a democracy. Sanders is living in make-believe land and has never considered escaping.
Unlike Sanders, Sunkara has publicly acknowledged the undemocratic Constitution. “To be a socialist today,” he wrote in The Socialist Manifesto, “is to believe that more, not less, democracy will help solve social ills — and to believe that ordinary people can shape the systems that shape their lives.” Citing Daniel Lazare’s The Frozen Republic, which reinvigorated constitutional critique in the mid-90s, Sunkara argued that America’s myriad problems “didn’t come about by accident; the subversion of democracy was the explicit intent of the Constitution’s framers.” “The Byzantine Constitution,” he argued, “serves as the foundation for a system of government that rules over people, rather than an evolving tool for popular self-government.” Sunkara concluded that socialists should strive for “a strong federal government powered by a proportionally elected unicameral legislature” and cited the disproportionate Senate, the Electoral College, winner-take-all elections, and the obstructive amendment process as obstacles to achieving a socialist America.
Five years ago, Sunkara was far closer than Sanders to rejecting the narrow confines of the Constitution. Yet now, the issue seems far from his mind. In the interview, Sanders mentions that Democrats came within “two fucking votes” of passing the Build Back Better Act; why didn’t Sunkara take that opportunity to say something about the Senate and the need for a unicameral legislature? Sanders claims that “No other president since FDR” would have pushed such “transformative legislation.” Maybe. Regardless, Sunkara knows that the Constitution was designed to render the realization of such legislation all but impossible. Why the silence?
“Look,” says Sanders early in the conversation, “deciding what you prioritize is the most important thing in politics.” For Sanders, “[creating] a nation in the wealthiest country on Earth that guarantees a decent standard of living to all people” is priority number one. I do not doubt that Sanders will spend the rest of his time in politics working to prod presidents, sway judges, and pass legislation and constitutional amendments through Congress. His desire is admirable, but his labor is Sisyphean. Ultimately, he will not escape the gravitational pull of the Constitution. Sanders energized a new generation of political actors. Still, he has failed to recognize our moment’s most pressing question: can the U.S. become a democracy?
Worse, by working within the existing political system without publicly critiquing its undemocratic features, Sanders serves as a figleaf for the existing constitutional order. If Sanders were a true small-d democrat and champion of the working class, he would use his Senate soapbox to condemn the ground beneath him. In other words, he would work to put himself out of a job. If tongue-tied, he could always borrow a sentence from Debs: “The new Constitution will not be framed by ruling-class lawyers and politicians, but by the bona fide representatives of the working class, who in the day of their triumph will be the people in the complete sense of that magnificent and much maligned term.”
Sanders’ bold political demands continue to inspire many people. However, he fundamentally misunderstands how to achieve those demands. Sixty years into his political career, I don’t really expect him to learn a new tune. What about Sunkara and the Jacobin milieu? I’d love to be proven wrong, but to my knowledge, Sunkara hasn’t talked about the Constitution since The Socialist Manifesto. The same is true of Seth Ackerman, who published “Burn the Constitution” in the second issue of Jacobin in 2011. “It stands to reason,” wrote Ackerman, “that a document drafted by a coterie of gilded gentry, openly contemptuous of ‘democracy’ and panicked by what they saw as the mob rule of the 1780s, would seek to constrict popular sovereignty to the point of strangulation.” Like Sunkara in 2019, Ackerman railed against the Senate (an “undemocratic monstrosity”), the Electoral College (“illogical”), and the amendment process (of “comical complexity”). Since Ackerman’s article, Jacobin has published a handful of articles about the Constitution, including Daniel Lazare’s “Abolish the Senate” (2014) and “A Constitutional Revolution” (2017), Luke Savage’s “The United States Is Badly In Need of Democratic Reform,” Aziz Rana’s “It Would Be Great if the United States Were Actually a Democracy” (2021), and Chris Maisano’s 2023 interview with Robert Ovetz, “The Constitution Is a Plutocratic Document.” However, democracy and the Constitution haven’t been Jacobin’s focus.
Not long ago, I’d have ended this article by inviting Sankura, Ackerman, Savage, and others to return to a critique of the Constitution and help make democratic-republican ideology hegemonic. The invitation still stands, but after the release of DSA’s For Our Rights (FORC) program and my conversation with the immensely inspiring DSA National Political Committee member Rashad X, I’m much less invested in what Sankura and company do.
Despite its inconsistencies, the FORC program is laudable for demanding a democratic constitution that “establishes a political system with universal and equal working-class voting rights, proportional representation in a single federal legislature, and ending the role of money in politics.” Rashad noted that the program emerged from the “Defend Democracy through Political Independence” convention resolution. While emphasizing political independence, the resolution said nothing about the Constitution and framed the conversation around “defending” an existing democracy from the far-right. Marxist Unity Group (MUG) members in and around the NPC worked tirelessly to win a majority of NPC members to their position and change the framing from defending to winning democracy and a democratic constitution.
The FORC program was born from a belief in universal and equal rights and a desire for political independence through “a robust vision of democracy different from that of both capitalist parties.” By advocating for a democratic constitution, the program provides precisely that vision. During the struggle for Prussian suffrage reform in 1910, Rosa Luxemburg argued that “the slogan of a republic is thus infinitely more than the expression of a beautiful dream of democratic ‘peoples’ government,’ or political doctrinairism floating in the clouds: it is a practical war cry against militarism, navalism, colonialism, geopolitics, Junker rule, the Prussianization of Germany; it is only a consequence and drastic summation of our daily battle against all individual manifestations of the reigning reaction.” The demand for a democratic constitution in the U.S. serves the same purpose as Luxemburg’s demand for a republic: a robust line of demarcation between us and all undemocratic parties, and a “drastic” summation of our points of opposition.
The next step is bringing the FORC program to DSA chapters nationwide. We must win members to political demands that match the program’s preamble (including the abolition of the Senate, judicial review, and the Executive’s veto) and prepare the ground for a Political Platform amendment in 2025 that puts the fight for a democratic constitution front and center. As Rashad emphasized, the program must also be spread outside DSA through one-on-one conversations in our communities, families, workplaces, unions, tenant organizations, and anywhere else people are receptive: “Let’s talk about our program. Let’s center winning the battle for democracy.”
A lot of work remains. As Rashad noted, many people on the left, including other DSA members, still need to be convinced that our political strategy must revolve around winning a democratic constitution. Still, with the FORC program in one fist and YDSA’s “Winning the Battle for Democracy” and its various copycat resolutions in the other, DSA is making waves. I doubt Bernie Sanders and any other established Democrats will join; perhaps Bhashkar Sunkara and others will. Regardless, DSA isn’t waiting to find out.