The Democratic Republic Strategy Isn't Going Anywhere
By Luke Pickrell
The following was read at a discussion hosted by the U.K.-based Republican Labour Education Forum.
One way of answering what the elections mean for the U.S., England, and the rest of the United Kingdom is to focus on policy speculations. What does a Trump victory mean for the economy, foreign policy, the climate crisis, immigration, etc? What’s a Trump administration likely to do that a Harris administration would not have done, and vice versa? How will the Labour Party work with Trump, etc?
These are valid questions. But I’m here to talk about the elections from a democratic republican perspective or, to put it another way, the struggle for a democratic constitution based on unicameralism and universal and equal rights. What’s the state of the democratic republican movement in the U.S.? How will a Trump victory impact that movement? These are the questions I’m going to focus on.
First, I want to define “democracy” — something rarely done. (I will use democracy, democratic state, and democratic republic interchangeably). What’s this thing the working class doesn’t have but needs?
I reserve the word “democracy” for a specific political structure. To paraphrase Victor Berger, a congressman and member of the Socialist Party of America in the early 20th century, a state can be called democratic when all legislative power is vested in a single legislative body (Berger argued for the House of Representatives) whose enactments, subject to referendum, will be the supreme law (that is, no other branch of government can veto or invalidate them). To borrow from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) and the indefatigable Tom Paine, that single legislative body must be elected by universal and equal suffrage, and all citizens must have universal and equal rights.
When the above conditions exist, the U.S. can be called a democracy. Until then, it can’t. There are no degrees of democracy in the U.S. We weren’t more of a democracy under Biden and won’t be less of a democracy under Trump. There is no “bourgeois” democracy for one group of people but not for another. The capitalist class doesn’t use “democracy” to hoodwink the working class and keep them from fighting for socialism.
Instead, the U.S. is a constitutional republic with varying degrees of freedom versus authoritarianism. For example, more freedom existed under Jim Crow than under slavery. The Civil and Voting Rights laws of the 1960s expanded freedom compared to Jim Crow. Given everything he said on the campaign trail, I expect we will see a restriction of domestic freedoms under a Trump administration. But again, I reserve the word democracy for a specific type of state. Problems will surely arise within that future state, but at least institutional mechanisms will exist to address them. Currently, issues in the U.S. can’t be addressed through institutional mechanisms because no such mechanisms exist.
So, I’ll turn to the Constitution. I’m going to assume folks are familiar with the U.S. Constitution and its oddities — the most relevant being a remarkably powerful president, a severely malapportioned Senate with a formal minority veto (the filibuster), an unelected federal judiciary with life terms, and (what many now conclude is) a useless amending clause. These are the “hard-wired” parts of the Constitution — to use the University of Texas political scientist Sanford Levinson’s term. Presidents come and go, and Amendments pass (or, in the case of the U.S., rarely ever pass), but these hard-wired parts stay the same.
Why? The Constitution is a class-based document designed to frustrate and deny majority rule. Its creators feared rule by the many (democracy) just as much as they feared the rise of a new king (rule by one).
Ian Forgie explains: “The framers designed the Constitution (in 1787) 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 [which is severely gerrymandered] 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 few statistics from Daniel Lazare’s recent article emphasize how the Constitution egregiously violates the principle of universal and equal rights and creates a “tyranny of the minority.”
Before 2000, the Electoral College had overturned the popular vote for president only three times. But it has done so twice since November 2000 and nearly did so a third time in 2020.
The Senate is only growing more imbalanced. Thanks to equal state representation, by 2040, 70 percent of Americans will be represented by just 30 senators. The remaining 70 senators will represent the other 30 percent. Often, the party representing a minority of the population wins a majority of Senate seats, as in the 2016 election when Republicans won a fifty-two-seat majority with senators representing only 45 percent of Americans. In 2018, the GOP won a fifty-three-seat majority, but again, its senators represented only a minority (48 percent) of Americans.
Of the few countries with a bicameral legislature and a malapportioned upper house, only the U.S. has a senate with a veto: the filibuster. A filibuster can be made from 41 senators representing as little as eleven percent of the country. Every bill needs 60 votes to pass. This creates situations in which bills lose 54 to 39, as did a recent bill to expand access to in vitro fertilization. Police reform? Filibustered. Gun control? No chance. Climate change action? Blocked by two Democrats and later picked apart — as was the case with the Green New Deal.
Federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are unelected and serve life terms. The Supreme Court gave itself judicial review in 1803, cementing itself as the final legal authority. Five of the six justices who comprise the court’s six-member conservative majority were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote (George W. Bush and Donald Trump). Four justices were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas). Given that Clarence Thomas, the oldest member of the court, is just 76, the rightwing judicial dictatorship will likely continue well into the mid-2030s. Now that Trump can nominate new justices, the right will likely control the court for far longer.
Individual bias is glaring. Justice Thomas (confirmed by a majority representing a minority) has received over $4 million in gifted luxury travel. A billionaire bought a house for his mom and paid the private school tuition for an adopted son. Justice Samuel Alito has promoted the idea that the 2020 elections were stolen.
All the justices are safe (as is any president) because it’s essentially impossible to be kicked out of office through the impeachment clause, which requires an onerous two-thirds vote in the Senate after a simple majority vote in the House. No Justice has ever been impeached, and no president has ever been convicted of impeachment.
Constitution reform is impossible through Article V, which says two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the state legislatures must consent before making any change. Thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the nation can thus veto any effort at structural change, no matter how modest. Article V also says the two senators per state rule can’t be changed. It’s widely understood that our constitution is one of the hardest to amend in the world.
So, what’s the state of constitutional critique? The first thing to say is that the U.S. had a relatively mainstream tradition of constitutional critique up until the 1930s. People have critiqued our Constitution as undemocratic and violating universal and equal rights principles since it was ratified. That critiquing was probably the strongest from the end of the Civil War to the start of World War II. The Socialist Party of America called for a democratic republic in most of its presidential campaign programs. However, constitutional critiques have come in waves — and we are just emerging from a very long lull. Aziz Rana recently published a groundbreaking book, The Constitutional Bind, that traces the hundred-year marooning of that critique due to World War II, the Cold War, and the general disaster of the 20th century.
But there’s a renewed focus on the Constitution, which appears in two distinct areas. First, there’s a critique taking place in academia and some sections of the media. In some ways, this sphere of critique is ahead of what the socialist left has provided; the New York Times has published far more critiques of the Constitution than Jacobin. Some people in this media/academia camp, including Rana, Robert Ovetz, and Daniel Lazare, are politically far to the left and have always held critical views of the Constitution. They are very much ideologically distinct from those who work in similar professions.
Others, like Harvard professors Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky and the head of the University of California, Berkeley Law School, Edwin Chemerinsky, have changed their minds about the Constitution within the past five or so years. Yet, they see a new constitution as a more technical fix to America’s woes rather than a means through which a more significant transformation of America and the world can occur.
Hardcore defenders of the Constitution remain; make no mistake about it. But there’s something in the water — likely something that’s been there since about 2000 when the Supreme Court handed W. Bush the presidency. Even some supporters of the Constitution, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, have hesitated to launch full-throated endorsement. Pelosi admits some problems but assures people that the existing Constitution and the Democratic Party will make everything right.
Will the constitutional critique from those in the academic-media sphere who aren’t grounded in democratic republicanism change after Trump’s election? Maybe. The “constitutional bind” described by Rana (in which one thinks the constitution is simultaneously a problem and the solution) and the “devil you know” attitude expressed by Samuel Moyn (in which one is more content with something familiar, no matter how bad) will be alluring. It will be tempting to seek safety in the Constitution and the “guardrails” of checks and balances.
Then again, maybe not. The Supreme Court is less popular than at any point since polling began. And while the Electoral College didn’t give Trump the presidency this time like it did in 2016, it also hasn’t done anything to stop his return. “No more guardrails exist” is an increasingly common refrain.
Along with the small but noticeable critique in academia and some sections of the media, there’s also a slight but noticeable movement within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a “big tent” of many different left-of-center tendencies. This is mainly due to the work of one faction, the Marxist Unity Group (MUG). I have my differences with MUG’s positions — I’m on record saying we should focus our political agitation and change our name to the Democratic Constitution Group — but it’s impossible to trace the return of democratic republican ideas to the U.S. left without mentioning the only DSA faction that talks about the Constitution.
Thanks to the hard work of MUG members, many democratic republican positions are sprinkled across DSA. DSA’s 2024 Program, for example, says, “Our goal is 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.”
In Cleveland and San Diego, DSA chapters passed resolutions stating that “the Constitution to this day serves to deny equality and self-determination to Black, Indigenous, and other oppressed people by placing inordinate power in a handful of predominantly white, low population states” and calling for “a new and radically democratic constitution, drafted by an assembly of the people elected by direct, universal and equal suffrage with proportional representation.”
Last year, YDSA passed a resolution urging DSA to oppose the Constitution, “openly indicting it as anti-democratic and oppressive, encouraging all DSA members in office to do the same, taking concrete actions to advance the struggle for a democratic republic such as agitating against undemocratic Judicial Review, fighting for proportional representation, delegitimizing the anti-democratic U.S. Senate, and advancing the long-term demand for a new democratic Constitution. As the youth of the democratic socialist movement, we declare that to be a socialist is to fight for an expansive working-class democracy in which the state and society are democratically managed by the majority. In the U.S., this means demanding a new Constitution.”
Putting modesty aside for the moment, I’ll mention that Lucas De Hart and I, two members of DSA and MUG, have been tending to the Democratic Constitution Blog and Podcast. We are the only media organ in the U.S. that focuses on the need for universal and equal rights and a democratic constitution.
Right now, DSA’s statements are more or less words on paper. There’s minimal, if any, direction in DSA. The Democratic Constitution Blog, while attracting many people who want to talk about the need for a new constitution, has anything but a critical mass. But new words and publications are indicative of new ideas. This kind of language — not just critiques of the Constitution but demands for a new and democratic one — hasn’t been seen within the U.S. socialist movement since the Socialist Party of America was at its height. Then, Eugene Debs was writing articles like “Why We Have Outgrown the United States Constitution,” and Victor Berger was trying to pass bills through the House stating that the Senate is an “obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people, and an obstacle to social growth.” This was also when one of the period's most respected historians, Charles Beard, wrote An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, arguing that the framers, far from being omniscient angels, were motivated by crude economic interests. Again, Constitution critique used to be expected.
Will Trump’s election help spread democratic republican ideology within DSA? If it does, it will only be because of hardworking members who want to make it happen — people with clear and consistent messaging. I don’t think democratic republican ideology will develop spontaneously in the socialist movement or the larger society.
Until then, unfortunately, I think we will see a lot of vague slogans and no clear political direction. For example, the day after the election, I got an email from DSA saying, “Regardless of the election results, our task is to organize. To become a bigger and more skilled socialist movement, to contest for power, and win big for the working class.” Vague platitudes. I dream of a time in which this paragraph reads, “Regardless of the election results, our task is to win a democratic republic.”
Then there’s the Democratic Party — the party with democracy in its name. The Democrats spent the entire campaign posing as the defenders of the Constitution and, therefore, of “democracy.” Kamala Harris admonished Americans to “Understand what it would mean if Donald Trump were back in the White House with no guardrails.” She promulgated the myth that political power lies in the hands of ordinary Americans, saying, “It's up to the American people to stop him.” Joe Biden said, “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today,” and “If the Democrats don’t own the presidency, we’re going to find ourselves in the position where democracy is…literally at stake.”
In fact, the Democrats rely on the undemocratic Senate and other undemocratic features of our political system just as much as the Republicans to fund their wars and block progressive legislation. A vital part of the democratic republican project will involve taking back the meaning of democracy and severing its ideological link to the Constitution.
The question of how to build a political party independent of the Democrats is evergreen. Trying to push them left hasn’t worked, nor has calling them capitalists who hate socialism. Trump’s victory presents an opportunity — only an opportunity — to argue that democratic republicanism and the demand for a democratic constitution is what separates us from the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Gil Schaeffer explains: “The fundamental fault line in American politics runs between those who are for democracy and those who are against it, and that fault line runs through the Democratic Party itself. The aim of the democratic constitution strategy is to separate real democrats from fake democrats and create a genuinely democratic party.” The Democrats call themselves small-d democrats. Well, why aren’t they attacking the Supreme Court? Why aren’t they talking about the malapportioned Senate even when the Republicans are in the majority, as they now are? We should keep pointing at the undemocratic Constitution and call out any Democrats who fail to join us.
What does this mean for England and the rest of the United Kingdom? I don’t know. In some ways, democratic republicans have an “easier” job than our counterparts in the U.K. because our system is so glaringly undemocratic! Each aspect of the Constitution (the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, the Senate), let alone the entire document, is patently absurd from dozens of angles. The reverberations caused by a mighty struggle for a democratic republic in the U.S. (let alone the movement’s success) would cause waves in the U.K.
(As an aside, I want to give an example of how ideas spread and the power ideas hold when seized upon by curious and dedicated people. I said earlier that MUG deserves credit for at least putting the word “democratic republic” back into the left’s vocabulary. I started to care about the Constitution because of the ideas I learned and the people I met in MUG. Marxist Unity Group got its democratic republican language from Mike Macnair and the CPGB-PCC. I think that the CPGB got their democratic republicanism through Steve Freeman and you all in the republican labor camp).
Some people in DSA are wondering about a boost in membership numbers similar to what happened in 2016. But right now, numbers aren’t the pressing issue. A hundred thousand people with the wrong ideology and strategy are just a hundred thousand people with the wrong ideology and strategy. DSA will be under a lot of pressure to run around trying to stop what Trump is doing instead of moving forward with a positive program — let alone a program that centers the demand for a democratic constitution. We should prioritize a positive demand. Our focus on the constitution and the demand for a democratic alternative drives everything else forward.
The democratic republic strategy would have been the same if Harris had won. Maybe a Trump administration will provide a few more openings for democratic agitation. But it won’t do the hard work for us — the work of developing political consciousness and winning people to our ideas.
So, while some might be scrambling to figure out what went wrong and reevaluating strategies and tactics, democratic republics keep on going. The demand for democracy stays the same.