The Constituency is Coming

Will the left be ready to lead?

The original title for this post was “Where’s the Constituency?” Then I came across an interview of Mark Peterson discussing his latest book, The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution, and changed the tone. One thing led to another, and the result is below.

That makes it sound a bit dramatic. Peterson’s interview was engaging, but not revelatory. Not for the first time, I heard someone making more or less the same points that Thomas Geoghegan made in 1994 (“The Infernal Senate”), Daniel Lazare made in 1996 (The Frozen Republic), Robert Dahl made in 2000 (How Democratic is the American Constitution?), and Sanford Levinson made in 2006 (Our Undemocratic Constitution). It has taken two decades, but the success of Daniel Ziblatt’s and David Levitsky’s Tyranny of the Minority, Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind, and Jill Lepore’s We the People shows that the public zeitgeist is slowly starting to catch up. Other books, including Robert Ovetz’s We the Elites, Erwin Chemerinsky’s No Democracy Last Forever, and Tad Stoermer’s forthcoming A Resistance History of the United States, as well as many articles and op-eds in the New York Times, only reinforce the point.

Most published constitutional critiques over the next decade will probably follow a certain formula, taking the core arguments made by Lazare and Geoghegan, adding something new like the Internet (Chemerinsky) or old like the Doomsday Book (Peterson), and producing a critical success. That’s a big change. For those familiar with the source material, the new stuff will excite not because it says essentially new—we’ve moved past that phase—but because the consciousness is spreading. The “complete and total” devotionals from Barbara Jordan and Nancy Pelosi are increasingly quaint. Hakeem Jeffries can talk about “uplifting” and “cherishing” the Constitution all he wants, but fewer people are buying it. It’s just too obvious that “the rot is at the top.”

Of course, it’s anything but smooth sailing. Many know that America is in a very bad spot and that neither the Democrats, the Republicans, nor the Constitution is helping. But fewer are talking about a democratic constitution as the solution and a popular assembly as the means to achieve it. This is where a degree of uncertainty can creep in. Do we have the “political will to create a new constitutional order,” as Claire Rydell Arcenas asks in her review of Peterson’s work? Will enough Americans get behind the idea of a democratic constitution to make it happen?

It’s a perfectly natural question. Since our Constitution is the hardest to amend—and the Senate can’t be changed through any amendment—wanting change implies frustration. But as the old saying goes, perfect should never be the enemy of good. More people today are talking about the undemocratic Constitution than they were two years ago. Some of them are self-identified socialists. (The fact that many of them aren’t poses all kinds of questions that the left may or may not choose to take up.) The messaging is inconsistent and too few people are engaged, but the pulse is getting stronger.

Democracy is rarely demanded in the abstract. People want political power—the ability to make and enforce laws—to end negatives and create positives. Friedrich Engels argued that the political power won through a democratic constitution would be meaningless if it weren’t “immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat.” The Socialist Party of America knew that a democratic constitution—and the resulting workers’ control of government—was a precondition for “laying hold of the whole system of socialized industry.” Radical Republicans excluded Southern Democrats from Congress to ensure they could continue pushing Reconstruction forward despite Andrew Johnson’s entirely constitutional vetoes. When Americans turned against “silent gerrymandering” and began demanding equal voting state congressional districts, it was because minoritarian power led to single-party hegemony and the unequal allocation of state resources.

A democratic constitution movement will emerge from our current struggles because none of them can be resolved so long as the wealthy make the laws. But it will take all of us to make it happen. We have to draw the connections. We have to lead. Argued Lenin, there is an “indubitable connection between these demands and the demand for a constitution.”

If we can get the masses to understand this connection (and we undoubtedly will), then the cry ‘A constitution!’ will not be an isolated one, but will come from the throats of thousands and hundreds of thousands, when it will no longer be comical, but menacing… When the demand that the tsar convene an assembly of people’s representatives is repeated with full consciousness and indomitable determination by the working masses in all industrial cities and factory districts in Russia; when the workers have reached the stage at which the entire urban population, and all the rural people who come into the towns, understand what the socialists want and what the workers are fighting for, then the great day of the people’s liberation from police tyranny will not be far off!

And to quote the first line of Common Sense.

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

Finally, Alexis de Tocqueville. “Patiently endured so long as it seems beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds.”

The constituency for a democratic constitution isn’t here yet—but if the past and present indicate anything, it’s that it will come. When people come asking about the Constitution, will the left be ready to lead?