The National Constitution Center: A Product of (Finite) Reverence
Constitutional propaganda comes in different forms but only lasts so long. By Luke Pickrell
The first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, an institution designed to “disseminate information about the U.S. Constitution on a nonpartisan basis in order to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.” Responding to the selection, Jeffrey Rosen, the Center’s president and CEO, said, “Presidential debates are a meaningful opportunity for all Americans to learn more about the principles that define American democracy, embodied in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the American idea.”
I suspect both Trump and Harris will note the location during the debate and accuse each other of not being sufficiently loyal to the framers’ creation. After all, both have already attempted to undermine their opponent’s constitutional bonafide. “Kamala went full communist,” Trump claimed at a rally in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Harris asserted, “Someone who suggests that we should terminate the Constitution of the United States of America should never again stand behind the seal of the president of the United States.”
I’ll cover the debate in a later post. In the meantime, it’s worth understanding the context in which the Constitution Center was created, challenging its supposed neutrality, and asking if our constitution deserves the title bestowed upon it by the Center as “the greatest vision of human freedom in history.”
In The Constitutional Bind, Aziz Rana explains, “By the late 1980s, Americans had moved far from the politics of national self-examination that existed in the 1960s and early 1970s.” As the Constitution’s bicentennial approached, a “conservative political ascendancy” fortified an “even more self-congratulatory climate, which praised American exceptionalism and raised to seemingly mythic status the eighteenth-century framers.” Memories of the Socialist Party of America’s “constitutional politics of mass democracy and the Black radical vision of decolonization” were gone. Also missing were “the questions — raised by King in those months before his murder — of whether Americans would be willing to confront the structural hierarchies of their own society or the forms of power that they projected abroad.”
Ronald Reagan signed the Constitutional Heritage Act of 1988 during this climate of intense constitutional reverence. The act created the National Constitution Center and tasked it with increasing “public awareness of the Constitution and the democratic process,” presenting the Constitution’s “profound impact on the political, economic and social development of this Nation,” and recognizing “Americans instrumental in the history of the Constitution.” Writing at the time, Sanford Levinson noted a “persistent invocation of religious language” around the Constitution and the “pervasive treatment of the Constitution as a ‘sacred object.’” Levinson concluded that in 1980s America, the Constitution “embodied nothing less than the country’s ‘civil religion.’” The Center’s groundbreaking ceremony was held on September 17, 2000, the 213th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, and doors opened three years later.
Is the Constitution Center a place of unadulterated worship? It’s not that simple. Aziz Rana was invited to debate Yuval Levin on whether or not the Constitution can unify the country, and the points raised by both speakers were anything but kind to the Constitution as it exists. The Center’s website describes the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution as the “most democratic (and radical) of the state constitutions” and highlights the “inspiring Preamble” and “robust Declaration of Rights.” And Erwin Chemerinsky, author of the new book No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, was asked to comment on the Supreme Court’s latest term.
The Constitution has undoubtedly benefited from a liberal dose of unfiltered propaganda, including shrines for department stores and private homes, citywide readings of the Bill of Rights, Freedom Trains, and two lavish birthday parties. The Constitution Center isn’t the propaganda of the ham-fisted Cold War type described above. Still, the organization contributes to what Daniel Lazare calls the “political playing field” of constitutional discourse and practice. Supporters like Levin and critics like Rana; patriots like James Madison and dissidents like W.E.B. DuBois; aristocratic republicans like Alexander Hamilton and democratic republicans like Paine — almost everyone can be incorporated into the Center’s wide embrace and the loving arms of American “democracy.”
Of course, I’m not suggesting Rana believes the U.S. is a democracy or is somehow being duped — far from it. Instead, I’m pointing to the Center’s immense power to engage with various perspectives and present them to the public under the umbrella of supposed nonpartisanship and neutrality. Chairmen of the Center include former presidents and current Supreme Court Justices, so claims of nonpartisanship are dubious. But more importantly, neutrality in politics is impossible. Telling the public the U.S. is a democracy, describing the First Amendment as the “pillar of democracy” (while promoting the ADL, an organization not interested in the rights of Palestinians and their supporters), and calling the Constitution “the greatest vision of human freedom in history” is an eminently political act. Lucas and I interviewed Rana but made no pretense of impartiality in the name of “increasing public knowledge” or “fostering debate.” The Democratic Constitution Blog and the Constitution Center have a political agenda, but only one of us acknowledges it.
Still, any discussion of the Constitution can’t help but raise a few glaring contradictions. In a recent article, Lazare argued that Article VII (which self-legalized the Constitution against the Articles of Confederation) is one of those contradictions. Lazare identifies another contradiction in the Preamble’s invocation of “we the people,” a phrase proudly enshrined on the Constitution Center’s southernmost wall. While those three words “summoned up” popular sovereignty and made some people “politically alive in a way they never had been before,” the rest of the document “canceled popular sovereignty in practically the same breath.” The people are sovereign — except for electing the president, vice president, federal judges, and Senators (until 1913), ending the legal importation of slaves (until 1808), and being represented equally in the Senate. (Of course, the continued subjugation of slaves, Indigenous people, women, and most white men also flew in the face of “we the people”). By presenting the Constitution in its contradictory and undemocratic decor, the Center can’t help but expose the document to independent critique capable of stepping outside the acceptable parameters of political discourse.
Does our current Constitution deserve the praise outlined in the Heritage Act and bestowed by the Constitution Center? Tom Paine’s idea can be used as a benchmark. In his defense of the 1789 French Revolution, Rights of Man, Paine wrote: “When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government.” Judged by Paine’s democratic-republican standards, our current constitution and government are severely lacking.
Nothing lasts forever, and Americans’ patience with a political system that cannot meet most people’s needs isn’t infinite. Rana writes, “[The] official Cold War version of the American project is breaking down before our eyes. From the debates over how the Constitution protects Trump’s impunity and feeds right-wing authoritarianism to the reverberating implications of Gaza, we are all witness to the basic failures everywhere of the American ‘rules-based’ order. And just as both the American constitutional model and American international power were joined together, their entangled limitations now simultaneously lay exposed.” Today, the Constitution Center is an intricate form of propaganda that portrays the Constitution as politically neutral, tolerant of all kinds of dissent, and capable of meaningful internal transformation through its own political rules. However, as political friction increases and frustration with “politics as usual” grows, the Constitution’s limitations will become increasingly difficult to ignore, and the fundamental unusability of Article V will loom large.