The U.S. Left's Rediscovery of Democratic Republicanism

A recording and edited transcript of Luke's presentation to East Bay DSA

This article was originally published in April of 2024. Luke’s DSA presentation followed Ian Forgie’s excellent critique of the Constitution.

This article argues that the left must reclaim and advance the fight for a democratic constitution. Conversations about democracy and constitutional change fall within democratic republicanism — the idea that the ideal political system vests full lawmaking power in a unicameral legislature elected by universal and equal suffrage.

Marx and Engels didn’t invent democratic republicanism, nor did they initiate the struggle for equal rights. Rather, they inherited the democratic republican project before becoming communists and gave it a new purpose by tying socialism to the goal of a democratic republic.

For a long time, the democratic republic was the central demand of the working-class movement. As Engels put it in 1881, “democracy means the dominion of the working class, neither more nor less.” In other words, the fight for socialism was the fight for political democracy.

Marx and Engels spent their entire political lives struggling for that vision. Near the end of his life, Engels, likely with some frustration, wrote: “Marx and I have repeated ad nauseam that… the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.”

But that vision — the classical Marxist conception of democratic republicanism — was largely abandoned after the Russian Revolution. The consequence was a collapse in constitutional agitation. That tradition, however, is being rediscovered. Was lost is the key phrase. Times are changing.

The fight for democracy has deep roots, and so this article covers a lot of ground. Part One focuses on two U.S. movements of the 1960s — the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left — and on two of their leading voices: Martin Luther King Jr. and Tom Hayden.

Also in the 1960s, Hal Draper reintroduced Lenin’s democratic republicanism to a new generation. From there, the work of revival continued. Part Two follows Draper and those influenced by him, thinkers who slowly reshaped the conversation and helped lay the foundation for the current moment.

The transition between these two parts may feel abrupt. They involve different people, eras, and vocabularies. But what unites them is a common pursuit: universal and equal rights. What links these struggles — including our own — is the unfinished fight for political freedom.

Part One

Martin Luther King Jr. and Tom Hayden led parallel movements for democracy: the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. King was president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Hayden, president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from 1962–63, authored the Port Huron Statement, the most influential document to emerge from the New Left.

As a 26-year-old minister, King grounded the Civil Rights Movement in the nation’s founding documents: “If we are wrong,” he declared, “then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.” Years later, he would describe the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as “great wells of democracy,” “promissory [notes] to which every American was to fall heir.”

But for all his rhetorical gestures, King never expressed genuine faith in the Constitution’s legitimacy. Unlike countless presidents, he never praised the “guardrails” created by the Framers. He shared little in common with James Madison, who extolled America’s republican form of government as a means to frustrate any “interested and overbearing majority” and disrupt the power of the “people out of doors.” King sounded nothing like Benjamin Rush, who once called democracy “one of the greatest of evils.”

The Constitution is designed to make swift and decisive action difficult. King, however, famously explained that “‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” Freedom and justice were his guiding lights. In his Letter From Birmingham Jail, he repeated Saint Augustine’s declarations that “[a]n unjust law is no law at all” and “[a]ny law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” If the Constitution helped secure justice, it was good. If it blocked it, it was not.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked the “peak of optimism” for the Civil Rights Movement. King called it a “shining moment” and suggested that the new law might make mass protests unnecessary.

But just five days later, the Watts uprising erupted in Los Angeles. In 1968, the Kerner Commission concluded that the country was headed toward “two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” King did not need an official report to tell him what was going on: “The quality and quantity of discrimination and deprivation in our nation are so pervasive,” he explained, “that all the changes of a decade have merely initiated preliminary alterations in an edifice of injustice and misery.”

By 1967, King felt he’d run out of answers. In that period of uncertainty, he made a significant turn — he began to question the Constitution. In his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, he reflected, “We have had constitutional backing for most of our demands… this made our work easier… Now we are approaching areas where the voice of the Constitution is not clear.” The movement, he wrote, had moved beyond “constitutional rights” into the realm of “human rights.”

The Civil Rights Movement transformed the U.S. from a system of non-universal and unequal suffrage, characterized by minoritarian checks such as the Senate alongside laws explicitly barring Blacks from voting, to one of universal and unequal suffrage, where the Constitution's minoritarian features coexisted with expanded suffrage. The fundamental elements of the Constitution — the presidential veto, a bicameral legislature, and a powerful Supreme Court — remained intact.

Where Do We Go From Here surprised me when I first read it. I was familiar with King’s policy proposals, like an economic bill of rights. However, I was unaware that King began to question the feasibility of those proposals being realized within the existing Constitution. King identified the boundaries of action within the limits of the current political order and voiced his thoughts publicly in the context of a mass political movement. No one else in the 1960s did that.

Tom Hayden first met King in Los Angeles in 1960. Two years later, Hayden wrote the Port Huron Statement, the most recognized text to emerge from the New Left. The statement was the political manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which had a mostly student membership surpassing 100,000 in 1968. In the statement, Hayden described the “permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry” and the “enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb.” America was a prosperous country plagued by racism and greed, ruled by a powerful and unaccountable elite. SDS’s original idea of participatory democracy merged a critique of America’s incomplete democracy with a call to take action.

In 1965, SDS organized the largest protest against any war in U.S. history. At that event, Paul Potter, a founding member of SDS, urged the assembled crowd to “name the system” that facilitated the violence. During another rally, SDS president Carl Oglesby delivered one of the period’s most significant speeches, criticizing the “corporate liberals” who, unlike the “humanist liberals,” had abandoned Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson and embraced the “menacing coalition of military and industrial power.”

The iconoclastic academic C. Wright Mills greatly influenced SDS. In his work, The Power Elite, he described the “domination of the military event” over post-war American society. He noted that many people, both Black and white, understand that “Congress has again abdicated to a handful of men decisions clearly related to the issue of war or peace. They know that the bomb was dropped over Japan in the name of the United States of America, although they were at no time consulted about the matter. They feel that they live in a time of big decisions; they know that they are not making any.”

SDS and the Civil Rights Movement recognized that the U.S. has a democracy problem. Tom Hayden acknowledged that the U.S. was a republic, not a democracy, and commented on the Constitution in a draft of the Port Huron Statement. However, that comment was removed. Some in SDS felt that publicly challenging the Founding Fathers would embroil the still-fledgling organization in too much controversy. Others emphasized the Constitution's preamble and the Bill of Rights, viewing the entire framework as something to aspire to. Still others — those with a more explicit “formal socialist orientation” — regarded the issue of democracy as “somewhat superstructural” and less significant than the “relations of production.”

Ultimately, the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left failed to cross the conceptual Rubicon. Both movements condemned imperialism and economic inequality. Both primarily focused on the immediate struggle to advance democracy. However, no one connected democratic values with the constitutional structure of government. No one, except for King near the end, asked whether democracy was possible in a nation with an undemocratic constitution. This was a missed opportunity, but today’s left can and is connecting the dots.

Part Two

Today, we can reflect on the 1960s and recognize a constitutional blind spot. For various reasons, political actors didn’t see something that we now understand: democracy cannot be achieved through an undemocratic political system. Furthermore, the question of political power cannot be avoided, and in the U.S., discussing political power means discussing the Constitution.

The Constitution is akin to the proverbial elephant in the room; someone might touch a leg or the trunk, but can’t comprehend how all the pieces fit together. Occasionally, someone realizes it’s an elephant but decides to look away for whatever reason.

But here’s the silver lining. If we can critique the past, it’s because we now possess the ideological tools necessary to address the problem. We see the elephant in the room and are prepared and willing to confront it.

But if not from King and Hayden, how is democratic republicanism experiencing a resurgence? How did the left regain its view of the Constitution?

In the 1960s, Hal Draper published “The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of the Party,’” portraying Lenin as one of history’s foremost revolutionary democrats. Draper worked alongside Richard N. Hunt, whose 1974 book, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, examined the relationship between the two men and democratic republicanism. Draper and Hunt were contemporaries of Neil Harding, who, in his 1977 book Lenin’s Political Thought, stated that according to Lenin, workers didn’t need to have developed “socialist consciousness” to attain “political consciousness.” In other words, Lenin believed someone didn't need to be a socialist to recognize the need for democracy. The struggle for democracy was paramount.

Draper, Hunt, and Harding did their part in debunking many of the myths of undemocratic Marxism peddled by the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This is an ongoing project. Thanks to them, we know that “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant a state based on universal and equal suffrage, that Lenin had no “model party” outside what was necessitated in Russia, and that only the chaos of civil war and unrealized predictions forced Lenin to create a one-party state.

In 2006, Lars T. Lih, who had read Draper and Harding, published Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? In Context. Lih wrote, “The imperative necessity of political freedom is the central theme of Lenin's political agitation.” He continued: “If you were willing to fight for political freedom, you were Lenin's ally, even if you were hostile to socialism. If you downgraded the goal of political freedom in any way, you were Lenin's foe, even if you were a committed socialist.” As we will see, Lenin’s belief that establishing a democratic republic is the paramount task of the working-class movement is simply orthodox Marxism.

In Jacobin’s second issue, Seth Ackerman published “Burn the Constitution,” in which he explained that the Constitution makes it “virtually impossible for the electorate to obtain a concerted change in national policy by a collective act of political will.” In 2018, former SDS member Gil Schaeffer wrote an essay about SDS and Lenin’s democratic republicanism titled, You Can’t Use Weathermen to Show Which Way the Wind Blew. Schaeffer developed his politics by reading Draper, Harding, Lenin’s political agitation in the newspaper Iskra, and general U.S. history.

In 2021, DSA took a modest but meaningful step toward confronting the Constitution by incorporating demands for a second constitutional convention and the abolition of the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College into its Political Platform. “The nation that holds itself out as the world’s premier democracy,” the document declared, “is no democracy at all,” affirming that “democracy is necessary to win a socialist society.”

But as usual, it’s the youth who are leading the way. Last year, YDSA passed Winning the Battle For Democracy, which raised the demand for “a new and radically democratic constitution.” As the “youth of the democratic socialist movement,” YDSA urged all DSA members in and out of elected office to take “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…”

With that call as context, I turn to the classical Marxist tradition, where the strategy of building a democratic republic was long taken as foundational. Thinkers like Hal Draper, Richard Hunt, and Neil Harding all returned to this tradition and emerged convinced of democracy’s central role. Today’s left is rediscovering that same lineage.

In 1847, Friedrich Engels drafted The Principles of Communism, a precursor to the Communist Manifesto. Asked about the first steps of the communist revolution, he answered: “Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution and, through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.” The following year, Marx and Engels would write in the Manifesto that “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”

In 1891, Engels wrote Critique of the Erfurt Program, responding to the SPD’s new platform. He agreed with many of its points but insisted it “lacks precisely what should have been said.” If the demands were granted, he wrote, “we should indeed have more diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no way have been achieved.” What was the aim? Engels was clear: “If one thing is certain, it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.”

The 1903 program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) — Lenin’s party — reaffirmed the Marxist demand for a democratic republic. The political section opened with the call for “the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy and its replacement by a democratic republic, the constitution of which would ensure…” followed by fourteen demands. These included “the sovereignty of the people — that is, the concentration of supreme state power wholly in the hands of a legislative assembly consisting of representatives of the people and forming a single chamber,” and “universal, equal and direct suffrage… for all citizens and citizenesses who have attained the age of 20.”

The Socialist Party of Germany (SPD) published critiques of the French Third Republic in the party’s newspapers in the early 1900s. The critiques of this French “bourgeois republic” were so intense that critics called the socialists secret monarchists. Karl Kautsky took up his pen and eviscerated the Third Republic’s undemocratic constitution, which vested king-like power in the presidency and split the legislature into two houses with a malapportioned upper house, much like the U.S.

Defenders of the Third Republic argued that all forces should unite to defend it against reaction during the Dreyfus Affair. Kautsky rejected that logic, arguing that the only way to defeat the right was to advocate democratic republican principles. He explained: “If we want to strengthen the propagandist power of the republican idea in France, then we have to show, above all, that the republic we want — the republic that the fighters of 1793, 1848, and 1871 strove to achieve — is fundamentally different from the republic of today.”

The distinction mattered: a bourgeois republic divides legislative power between an upper and lower house. A democratic republic places legislative authority in a unicameral assembly elected by universal, equal, and direct suffrage.

In The Road to Power (1909), Kautsky repeated the orthodox Marxist understanding that “The only form of the state in which Socialism can be realized is that of a republic, and a thoroughly democratic republic at that.” Still, we should be careful with Kautsky because he dramatically changed his definition of a democratic republic between 1905 and 1919.

In 1910, mass demonstrations for voting reform swept through Prussia. Kautsky urged a focus on the upcoming Reichstag elections. Rosa Luxemburg disagreed. She argued that the SPD should seize the moment to demand a democratic republic, exposing the sham democracy of the Reichstag, whose lower house remained subordinate to the Kaiser and the malapportioned upper chamber. In a party paper, she wrote: “In Germany, the slogan of a republic… is a practical war cry against militarism, navalism, colonialism, geopolitics, Junker rule. … It is only a consequence and drastic summation of our daily battle against all individual manifestations of the reigning reaction.”

Finally, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) constantly discussed the political system. The SPA’s Rand School of Social Science featured constitutional history classes taught by Charles Beard, whose An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution was the generally accepted academic view of the founding during the Progressive era (1897-1920). John Wertheimer writes that the SPA’s “rhetorical bashing of courts, constitutions, and judges knew few bounds.” The party’s 1912 platform declared:

• The abolition of the Senate and the veto power of the President.

• The election of the President and Vice-President by direct vote of the people.

• The abolition of the power usurped by the Supreme Court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of the legislation enacted by Congress.

• The calling of a convention for the revision of the Constitution

The SPA’s program, along with Kautsky’s critique of the French bourgeois republic and Engel’s comments to the Germans, shows that classical Marxism pursued the strategy of achieving a democratic republic for all countries that lacked a system of universal and equal suffrage, whether that country was economically advanced — like France, Germany, or the United States — or economically backward, like Poland or Russia.

Also, the SPA’s program clearly states that political power is needed to do everything else in the program. The revolution must be political in order to be social. The program ends with this statement: “Such measures of relief as we may be able to force from capitalism are but a preparation of the workers to seize the whole powers of government, so that they may lay hold of the whole system of socialized industry and thus come to their rightful inheritance.”

Putting the Pieces Together

The classic Marxist strategy was to achieve democracy in countries that weren’t democratic. The state form of democracy was a democratic republic, where unimpeded lawmaking power lay in a unicameral legislature with representatives elected by universal and equal suffrage.

The U.S. does not meet this standard. The American working class has not yet won what Lenin (citing Marx and Engels) called the “certain political rights” needed to begin the struggle for economic emancipation. But the U.S. does have a history of democratic struggle — from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. That history, combined with the classical tradition, points us toward a conclusion: the strategy of achieving a democratic republic remains relevant because the U.S. remains undemocratic.

Our task is to do something with all of this history. Here is where Lenin’s theory of political agitation becomes useful: we must connect every abuse of society — inequality, injustice, stagnation — to the question of political power and self-determination. Our primary emotional appeal should be the desire for democracy.

Will a vision of what life could be like in a future socialist society be the primary means by which we seek to persuade people to become politically active? Will a mass movement in the U.S. be built through the language of socialism? Is socialism the first thing we should talk about?

Or, should concrete demands for the immediate improvement of people's lives through electoral campaigns and legislation be the primary focus of our work? Is turning out the vote and pushing reforms where we should focus most of our energy?

Or, should concrete demands be coupled simultaneously with criticisms of our undemocratic political system to explain the lack of legislative progress and the necessity of democracy? Reforms, yes. Socialism, yes. But to win either, we need democracy.

I’ve made this argument to many socialists. Some agree, some don’t. My goal is not to win every debate, but to get us on the same historical page. That way, we can argue not over what happened, but over whether that history still matters — and what to do about it. Someone might say: “Yes, democratic republicanism was the strategy, but times have changed.” Or: “Lenin said this — but he also said that.” Or: “Luxemburg was wrong, Kautsky was right.” That’s the kind of disagreement we can work with.

Each of us speaks from an ideological center. Mine is democratic republicanism. I speak in the language of democracy, appealing to the deep desire for universal and equal rights — and I think Lenin, King, and the best of SDS did the same. If DSA hopes to build a mass movement capable of transforming society, it must tap into this ideological center. To do that, we can turn to the democratic republicanism of classical Marxism and the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, which, it turns out, have been with us all along.