Constitutional Politics Archives

The Merits—and Risks—of Constitutional Politics

Further comments on the prospects for democratizing modern forms of government

October 13, 2021 • by Aziz Rana and Sanford Levinson

Sanford Levinson: The participants in this symposium all join in desiring significant constitutional reform, focusing on the general rubric of “democratizing” what is now almost universally recognized to be an undemocratic political structure established by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. As in 1787, when the mission was to supplant the “imbecilic” government ...

Constitutional Politics

The Decline and Fall of American Exceptionalism

Why the perception of the Constitution will inevitably be a central part of an extended process of political self-reckoning

October 13, 2021 • by Anthony Barnett

It’s a fact that the United States is no longer the world’s pre-eminent superpower—a change that cannot help but transform America’s political conception of itself. Its decline in relative power will of course take time. The dollar still rules, the military reach of the States is unequalled. But the US has ...

The Decline and Fall of American Exceptionalism

Constitutional Politics

Chile Tries to Write a New Constitution

Progressives in the nation’s Constitutional Convention see an opportunity for creating a more just society

October 13, 2021 • by Jennifer M. Piscopo

In a national referendum held on October 25, 2020, nearly 80 percent of Chileans agreed that the country should have a new constitution, to be written at a convention attended by specially elected delegates. The vote was the climactic result of weeks of paralyzing demonstrations in 2019, as students, feminists, workers, Indigenous peoples, pensioners, and thousands of others had taken to the streets to protest economic and social injustice. With resounding majorities choosing change, Chileans ...

Constitutional Politics

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Amid a racial uprising and calls for “political revolution,” why pretend that our political disputes turn on the “best” reading of an eighteenth-century text, the Constitution?

October 12, 2021 • by Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn

Aziz Rana’s genealogy of American constitutional veneration overturns the conventional wisdom, not merely about the chronology, but also about the reasons for this worshipful attitude towards a document drafted in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, his forthcoming book, Rise of the Constitution, is politically explosive: for it ...

Imagining a Post-Constitutional Political Culture

Constitutional Politics

How to Cure America’s Constitution Worship

Many American states have not only frequently amended their constitutions, but, at least as importantly, have replaced existing constitutions with presumably better, updated, ones

October 12, 2021 • by Sanford Levinson

“Veneration” is a term that James Madison used in Federalist 49, to express the kind of great respect he hoped the new Constitution he had helped write would command in the debate over ratification then raging in America. Yet as Aziz Rana reminds us, many of America’s most notable political ...

How to Cure America’s Constitution Worship

Constitutional Politics

Why Americans Worship the Constitution

October 11, 2021 • by Aziz Rana

In the last two centuries, 220 countries have appeared on the global stage and, between them, they have produced a remarkable 900 written constitutions. The sheer numbers are telling: For the most part, societies treat their constitutions instrumentally. When these legal-political orders break down or social upheaval brings new elites and alliances ...