The main takeaway is that we have a constitutional system that is fundamentally flawed. The central eighteenth-century architects of the federal constitution were deeply suspicious of mass democracy. They therefore created a legal-political framework that placed massive roadblocks in the path of ordinary people using the vote to exercise majority rule. From the founding to the present, the result has been a system that fractures the power of the vote and makes it very difficult for the most marginalized within society to have their voices heard, let alone their needs met. At the same time, due to this system’s veto points and overall fragmentation, the larger order is especially conducive to capture by empowered elites — particularly corporations and forces of white supremacy.
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The result of this Cold War context was a worshipful culture around the framers, which would have been out of place as late as the 1930s. During that earlier era of class conflict and labor protest, Madison, Hamilton, and company were often viewed as socioeconomic elites, concerned above all else with protecting their property and suspicious of the democratic impulses unleashed by the revolution. Yet, by the 1950s, this conversation flipped fundamentally. Mainstream politicians and commentators in both parties essentially embraced a perfectionist narrative of the framers, one that to this day proliferates in public life — buttressed seemingly every year by a new hagiographic biography extolling the wisdom of one founder or another.
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n particular, Socialists were deeply concerned with the extent to which unelected judges controlled the terms of any meaningful constitutional change. This was because the Constitution itself was incredibly difficult to amend formally, requiring a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and then three-fourths of the states to ratify. In essence, mobilized publics were deeply limited in their ability to use mass organization and the vote to shift basic design features of the overall system. Instead, most debates about constitutional change were funneled into the narrow domain of judge-driven textual interpretation. This meant that a small coterie of judges, selected through the presidency and the Senate and serving for life, dictated the terms of what counted as acceptable reform.
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Socialists therefore called for a break from the culture of veneration and for a thoroughgoing democratization of the constitutional order, with many of their suggestions frankly still essential today. They sought to address the pathologies of gerrymandering and winner-take-all elections by implementing proportional representation in the House of Representatives and at the state and local levels. They demanded the abolition of both the Electoral College and the Senate — or failing the eradication of the Senate, at least its dramatic restructuring on terms far more compatible with popular representation. They argued that there should be significant court reform for the federal judiciary, including term limits, retirement ages, dramatic expansions to the number of judges on the Supreme Court (de-emphasizing the power of any one judge), and either the total elimination of judicial review or massive shifts in how review operated.
The pervasive mythmaking about the supposed wisdom of the founders has covered up a central truth: the US Constitution is an antidemocratic mess. Our task is to push a program of political and economic transformation — so the United States can become, for the first time, a truly democratic society.
jacobinmag.com
