In his new book, The Constitutional Bind, lawyer and political theorist Aziz Rana adds his voice to this swelling chorus, urging that a truly emancipatory politics requires breaking free from the U.S. constitutional project. Rana takes aim at what he calls the worship of the Constitution. U.S. politics today, he contends, idealizes the Constitution to its own detriment. Our political formations—especially those on the left—trim their sails in advance of doing battle by accepting the charter’s historical compromises. But such compromises, Rana says, come at a galling democratic cost. They grant unelected justices on the Supreme Court unwarranted authority over the basic terms of our social life. And they sustain voting inequities in the Electoral College and the Senate, which confer unwarranted representation on rural states with disproportionately white and conservative populations.
As late as the first decades of the twentieth century, Rana proposes, Americans took part in a more robust debate over the Constitution, one that nurtured a wild profusion of alternative political visions. The most promising of those visions, in Rana’s eyes, chafed at and often even rejected the Constitution as a parochial and limiting framework. In the middle third of the twentieth century, however, U.S. politics marginalized the political formations that were most critical of the Constitution’s basic terms. And since the middle of the twentieth century, Rana argues, constitutional politics has shape-shifted into a kind of idolatry. Constitutional devotion has sustained American global empire, supported white ethno-nationalism, justified security panics, and cabined real democracy. Constitutional fetishism, according to Rana, sustains “a fundamentally undemocratic order” by granting the Constitution undue “immunity from challenge”; it produces an anti-democratic “cultural genuflection” before a Supreme Court that supports the interests of elites over the liberation of the masses. We are, Rana tells us, bound “by a narrow constitutional narrative” that constrains our collective life and imposes severe limits on our aspirations for true freedom and equality.
Rana’s account is charismatic and forceful on every page. His book conveys the moral weight of arguments against an order that murdered Indigenous peoples, sustained the enslavement of millions of people of African descent, enshrined patriarchy in law, and adopted racial exclusions that made immigrants from Asia ineligible for citizenship. Rana urges us to free ourselves of the charter that sponsored such evils and to chart a new course toward an emancipatory politics, untethered from the crimes of its history. Yet at the heart of the book lies a conundrum. Is there a viable alternative focal point for American democratic politics? Or are shrewd, disillusioned strategists of political change well advised to draw on an imperfect document to make the world a better place?