This is an edited transcript of my conversation with Alec Karakatsanis, Founder and Executive Director of the Civil Rights Corps and author of Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. We talk about George Floyd’s murder and subsequent protests; the illusion of police reforms as presented through body cameras and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; the undemocratic Constitution and obstructionist Senate; and resisting copaganda.

Alec: I’m a civil rights lawyer, and I started my career as a public defender, first in Alabama and then in Washington, DC. So for the first few years of my career, I was representing people accused of crimes who couldn’t afford a lawyer.

That experience really taught me a lot about how the criminal punishment bureaucracy works. The incredible amount of brutality and injustice in that system, and how so many of the people who work in that system actually don’t have any faith in it at all and don’t believe that it has anything to do with safety.

That was a real wake-up call for me in those early years. And then after a few years of doing that, I was lucky enough to get a grant from Harvard Law School to quit my job as a public defender and start a small civil rights organization. And for over 10 years or so, we’ve been going around the country litigating systemic injustices in the criminal punishment system. So our cases have changed. We have challenged the money bail system. We think that people should be home with their families, children, schools, jobs, churches, communities, medicines, pets, et cetera. People can be deprived of all of that if they can’t pay cash.

We’ve been litigating those kinds of cases across the country. The cases that we’ve won have gotten hundreds of thousands of people out of jail cells. We’ve also been litigating the criminalization of poverty and the rise of modern debtors’ prisons, issues of rampant prosecutorial and police and judicial abuse and misconduct, and a variety of other issues, including the privatization of these systems.

Right now, we have a big campaign called “the right to hug,” which is representing children across the country who are challenging the elimination of visits with their parents in jails. Millions of children are barred every year from visiting their parents in jail, and these are mostly people who are held in jail pre-trial. The private equity industry owns the major jail and prison telecom companies, and they have this sort of conspiracy that we allege is to make more money off of the phone and video calls. The sheriffs take a cut of this. If you stop families from visiting each other, they’ll have to spend more money on these phone and video calls, which are really expensive.

We want to resensitize our society to the incredible deprivation and brutality and injustice in the punishment system. We also want to get people to understand that many of the decisions that are made within this bureaucracy are actually not made based on some assessment of public safety or what’s right or wrong, but on profit.

We kept confronting how so much of what underlies these unjust systems is various mythologies, assumptions, attitudes, and intuitions. Those mythologies are leading to really, really terrible public policy.

What I’m doing with the most recent book, Copaganda, is trying to get people to understand the ways in which their own attitudes and assumptions and beliefs have been distorted. These mythologies are so pervasive.

Luke: Your book discusses George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the movement that event generated—the largest protests in US history. Before diving into the role of propaganda in influencing the aftermath of those protests, I was hoping you could just reflect on George Floyd’s murder, the protests, what you saw, what you were thinking.

Alec: There was this incredible period where it seemed like huge portions of our society were finally coming to understand what so many of us who work in the criminal punishment system already understood: the system is incredibly violent, unaccountable, and part of some of the great injustices of our time.

People were thinking in new ways at a really visceral level. Tens of millions of people out in the streets, many, many, many more people doing that reckoning in some form. People were starting to become open to ideas that would have been shocking just a few years earlier. They began to see this massive bureaucracy—or this constellation of bureaucracies—for what it is.

This constellation of bureaucracies is composed of the police, prosecutors, judicial bureaucracies, prison bureaucracies, and jails. But at every single stage of that process, there are parasitic multi-billion dollar industries.

For example, the for-profit commercial money bail industry exists only in the US and the Philippines. There’s the prison and jail telecom industry—again, a multi-billion dollar industry. There’s the prison medical care industry. There are the institutions and companies that build all the surveillance architecture. We are talking about tens of billions of dollars. People who make the handcuffs and the guns, build the caging facilities, et cetera.

The George Floyd uprising created an opening in our culture and society for the first time in a long time. It allowed people to ask: is all of this making us safe? How is it that the United States spends way more money than any society in the recorded history of the modern world on the bureaucracies of punishment and surveillance, and yet we have an extremely unequal society and a pretty unsafe society. What are we getting for all of this?

People were focused for the first time in my recollection on questions of funding this bureaucracy. This was a profound threat to the people that benefit from these systems. Not just the people who are directly earning tens of billions of dollars from the system, but all of the people in general in our society who have a lot of wealth—who benefit from the selective weaponization of this system to control poor people and marginalized people.

Every single major social justice movement or progressive movement over the last 150 years has been a major target of the punishment bureaucracy, from anti-slavery movements to women’s suffrage to anti-war movements. You can go on and on up until our current moment.

None of these bureaucracies are very effective at making us safe, and most other countries are way safer than the United States. Every other country spends far less. The United States puts Black people in cages at six times the rate of South Africa at the height of apartheid. People started learning that since 1980, the incarceration rate in the United States quintupled, or by some measurements went up by a factor of 600%. People started wondering what changed in our society. Did people become much more evil starting in 1980? Or were there a series of policy choices to expand this profitable bureaucracy that actually have not made us any safer?

I wanted to write this book after watching all of these institutions mobilize to preserve the size and power of the punishment bureaucracy as it came under the greatest threat that it’s faced in our lifetime. I wanted to explore how we get to this moment where all of these elite systems—the news media, the academic system, universities, nonprofits, philanthropy, the Democratic Party—coalesced around a series of false and misleading narratives that distorted our conception of safety, made us extremely afraid, and sought to preserve the size and tower of the punishment bureaucracy, which is used in service of the most wealthy and powerful people in our society.

The book is really about the story of what happened among people on the Left side of the spectrum who would at least say publicly—and many of whom believe privately—that they want a society that is more equal, just, free, and less violent.

Luke: The Democratic Party talked a lot about change. Yet, as you describe in the book, we’re pretty much in the same spot—if not perhaps arguably worse—as we were five years ago. How did the punishment bureaucracy survive? How did propaganda play into it? What did the Democratic Party do?

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Alec: I try to use an extraordinary wealth of examples from my archive of news stories and really walk you through story by story, outlet by outlet, tactic by tactic, exactly how all of these people created a sort of liberal consensus around the most illiberal of ideas: mass human caging and surveillance.

This strategy exists across the spectrum, from things like what stories they consider news, what stories they push on us in really high volume and what stories they ignore, what sources are quoted in these stories and what sources are ignored, whose voices are considered an expert, the language that’s used in the stories, the context and history that’s provided, and the context and history that’s ignored. For each of these questions, you have to think to yourself: who benefits from this? Out of the one million things that happened last night, who benefits from this story being told to me right now? Who benefits from there being 7 out of the 10 news stories on your local TV station that are about a poor person—typically a person of color or an immigrant or a black person—who is accused of some street crime? Who benefits from not talking about wage theft, tax evasion, air pollution, water pollution, public corruption, etc.

The Democratic Party leaders, liberals, and several leading professors who have various ties to the policing industrial complex were able to co-opt the idea of reform and to take energy and outrage over injustices and increase the size of the punishment bureaucracy.

I think the best example, or at least the example that is widely understood by the public, is the police body camera. There was tremendous outrage over a lot of these police killings, like Michael Brown and Ferguson. The result was the liberal establishment coalescing around various kinds of fake reforms. The primary one being the police body camera. The interesting backstory of this—and the reason why it’s one of the most successful propaganda achievements in modern history—is that the police industrial complex, the surveillance industry, et cetera, desperately wanted body cameras for many years. They had a big problem, though. They couldn’t get the billions of dollars in government funding they needed to outfit every police officer in the United States with a mobile surveillance camera that the cops themselves control.

Why do they want them so badly? Three or four main reasons. First, you have to understand, prosecutors really wanted them. Prosecutors understood that they would very rarely be used against the police. But the volume of court cases and prosecutions and arrests in the United States is unlike anything any society has ever attempted—let alone any society that has lots of procedural rights as we do in our Bill of Rights, including the right to a lawyer, an investigator, the right to a jury, etc.

We couldn’t impanel 10 million juries every year. The system would totally crumble if people were able to exercise their rights. So the whole system is predicated on getting people to plead guilty and to plead guilty quickly. So prosecutors wanted these body cameras because they knew they’d be evidence-based in low-level cases against very poor people millions of times a year, particularly trespassing by unhoused people, drug possession, the lowest of the low cases that actually clog up the courts because police arrest so many people.

Prosecutors knew that these body cameras would catch a lot of people on video committing these low-level offenses. That’s why they wanted them. Police wanted them to protect themselves against their own liability, but also as a surveillance tool. Obviously they understood that they controlled the cameras. They could decide when to turn them off. They would edit them. They could decide which stories became public right away and which stories were buried. But also, really importantly, they could go into neighborhoods and scan with their cameras. They could go to protests and scan the crowd. And they could link those up eventually with facial and voice recognition software and big data databases. They could basically create the largest kind of surveillance databases in world history and then combine that with the new predictive policing algorithms. This is why companies like Microsoft and Amazon and Axon were so interested in this stuff.

When Michael Brown was killed without a video, they had a brilliant idea. Instead of framing this as something really good for surveillance and control and police (like it was framed in more authoritarian societies around the world), we should frame it in America as a police reform for accountability and transparency. Starting with President Obama and Eric Holder, they actually got Democrats across the country to pitch this thing that the police actually had been desperately wanting. Police wanted it so badly that before the Democrats started funding it, they were getting private donations to police foundations (from people like Steven Spielberg) to pay for police body cameras. That’s how badly they wanted them. They were able to create one of the most misleading and unfortunate narratives of modern copaganda, which is that the body cameras were about accountability and transparency.

In fact, they were about profit, surveillance, control, and increased leverage for punishment. We have over a decade of really solid evidence: police body cameras don’t make police any less violent or less corrupt. They don’t make them more accountable. They do grant enormous control, especially now that they’re paired with facial and voice recognition.

How did outrage over various injustices get co-opted by the punishment bureaucracy to support more investment in the very tools that the punishment bureaucracy uses for state repression? Body cameras are a great example.

Luke: Shortly after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic Party mayoral primary in New York, you pointed out on Twitter that local governments are incapable of solving the big problems we face because of the undemocratic Constitution. You were responding to a New York Times article that really made it sound like Zohran’s campaign or Zohran alone would determine what happens in New York City. Everything could be blamed on him. The larger picture was missing.

Alec: One of the things about mainstream news is it oversimplifies stories, right? These are complicated issues that exist on a long causal chain. There’s a lot of historical and other context behind a lot of the events that are covered that necessarily have to be taken out. For every 1,000-word piece about something in the news, there’s probably like 5,000 really long books and dissertations on that topic. So it’s not a knock on the mainstream news that they simplify things. However, I do suggest for this and other reasons that people should stop consuming daily news as much as possible because of its propaganda and oversimplification aspects. Instead, they should consume more long-form journalism and long-form content that gives you more context to understand the facts you’re interacting with.

As a journalist, you have to decide which parts of the context to cut out and which parts to include. When political events are covered, most of the important context is omitted. So for example, we’re told that we have a Voting Rights Act because Lyndon Johnson signed it into law. But that really erases like a multi-decade-long civil rights movement that built the power that ensured that whoever was in the presidency was going to have certain constraints and have to do certain things.

The same is true whenever you see a news story about a new bail reform law. There’s a complicated story of power and organized political activity behind a lot of these stories. Many of the New York Times stories ignore all of that; they give people a really false understanding of why things are the way they are.

That one article made it sound like the mayor of New York City has a lot more power and control over certain decisions than they really do. This is a problem. If you don’t like things about our society, your theory of why they exist as such is important for understanding how to organize to change them. Often missed is the concentric circles of power wielded at the local, state, and federal level, and then globally.

The United States has a very undemocratic constitutional structure, as the great scholar Aziz Rana has written about. Most people are familiar with some of the easiest examples, especially around Senate representation, which locks in an extremely undemocratic system where mostly rural people have outsized authority.

The same dynamic is replicated in most states where the balance of power is shifted toward far more conservative people in rural areas instead of cities. Throughout United States history, when progressive people have tried to do really significant things on the local level, they can always be vetoed by the state level. And then sometimes when progressive states want to do something that upsets very wealthy interests like large organized capital, the wealthy can get the federal government to overturn those rules. And this is a tool that the U.S. weaponizes around the world: when governments do something too progressive, global capital will intervene to make that not really a policy option.

Luke: I want to give you an example of how I connect the Constitution and policing, and then hear your response. Sonia Massey was a woman killed by a sheriff in Illinois on July 6th, 2024. The Democratic Party, supportive university professors, lawyers—they all talked about the need to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. But that bill has been introduced multiple times and has failed repeatedly in the Senate. It can’t get through our legal system. This thing just isn’t going to happen.

So regardless of how effective people think the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act might be—and feel free to comment on this part as well—it’s never going to pass. Yet everyone acts as if our political system is democratic enough to make the necessary changes.

Alec: There’s so much to say here, and it’s such a fascinating question. I would say a couple of things. First, the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act is an example of what I was talking about earlier. It’s an almost entirely fake reform. It would not meaningfully alter any element of the way the policing bureaucracy works. It wouldn’t shrink the size and power of punishment bureaucracy. It wouldn’t meaningfully alter the role of police surveillance punishment in our society. It was designed as something of a counterinsurgency operation by Democrats to co-opt and distract from the demands to defund the police (when I say defund the police, I’m talking about the general kind of demand at the time to reduce the amount of money that our society is throwing into the policing bureaucracy). That demand was very scary to people in power. So they had to concoct things like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which didn’t do that.

But I think you’re getting at something even deeper. Everybody understands when something like that is introduced that it has no chance of passing because the political system is so undemocratic and in many respects so completely controlled by a very small group of interests that even something like universal healthcare has no chance of passing. The people who propose these bills know all of this. Instead of helping to educate the public about that and organizing to build the kind of power it would take to take some semblance of democracy back from the wealthy interests that control much of how our society functions, they just keep up this charade.

Every few years, there’s lots of attention in articles about how brutal and unjust and ineffective the prison system is in the United States. Each time, the same kinds of strategies and quote-unquote “solutions” and “reforms” are trotted out; none of them are a meaningful good-faith effort to actually address some of the underlying problems that cause this. That’s the reason why these problems are not getting solved decade after decade after decade.

The same tactics were used after Watts. The same tactics were used after the Rodney King uprising. The same tactics were used after Ferguson. The same tactics were used after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and other uprisings.

One of the favorite words the New York Times uses for all these things is that they’re “intractable.” Well, they’re just not trying the obvious solutions. There are really obvious solutions to problems of homelessness, to the destruction of the healthcare and mental health infrastructure in society, to the kinds of things that create trauma for people. We have evidence-based policy interventions that are obvious. We’re stuck in this kind of Groundhog Day.

Luke: Where does the current conversation stand around policing?

Alec: The extraordinary and pervasive propaganda in the mainstream press over the last few years has essentially created a mass delusion. And what we have is an utterly terrified population. There’s been moral panic after moral panic after moral panic. Everyone is really, really afraid of so-called crime. Now, what are they afraid of? Well, they’re not afraid of the crimes that are most damaging. They’re not afraid of the crimes that are actually costing the most money. Wage theft is $50 billion a year. It’s five times all property crime combined. There are millions of illegal air pollution crimes every year, and water pollution kills hundreds of thousands of people—at least five times more than all homicides combined.

But people are very afraid of poor people, of immigrants, of people of color—particularly black people. We are frightened of strangers. That’s who the news media tells us to be scared of, even though the vast bulk of physical and sexual violence in our society is not perpetrated by strangers. It’s perpetrated by people who know each other. That’s a very uncomfortable fact for the policing bureaucracy because nobody thinks that more money for police and police surveillance is the solution to why people who know each other hurt each other in a society.

It’s kind of like a modern flat-earther religious belief akin to what Galileo might have been confronting. Everyone seems to believe that not only is crime always going up (which is false; we’re at the lowest level of police recorded crime in modern recorded history in the United States), but also that the solution to interpersonal harm in a given society is like more armed cops and more surveillance technology and more prison cages.

We know this is false. It’s like climate denial. What the evidence actually tells us from American history and from all over the world is that the root causes of interpersonal harm are big features of a society like levels of inequality and poverty, access to housing, health care, levels of loneliness and isolation. But instead we’re told that more police and more prisons are the way to make us safe.

This conventional wisdom, which is completely false, has brought us to this moment where authoritarian and fascist interests have co-opted those fears. They have taken a very afraid public, and then they’ve relied on the sort of delusion that more guns and surveillance and control by the state is going to make people safer. They’ve relied on that to make a huge push to transform society in dark and scary ways. This would have been completely impossible without the groundwork laid by the mainstream news to normalize mass incarceration, to normalize levels of government surveillance and incarceration that are unseen and unheard of in the modern history of the world. And to normalize the idea that crime is going up, up, up, up, up every year, you know, people have been wrong about that in the Gallup polls for almost every single year for the last 25 years. That’s the culture of fear and the delusion that the mainstream news has created that is now being exploited.

It’s being exploited to do things that I think make even a lot of those liberals really uncomfortable. The culture that they created is now being taken to its logical conclusion. It is being turned against even people who once thought that they were safe; people who thought that the criminal punishment bureaucracy was only for the poorest people in our society and for the most vulnerable people of color and immigrants, people with disabilities, et cetera. Well, now a lot of people who contributed to those narratives are now worried that these systems of repression are going to be turned against them.

Luke: What are the solutions?

Alec: I don’t want to say I have the solutions. This is a problem that is really profound, and it’s one of the great problems of our time. But in the last chapter of the book, I try to offer some easy things that everybody can do to resist and to come together. Whether you’re a lawyer or a teacher or a coder or an artist, I offer things that people are doing that you can get involved in. I offer easy tools for getting involved in your own local political discussions about this. I offer my thoughts on ways that any ordinary person can start to learn about these things, questions to ask as you’re engaging with the news, practices that you might develop in your own group of friends and family and in your own professional communities. The forces that are escalating state repression right now are relying on us feeling like everything is futile and nothing matters. It couldn’t be further from the truth.

Maybe most of my career is for nothing because it’s really impossible to use such an undemocratic legal system in ways that actually promote liberty and justice. But I’m not of that opinion. Our work has been immensely liberatory in my view, and I think we’ve helped a lot of people. We’re just one small group among many that have been working on these issues. We’ve reduced the prison and jail population in this country by over 10 to 15 percent—hundreds of thousands of people fewer than they were a decade ago. We’ve helped raise mass awareness of mass incarceration. These are all things that the population now is much more aware of than they were when I entered the legal profession.

When we have one of these cases in a local community, people start to become aware of it. People start to ask profound questions like, well, why is our local jail determining who’s in jail and who’s not on the basis of how much access to cash they have? Why are we letting a company pay the sheriff to stop children from visiting their parents when we know that children visiting their parents actually reduces crime in the short, medium, and long term?

Even in the most authoritarian of societies, it’s absolutely vital to preserve that light of truth. There was an attempt by the government in 1984 to get people to say and to believe that two plus two equals five through sheer repetition.

One role of civil rights work in a time of rising authoritarianism is just to say that 2 plus 2 equals 4. These values and rights that we have are true. They’re important for daily life. Children do have a right to hug their parents. People shouldn’t be jailed just because they can’t pay. The way to a safer society is actually more healthcare and more housing. We need fewer cages and guns and tasers and punishment. Standing up for what is true and just is a vital component of preserving the hope a society has to rely on if it’s going to meet any of its lofty goals.

This article was originally published in Light & Air on August 22, 2026.

Two years ago, Aziz Rana published The Constitutional Bind, a sweeping historical investigation meant to aid progressive and radical movements in the United States. How was it, Rana asked, that the relatively vibrant constitutional critique found in socialist, progressive, and intellectually honest circles in the early 20th century had been effectively silenced? How had the ruling class built a persuasive narrative of “American democracy” and convinced so many people to “idolize a document that fails them”? Where had the demand for a democratic constitution gone? More importantly, when would it return?

Constitutional criticism of all stripes was submerged in a toxic brew of World War jingoism, Cold War nationalism, and state-sponsored terrorism. Stalinism obscured Marxism’s historically longstanding commitment to democratic republicanism and universal and equal rights, which led to immense ideological and theoretical confusion, like the Communist Party USA’s embrace of “Bill of Rights Socialism.” During the mid-20th century, a handful of scholars and activists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Harry Haywood, Afeni Shakur, Tom Hayden, and Martin Luther King Jr., offered passing critiques. But these voices were a dime a dozen and did not center the need to replace the undemocratic constitutional order in the struggle for freedom and autonomy.

Today, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is bringing constitutional politics back into the national spotlight. Our program proclaims that: “We are workers fighting to transform society, to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” Establishing that new republic, the program continues, will entail abolishing the Senate and replacing the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary entirely subordinate to Congress, now unicameral and elected by proportional representation. This is the bold strategy for political power that the Left has lacked for more than a century. It’s precisely this struggle for popular, centralized government—for democracy—that will unite the working class and be our North Star during the trying times ahead.

The new program and resulting media attention have placed DSA into the vanguard of the developing movement for a Third Reconstruction. The struggle for democracy is now ours to win or lose. How can we make sure this movement will continue to grow, both in power and ambition?

Force the Issue

First, we must take a page from the Antebellum abolitionists and force the issue. We demand a democratic government and a democratic society. From the floor of Congress to a picket line or a rally against ICE—every struggle is a platform to connect the denial of equal rights to institutions like the Senate, the President, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court. Every election from here on out can become a “referendum on the question of universal and equal suffrage.” No politico or talking head will be able to spout off about the alleged “miracles” of America’s government without being jeered and laughed at. No politician will be able to say they are seriously addressing important issues without being challenged about their plan to fix our rotten institutions.

When we take a bold stand, others follow. In the days after the release of Workers Deserve More, Bhaskar Sunkara and Ben Burgis, two of the more public intellectuals on the American Left, both expressed support for abolishing the Senate. Of course, like almost everyone on the Left, both of them know perfectly well that the Constitution is designed to stifle the will of the majority, which therefore makes the “democratic road to socialism” impossible. But it took DSA forcing the issue—pointing to the elephant in the room and saying, “There, look!”—for others to speak up.

Bernie Sanders isn’t pointing to the Senate—let alone to the Constitution. Neither is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez nor Zohran Mamdani. DSA member and then-Wisconsin gubernatorial hopeful Francesca Hong retracted her previous calls to abolish the Senate under pressure. These political superstars might come around in time. But if they do, it will only be because DSA made the issue impossible to ignore. When we lead on bold demands for a democratic reconstruction of society—and specific constitutional proposals to bring that transformation about—other people follow. After all, who likes the Senate? And if someone doesn’t support our demand, all the worse for them. Up and over we go, pushing aside the equivocators and naysayers. As King knew well, “wait” almost always means “never.” The time is always right to fight for democracy and demand that others do the same.

Tie It All Together

We have far more friends than enemies in the struggle for equal rights. Over this July 4 weekend, DSA members attended the Spirit of Mandela’s Mobilization Against Genocide in Atlanta. National DSA endorsed the event, stating that the Declaration of Independence’s “ideals of universal and equal rights—since broadened beyond white property-owning men—have never been fully realized,” and that “We will not let the bourgeoisie control the narrative. We will struggle against ongoing oppression and tyranny.”

DSA was joined by dozens of other organizations, including the Jericho Movement, the Southern Workers Assembly, the Peoples Power Union, and Black Workers for Justice. These organizations are incredibly diverse, both in membership and in politics. Yet, universal and equal rights were on the tip of everyone’s tongue, especially after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais stuck another knife into the Voting Rights Act. Everyone knows that a handful of wealthy individuals—not the people—make the laws that shape the country’s direction and spread destruction across the world. Everyone at least can intuitively understand King’s declaration that, without an equal vote, “I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind—it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact—I can only submit to the edict of others.”

We are all united by our lack of equal political power. Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is one example. It slashed funding for Medicaid, lined the pockets of the military and ICE, expanded opportunities for oil and gas development, and made it harder to pay for college. There was something in it for everyone to hate, and a significant majority of the population opposed the law. But the Senate does not represent majority opinion. Thanks to equal state representation, the 50 Republican senators who voted for the bill represented roughly 25 million fewer Americans than the 50 Democrats who voted against it. The Vice President—a position won through the undemocratic Electoral College—cast the tie-breaking vote. And voilà, the ruling class has its law. Not because Americans wanted it, but because the Constitution was designed to ensure that the rich and powerful grow more rich and powerful.

DSA is still only a fraction of the national population. As the Mobilization Against Genocide in Atlanta made clear, we are one part in a vast panorama of political organizations struggling for change. Amid all this complexity and competing ideas, a political program that centers the demand for a democratic republic can cut through the noise and grab people’s attention by providing a clear strategy. What unites the working class is our shared exclusion from property and political power. We want this power because we understand that it is intolerable to live without it, and impossible to achieve our goals for a liberated world. Our lack of power enables repression at home and imperial plunder abroad. The demand for democracy brings everything together.

No Shortcuts

Can some of DSA’s more modest programmatic demands, say, winning Medicare for All or transitioning to renewable energy, be won under the existing Constitution? Unlikely. Both have already failed in Congress, and face incredible opposition from capital. But even if we win a few of our major demands, the political playing field will not have changed. We would need to constantly look over our shoulder, scanning the horizon for the next filibuster, veto, or judicial review. Our wins would “never be stable, secure, or complete without full democratization,” as we find ourselves forced to fight a never-ending rearguard battle.

Some argue that there is a constitutional path to universal and equal rights and an end to the tyranny of the minority through an Article V Convention. Again, this is unlikely. So unlikely, in fact, that entertaining it would be to miseducate the working class by sowing illusions about what’s possible. The demand to abolish the Senate has attracted particular attention. It’s also one that clearly demonstrates the need to break free of the constitutional cage, since Article V expressly forbids changing the Senate’s allocation of representation among the states unless every single state agrees. This unanimity of agreement is what political scientists call “interpretive unamendability.” In layman’s terms, don’t hold your breath.

As Jane McAlevey taught a generation of labor activists, there are no shortcuts. The same is true of the struggle for a radically transformed political playing field. There is no constitutional or reformist path to achieve equal suffrage, nor is leaving the Constitution untouched a viable option. The struggle for democracy must therefore take the revolutionary road. This means uniting millions behind a political program committed to convening a sovereign, popular assembly to draft a new constitution. That draft must then be submitted to the nation for ratification on the basis of one person, one vote. With political power in our hands, the working class will, for the first time, have a government of, by, and for the people.

Run It Up the Flagpole

Five years ago, DSA’s 2021 program took a modest but meaningful step toward confronting the Constitution, declaring that “the nation that holds itself out as the world’s premier democracy is no democracy at all,” and that “democracy is necessary to win a socialist society,” which is also the “complete realization of democracy.” Two years later, YDSA’s national convention passed Winning the Battle for Democracy, an homage to a similar resolution put forward at DSA’s 2023 National Convention. YDSA identified the “liberal-constitutional regime outlined in the Constitution” as the “specific form” of capitalist-class rule, adding important theoretical clarity to the question of how the capitalist class rules. It also broke necessary ground by calling on DSA electeds to indict the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the other minoritarian checks on popular will. In 2024, the first Workers Deserve More program stated that “working-class majority rule” would be secured “through a democratic constitution that establishes a political system with universal and equal working-class voting rights,” and with political power vested in a single federal legislature elected by proportional representation. That brings us to today, where the new version of Workers Deserve More has brought us one more step forward, and DSA’s programmatic positions are capturing the attention of the country more than ever.

Asked recently about the demand for a democratic constitution, Richard Wolff responded, “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes… then you know who you got.” This is the right attitude. Slowly but surely, DSA is raising the flag for a democratic constitution and embracing its newfound position at the forefront of a developing Third Reconstruction in the United States. The demand for democracy drives everything else forward. All those who stand for universal and equal suffrage and against minoritarian obstacles to majority rule should join DSA. In turn, DSA should center its demand for a new constitution in the Workers Deserve More program. We aren’t the only ones with democracy in the name—but we are the only ones prepared to fight to the end to achieve it.

Luke talks with Professor Jeremy Popkin, author of several books on the French Revolution, including A Short History of the French Revolution, A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution, and The First Emancipation: The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France. They discuss constitutional debates during the Revolution; state intervention in the economy and Babeuf’s communism; Thomas Paine’s insistence on the importance of equal suffrage in the face of the Thermidorian Reaction; the continuities between 1793, 1848, and 1871; the Revolution’s international repercussions, including its impact on slavery in the French colonies; and Herbert Marcuse’s course on “Social Philosophy.”

It takes a lot of work to plan, record, and edit each episode. If you enjoy these conversations with guests like Professor Popkin, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Your support is the motivation we need to keep going.

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This article was originally published in Jacobin on September 5, 2024. My articles were recently paywalled on Jacobin—I get it: we all need to pay the bills—but everything is fair use after 12 months. I’m happy to reproduce the article here. Much has happened in two years, but the article’s conclusion—“each passing day, the Constitution Center’s efforts to defend the Constitution seem increasingly absurd”—is more relevant than ever.

The first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be on September 10 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, an institution designed to “disseminate information about the U.S. Constitution on a nonpartisan basis to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.” Jeffrey Rosen, the center’s president and CEO, called presidential debates 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 Trump and Harris will each note the location during the debate and accuse the other of not being sufficiently loyal to the framers’ creation. Both have already attempted to undermine their opponent’s constitutional bona fides. “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.”

It will surely be riveting stuff. But before the two candidates try to out-Constitute each other on a national stage, it’s worth understanding the context in which the Constitution Center was created, challenging its supposed neutrality, and most important, asking if the Constitution deserves the title bestowed upon it by the center as “the greatest vision of human freedom in history.”

In The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them, law professor Aziz Rana explains that by the end of the 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.”

Writing at the time, American legal scholar Sanford Levinson concluded that the Constitution “embodied nothing less than the country’s ‘civil religion.’” Levinson also noted a “persistent invocation of religious language” around the Constitution and the “pervasive treatment of the Constitution as a ‘sacred object.’”

President Ronald Reagan signed the Constitutional Heritage Act during this climate of intense constitutional reverence. The act created the National Constitution Center and, fittingly, gave America’s “sacred object” its own shrine. The center was tasked 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.”

The center’s groundbreaking ceremony was held on September 17, 2000, the two-hundred-thirteenth anniversary of the Constitution’s signing. Four years later, an amended spending bill made September 17 Constitution Day and Citizenship Day. This month, Constitution Center honorary cochair and Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch will join visitors for a weeklong Constitution Day celebration, including in-person Constitution readings, a “We, the People” live show, and a star-spangled cake cutting.

You might assume the Constitution Center is a place of unadulterated worship of the Constitution, but it’s not that simple. Rana, an outspoken critic of the Constitution, was invited to debate conservative political analyst and journalist Yuval Levin on whether or not the Constitution can unify the country. Neither was particularly kind to the sanctified document as it exists.

There’s “a view that the Constitution is not serving us well,” explained Levin,

and certainly there is some truth to that view. Our system now is in a moment when it frustrates us. When we think about what could be changed, I think it’s important for us to grasp the ways in which the Constitution is working and not working in this moment.

The problem, added Rana, is that the Constitution’s “countermajoritarian checks and constraints are far more extreme than comparable constitutional democracies in a way that inhibits that underlying value of one person, one vote, and makes it very hard for organized majorities to influence policy.” At the same time, continued Rana, the Constitution “limits or delays policy and mobilizes and facilitates rule by particular empowered minorities.”

In addition, 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.” This is a somewhat surprising assertion, since the federal Constitution curtailed the power of state constitutions like Pennsylvania’s that featured a unicameral legislature (which John Adams considered “a halfway house to despotism”), made elected officials recallable, and limited them to short terms in office. And last month, UC Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky was asked to comment on the Supreme Court’s latest term for the center. His new book, which received a positive review in the New York Times and scorn from Elon Musk, is titled No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.

Historically, the Constitution has benefited from a liberal dose of propaganda, including shrines for department stores and private homes, citywide readings of the Bill of Rights, “Freedom Trains” that toured the country displaying various treasures, including paintings of the framers and George Washington’s copy of the Constitution, and two lavish centennial celebrations in 1887 and 1987. The Constitution Center does not engage in this kind of ham-fisted Cold War propaganda. Still, it contributes to what Daniel Lazare called 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. Du Bois; 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.” The center engages with a wide variety of perspectives and presents them to the public as nonpartisan and neutral.

Chairmen of the center include former presidents and current Supreme Court justices, so claims of nonpartisanship are dubious, as are all claims of neutrality in politics, of course. Telling the public the United States is a democracy, saying the First Amendment “guarantees five core freedoms,” and calling the Constitution “the greatest vision of human freedom in history” is an eminently political act.

Ultimately, the Constitution Center is propaganda of a different type. It hides the Constitution’s blemishes and portrays the framers’ creation as politically neutral, tolerant of dissent, and capable of meaningful transformation through its own rules.

Those blemishes are abundant. The House has been gerrymandered and malapportioned into irrelevance. Winner-take-all elections all but ensure two-party rule. By 2040, 70 percent of the population living in fifteen states will be represented by only thirty senators. George W. Bush and Donald Trump, neither of whom initially entered the White House with a plurality of the popular vote, have appointed five of today’s six Republican justices, and four of those justices were confirmed by a majority of Republican senators representing a minority of Americans. Furthermore, as scholar and author Michael Klarman explains, remedying any of the Constitution’s problems through Article V is “virtually impossible.”

Trump and the Republican Party have done well by the Constitution. Partisan gerrymandering, geographic clustering, and, most important, Senate malapportionment have given the Republicans disproportionate congressional power for decades. As Klarman notes, between 2020 and 2022, the fifty Republican senators represented forty million fewer people than the fifty Democratic senators. If not for the Electoral College, Republicans would have lost seven of the past eight elections, and Trump would be gunning for a first term instead of a second. Should Trump enter the White House in November, he will benefit from a political system created by the Constitution, including the all-but-impossible impeachment process and the unelected federal judiciary at his beck and call.

Of course, if Harris takes the White House, she would also benefit from the executive’s immense powers. However, the Democrats have less to gain by the Constitution than the Republicans. Trump could once again win the Electoral College. After all, Joe Biden won roughly seven million more votes in 2020 but only won the Electoral College thanks to some 43,000 votes across three swing states. If Harris wins, she will face a Supreme Court decidedly not of her party’s making, a House with undue Republican influence, and the same Senate that killed the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Build Back Better Act. If geographic trends continue, Congress may be forever beyond the Democrat’s control.

For the past year, the Democrats have praised the Constitution and touted their democratic bona fides. “What will we do to maintain our democracy,” Biden asked an audience last September. “Do we still believe in the Constitution?” Harris has picked up where Biden left off, imploring supporters at the Democratic National Convention to imagine Trump without any constitutional “guardrails.” If Harris were genuinely interested in democracy, she would use her platform at the Constitution Center to demand a democratic constitution. She could condemn the Electoral College and Senate for empowering Republicans, rail against the far-too-onerous two-thirds impeachment requirement that kept Trump in office and protects corrupt justices, or criticize Article V for making amendments a fantasy.

But we shouldn’t hold our breaths. Neither political party will rock the boat when either could win in November.

The National Constitution Center is advertised as a “thriving museum” that “brings the Constitution to life” for each of its hundreds of thousands of yearly visitors. Everything about the project — from the website’s red, white, and blue color scheme, to the building’s massive “We the People” mural, to the forty-two life-size, bronze statues of the framers in Signers’ Hall — is designed to invoke a sense of optimism, dynamism, and vitality. Given the effort to create such a positive environment, it’s ironic that the Constitution created a political system that so many today describe in negative terms.

The center is preparing for the presidential debate and a Constitution Day cake cutting with Justice Gorsuch. Meanwhile, more than six in ten Americans hold little to no confidence in the US political system, and Erwin Chemerinsky is only the latest observer calling the Constitution a threat to whatever democracy remains. Each passing day, the Constitution Center’s efforts to defend the Constitution seem increasingly absurd. No monument lasts forever.

In this episode, I speak with Geoffrey Robertson, an English barrister, historian, and the author of several works on the English Civil War and the Levellers, including The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man who sent Charles I to the Scaffold, and the introduction to Verso books’ The Putney Debates. We’ve published blog articles on the Levellers (here and here), and they have come up in many other conversations, particularly with Gil Schaeffer and around our reader, Equal Human and Political Rights and Democratic Republicanism, but this is the first time I’ve had a guest dedicated to the topic.

So much has been written about the Levellers and the English Civil War more generally. Besides Geoffrey’s work, I’d recommend John Rees’ The Leveller Revolution, Anna Keay’s The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown, and a much older collection of Leveller documents called Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution—especially the introduction. The foreword to that book was written by Charles Beard, who folks might remember from our conversation with Clyde Barrow. It’s a fun demonstration of how these ideas and thinkers all connect.

It takes a lot of work to plan, record, and edit each episode. If you enjoy these conversations with guests like John, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Your support is the motivation we need to keep going.

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This is an edited transcript of my conversation with Dr. Guy Aitchison, a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Loughborough University. The conversation touches on the neo-republican conception of rights, rights claims as speech acts and forms of communication, the importance of “moral rights,” and the Declaration of Independence.

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Luke: Could you start by unpacking this idea of natural rights and possessive individualism? This term has come up before, and it feeds back into the idea that liberty and private property are connected.

Guy: The term possessive individualism is derived from a famous book by C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. In that book, he gives an intellectual history of liberalism. He goes back to the early modern period with John Locke—and even earlier people on the parliamentarian side of the Civil War, including the Levellers—and looks at the ideology of rights. Macpherson says that they articulated a particularly individualistic idea of rights based on this notion of self-ownership.

Basically, individuals own their own bodies. Therefore, they can sell themselves in the marketplace as workers. The only responsibilities they have are to themselves when it comes to how they use their bodies. It’s a very individualistic conception of the self. It’s also a conception that Macpherson associates with nascent capitalism. This individualistic conception was seen by many on the left as a justification for capitalist accumulation and colonial dispossession (think about the way in which indigenous peoples in various parts of the world were being dispossessed by European colonialists).

Not all of that is found in John Locke, but the idea is that there’s this kind of intuitive or conceptual connection between an idea of self-ownership—which is the basis of rights and the basis of our autonomy—and a capitalist theory of property rights. We sell our labour, and we gain wealth by mixing it with resources through our work. Individuals are seen as self-reliant economic units who can accumulate through using their own labour power. Macpherson argues that possessive individualism is at the foundation of liberal rights.

This was a very influential argument. It echoes many of the arguments Karl Marx first made in On the Jewish Question. There, he gives a critique of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the idea of natural rights, arguing that these rights are intrinsically linked in the liberal tradition to capitalist property accumulation.

However, other intellectual historians have found problems with this point. They’ve pointed out that Macpherson exaggerates the extent to which the Levellers, early rights theorists, and even Locke himself were individualistic. In fact, the Levellers had a very social idea of human beings. For them, the right of self-ownership—and this is the point I made in the article—was linked to freedom from domination because it could be used to criticize slavery (not necessarily racial slavery then, but certainly what they called arbitrary government, which described absolute monarchical power).

Therefore, the language of rights was linked to non-domination, democratic participation, and ultimately to a right to resistance. If someone uses you in ways that you do not consent to, you have the right to resist them based on that fundamental right of ownership.

My article argues that rights from their beginning were political; they were linked to resistance and non-domination. It’s slightly reductive and misleading to see them purely as being linked to possessive individualism as Macpherson and some Marxists did.

Luke: I’ve picked up on a bit of this reductivism. Not all of the discussions on the Left include references to Macpherson or Marx, but it all leads to something in which rights discourse is put on the back burner.

Guy: There’s a long tradition of skepticism about rights on the Left. Like I say, this dates from Karl Marx. But more recent writers like Foucault, Wendy Brown, the American political theorist, have had some skeptical things to say about rights. The other thing to mention, of course, is that in an American political context, the discourse of rights is tied to the Constitution. The Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution. Rights discourse has a particular flavor in that context

Luke: The argument for a democratic republic is crucial: we want a state in which certain rights are institutionalized and protected. You write, though, that neo-republicanism’s “focus on rights as institutional claims has been at the expense of the political role rights also play as a tool of critique and activism with which to mobilize outside and against institutions.” My takeaway: It’s one thing to have the end goal in mind; it’s another thing to have a strategy or a way of talking that gets us there. Neo-republicanism doesn’t see a rights-based discourse as something that can help us build a movement, a political party—whatever—that gets you to that goal. Is this what you are getting at?

Guy: That article was a critique of recent neo-republican authors, in particular Philip Pettit. He’s famous for a book of Republicanism from the 1990s that prompted a Republican revival in political thought. Of course, Republicanism goes back to ancient Rome and enjoys a revival in the Florentine Renaissance. Then there’s the English Civil War and later a tradition of 19th-century labour republicanism. But in modern political theory, republicanism was given a big shot in the arm from Philip Pettit. We can also think of Richard Bellamy, who’s been pretty prominent in articulating a republican theory of politics.

But so far as I understand their work, they see rights as being essentially legal rights or institutional claims deriving from the existing law. They’re concerned with how you make those claims effective, how you have a constitution with the appropriate balance of powers, how you have means for citizens to organize through political parties and to claim their rights through the court. There’s an emphasis on the institutionalization of rights.

This welcome. But I think there’s sometimes a conflation in their work between what it means for a right to exist and what it means for a right to be protected. I’m concerned about saying that a right only exists when that right is legally recognized. Saying this does away with one of the most important fundamental features of rights: they allow people to claim very strong moral entitlements precisely in cases where they’re being denied rights.

Think of the women’s suffrage movement. They said they had the right to vote even though they didn’t have the right to vote in law. This was a very strong or valid moral claim that ought to be recognized. They were saying to the powers that be: you have a duty to provide that right.

Now, I would perhaps articulate that demand through the language of non-domination. But someone can give another justification for why that right exists, perhaps basing it on other interests or other claims.

The key point there is that when movements make that kind of claim, they aren’t saying it would be nice for us to have the right recognized in law. They are saying that their rights are being violated currently by the state through the denial of those rights.

Take another example. If we say that people in Iran have the right to freedom of religion, obviously in one sense they don’t. They don’t legally enjoy the right to freedom of religion. But I would argue that they still have a right to freedom of religion morally. It’s just not being recognized. Therefore, if they are practicing religion in perhaps clandestine ways, they’re doing so within their rights. Moreover, they would also be entitled to claim something as a matter of moral right, rather than just making an argument about what should be a legal right. So that’s a kind of conceptual point and a normative point about what rights are.

There’s a long historical tradition that is very important of people claiming rights before those rights are necessarily recognized. It’s possible to do so in a way that’s coherent and makes sense of the situation accurately.

Jeremy Bentham first articulated that any talk of natural rights is “nonsense upon stilts.” He argued that moral rights don’t exist anywhere in the universe; they’re not written into the fabric of our DNA. Natural rights talk is just loose and confusing. We should only talk about legal rights.

Luke: Is there a strand of republican thinking that would say people don’t have a right to resist if their rights aren’t legally recognized?

Guy: That’s part of my challenge to contemporary republicans: how do we make sense of a right to resist if we just see the right to resist as being a legal right? If it’s just a legal right, then it must derive its authority from the law. But if we need to resist, then that authority is already in doubt. So it seems strange to say a legal right is based on the authority of the law.

The Levellers during the English Civil War saw the right of self-ownership as being linked to the right to resist. John Locke is often seen as more of a liberal than a republican, but there are certainly elements of republican influence in his work. He uses language of republicanism. He talks of a right to resistance as being a fundamental natural right. When the state oversteps its authority in egregious ways— when it violates certain fundamental rights—we have the right to resist.

Someone like Philip Pettit says there is a right to resist. But I don’t think it’s clear how he can explain or ground that right if he thinks that rights are just rights that we have through the law. In his account of republicanism, there isn’t really much space for actual concrete practices of resistance. It figures more like a possibility that’s meant to discipline political decision makers.

Luke: It’s one thing to say that we want a democratic constitution that will guarantee universal and equal rights. That’s important, especially considering the history of socialism’s denial of those things under particular regimes and constitutions. But we also need to consider how rights talk can help us build a movement to get that constitution. That’s what I took from your work, and something I’ve thought about for a little while.

Guy: Rights discourse is one of the more popular ways of framing our political demands. It’s part of the currency of politics now. Of course, a lot of it depends on the kind of legal and constitutional context. In the US, the Constitution imposes a certain constraint on the types of rights claims that can be made. There’s not really anything in the US Constitution about a very important category of rights: social and economic rights. Furthermore, the US Constitution has such a powerful hold over the popular imagination and how politics is conducted that it precludes many claims that would naturally lend themselves to the idea of rights. Say, for example, the right to housing. That’s important in many countries and is recognized in many places. But it would be a bit of a struggle to try and get people to acknowledge that right in the US.

Historically, rights have been really a powerful claim that social movements have made. Not every moral claim should be couched necessarily in the language of rights; there might be certain claims that are best expressed in other ways. But in many cases, I think they can still play an important role.

Luke: You write that “in the absence of institutional enforcement, the claiming of a moral right sanctions critique, protest, and mobilization outside and against the state.” Who or what is doing the sanctioning? Does the person doing the critique or the protest against the state care about whether they have a sanction to do this?

Guy: When someone claims a morally justified right—a right that is something that ought to be recognized and granted by the state—then they’re doing something. They’re performing what’s sometimes described in philosophy as a particular kind of speech act. They’re making demands. They’re claiming. They’re pressuring. They’re enforcing their rights. That can be something that sets them up in opposition to the agent against which they’re claiming their rights. So there’s a kind of conflictual logic to rights where they’re claimed against others.

The person who’s denying your rights is the person you’re claiming them against. So they’re political in that sense as well. They set up those relations of political claim-making vis-a-vis particular other actors who are accused of denying you those rights. There’s a kind of logic of political conflict and mobilization. I think too there’s an implicit appeal to others to support you in claiming your rights because rights are partly a relationship between the person claiming the right and the person who they’re demanding recognizes and enforces their rights.

They’re also partly a relation between those people and others who are meant to act in support of a valid, morally justified claim. So when there’s a conflict over rights, then others will generally have a duty to support them and to help them and assist them in gaining their rights.

That’s partly what a right is. That’s partly why it’s such a powerful vocabulary, because it demands recognition, it demands enforcement, it demands concrete action to fix it. It’s not just saying “would be nice if I had this” or “wouldn’t it be good if we had housing.” We have a right to housing, and this particular person or group of people are denying it to us. That’s a different kind of claim than saying it would be a good thing if we had housing.

Luke: I wanted to close out by making an assertion about the importance of rights. It’s in a bit of a U.S. focused context, but I think it applies more generally. It’s the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I argue that the Declaration's proclamation of equal rights and equal liberty was and still is revolutionary. I think that socialists mislead themselves and weaken their cause when they say that socialism should not or can’t be based on them.

Guy: It certainly was a revolutionary declaration, and it was really one of the first major anti-imperialist uprisings of the modern period. Of course, people will say that those rights at the time were ones reserved for white and property-owning males. That’s true.

But there’s also the fact that these ideas of equal liberty and equality had their own logic to them. Several theorists who became known as post-Marxists pointed this out in the 1960s and 1970s. These rights at first were indeed limited, but there’s a logic to the language of equality and freedom, which sort of cascades beyond the intentions of the initial people who deploy it.

Not long after the American Revolution, you have the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. French slaves in Haiti used the language of rights to rebel against the French colonists. There’s a tradition of these rights being claimed by groups who were excluded and for whom they weren’t originally intended. These declarations have that possibility inherent to them: the idea of universal equality and universal freedom.

After slaves, women claimed their rights; working-class people claimed the right to vote. The right to unionize. Colonized people all over the world used these languages. Sometimes they used Marxist languages, but they also used vocabulary of rights, freedom. and equality.

It’s a mistake for people on the left to ignore rights. I get slightly concerned when people on the Left say we can dispense with this idea of rights because it’s just a purely bourgeois or individualistic notion—that socialist politics doesn’t have space for rights. Particularly from our vantage point today, when we’ve seen the history of many self-described Marxists and socialist regimes and the persecution and oppression and denial of rights.

Rights should be central. Rights can be quite radical as well. They can be the basis for claims. For example, someone could claim the right to universal basic income. I’ve seen arguments around basic income framed in terms of rights. Or rights to workplace decision-making, for example, could be a conceivably quite radical claim. So, yeah, like yourself, I’d be somewhat skeptical, not somewhat skeptical,

Luke: Like you, I am really taken by the idea that you presented around rights claims once asserted have sort of a logic of their own. They spread.

I think about often Jonathan Israel’s phrase, the expanding blaze. They take off and leap and jump. That’s very powerful as well.

Guy: Yeah, exactly.

Luke talks with John Mulkins, creator and host of the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast. Luke and John share how they each came to fight for a democratic constitution, the necessity of ideological and strategic leadership, and what will be important to keep in mind in the many struggles ahead. John also shares the knowledge he has gained through his podcast, and how he approached the work of educating the public.

It takes a lot of work to plan, record, and edit each episode. If you enjoy these conversations with guests like John, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Your support is the motivation we need to keep going.

Subscribe now

What a month it’s been for the U.S. Senate. The perceived ascendance of democratic socialism on the heels of a string of earth-shattering electoral victories has sent the corporate media into hysteria over DSA’s new program. In a document whose planks include “a 32-hour work week” and “universal rent control,” the real lightning rod for ruling-class condemnation seems to be the demand to abolish the Senate. But while pundits spent the month wailing in defense of the old “millionaires’ club,” events in the chamber itself and the races for its few contested seats made it plain that abolishing it is not only reasonable but necessary if we hope to live in anything resembling a democracy.

In Maine, presumptive Democratic nominee Graham Platner was forced to drop his Senate bid after being credibly accused of rape, leaving Democrats to scramble to find a replacement in time to field a challenger to Republican Susan Collins. Some 1.4 million people reside in the state of Maine, or 0.4% of the U.S. population. But because of the wildly undemocratic distribution of voting power in the Senate, the scandal dominated national headlines in a way that DSA’s electoral surge in New York City earlier this summer did not. The simple reason is that Maine’s voters get two Senators all to themselves, and NYC-DSA’s do not (or rather, they split theirs with the 14 “Maines” worth of other New Yorker Staters). And because Maine just so happens to be one of a few “swing states,” the outcome of the state’s Senate race this year could very well decide which party controls Congress for the remainder of the second Trump administration. So against all reason, the results of an election to represent 0.4% of the population—and by extension, the sordid details of one man’s record of violence against women—turn out to be existentially important for the other 99.6% who have no right to vote in it.

Before the state Democratic Party had a chance to install Platner’s replacement, events in Maine were overtaken by news of Senator Lindsey Graham’s sudden death at the age of 71. As conservatives eulogized Graham, speculation began to swirl: What if Senator Mitch McConnell—who hadn’t been seen in a month after a mysterious fall—was also incapacitated? These two Senators, one dead and one missing in action, deserve more credit for the twenty-first-century onslaught of the Right than almost anyone else in America.

While leading the Republican Party in the Senate, McConnell oversaw a dramatic expansion of the filibuster, using it to kill popular public-option healthcare and voting rights legislation. As chair of the Senate Budget Committee, Graham was one of the key architects of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which ballooned ICE into a sprawling paramilitary better funded than most of the world’s major armies and imposed a nakedly kleptocratic budget on the working class. Together, McConnell and Graham engineered the ultra-conservative majority on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, declared the President functionally above the law in 2024, and nullified what was left of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

But McConnell and Graham’s misfortune is more than an opportunity to remember the evil ends they strove for while in power. Their careers, and the bizarre epilogues to those careers, are symptoms of a deeply undemocratic institution and the noxious aristocratic political culture that has grown up around it.

Both men owe their time in power entirely to the absence of universal, equal, and proportional suffrage in this country. The fact that two-thirds of the Senate is protected from the ballot box in any given election year makes it intentionally difficult to usefully measure a party’s popular mandate based on its share of Senate seats. But at no time during McConnell’s career as Majority Leader (or Graham’s leadership on major Senate committees) did Senate Republicans clearly represent an actual popular majority—either residents of states represented by Democrats and independents outnumbered those with Republican Senators by millions, as in 2015-2019, or Republicans gained ground in the Senate despite losing the popular vote in the more representative House by ten million votes, as in 2019-2021. The objectives McConnell and Graham championed with their malapportioned power have always been deeply unpopular, too: commanding majorities opposed the One Big Beautiful Bill, overturning Roe v. Wade, and Graham’s final monstrous pet project, the war on Iran.

In a democratic political system, McConnell and Graham would be historical footnotes, and their life’s work would be nothing. But thanks to the radically anti-egalitarian Senate, a President who lost the popular vote (who they helped shield from meaningful consequences for trying to remain in power by force), and an unelected and unaccountable Supreme Court they helped shape, McConnell and Graham enjoyed more than a decade of free rein to remake the world according to their designs. Hundreds of millions of people across the globe live tangibly worse lives as a result.

Because the Senate concentrates such vast power in so few hands and insulates it from popular pressures, Senate seats attract court intrigue, jockeying, and corruption by self-interested parties—careerist staffers and consultants, corporate lobbies, and foreign interests looking to curry favor with the world’s sole superpower, for starters. The resulting perversion of even the pretense of democracy can reach truly absurd levels. Case in point, Mitch McConnell’s staff continued to parade him around Capitol Hill as Senate Minority Leader for years after it became clear he was medically incapable of representing anyone. Now his colleagues are attempting to cast proxy votes on his behalf while he remains out of the public eye.

The most common form of influence-jockeying in the Senate, of course, is the buying and selling of seats on the open market. Wealthy interests try to buy their preferred result in just about every election for every office in the country, and most American politicians are happy to auction their platforms off to the highest bidder. But the Senate, with its maldistribution of power, attracts some of the most brazen examples of this legalized corruption. Just this month, the anti-war and pro-universal healthcare populist Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat. He did so despite PACs backed by the Israel lobby, arms manufacturers, tech capital, and the other monsters of modern American capitalism spending a staggering $70 million to defeat him. Had his opponent won, her patrons would have demanded a hefty return on their investment in the Senate.

The eleven-to-one spending gap in Michigan is a panicked swing in the dark by a ruling class frantically trying to buy back what it has lost in the last fifteen years: hegemony. The neoliberal political project that ascended to the level of state ideology under Ronald Reagan has rapidly lost popular legitimacy in the environment of permanent crisis—recessions, climate disasters, pandemics—that has defined the twenty-first century so far. As the heart of the American empire starts to look less like a walled garden and more like a crumbling barracks, Americans no longer want to live with austerity, endless wars, tax breaks for the super-rich, crushing debt, and a sprawling police state. And as those reasonable requests continue to come to nothing through the electoral process, they increasingly take it as a given that our political system is rigged.

One of the driving factors behind this growing awareness of the lack of democracy is that our political institutions were transparently not designed to permit majority rule. Donald Trump won the Presidency despite losing the popular vote by millions. The Supreme Court legislates by holy decree no matter who holds elected office. And at the heart of it all lies the Senate, a playground for reactionary elites where popular reform legislation stands no chance of success and unpopular moves to entrench racial capitalism face little risk of failure. Beyond just deciding the fate of legislation, the Senate has the final say in who staffs presidential cabinets, who holds federal judgeships, and whether impeached federal officials are removed from office. Its logic of unequal suffrage is the rot at the core of the American political system.

Candidates like Abdul El-Sayed or Bernie Sanders speak to working people’s growing disillusionment with that system. So do DSA’s candidates, like the socialists sweeping to office from New York City, Philadelphia, Denver, and elsewhere. DSA’s new program goes even further and offers a glimpse of what a charter for a new political system could look like: an expanded and proportionally-elected House unencumbered by the undemocratic Senate, Presidency, or Supreme Court, with suffrage guaranteed to all U.S. residents. That’s what scares the capitalist establishment about DSA’s rise to prominence. The white nationalists and religious fanatics running the Republican Party are scared that it represents a growing vote of no confidence in the minoritarian constitutional order that allows them to impose their agenda on an unwilling population. Imperialist corporate Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are worried that it represents the end of an era where they can make a career as loyal technocratic managers of a political system that disenfranchises their own voters.

The movement for democracy has made a few probing jabs at the capitalist establishment this year and revealed what makes it flinch. Now is no time to let up. DSA must embrace the demand to abolish the Senate, revel in the shock and horror the ruling class greets it with, and insist that the people we endorse for public office stand by it. Abolition of the Senate is not an issue we can win through incremental concessions or campaigns at the local level. But if we turn every election from here on out into a referendum on the question of universal and equal suffrage, we can build a mass constituency for democracy that will someday have the numbers and organizational muscle to sweep rotten old institutions like the Senate aside and will have no interest in asking the next generation’s Mitch McConnells for permission to do so.

Steven Raney is a member of Atlanta DSA and Marxist Unity Group. He has appeared twice on the Democratic Constitution Podcast (here and here)

We’re always looking to publish more reader-produced work like Steven’s that advances our values of democracy, universal and equal rights, and the goal of winning a new constitution. Send us a pitch at lukepickrell@yahoo.com.

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Lucas and Luke talk with Gil Schaeffer, a frequent podcast guest and blog contributor. Gil’s most recent article is “Political Slavery and Modern Democratic Constitutions,” in which he engages with Mike Macnair’s comments on constitutions and universal and equal rights. Here, Gil talks about DSA’s new Workers Deserve More program and the explosion of discourse around abolishing the Senate. Thanks in no small part to Marxist Unity Group, DSA is slowly (and fitfully) positioning itself at the vanguard of the struggle for a democratic constitution. Gil also discusses the lessons we should draw from the Chartists, the US Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement; why and how we should rethink the traditional Marxist minimum-maximum program; and the conjuncture of multiple crises, including the end of Medicare and the ballooning cost of the war with Iran.

It takes a lot of work to plan, record, and edit each episode. If you enjoy these conversations with Gil and our other guests, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Your support is the motivation we need to keep going.

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“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,” Obi-Wan Kenobi warned Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope. He was talking about Mos Eisley, a desert spaceport filled with rogues and smugglers of every species. But he might just as well have been describing Washington, D.C., home to some of the nation’s most repugnant people. The American government is one big racket, and all of us are getting fleeced.

A recent example is Donald Trump’s deal with his own Justice Department over disclosures of his tax returns in 2024. Trump agreed to drop his mammoth $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS—the first time a sitting president had sued his own government—in return for the creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund to compensate his allies, including rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. You remember them. These were the people who, when confronted by police, responded, “No, man. This is our house! President Trump invited us here. We’re here to stop the steal.” The deal also bars the IRS from auditing old tax returns associated with Trump, his family, and his businesses.

As the Guardian reported, the move is the “equivalent of Trump forgiving himself for any past tax debt or penalties in his years-long battle with the IRS, an agency that is supposed to ensure compliance with tax laws without succumbing to political pressure.” Trump now has what few of us mere mortals can imagine: immunity from the IRS.

The taxpayer-funded mountain of cash would have been overseen by five commissioners appointed by the executive branch and serving at Trump’s behest. It would have drawn money from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund, bypassing the normal congressional appropriations process. Hundreds of people initially expressed interest. Former Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to a twenty-two-year prison term before Trump set him and some 1,500 other J6’ers free, was ready to get his payout. “I’m not greedy,” said Tarrio, “but my life was all fucked up because of this.” Poor guy. Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, also wanted reparations. He flushed most of his fortune down the drain while pushing Trump’s election fraud narrative. George Santos wanted his millions. Mark McCloskey, the personal injury attorney who pointed an AK-47 at protestors during the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, also wanted a slice.

But the fund faced immediate and steep opposition. Democrats called it a blatant cash grab, and “illegal and corrupt as hell.” They promised to go straight to court. Several private citizens also sued to block the fund, arguing that it was a “personal vendetta” and the “most brazen act of presidential corruption this century.” Many Republicans also opposed the measure. Thom Tillis, a dissenting Republican who just happened to grow a spine six months before his retirement, said that Trump’s actions were “stupid on stilts” and would be rejected “out of hand” by the American people. Finally, on June 10, Todd Blanche, the acting US attorney general and Trump’s former personal lawyer, announced that the slush fund was being scrapped, but the IRS immunity would remain.

The slush fund is now gone, and Trump gets to keep his IRS immunity. The case is closed. But Tillis’ words echo: “The American people are going to reject this out of hand.”

How, exactly, were the American people supposed to have intervened? Tillis—who made a lucrative career in the Senate, the most undemocratic body of its kind in the world—knows very well it wouldn’t have been through Congress. The Senate does many things, but allowing an equal say for all Americans in the political process is not one of them.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, for example, which cut social services and fattened the pockets of corporations and higher-income earners, was passed by 50 Senators (plus J.D. Vance’s tie-breaking vote) representing only 44 percent of the population. The July 2025 Rescissions Act, which withdrew funding for health services and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was passed by 52 senators representing only 46 percent of the population.

Americans want universal background checks, a minimum wage increase, campaign finance reform, anti-gerrymandering laws, expanded healthcare, and stricter environmental protections. But the Senate—or more accurately, the minority of Americans it represents—doesn’t. No wonder a humorous 83 percent of Americans hate Congress’s guts. The only thing “stupid” here is thinking that Tillis and company represent the people.

What about the courts? After all, “scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.” From the get-go, many had hoped that Judge Kathleen Williams of the Southern District of Florida would nullify the initial settlement that created the fund. Others immediately placed their chips on Judge Richard Leon of the District of Columbia, who will oversee the suit filed by the Capitol police officers. On May 29, the fund was temporarily blocked by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia pending the resolution of lawsuits against the administration. Soon after, Blanche announced that the fund was dead.

Trump’s bravest soldiers won’t get their financial reward—at least not yet. But the overall picture has not changed. Yet again, important decisions were made—and will continue to be made—not by accountable officials elected by universal and equal suffrage, but by unelected and entirely unaccountable judges, millionaire Senators, and bureaucrats like Todd Blanche with extreme conflicts of interest. All we can do is sit on the sidelines, watch the politicians grow even wealthier, and hope that someone in a black robe or suit and tie is nice enough to do something decent. That’s political slavery, not freedom. It’s tyranny, not democracy.

To hell with all of this. We demand a universal and equal say in all important matters, including who makes the laws, who spends tax dollars, and who presides over important legal decisions. We are sick of waiting on the sidelines and watching the imperial president, the minoritarian Senate, and the unelected judiciary call the shots. We want the ability to make and enforce new laws that benefit the poor and working-class majority. We want state power placed under democratic control to ensure a sycophantic and pedophilic elite can never again terrorize our communities with impunity.

No more slush funds. No more conflicts of interest. And no more restricted and unequal suffrage. Let’s fight for a democratic constitution and use it to smoke out the true hive of scum and villainy.

Thanks for reading! Unlike the people who lord over this country, we aren’t filthy rich. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber and help the project move forward. Let’s win a democratic constitution.

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“The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every man has a right to one vote, and no more in the choice of representatives…

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another…”

- Thomas Paine, “Dissertation on the First Principles of Government” (1795)

Mike Macnair’s comment in “Modern Ancient Constitutions” that a campaign for a democratic constitution in the US runs the risk of turning into a “tactical fetish” was directed partly at my criticism of his preceding article, “Enlightened Constitutions.” In that earlier article, Macnair wrote, “if there has been progress from antiquity, through feudalism, to capitalism, it logically implies that there may be a future beyond capitalism.” I said it was out of place to inject Marx’s later theory of historical stages into a discussion of Enlightenment constitutions, primarily because this shift to speculation about a future beyond capitalism came at the expense of any mention of the most enlightened constitution of all, the French Constitution of 1793. I added that the idea of progress associated with the Enlightenment gave rise not only to a socialist vision beyond capitalism, but also to a democratic vision beyond authoritarianism, and this democratic vision was just as important to working class movements and to Marxism over the next century as the socialist one.

Macnair also claimed in “Enlightened Constitutions” that if one does not believe in Marx’s theory of historical stages, then “socialism ceases to be grounded in historical dynamics and becomes merely an ethical imperative.” And ethical imperatives in Macnair’s view are either politically inadequate or downright harmful: “Ethical or utopian socialism may prioritise the working class,...but it lacks serious and solid grounds for supposing working class self-activity under capitalism points toward a future without capitalism” (“Marxism and Theoretical Overkill”); and, “in the absence of a Marxist strategic understanding, most socialists are socialists by ethical and emotional commitment only. This leads to the adoption of ‘get rich-quick’ solutions that enter into the capitalist politicians’ government games” (Revolutionary Strategy, p. 162).

In “The Declaration of Independence and Finishing Reconstruction,” I cited Marx’s Letter to Lincoln as one example of the strength of an equal rights democratic republican ethic in the workers’ movement well into the second half of the nineteenth century. But that was only one example. To get beyond a whack-a-mole, single example response to the general problem of the relationship between democracy and socialism, I am going to sketch the history of this relationship across France, England, Germany, the US, Russia, and Sweden from the French Revolution to the present. This survey won’t produce a single answer to the problem of the relationship between democracy and socialism, because multiple combinations were formulated. But it will present the full range of these formulations so that their relevance for today can be compared and judged.

The French Revolution and the 1793 Constitution

On August 10, 1792, a nationwide uprising forced the French Assembly to abandon the 1791 Constitution with its property qualifications for voting and to immediately hold another election without property qualifications for a National Convention to write a new democratic constitution. The Convention first assembled on September 20, the same day the French sans-culottes army stopped the invading armies of Old Regime Europe at Valmy. Watching the battle from the German side, Goethe is said to have remarked in words that are engraved on a monument commemorating the French victory: “This day and this place open a new era in the history of the world.”

The same can be said of the Convention’s work in creating the democratic Constitution of 1793.

A nine-member committee headed by Condorcet and including Tom Paine was chosen to draft the new constitution. But the growing conflict between Girondins and Montagnards led to a rejection of Condorcet’s draft and the adoption of Saint-Just’s more centralized plan. Yet despite their differences, both Condorcet and Saint-Just agreed that political sovereignty in a democratic republic must be located in a single legislative chamber elected by universal and equal suffrage; that executive officials must be subject to oversight and control by the legislature; and that equality of rights included not only the rights of individuals against unjust interference by the state, but also the obligation of the state to guarantee every individual’s right to the necessary work, sustenance, and education without which real equality was impossible.

As a result of the further intensification of the Girondin/Montagnard conflict, both Condorcet and Paine were soon arrested and jailed, Condorcet dying in prison and Paine escaping the guillotine perhaps only by a misplaced mark on his cell door. Several months later, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their allies were themselves arrested and executed in the counterrevolutionary coup of Thermidor. The new leaders then proceeded to further suppress the popular movement, end price controls and food assistance, privatize the government’s armaments industries, and reinstitute property qualifications for voting in the 1795 Constitution.

Even though Paine had been imprisoned under The Terror and freed by the new regime, he did not turn against the revolution and did not hesitate to condemn the 1795 Constitution. In two addresses to the Convention, “Dissertation on the First Principles of Government” and “The Constitution of 1795,” Paine reaffirmed his commitment to democratic principles and his opposition to limiting voting rights to owners of property. Below are selections from the two addresses.

On principles:

The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every man has a right to one vote, and no more in the choice of representatives…

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another…

The first article of the Declaration of Rights says: “The end of society is the public good; and the institution of government is to secure to every individual the enjoyment of his rights.” But the article of the Constitution to which I have just adverted proposes as the object of society, not the public good, or in other words, the good of all, but a partial good; or the good only of a few; and the Constitution provides solely for the rights of this few, to the exclusion of the many…

Personal rights, of which the right of voting for representatives is one, are a species of property of the most sacred kind: and he that would employ his pecuniary property, or presume upon the influence it gives him, to dispossess or rob another of his property or rights, uses that pecuniary property as he would use fire-arms, and merits to have it taken from him…

All that is required with respect to property is to obtain it honestly, and not employ it criminally; but it is always criminally employed when it is made a criterion for exclusive rights…

When we speak of rights we ought always to unite with it the idea of duties: rights become duties by reciprocity. The right which I enjoy becomes my duty to guarantee it to another, and he to me; and those who violate the duty justly incur a forfeiture of the right…

An enquiry into the origin of rights will demonstrate to us that rights are not gifts from one man to another, nor from one class of men to another; for who is he who could be the first giver? Or by what principle, or on what authority, could he possess the right of giving? A declaration of rights is not a creation of them, nor a donation of them. It is a manifest of the principle by which they exist… As therefore it is impossible to discover any origin of rights otherwise than in the origin of man, it consequently follows that rights appertain to man in right of his existence only, and must therefore be equal to every man. The principle of an equality of rights is clear and simple. Every man can understand it, and it is by understanding his rights that he learns his duties; for where the rights of men are equal, every man must finally see the necessity of protecting the rights of others as the most effectual security for his own…

On practice:

It is, in the first place, necessary that we distinguish between the means made use of to overthrow despotism, in order to prepare the way for the establishment of liberty, and the means to be used after the despotism is overthrown…

The means made use of in the first case are justified by necessity. Those means are, in general, insurrections; for whilst the established government of despotism continues in any country it is scarcely possible that any other means can be used. It is also certain that in the commencement of a revolution, the revolutionary party permit to themselves a discretionary exercise of power regulated more by circumstances than by principle, which, were the practice to continue, liberty would never be established, or if established would soon be overthrown…

In England I was proscribed for having vindicated the French Revolution, and I have suffered a rigorous imprisonment in France for having pursued a similar mode of conduct. During the reign of terrorism, I was a close prisoner for eight long months, and remained so above three months after the era of the tenth Thermidor. I ought, however, to state, that I was not persecuted by the people either of England or France. The proceedings in both countries were the effects of the despotism existing in their respective governments. But, even if my persecution had originated in the people at large, my principles and conduct would still have remained the same…

“Without an equal vote, we are political slaves” is not the kind of language generally used by the left today; yet from the time of the French Revolution until WWI, it was standard in the workers’ and socialist movements to equate political freedom with the equal vote first proclaimed in the French 1793 Constitution. Here are Engels and Kautsky associating both the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Commune with the First French Republic:

Engels (“A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891”): 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 for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.

Engels (“1891 Introduction” to “The Civil War in France”): Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Kautsky (“The Republic and Social-Democracy In France”): To set out the political ideal of the Commune is not so easy, since various different tendencies clashed within it. But fundamentally all the practical demands and organisational efforts of the Commune arose from the same type of democratic republic that had already been established by the Great Revolution.

And as Kautsky also pointed out in “The Republic and Social-Democracy In France,” the French Revolution was the first to “smash [wreck, ruin, destroy] the state” eighty years before the Commune (see Lars Lih, “The Book That Didn’t Bark”).

My takeaways from this history are the following.

First. Paine’s proposition that without an equal vote we are political slaves is as true today as it was in 1795.

Second. The battle for universal and equal suffrage in the vote for the Convention and the 1793 Constitution was revolutionary. The bourgeoisie and aristocracy in the US, France, and Britain opposed democracy and constructed their oligarchic political systems to block equal representation. The concept of bourgeois democracy did not yet exist because it would have been an incomprehensible joining of two contradictory social and political concepts representing two irreconcilably opposed social and political forces. The bourgeoisie’s property-owner republicanism was not seen by either its advocates or its opponents as partial democracy or as a step toward democracy but as opposed to democracy.

Third. Over time this sharp distinction between democratic republicanism and property-owner republicanism was blurred in various ways. It is particularly confusing for us in the US to read Marx’s, Engels’, and other European Marxists’ many characterizations of the US as a democratic republic. They were either changing their definition of a democratic republic from universal and equal suffrage to universal but unequal suffrage (for white males), or they did not fully understand the US. Considering that they remained committed to universal and equal suffrage in their own countries, they apparently could not understand a country so different from their own.

Fourth. Unfortunately, this apparent willingness to accept that the vast inequalities and injustices of US society were the freely chosen policies of a self-governing people may have contributed to the plausibility of the concept of “bourgeois democracy” that weaves in and out of the history of Marxism. Macnair, in his arguments against the Trotskyist claim that the fight for a democratic republic is a fight for a “bourgeois democratic” revolution, examines the origins and meaning of this curious term in “For a Minimum Programme!” It seems that Marx and Engels were put on the defensive in 1870 by Bakunin’s accusation that the political demands of the Marx-influenced but not thoroughly Marxist Eisenach Program were just a rehash of non-socialist petty bourgeois democratic republican demands, which Bakunin labelled bourgeois.

This criticism then led to Marx’s and Engels’ own criticisms of the main political demands of the 1875 Gotha program—universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular rights, a people’s militia—as petty bourgeois rather than socialist. But as Macnair points out, there is a woeful misconception underlying this entire controversy: “The democratic republic is not and never has been the political programme of the capitalist class”:

The democratic republic was the programme of the urban artisans in the process of becoming proletarianised and the proletariat in the process of formation: from the Levellers in 1640s-50s England, through the Democratic Republicans in the 1780s-1800s US and the ‘Mountain’ in 1790s France, to the Chartists in the 1830s-40s Britain.

Plus, Marx and Engels did not hold these views for long. The policies they criticized as petty bourgeois in 1875 are essentially the same ones Marx endorsed in the 1880 French Workers Party Program, and Engels endorsed in the 1891 Erfurt Program.

Macnair also cites Kautsky’s The Social Revolution (1902) as an uncharacteristic instance of him employing the assumption that the bourgeoisie had at one time fought for a democratic republic, which then led Kautsky to argue that it was now up to the proletariat to complete the bourgeois revolution. By formulating the problem in this way, Kautsky seemed to suggest that the establishment of a democratic republic might first be a bourgeois republic rather than a workers’ republic.

I agree with Macnair’s conclusion about these departures from the main line of Marxist thinking on the history and politics of democratic republicanism:

It follows that Marx and Engels were wrong in their critiques of the Gotha programme to make casual comments which in effect accepted Bakunin’s criticism of the democratic demands of the Eisenach programme. Engels was wrong in 1891 to characterise the US (or France) as a democratic republic. And Kautsky was wrong to see the struggle for the democratic republic as a task of the bourgeois revolution….

Fifth. None of these anomalous episodes about how to specify the historical and class character of democratic republicanism had much, if any, practical significance before WWI. Since no country before WWI had universal and equal suffrage (except Norway in 1911), working class movements and socialist parties continued to press for it, and all governments and bourgeois parties continued to oppose it. But WWI and the Russian Revolution moved Lenin to reexamine Marx’s and Engels’ writings on democracy and the state in order to understand why Western European socialist parties had supported their governments in the war. In The State and Revolution, Lenin seemed to conclude that the democratic republic had turned out to be the perfect state form for capitalist rule rather than the state form for working-class rule. Summarizing Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Lenin writes:

In a democratic republic, Engels continues, ‘wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely’, first, by means of the ‘direct corruption of officials’ (America); secondly, by means of an ‘alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange’ (France and America).

Then Lenin adds his own comment:

Another reason why the omnipotence of ‘wealth’ is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell…, it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.

Putting aside the problem that France and the US were not democratic republics by Lenin’s own requirement of universal and equal suffrage, did Lenin’s criticism of the bourgeois-democratic republic as the best possible political shell for capitalism mean he had rejected the goal of a democratic republic entirely?

No.

Later in The State and Revolution Lenin quotes the passage from Engels’ “Critique of the Draft 1891 Social-Democratic Program of 1891” calling the democratic republic the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat and comments:

Engels realized here in a particularly striking form the fundamental idea which runs through all of Marx’s works, namely, that the democratic republic is the nearest approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat. For such a republic, without in the least abolishing the rule of capital, and, therefore, the oppression of the masses and the class struggle, inevitably leads to such an extension, development, unfolding, and intensification of this struggle that, as soon as it becomes possible to meet the fundamental interests of the oppressed masses, this possibility is realized inevitably and solely through the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the leadership of those masses by the proletariat…

And Lenin ends The State and Revolution with:

Kautsky will have to achieve his beloved ‘unity’ with the Scheidemanns, Plekhanovs, and Vanderveldes, all of whom agree to fight for a government ‘willing to meet the proletariat half-way’.

We, however, shall break with these traitors to socialism, and we shall fight for the complete destruction of the old state machine, in order that the armed proletariat itself may become the government. These are two vastly different things.

Kautsky will have to enjoy the pleasant company of the Legiens and Davids, Plekhanovs, Potresovs, Tseretelis, and Chernovs, who are quite willing to work for the ‘shifting of the balance of forces within the state power’, for ‘winning a majority in parliament’, and ‘raising parliament to the ranks of master of the government’. A most worthy object, which is wholly acceptable to the opportunists and which keeps everything within the bounds of the bourgeois parliamentary republic.

We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the entire class-conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight—not to ‘shift the balance of forces’, but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

These last two excerpts draw the line separating a democratic republic from an undemocratic bourgeois republic in the right way. Contrary to Engels’ and Lenin’s earlier characterization of the democratic republic as the best possible political shell for capitalism, a democratic republic would be either the most fragile possible political shell for capitalism, or the just-emerged body of an entirely new social order. Engels makes this exact analogy between a crab bursting its old shell by force and a democratic republic bursting the shell of Germany’s old social order in his 1891 “Critique.” In The State and Revolution, Lenin did not replace the original Marxist goal of a democratic republic with the new goal of a Soviet of Workers and Soldiers. He considered both of them possible forms of a workers’ republic.

Sixth. Although we are in general agreement on the nature and centrality of democratic republicanism in the workers’ movement and Marxism between the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution, Macnair and I draw different lessons from this history. For me, Paine’s principle is as politically central to the definition of democratic republicanism now as it was more than two centuries ago: without an equal vote, we are not free. That is why I argue that the demand for a democratic constitution should be the US left’s primary strategic goal.

Macnair does not mention universal and equal suffrage at all in “For a Minimum Program!” (or in most of his other writings), only universal suffrage. Instead of centering traditional democratic republicanism’s demand for equal representation, Macnair substitutes his own formulations. “Rule of law constitutionalism” replaces unequal representation as the main obstacle to democratic republicanism; and the strategic place of the demand for universal and equal suffrage at the top of Second International Social-Democratic party programs becomes:

Each of the individual demands of the minimum programme could, on its own, be conceded by capital with the capitalist state remaining intact. But if all the demands of the political part of the minimum programme are implemented - ie, the democratic republic replaces the rule-of-law state and the public debt is suppressed (which requires that the financial sector be nationalised under democratic control) - political power will have been transferred from the capitalist class to the working class.

I don’t agree with this formulation. On its own, if the demand for universal and equal suffrage was conceded by the US ruling class, it would amount to a political revolution. In addition, the lack of universal and equal suffrage explains why most of the other demands in the minimum program are so difficult if not impossible to achieve. (The establishment of a people’s militia to replace the standing army will probably be possible only coincident with a political revolution.)

As a last point, I would rearrange the minimum and maximum parts of the program and put the demand for a democratic republic first. That would make it consistent with what should be the leading aspect of our agitation and make it clear that winning the battle of democracy is necessary for the transition to socialism. I would also not call the program a minimum-maximum program, but a maximum democracy program. I hope the reasons for these suggestions will become clearer as we go through the history of the relationship between democracy and socialism since the French Revolution.

Paine, Babeuf, and the Origins of Socialism in the French Revolution

(To be continued)

We are always looking to publish more reader-produced material like Lee’s that aligns with our values of democracy and universal and equal rights, and our goal of winning a new constitution. Please consider sending us a pitch (lukepickrell@yahoo.com). Thanks for reading the content we produce. If you like the articles, please share them with family, friends, and anyone else. Also, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to the blog. Subscribers provide the moral and material means to keep going!

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It’s no secret that we need to fundamentally change our political system. This means changing the Constitution. But individual amendments won’t be enough. Only a major overhaul can successfully establish and maintain the representative democracy that we need.

The current Constitution has been interpreted and reinterpreted many times since its ratification on June 21, 1788. These interpretations have been based on the false premise that capitalism is compatible with democracy. In fact, the two forces are antithetical. Massive wealth inequality, competition, and conflict are inherent to capitalism, and inevitably lead to plutocracy (a government run by the wealthy). Any time an individual or small group is allowed to accumulate enough wealth to purchase the government, they do precisely that. This is what we have today in the United States.

Establishing and sustaining democracy in the US will require two things: a consensus-based representative form of democratic government and an economic system that works with the government to prioritize the wellbeing of the entire commonwealth above the preservation of individual wealth. The interdependence of government and economy is crucial to preserving the wealth equity required to sustain peaceful “liberty and justice for all.”

Before we can achieve the Constitutional changes needed, I believe that working people must demand it. This should be done by exerting the ultimate power that only workers have: a nationwide general strike that shuts down the mega-corporations and brings society to a halt (save for emergency response systems, hospitals, and utilities). This is how working people can successfully demand the drafting of a new constitution through a nationwide citizens’ assembly or a series of citizens’ assemblies. Whatever is drafted must be ratified by the entire country on a one-person, one-vote basis.

My draft plan for this new constitution can be found below. It is a work in progress that lays out the parameters for a democratic republic with an executive and judiciary accountable to a unicameral legislature. It addresses some of the pros and cons of the two possible methods for selecting congressional representatives, judges, board members, etc. The two methods are sortition and election. If elections are used, they should be ranked choice, exclusively publicly funded, and based on universal, equal, and direct suffrage. Some sections are more developed than others. The less developed sections await feedback from you all.

I offer this document as a growing, evolving, and challenging compilation of my own and others’ ideas. The final result will be decided by all of us. Please feel free to comment on these documents and spread these ideas. Any feedback can be sent to onesimplee@gmail.com. We need to begin imagining the foundation of a truly democratic nation.

Legislative and Executive Powers (link)

Judicial Powers (link)

The Selection of Representatives and Leaders (link)

Education and Separation of Church and State (link)

Code of Ethics and Whistleblower Protections (link)

Business and Economy (link)

Human Rights v. Privileges, Healthcare, and Personhood (link)

Immigration, Borders, and Illicit Drugs (link)

The Military (link)

Taxation (link)

This is an abridged transcript of my conversation with Jason Maloy, the author of several works, including “The Paine-Adams Debate and Its Seventeenth-Century Antecedents,” presented at a conference on Paine hosted by San Jose State University in 2007. I’ve thought a lot about Paine’s argument for a unicameral legislature given DSA’s call to abolish the Senate and the subsequent uproar around such a proposal. Paine would surely be on our side in calling for the Senate’s abolition. Thanks for reading the articles and transcripts that we produce. If you like them, please share them with family, friends, and anyone else. Also, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to the blog. Subscribers provide the moral and material means to keep going!

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Jason: I read some excerpts from Common Sense in my senior year of high school. There was a U.S. government class at Austin High. The first thing that struck me about Paine was just the writing. I was also a student journalist in both high school and college. And so my striving to become a better writer probably had something to do with why I was drawn to Paine’s writings.

Paine and Adams were ideological rivals, and it seems they weren’t personally very fond of one another either. If you look at the published writings, both men were fairly prolific in getting their ideas out into print. The thing that I focused on in that particular research project was the question of legislative structure or cameral structure. How do you organize a representative legislature in a republican constitution?

As much as Paine and Adams agreed on some core issues that arose in the American Revolution—a hostility to being ruled by the British monarchy, for one thing—they differed very sharply on this issue of legislative structure, as well as other issues. I focused on Paine’s unicameralism versus Adams’ multicameral approach to setting up the legislature.

You have to remember that the first written constitutions were not for the United States as a whole. They were for each of the individual states that had become independent. Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, etc. The individual states are writing their own constitutions, and they’ve got executive agencies, they’ve got legislative organs, they’ve got things to organize. Should the legislature of a U.S. state’s constitution be unicameral, bicameral, or maybe have even more add-ons?

Most of the states did come up with a sort of House and Senate model or lower chamber and upper chamber model—a primary assembly and a secondary assembly. The majority of the new states after 1776 put these bicameral legislatures into their constitutions. Pennsylvania, which happens to be where Paine had the most influence, was one of the few states with a unicameral legislature. A little while later, Vermont came in, also with a unicameral legislature.

Should you follow the Pennsylvania model and have a unicameral legislature? That’s the Paine option. Or should you follow Massachusetts, the Adams option, plus several other states that followed that bicameral model?

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Paine firmly believed that it was not only morally right to respect the equality of citizens through extremely egalitarian institutions, but also that those egalitarian institutions would be a bulwark against future disorder, future revolutions, and future popular unrest. Paine’s essential line of thinking is that ordinary citizens—the people, quote unquote—are the foundation of a country, of a political system. If they are not taken care of, if their rights are not respected, if their dignity is not afforded legal and political recognition, they’re discontent. Their unrest is the greatest possible source of practical problems within that state, the greatest possible source of disorder and civil strife. This isn’t just the right thing to do, the legitimate way to set up a popular government. It’s also a stable and expedient option.

Luke: The British historian G.D.H. Cole called Paine’s Rights of Man “the first fundamental social program put forward on behalf of the people since the days of Jared Winstanley and the diggers.” He’s referencing a group that appeared in the English Civil War. You bring up the English Civil War, though you discuss the levelers, not the diggers.

Jason: If you take Paine as the advocate for the unicameral side of this debate that we’re talking about today, Adams as taking the bicameral or multicameral, there could be more than two inputs into the legislative process, right? So unicameralism versus multicameralism. After the regicide of 1649, the English Civil War ended.

Cromwell and his lieutenants set up a government that had a lot of checks and balances. It’s an example of the kind of mixed government that Paine really was opposed to. There are parallels that are worth following back to Paine and Adams. There’s an older parallel: Massachusetts Bay before the English Civil War even began. Paine and Adams would not have been ignorant of that history. In fact, Englishmen and English colonists in the United States often had a very keen sense of English political history, and the fact that many of these battles had been fought before. The levelers were on the losing side of that institutional debate with Cromwell.

Cromwell ruled during the Commonwealth period in the 1650s under a constitution that was really institutionally mixed. Powers were divided—this, that, and the other way. Cromwell himself was an overwhelming force who tried to get the parliament to do what he wanted.

But the Levelers had said that you need to focus all the power —all the legal authority of this new republic—in freely, fairly elected representatives of the people in a single assembly. And so they were attempting—by advocating this kind of elected representative body with no division of legislative power—to make a counterweight to Cromwell’s executive power.

But they lost the argument for practical purposes, and Cromwell got a constitution that was rather complex and very mixed. John Adams himself did not consider that he was the heir to Cromwell. Despite himself, Adams was actually repeating arguments that had been raised. He was using arguments against Paine that had been used against the Levelers by supporters of the Cromwellian protectorate.

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These are people like Benjamin Franklin who genuinely thought of themselves as English up to a certain point, when the political conflict between the empire and the colonies got very intense. People started discovering more of an American identity, an Anglo-American identity distinct from being English or British. The Levelers were—in the English-speaking tradition—pretty much the first historical figures who said, “Look, what we ought to do to reform the political system is take this sort of mishmash of customs and laws—this unwritten constitution of king, lords, and commons—and we ought to sweep it aside and write a new blueprint.”

...

Leveling. What is that exactly? Which level? Whose level? Many people would have been suspicious of the social and economic program of the Levelers, which was about equality. The idea of leveling was to combat inequality, especially extreme inequality. That’s the figurative or metaphorical meaning of that language. There’s ambivalence for a lot of people. They love the idea of a written constitution, but aren’t necessarily crazy about the idea of social and economic equality. So on the one hand, they’re indebted to the radicals of the mid-17th century. On the other hand, they don’t want to follow that egalitarian program all the way through.

Luke: Can you talk about the French Revolution’s impact?

Jason: France had been the key ally of the revolutionaries fighting off the British Empire. When the French Revolution happened, a section of the American public thought, “Yeah, this is kind of what we hoped would happen. We knew that the French really, really loved liberty as much as we did, and they would eventually throw off monarchy as well. We’re brothers in liberty.” The populists and unicameralists tend to gravitate toward the Francophile side, including people like Paine.

Luke: Jonathan Israel talks about democratic versus aristocratic republicans. All democrats are republicans, but not all republicans are democrats. Was the unicameral versus bicameral division a line that split republicanism more generally?

Jason: I believe it was. The core distinction that you mentioned is important. I’ve always understood Jefferson and Madison’s Democratic-Republican Party as an attempt to appeal to both sides. But it’s also just the idea that there are lots of different kinds of republics. This, by the way, also goes back to the 1630s in Boston, the debate in the Massachusetts colony—John Winthrop and his allies saying, “Yeah, we want to have a mixture of aristocracy and democracy.”

Adams certainly believed that if your democracy was too pure, if your representation was too equal, you’re going to get unstable and unwise policymaking in government because ordinary citizens or their faithful representatives would not be able to handle the complexities of the modern world. The elites will not take it lying down, he thinks, and they are the source of potential trouble if you go for a really egalitarian political system.

One version of the argument I’ve heard in Adams’s defense was that he was trying to be very pragmatic about preserving a republic, and he thought that popular republics—unicameral legislatures, thoroughgoing political and maybe even social and economic equality—could not last because the organized, powerful elites would subvert it. Adams looks at something like the French Revolution and thinks, “The problem is they tried to be too radical. And now things are falling apart.”

People remember the Terror from the French Revolution. But also consider the economic and financial picture. This scene of economic chaos… very little respect for property rights, very little economic stability. This leads people like Adams, Hamilton, Washington, and the Federalists in general to say, “Yeah, the French are showing everything not to do. The French National Assembly is a terrible unicameral assembly and will lead to all of these bad things.” So the French Revolution became something of a crucible for debate in the United States, where people began to measure themselves.

Luke: You mentioned the Pennsylvania Constitution earlier.

There was a conservative reaction against this unicameral constitution before the French Revolution. There were other features of it that people took exception to. There was no single governor or president of Pennsylvania. There was an executive council similar to the Swiss Confederation today. There’s a very good book by a historian called Terry Bouton that goes through this in considerable detail. I don’t think the reaction against the French Revolution overturned Pennsylvania’s unicameral legislature, but it was part and parcel of the same sort of ideological cleavage. The unicameralists lost that battle in the end. They won the battle in 1776, but that constitution did not last.

Luke: You briefly make note that Paine offers a partial concession to Adams and multicameralism.

Jason: The Rights of Man is published in two parts. Both of these are directed at Edmund Burke, not John Adams. But the passages from The Rights of Man about legislative structure—about the kind of constitutional design—are very much built on the long-running disagreement between Paine and Adams, which had appeared in print in other forms for many years.

In the second part of Rights of Man, Paine says that if people are so worried about hasty, rash, or reckless decisions being made by a single legislative assembly, you might need to slow down the process—make it more deliberate and put in some kind of check. Having another chamber with veto power over the people’s representatives isn’t the only kind of check that will serve the purpose of trying to guard against reckless decisions that people will later regret. You could have a single sovereign assembly, with voting power equally distributed across the representatives of the people. You can break up the legislative process in different ways to slow it down a little. So it’s a partial concession.

It’s Paine saying that reckless legislation is something we should try to avoid. But, if you’re setting up a smaller second chamber representing the elite elements of society and giving them a veto over the primary assembly, you’re way overdoing it. You don’t need to go that far to slow down the legislature and ensure against reckless legislation. The single assembly for debating purposes could be divided. You could randomly assign members of the legislature to different committees to discuss and amend some piece of pending legislation. This was essential to Paine: you’re still a unicameral legislature if, at the end of crafting the bill, you still voted up or down on a simple majority vote with every vote counted equally. The essence of unicameralism is, however you debate things, the final decision is taken in one chamber.

Luke: In Sweden’s political system, the single body is elected by universal and equal suffrage through proportional representation. To change the Constitution (or their version of a constitution), you need a majority vote in the unicameral body. Then you need another election of that body, and another majority vote.

Jason: That’s somewhat common for unicameral legislatures when it comes to constitutional amendments. One legislature can, in essence, propose an amendment to the Constitution. But they can’t accomplish it all in one vote. Incidentally, it’s not too far off from something that the Levelers talked about back in the 1640s and 50s: for important pieces of legislation, there ought to be some resort to the country in between a first consideration and a second consideration. The levelers weren’t always very specific about procedures and processes. The logistics and technology of voting were very different back then compared to in Sweden or other democracies today.

Luke: In 2007, Ronald King of San Diego State University noted that the debate over unicameralism and bicameralism remains. I think Paine’s insistence on universal and equal political rights, along with this belief that nothing else but a sovereign assembly can be truly representative of the nation, is immensely important. What’s the contemporary importance of reading Paine and of understanding this debate?

Jason: It’s pretty undeniable to me that the U.S. Constitution is strongly inegalitarian in some respects. It’s supposed to be that way. Paine’s entire discourse around equality and unicameralism is premised on the idea of one nation. That was very much what the French Revolution was premised on as well.

Egalitarian political institutions should be used to represent the nation in its lawmaking, in its legal and political systems. But with the USA, there’s always been a question mark over that.

…

Just look at the U.S. Senate. The US Senate is not a body that reflects a one-nation mentality. It’s a body that gives the same amount of representation to half a million residents of Wyoming as it gives to 30 million residents of my home state, or 50-plus million in California. So it’s clearly an inegalitarian body. It was designed that way. It’s supposed to be that way. It’s baked into the U.S. Constitution that you cannot equalize representation of states in the Senate without the permission of all of the states. It’s hard to believe that Wyoming or any other small state is going to agree to that. So the inequality is baked in.

It was designed that way. And it was designed that way back at a time when most people thought of the USA as a kind of federation or confederation. They did not think of it as one nation.

The unicameral idea has always caught on much more strongly and quickly in smaller political units. You mentioned earlier that the United States has exactly one unicameral legislature. That’s the legislature of the state of Nebraska. It’s a state. It’s one unit, so it has one chamber in its legislature.

Rather than advocating wholeheartedly one side or the other on my own behalf, I’ll say this: If you want to be coherent and consistent, either you believe in the one nation idea—in which case Paine’s unicameral logic is really strong and coherent and has a consistent line of argumentation behind it—or you believe in, maybe for practical reasons, the need for large conglomerations called federations or confederations to operate as one unit some of the time, but to make compromises that lead to the people within that unit not being valued equally in political terms.

Germany and Brazil are also federal states. They’re federal democracies like the USA. Germany and Brazil also have some powers that are reserved for state or provincial governments that the national government can’t really interfere with.

But most countries that have bicameral legislatures are federal states. They have a lot of local regional autonomy in local government units. The US fits into that camp. Outside of the United States, most federal democracies do not have bicameral legislatures within provinces or regions or states. So, in other words, Nebraska—with its unicameral legislature—is the outlier in the USA. But in Germany or Brazil, it would be the norm.

Okay, some countries are federal, and they’re not truly one nation. They’re not one consolidated, centralized, unitary thing. They’re kind of a patchwork of different things. Maybe you need a second legislative chamber to accommodate some mixture, some differentiation. But there is no excuse from a Painite perspective for having more than one legislative chamber in Louisiana, where I currently am, or in Nebraska, or in Texas, or in California.

The state senates in our country have no theoretical justification. There may be various practical issues. I think the primary practical issue is that career politicians or people who aspire to become career politicians. When they get tired of being in the elected house of a state, they want a promotion. Because the second chamber has fewer members, better pay, and more prestige, it represents a sort of job promotion for wannabe career politicians.

You can justify bicameralism in certain interesting ways if your nation is a federation of component parts, not within a state. In the USA, we tell ourselves all the time that we are one nation now. We are no longer a federation of states. That ended in 1865. And yet our bicameral national legislature, the existence of the unequal structure of the U.S. Senate tells us every day, we are not one nation.

We still haven’t decided what we want to be when we grow up as a country. We tell ourselves one thing, but our institutions live a totally different experience day in and day out.

This is an edited transcript of our conversation with Bruce Watson about Freedom Summer, the Civil Rights Movement, and US history more generally. We also consider the limits to certain appeals to material interests and the importance of moral motivation. I’m constantly thinking of the parallels between Reconstruction, Freedom Summer, and our own time. Much has changed. But some things, like an unelected Supreme Court that’s able and willing to attack civil and political rights, have not.

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Bruce: Freedom Summer sparked rage and resentment in the South because, although it had been 100 years since Reconstruction and 90 years since the end of Reconstruction, in the mid-60s, those topics were still extremely raw wounds. And Reconstruction had been rewritten in the South for about 70 or more years.

It was rewritten as a horrible time when the carpetbaggers came from the North, and they imposed Black voting on the South. This is how it was being taught in every school in America, not just in the South, but especially in the South. And so the idea of 700—or some people thought there would be more, 1,000—mostly white students coming into the South from the North, just opened all the wounds of Reconstruction and all the scars. It was seen as another invasion. They called it the invasion, the N-word and Communist invasion of the South.

That was how the South saw Freedom Summer. Even though Bob Moses and others said we’re not going to be sitting in, we’re not going to be doing anything, we’re going to be teaching, we’re going to be trying to get people to vote. No protests, nothing. Mississippi was on a hair trigger.

Luke: Who were the people who participated in Freedom Summer? And what kind of things motivated these folks?

Bruce: Well, there were two groups. The second group, the Black group, participated in more than Freedom Summer. They had been in the South. Many were originally from the South. These were the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They’d organized all this, and so they came up to Ohio to bring a bunch of students down.

But the volunteers of Freedom Summer were the idealists of America, really. This was 1964, just a few years after Kennedy had called people to volunteer in the Peace Corps and other things, the “ask not what your country can do for you” speech. They had grown up with that. They had grown up seeing America change. They’d probably seen some civil rights violence on television. The Birmingham riots with the police dogs and fire hoses had just been a year before. Of course, they’d seen Kennedy gunned down. Suddenly, they were given a chance to go to one place, challenge one power structure, and do what they could to help one group of clearly oppressed people.

I wish we had that kind of clear-cut distinction and clear-cut opportunity for activism right now. Everybody’s so diverse and scattered. But here it was, the chance to do something, to spend your summer in Mississippi, of all places. And it seemed risky to some, but it was a risk worth taking.

Most of them were raised in fairly liberal families with a sense of commitment to America. Both a patriotic, democratic commitment, but also to ask what you can do for your country, to complete Kennedy’s quote. And they took it very seriously, and this was their chance.

Lucas: What did these volunteers do after 1964? And what did the people who were living in Mississippi do?

Bruce: First of all, it’s important to realize how this summer changed them. They were facing violence or the threat of violence every day. It did not erupt all the time. There were three murders on the first day. There were beatings. There were arrests, including false arrests for ludicrous things like driving with the wrong license plates. They had seen a power structure abuse its power in ways that these folks—these true believers in America—never thought that they would ever see. And it really radicalized them.

It radicalized the volunteers, those who stayed for the whole summer, went home in shock, really. They went back to school, back to their comfortable college environment. And one guy told me a story about being back at the University of Chicago. Someone said, well, what happened down there in Mississippi? And he just burst into tears.

It was such a life-changing thing. Some of them went on to be rather well-known activists. Many were involved in the civil rights movement again. Some went back to Mississippi the following summer. Many were involved in the women’s movement. Some of them had seen a fairly sexist Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee where the men did all the things, and the women were expected to type. Others were involved in the protests over the Vietnam War.

One volunteer who your listeners should know is Mario Savio. He was a fairly ordinary student before he went to Mississippi. When he came back, he led the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. He became a very outspoken, beautiful speaker whose speeches are still quoted. He was really changed by Mississippi. This really jump-started the 60s that we know of as the radical, outspoken, activist 60s.

Others stayed in Mississippi. Some of them were radicalized, people like Fannie Lou Hamer and others who continued political involvement for the rest of their lives. Others, especially those who had gone to Freedom Schools, saw that things didn’t have to be the same as they had been.

Lucas: What kind of influence did Freedom Summer have on the New Left and particularly the student movements?

Bruce: Mississippi became, for a brief time, the place to go to experience America in all its oppression. And it became sort of a whipping boy or a poster boy, depending on your point of view. For the left, people who had not gone down initially in Freedom Summer in 1964 did go down later. Tom Hayden and Abby Hoffman went to Mississippi just to see what was going on, to teach if they could, to help if they could. There wasn’t a lot for them to do by that time. Freedom Summer was over. But still, you went down. If you were on the left, you went down and saw it for yourself. It took on an outsized role in the critique of America.

Luke: In his biography, Tom Hayden’s biography talks about meeting King in 1960 in Los Angeles. King says something to him along the lines of, why aren’t you really getting involved with the struggle? It’s one thing to write. It’s another thing to be there.

Bruce: You are right. Hayden went before Freedom Summer. It took some nerve to go to the South, even as a—well, I would say especially—as a white person. You’ll recall in 1961, there were the Freedom Rides. They were every bit as daring and as much a catalyst as Freedom Summer. Initially, a couple dozen black and white students rode buses into the South to integrate bus terminals. They were beaten, and a bus was firebombed, and more and more and more. Hundreds came.

It became a huge movement, very important. That was sort of the precursor to Freedom Summer. But the danger that they faced as a white person coming into Mississippi was that you would be seen as a collaborator; you were an outside agitator, and you’re coming here to stir trouble. Most white supremacists in the South really believed that the colored people—again, the term they used—were happy. That’s how naive and how ignorant they were of what an oppressive system this was.

That was the standard take on both Freedom Riders and Freedom Summer. So you were taking your life in your hands if you went South as a white person. Tom Hayden wasn’t in Freedom Summer. But his wife, Casey Hayden, was all over that. She had worked throughout the South, long before Freedom Summer and into Freedom Summer. I talked with her as well, and she was a very important person in the movement.

Lucas: What were the Freedom Schools?

Bruce: They were the brainchild of Bob Moses, who had been a schoolteacher. He taught math in a private school for years before he joined the movement. He and several others wanted these schools to be a very important part of the summer.

They made a plan. They wrote out a curriculum for Freedom Schools, not knowing if many people would come. It was the summer, and kids don’t generally want to go on their own to school. But they set up Freedom Schools in every place where there was a Freedom Summer contingent.

Some were simply in old shacks. Some were old barns, and they put up blackboards. They got a lot of books shipped from around the country by asking for donations. They trained teachers to come down, and they opened right around July 4th or a little after, a couple weeks into the summer. They expected 1,000 students to come for daily lessons, and 2,000 showed up, including adults. Many of whom had never been allowed to go to school because they were being worked to the bone.

The kids would come during the day, and they were taught lessons that would never have been taught to them in their public schools in Mississippi. Teachers were trained to ask them questions, to ask about the Middle Passage of slavery, which they’d never heard of. They asked people to seriously look at racism and white supremacy.

Many Freedom Schools were open at night, and people would come to learn to read or type. The schools were the huge success of Freedom Summer. They didn’t register as many voters as they wanted to. They didn’t get their challenge at the Atlantic City Convention to seat a Black delegation. But the freedom schools continued on and into the following summer.

Luke: Can you talk about Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Delegation?

Bruce: Moses and a few other people in SNCC had a brilliant idea. They held what they called a “freedom election” the November before Freedom Summer. The trope in Mississippi was that Black people didn’t want to vote. They don’t care about voting at all. This was the justification for not allowing them to vote.

Seven percent of Blacks were registered to vote in Mississippi. That was because they were being held out by various poll taxes and things like that. SNCC decided to have this election. They registered their own party called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Now Blacks could register in their own election and vote at their own polls.

Some 80,000 votes were cast by Freedom Democrats for the gubernatorial elections in November. The polls were in barbershops and bars and other places. You could just have your own private ballot and vote for your own candidates. It showed people that, yes, Black people do want to vote.

The Democratic Party’s convention in November 1964 was held in Atlantic City. This would be where the Democrats would renominate Johnson. MFDP planned to send their own delegations. Naturally, the Mississippi delegation was going to be all white. So, the MFDP planned their own convention. They had nominated two Black people. People came and spoke. They got sharecroppers and barbers and preachers and other people—ordinary folks—to come to the convention to nominate. And they picked these two folks. They got some money, and they took two buses up to Atlantic City.

The MFDP challenged the all-white delegation in front of America. They declared themselves the true representative of Mississippi. The all-white delegation was illegal and shouldn’t be allowed to be seated.

Fannie Lou Hamer spoke before a national audience. It was a huge challenge and really upset the Democratic National Convention. Lyndon Johnson was watching in D.C., and he actually considered stepping down. He said he understood what they were doing. But he was terrified that if they were seated, the whole of the South would walk out as in 1948 when the Dixiecrats left, and that he would lose the election to Goldwater. So he didn’t want any part of it. He ordered Hubert Humphrey and other people to shut it down.

Still, Fannie Lou Hamer spoke. She made a very stirring speech (which everyone should watch) and told them how she’d been beaten. She’d been dragged off a bus after registering to vote. She’d been beaten in jail. The nation watched because LBJ tried to shut that down. He tried to hold a press conference during that time, and they cut away from Hamer’s speech.

Too late. It was aired on national television that night. And it looked for a while like they might get a chance to unseat the white delegation. But they got offered two non-voting seats. They turned that down. They hadn’t come so far for two non-voting seats.

They went back home, but they’d made their point. The Democrats promised never again to seat an all-white delegation from Mississippi—and they didn’t. In 1968, Hamer spoke from the podium of the Democratic National Convention.

Lucas: You quote William Faulkner: “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” Can you talk about Reconstruction and what didn’t happen some 100 years before Freedom Summer?

Bruce: Faulkner is always a good person to have on your side when you’re talking about Mississippi. It’s very important to understand what happened. Mississippi had been the most devastated state in the South. We always talk about Sherman’s March through Georgia during the Civil War, tearing up everything within a 60-mile-wide path to Atlanta. But he had practiced in Mississippi. After Vicksburg fell in 1863, Sherman and others came through and just tore up Mississippi, just made it a complete mess.

Mississippi was devastated by the Civil War. And it was the deepest part of the Deep South. It was the most bigoted and locked-down part. Change was not going to happen in Mississippi as it was creeping in Atlanta and elsewhere. It simply wasn’t going to happen. Nothing was going to change.

That’s why Freedom Summer was the most daring and radical thing to do. What Bob Moses did—leave everything behind, leave Martin Luther King behind in Atlanta, go to Mississippi and try to crack Mississippi. If we can crack Mississippi, as someone said, we can crack the whole South. King worked out of Atlanta. Atlanta wasn’t great; but it was Atlanta, the city too busy to hate. It could accommodate change. It wasn’t a terrible threat.

But Jim Crow was entrenched in rural Georgia, rural Alabama, and rural Florida. Mississippi was all rural. The biggest city in Mississippi at the time was Jackson; maybe it had 100,000 people. Meridian maybe had 20,000 people. The rest of Mississippi was rural. The interstate highway that we have now—that goes right through Jackson every day—wasn’t finished at that time. You really were isolated. There were two or three TV stations, and they were owned by the same people who owned the newspapers. Of course, they were white supremacists. The cops were infiltrated by the Klan. Actually, the sheriffs and the cops were Klansmen. It was truly an airtight system. You could only compare it to South Africa and apartheid. Nothing like it had been seen in America at that time.

Luke: Vivek Chibber wrote recently: “I don’t see any way that moral advocacy can be the mechanism for attracting most people to a political project [of the kind needed for socialism]. You have to be able to show people that you have a real interest in the outcome, a material interest, not just a moral calling, and also show them that it’s realistic, that it’s not just some kind of suicide mission.” I found his ideas to be emblematic of a certain sentiment on the left that feels—how can I put it—that ideas around morality or something other than material interests are not important to tap into. But in your book, I was reading stories of people who were motivated for all kinds of reasons, including some that had nothing to do with material interests and were completely counter to anything “rational,” including risking their physical health.”

Bruce: I enjoyed your post about this issue. I think Chibber couldn’t be more wrong. I gather that if he’s a Marxist, then we are talking about economic determinism as the motivating factor for everything. I won’t go into Marxism.

But look at George Floyd? How about the recent uprisings for Gaza? Did the people doing this have any material interest in these issues? Many people for Black Lives Matter, of course, had a personal interest in not wanting to see more deaths, but it had nothing to do with material interest. Or look at the Gaza protests. These are young students, most of whom have no dog in that fight materially, certainly.

I think that moral injustice is far more compelling than a material injustice. Occupy Wall Street was an example of a material injustice. People were upset. But it didn’t do a great deal, and it didn’t last a great while because there was some moral outrage, but it was mostly trying to garner a wide tent of protesters based on economic injustice. It really didn’t sink in. It was a great slogan, but it didn’t sink in.

By contrast, look at “I can’t breathe.” Or other aspects of Black Lives Matter. Watching murder in the case of George Floyd, watching other injustices in the case of Gaza, or watching the oppression of Freedom Summer, the oppression of Jim Crow. That’s a moral issue.

Any social movement worth its salt calls to a higher motivation, a moral motivation to be marching and standing up, not just for your own interests—material or otherwise—but for other people. Everybody from the army and the Marines to the people on the front lines of the barricades in any movement wants to be part of something bigger than themselves. It’s about standing up for something bigger than you. Freedom Summer was a very good example. Any one of these 700 people who came South for the summer could have just as easily stayed home or gone to Europe as some of their wealthier friends did or been hanging around the beach—whatever. They didn’t have a material interest in it at all. But they saw this struggle as something bigger than a paycheck issue.

Freedom Summer shows that you can rally people to the ideals of America when they are being betrayed. We should keep talking about the ideals and hold them up, not cynically dismiss them. All men are created equal.

Lucas: What are your thoughts on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence?

The reaction in 1976, which I still remember, was that the Left couldn’t care less. We don’t have a stake in this at all. The counterculture was rising, and there was a lot of disgust with that kind of history, but Howard Zinn hadn’t quite gotten his book out yet, I don’t think. We didn’t have that alternate history to counter with.

I think it will be important to remind people of what the Declaration really meant. First of all, to remind people that it was written by a slaveholder. But to not stop there and discredit it. It does have a great deal of meaning, and we need to talk about that. We need to talk about the inherent contradictions in the fact that a slaveholder wrote that all men were created equal. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean nothing.

We shouldn’t settle for what it was written back then. But we also should be dismissive. In 1976, the Left sort of just checked out and didn’t show up. And the Bicentennial was sort of a non-event. I still pin my hopes on the young people who do take the Declaration and other aspects of America very seriously. I think that’s a really important point.

This article was originally published in Light and Air on July 10.

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

– Thomas Paine, Common Sense

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The ideas promoted within—that all men are created equal, and have a right to establish or alter a government to secure their fundamental rights—were not new in the 18th century. But their inclusion in a statement of national founding, a public declaration for all the world to read, was novel. These ideals had incredible staying power, especially among movements that sought to go far beyond the Founders’ intentions. In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King called the Declaration a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” and condemned the U.S. government for defaulting on that promise. Four years later, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale included almost all of the Declaration’s preamble in the conclusion of the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program.

This year also marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of Common Sense, a rousing call to revolution written by Thomas Paine. Paine was a man who gave his heart and mind to democratic struggles across the Atlantic world. In life, he was attacked by defenders of traditional authority, and by proponents of conservative republicanism like John Adams, who won out in the immediate debate over the structure of American government. In death, his ideas influenced Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens and civil rights leaders like MLK. He also influenced Socialists like Eugene Debs, who famously declared himself:

A patriot, but in the sense that I love all countries. I love the sentiment of William L. Garrison: ‘All the world is my country and all mankind are my countrymen.’ Thomas Jefferson once said: ‘Where liberty is, is my country.’ That is good. Thomas Paine said: ‘Where liberty is honored, that is my country.’ That is better. Where liberty is not, socialism has a mission, and, therefore, the mission of socialism is as wide as the world.

In Common Sense, Paine planted the flag of unconditional independence and won people to that position on a mass scale, helping to transform diffuse radicalism into a broad popular consensus. He wrote Common Sense not to echo ideas that were already popular, but to express what he believed was necessary to resolve the ongoing crisis. Ideologically, Paine was a democratic republican who fought for a constitution based on unicameralism and universal and equal suffrage as a means to alleviate economic inequality. In his eyes, the inability to participate fully and equally in government was tantamount to slavery. Paine’s story can inspire us, but it also throws into sharper relief the absence of a sustained demand for a democratic constitution coming from today’s Left. The more we draw from Paine and the people he inspired, the farther we will go.

Defining a Majority

The first edition of Common Sense appeared in all the major colonial cities. Translations made their way north to Quebec, south to colonial Spanish America, and as far east as Russia. How did it spread so far, and so fast? For one thing, Paine knew how to connect with his audience. He spoke in “plain English,” and Common Sense reads like an intelligent conversation one might have at the pub (no coincidence considering where Paine loved to spend his time). Timing was another factor. Paine had his finger on America’s pulse, and the general ferment of the 1770s helped colonists digest his arguments. But a third factor was also decisive: Paine was not afraid to push forward bold minority positions. When Common Sense appeared, most colonists were searching for a resolution to the conflict that didn’t involve independence. They believed that the time wasn’t right. Paine disagreed. He argued instead that the colony was “ripe for revolution and republicanism,” and chided naysayers for falling prey to “chimeras” and “empty and unreal fancies of excited minds.” The people, he insisted, had it in their power to make the world over again.

At its core, Common Sense was a work of consensus-building. It “not only divined but also defined [the] readers’ views, strengthening their beliefs, detonating their prejudices, touching their hearts, changing their minds, convincing them that they must speak out and act.” Paine’s goal was both informative and emancipatory. He worked to “redefine” his audience by “pressing a more egalitarian republicanism upon them.” In an era before modern mass political parties, Paine, sensing that the time for revolutionary action was at hand, stood at the vanguard of the struggle for independence. He had no interest in being a “consensus leader”—a pejorative coined by MLK—who gained followers by saying what was already popular or widely accepted. If he had, Common Sense would have been a tepid call for reconciliation with the Crown.

The idea that new majorities are built by standing for principles that aren’t yet popular is unfortunately not always the common sense of our movement. Many socialists dismiss demands for a democratic government because they aren’t “widely felt.” Last year, some DSA chapters in California even used the national debate about gerrymandering, not to agitate for universal and equal suffrage and proportional representation, but to support Proposition 50, the Democratic Party’s scheme to go toe-to-toe with Republicans in stripping what little representation exists in the House of Representatives. Opposing Prop 50 was deemed sectarian and abstentionist. Supporters argued that the only way the masses would listen to socialists was if we told them what they already wanted to hear—consciousness-raising, therefore, was off the table.

If Paine had this vision of politics, he wouldn’t have written Common Sense, and the independence movement would have lost its greatest champion. If MLK had been a consensus leader and tailed the Vietnam War, he would have died with higher national approval ratings, but the anti-war movement—not to mention his own principles—would have been greatly damaged. Political leadership often means pushing the envelope and staying ahead of the curve. As Wayne Gretzky once said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

Political leadership also means recognizing that not every demand provides immediate returns. An astute reader of the political moment, Paine was confident that casting his voice into the fray of competing ideas would bear fruit. He didn’t wait for proof of success before demanding independence. He grasped what Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin would later argue: chasing “palpable results” instead of advancing necessary political principles—even if they are not yet popular—is a dereliction of duty.

The Centrality of Equal Suffrage

Paine was instrumental in drafting the Pennsylvania state constitution in 1776, which, before it was replaced in 1790, was the most radical charter for government of its time. It included a unicameral legislature based on broad suffrage for taxpaying white men, a weak judiciary, a twelve-man executive, and short terms in office. But radical democrats were in the minority before and after independence. Most of Paine’s powerful contemporaries, a venerated pantheon of “Founding Fathers” like Madison, Hamilton, and Adams, disagreed with his constitutional ideas. Drafted behind closed doors and in the shadow of Shays’s Rebellion, the Constitution of 1787 was one of the most conservative constitutional outcomes possible for the American Revolution. The slave-owning South was overrepresented thanks to equal state representation in the Senate and the ability to count all enslaved people as three-fifths of a voter when allocating House seats. Slave states also played an outsized role in choosing the President through the Electoral College, and when selecting and appointing Supreme Court Justices. The Federalist Constitution was a far cry from the far more radical Constitution of Pennsylvania.

Faced with an increasingly hostile political climate, Paine sailed to Britain in 1787 and soon became embroiled in debates over the French Revolution. Emerging from the Estates-General convened in May 1789, the Constituent Assembly split on precisely the issues that Paine had debated in America: unicameralism versus bicameralism, legislative authority versus royal power, and equal political rights among propertied white men (and perhaps some of the non-white colonial subjects in the Caribbean) versus an even more restricted suffrage.

Paine published Rights of Man in two parts between 1791-92 in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, which condemned the French for daring to assault the traditional authority of Church and King. In response, Paine defended the principles of universal and equal rights, arguing that political regimes and the constitutions that make them are legitimate only to the extent to which they protect those principles. No generation can permanently bind another to any one form of government. Along with the 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice, Rights of Man advocated a state-sponsored social welfare scheme with progressive taxation, old-age pensions, and abolition of the English Poor Laws.

This was too much for the British authorities. Paine was forced to flee to France, where he was welcomed by the revolutionary government before being thrown in prison and nearly executed after the Jacobins took power in 1793. Freed after the overthrow of Robespierre, he published his Dissertation on the First Principles of Government in 1795 in response to the overturning of the radically democratic (but never implemented) French Constitution of 1793. First Principles makes two important interventions. First, the right to an equal vote is the foundational right of a democratic political system. The “only true basis of representative government,” Paine argued, is the equality of rights. Without universal and equal suffrage, all other rights are jeopardized, and citizens are reduced to a state of political servitude, since “slavery consists in being subject to the will of another.” Paine further argued that “the influence of property” should never be allowed to infringe on these rights, which appeared increasingly common as the rising bourgeoisie asserted its own right to the unlimited accumulation of capital.

Bolstered by the French Revolution, the newly christened “Left” would forever be defined by opposition to powerful monarchs and presidents, support for a single-chamber legislature and legislative supremacy, elected judiciaries, and, of course, universal and equal suffrage. First Principles reminds us how radicals in the American and French Revolutions defined democracy: not in vague and abstract terms, but in clear language that centered universal and equal rights and directly translated into concrete demands about the structure of government.

Other demands were added to the Left’s repertoire during the French Revolution’s more radical phase, including a people’s militia in place of a standing army and progressive taxation. The rise of Marxist socialism over the course of the 19th century introduced a maximum goal to the democratic movement: the abolition of private property and all social classes with it. Until World War I, Social Democratic parties and thinkers from Marx and Engels down to Lenin and Luxemburg retained the democratic constitutional structure defended by Thomas Paine and radical French revolutionaries as the necessary form of working-class political rule and a precondition for socialism. Engels made clear that for him and Marx, the democratic republic forged in the French Revolution was 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.” For Lenin and the Russian Social Democrats, democracy meant “supreme state power” in a unicameral legislature with representatives elected through universal, equal, and direct suffrage.

Our Own Declaration

Paine argued that republican government is a dead letter without universal and equal suffrage, “citizens are reduced to a state of political servitude.” Lenin used similar language, arguing that a central task of the Russian Social Democrats was to connect the workers’ economic demands to their “condition of political slavery.” MLK, who was familiar with Paine’s work, also drew parallels between the denial of equal rights and a more general loss of freedom when discussing the struggle for suffrage in the South. Without the right to vote, he argued, “I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind—it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact—I can only submit to the edict of others.”

King’s words are striking. But today, socialists talk more about wage slavery than about our lack of political freedom. Much is said about the tyranny of the boss, but far less about the domination of the imperial executive, the malapportioned Senate, or the unelected judiciary. Yet, it is the undemocratic political system that ensures Americans will never have durable power in the workplace, let alone hold the power to socialize the means of production. The framework of government outlined in our Constitution enables racist voting laws, low minimum wages, poor healthcare, abysmal environmental protections, and imperialist foreign policy. Socialists have kept Paine’s interest in economic solutions to social ills, but discarded his focus on political democracy as a means to resolve social problems. In doing so, we have fallen back into the trap of economism—the belief that “the economic struggle is the most widely applicable method of drawing the masses into active political struggle,” and forgetting Lenin’s enduring contribution that the “class point of view” means pushing forward “every democratic movement.”

This point has been made before. Somewhere between the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, socialists stopped agitating for a democratic republic. Without that demand—and, more importantly, the ideological commitments that make it possible—Paine appears less relevant to us today. Absent concrete and positive constitutional proposals, socialists have also lost the ability to communicate to a mass audience. America has a long history of fighting for democracy and equality, from the abolitionist movement to the Civil War and Reconstruction, from women’s suffrage to Civil Rights. But socialists have little to say about this history, and are generally averse to the rights discourse that was central to the French Revolution and came across so clearly in Paine and his successors. Lenin called for “abolishing the whole system of police tyranny and denial of the people’s rights.” Debs advocated a constitution based on equality of rights, duties, privileges, and opportunities. Where is this language today? The Declaration’s proclamation of equal rights and equal liberty—the values that Paine struggled for all of his life—was and still is a revolutionary departure from our actually existing government.

Paine asserts that a country can boast of its constitution only when “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, [and] the taxes are not oppressive.” Today, the jails are full of prisoners, the streets are crowded with beggars, and the young and old alike lack the necessities of a decent life. The Constitution has always protected the interests of a minority of Americans—first slaveholders, then Jim Crow Southerners, and now industrial and financial capitalists. The method of wealth extraction has changed over time, but the political system that keeps the wealthy in power has stayed the same. Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Americans are still not independent from the tyranny of a minority. This July is an opportunity to learn from Thomas Paine and agitate for a political and social system grounded in universal and equal rights. We have it in our power to make this country—and by extension the world—over again.

Lucas and Luke talk with Zach and Elliot, authors of the recent Jacobin article, “How to Democratize the United States,” which presents a four-point program for reshaping our political terrain. The conversation touches on why folks should think twice before putting faith in the federal courts as a bulwark of democracy, where the Constitution fits into the democratization program, what Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) can do to further a democratization program, the impact of the Bernie Sanders campaign, Majority Speaker Mike Johnson’s concerns about DSA’s program, and why so many Americans—including some law students—are ready for a change. Luke mentions several other interviews, including with labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan and DSA congressional candidate Oliver Larkin.

This article was originally published in Jacobin on October 10, 2024. I’m happy to reproduce the article here. Much has happened in two years, but Chemerinsky’s analysis of the Constitution’s flaws and the need for a complete overhaul hasn’t (even if he seems to have been a bit quiet on the issue ever since). I spoke briefly with Chemerinsky after publishing this review (he burned through the questions; next time I’ll write more) and wrote a few more articles that take up his ideas. Thanks for reading the articles and transcripts that we produce. If you like them, please share them with family, friends, and anyone else. Also, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to the blog. Subscribers provide the moral and material means to keep going!

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Criticism of the US Constitution’s antimajoritarian and undemocratic nature has long been a staple of left-wing thought and commentary. But now, no less mainstream a figure than Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, has joined the chorus of voices calling for a new constitution.

His new book making this argument, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, has gained significant attention. It’s been reviewed by major outlets like the New York Times (twice), the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, MSNBC, and the Guardian have all published reviews. And an apparently alarmed Elon Musk tweeted in response, “They want to overthrow the Constitution.”

Chemerinsky was not always a constitutional critic. Even rather recently, notes Jennifer Szalai in her New York Times review of his latest book, he was “pleading with fellow progressives . . . ‘not to turn their back on the Constitution and the courts.’” However, like fellow academics Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die (2018) and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (2023), Chemerinsky has changed his mind.

“Cannot Be Reconciled With the Most Elementary Notion of Democracy”

Considering the facts, it is hard to imagine how honest people could fail to reach the same conclusions as Chemerinsky. Take the Senate. Thanks to the Connecticut Compromise that gave each state two senators regardless of population (a rule that is effectively impossible to change through Article V), states representing less than 20 percent of the population can produce a Senate majority, and forty-one senators representing as little as 11 percent of the population can kill any bill. This flagrant denial of equal suffrage, writes Chemerinsky, has become “impossible to ignore.”

Meanwhile, gerrymandering distorts House races and consistently leads to Republican overrepresentation. Three years ago, notes Chemerinsky, the For the People Act (designed to outlaw racial and political gerrymandering in drawing districts for the House of Representatives) was killed by a Senate filibuster.

Then there is the Electoral College, which “cannot be reconciled with the most elementary notion of democracy.” Under the college’s rules, not all votes are equal in determining who becomes the next president. California, for example, has fifty-four electoral votes for about 39.5 million citizens — one for about every 732,000 people. Meanwhile, the 577,000 people in Wyoming get three electoral votes, one for every 192,000 or so residents. And because in most states the winner gets all the Electoral College votes, most votes, Chemerinsky argues, have “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”

The Electoral College also creates swing states, which means presidential candidates vie not for individual votes across the country but the precious college points in what few undetermined states exist. As a result, a “tiny universe” of voters, some 0.03 percent, can swing the elections. The statement “I’d only vote in a swing state,” common among disillusioned politicos in California or New York, would not make any sense in a country with direct elections.

This tiny universe of voters has more often than not determined the outcome of presidential elections. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a president lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College only three times. The same phenomenon occurred twice between 2000 and 2016, and it almost happened again in 2020. No one is ruling out an Electoral College victory for Donald Trump in November even if he were to lose the popular vote, as seems likely.

Chemerinsky also argues that the Supreme Court routinely “undermines” democracy. The supposed benefits of life tenure are outweighed by its manifest drawbacks, including the creation of justices who are “seriously out of touch with the society they govern.” In his review of Chemerinsky’s book, Louis Menand reminds us that “Republicans have won the popular vote in only one of the last eight Presidential elections, [but] six of the nine sitting Justices have been appointed by Republican Presidents and are unremovable.” Furthermore, the John Roberts Court has an obvious agenda: “At a time when our country is more politically polarized than at any time since Reconstruction, the Court has come down solidly on one side of that divide — far to the right on it.”

Finally, the Constitution is almost impossible to amend. Only seventeen changes have been made since 1791, two of which were to create and then repeal Prohibition. The most recent amendment, ratified over thirty years ago, was first introduced in 1789. In the unlikely event that an Article V convention is organized, the new constitution would likely replicate the existing document’s worst features, like retaining the Electoral College and maintaining equal state representation in the Senate, since states, not people, would be allocated representation.

An Anti-Constitution Groundswell?

The arguments presented by Chemerinsky are alarming but far from groundbreaking. Daniel Lazare has long argued that the United States needs a new constitution; that the “We the people” clause contradicts what comes later; that population shifts have made the Senate especially antimajoritarian; and that an Article V convention to change the Constitution would itself be undemocratic. He argues further that because an Article V convention is both undesirable and unrealistic, we ought to remember how the Constitution came into being in the first place: through “self-legalization” in 1787, usurping what was then the nation’s legitimate governing document, the Articles of Confederation. The framers didn’t care about following the established rules — we shouldn’t either.

Robert Dahl long ago compared the US Constitution to that of other countries and found it remarkably deficient. Levitsky and Ziblatt have argued that checks and balances have given a Republican minority a disproportionate advantage in all branches of government for decades. Michael Kammen, Sanford and Cynthia Levinson, and Aziz Rana have all probed America’s fetishistic relationship to the Constitution (and would likely take issue with Chemerinsky’s assertion that Americans have always loved the framers’ creation).

Rana, in particular, has examined the rise of constitutional loyalty as an intentionally created “civic religion” in the unique (and arguably nonreplicable) context of Cold War imperialism and postwar capitalism. And long before any of the above names were around, Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens and socialists including Eugene Debs and Allan Benson were demanding that power be stripped from the Senate, Supreme Court, and president and given to the House of Representatives.

But even if the basic criticisms of the Constitution are old, the number of people talking about the problem is new. When the dean of UC Berkeley Law says we need a new constitution, agrees with some of the founding document’s most vocal critics, and gets a warm reception in the New York Times, it means something. Chemerinsky sides with Dahl and the Levinsons in claiming that the Electoral College and Senate are undemocratic and should be abolished.

He agrees with Levitsky and Ziblatt that the Constitution empowers a reactionary minority and impedes necessary change. And like Rana, he is concerned about America’s devotion to the framers’ creation. Perhaps most surprising, Chemerinsky agrees with Lazare that it is unlikely that the Constitution’s issues can be resolved through Article V and that considering a process outside that article’s undemocratic state-centered procedure is essential.

For a Real Democracy

No Democracy Lasts Forever has its problems. Like Dahl, Levitsky, Ziblatt, and most other liberal critics of the Constitution, Chemerinsky insists on calling the United States a democracy despite its egregious and admitted flaws. The framers abhorred democracy, he says, and constructed the Constitution accordingly. The Senate has always been undemocratic, he argues, and represents the interests of a numerical minority. Apartheid existed in the South until the 1960s, he states, and black Americans are still holding a bad check. Yet, somehow, the United States has always been a democracy.

Chemerinsky says that if Trump becomes president in November while losing the popular vote, it will be impossible to call the United States a democracy any longer. But why were 2000 and 2016 any different? Why is the third time the charm? Chemerinsky also provides several inadequate definitions of democracy, such as “the winner of an election governs” and “voters choose their elected officials” — definitions that are compatible with many of the Constitution’s undemocratic features that Chemerinsky bemoans. Then he contradicts himself by introducing a better definition: “one person, one vote.” Lacking stable definitions, Chemerinsky ties himself in knots. If democracy is defined correctly — as one person, one equal vote — then the US has clearly never been a true democracy.

Chemerinsky devotes a short chapter to the uses and abuses of the internet and social media. He argues that foreign interference in US elections, especially from Russia, should be taken seriously in a world of artificial intelligence and deepfakes that make it hard for voters to know what is real and what is not. He encourages Congress to pass stricter disclosure requirements to help people understand how campaigns are waged during election season and warns that left unregulated, the internet and social media “pose serious threats to democracy.”

Yet the discussion of the threats posed by the internet and social media sits awkwardly in a work devoted to the Constitution’s antidemocratic features. Chemerinsky thinks that the internet and unregulated AI will interfere with the voting process by impeding people’s ability to make decisions based on accurate information. The actual case for this claim and its policy upshots remain unclear, however. Even he admits that “there are no easy or even apparent solutions to these problems” and that “it is too soon even to know whether the net benefits of the internet and social media outweigh their harms.”

More importantly, though, focusing on the potential threats of AI, social media, and so on to democracy seems to put the cart before the horse. So long as we don’t have a political system that respects the principle of one person, one vote, we don’t even have the resources to address issues surrounding AI and technology democratically. We should have our priorities straight. Winning a new constitution — having a democracy — has to come before figuring out how to improve voters’ access to information.

Also, Chemerinsky’s comments about the Supreme Court reveal an underlying discomfort with majority rule — a crucial component of any democracy, along with universal and equal suffrage. He argues that “life tenure of federal judges makes federal courts uniquely suited for the protection of constitutional rights.” He takes at face value that “the Court is not expected to follow public opinion and is meant to enforce the Constitution even when it goes against the will of the majority.” He firmly supports a Supreme Court “largely insulated from majoritarian politics.”

Finally, there is the issue of creating a new constitution. Chemerinsky acknowledges that his book does not offer clear solutions, and he doubts that the Supreme Court will suddenly change its stance or that state legislatures will vote to lessen their states’ disproportionate electoral weight. Yet despite this skepticism toward existing political institutions as potential saviors, Chemerinsky proposes that Congress convene a constitutional convention with delegates appointed by the president. He enters what he himself calls “radical” territory by suggesting that a draft constitution should be presented to the people as a whole for ratification and not the states, but that is apparently as far as he is willing to go.

Ultimately, the establishment of both the Democratic and Republican parties is loyal to our existing Constitution, and their corporate sponsors have a vested interest in defending a political order that checks popular challenges to wealth and power. It is not likely that politicians of either party have the desire or ability to call a constitutional convention, let alone organize an actual majoritarian process like a constituent assembly. The path forward is murky, but it does not run through the structure built by the existing Constitution. What is needed is a mass movement for a new political system, one that is genuinely democratic and so breaks out of the antimajoritarian straitjacket imposed by our founders.

Despite its flaws, No Democracy Lasts Forever reiterates the Constitution’s undemocratic nature and ends with a refreshingly straightforward vision of the future. Chemerinsky’s conclusion — a new constitution is necessary, and those who fail to recognize this are “missing an essential element in understanding and ultimately solving the crisis” — is potent. “Americans will realize that the Constitution itself is endangering democracy and they will start thinking of replacing it,” he argues.

US history has not been lacking in discussions of the Constitution’s problems and in demands for a more democratic order. But critical attention on the document has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. No Democracy Lasts Forever is encouraging additional evidence that the United States is moving away from decades of neglect of the Constitution’s defects and entering a much-needed period of focused constitutional critique.

Two years ago, Aziz Rana published The Constitutional Bind, a sweeping historical investigation meant to aid democratic movements in the United States. How was it, Rana asked, that the relatively vibrant constitutional critique found in progressive and intellectually honest spaces in the early 20th century had been effectively silenced? How had America’s ruling class built a persuasive narrative of “American democracy” and convinced many people—though certainly not all—to “idolize a document that fails them”? Where had the demand for a democratic constitution gone, and how might it return?

In my review of the book, I paid particular attention to Rana’s analysis of DSA’s 2021 Platform, which he (rather charitably) described as a “conscious effort to update the 1912 Socialist Party of America’s legal-political agenda for the present day.” I argued that his words should be taken as a challenge by DSA to actually live up to the SPA’s legacy of pre-WWI constitutional criticism—seen best in its 1912 program advertising Eugene Debs’s presidential campaign—by advancing a bold call for a new constitution based on a sovereign unicameral legislature elected by universal, equal, and direct suffrage. In mid-2024, DSA had yet to offer a full-throated alternative to the minoritarian and oligarchic political system. But the potential was there.

In time, DSA has largely accepted that challenge. Workers Deserve More, a 2024 follow-up to the first platform, said that a “new democratic constitution…based on proportional representation in a single federal legislature” was the organization’s ultimate goal. With a government “by, for, and of the working class,” it continued, “we hope to build a socialist society where people come before profit, basic needs are guaranteed, the largest corporations are put under public ownership and democratic control, peace around the world is secured, and workers around the world join together in common struggle to construct socialism worldwide.”

DSA’s newest program will be released tomorrow, July 14. Folks can tune in here. It’s a much shorter document, and the constitutional demands are much clearer. The preamble declares that DSA is “fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” The rest goes on to call for abolishing the Electoral College and Senate, implementing proportional representation and ranked-choice voting, and replacing the current President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” This is the coherent vision of political power we need.

It’s also a vision that has constitutional loyalists feeling a little uneasy. Mike Johnson gave the program free publicity. Fox News issued a warning: “DSA calls for a ‘new democratic constitution’ that it says would establish civil, political, and democratic rights for all based on proportional representation in a ‘single federal legislature.’” The Democratic Party—as hostile to a democratic constitution as the Republicans—has been silent.

It’s high time the socialist movement returned to constitutional politics. The first step in the working class’s conquest of economic power is to win the battle for political democracy. There’s no “democratic road to socialism” in the United States because there is no democracy through which the working class can realize its agenda. Likewise, there’s no such thing as “bourgeois democracy” because the bourgeoisie has always opposed truly universal and equal rights and the majoritarian power that the attainment of those rights would unleash. All of this considered, DSA’s constitutional positions are a further step in the right direction.

It must be said that progress on the democratic constitution front wouldn’t have been made without Marxist Unity Group. MUG continues to be at the vanguard of the democratic republican struggle within DSA and the American socialist movement more broadly. This should make us quite proud. But we can’t do it alone. The demand for a democratic constitution must continue to expand beyond our caucus. The fact that it now appears in DSA’s program—even at the level of specific terms such as “democratic socialist republic”—proves that this process is already underway.

But we have to keep pushing. The demand for a democratic constitution has to become DSA’s central demand. Even if the Democrats win big in 2028, we still need a democratic constitution.

The call must extend beyond DSA, reaching every corner of our country and becoming impossible to ignore. No politician should be able to pontificate on democracy and equal rights without facing a simple question: What about the Constitution? With MUG and DSA’s support, all of the other organizations and movements stymied by the lack of democracy will take up the demand. After all, democracy has many friends and few enemies. All of us need the light and air of universal and equal political rights.

Much is chaos this July, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Paine’s masterpiece of political agitation, Common Sense. Much danger looms. But there is also good news. The demand for a democratic constitution—one that embodies the Declaration’s idea of universal and equal rights—is growing. It will be our North Star through these trying times.

Robert Levine joins the podcast to talk about his 2021 book, The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Topics include Douglass’s relationship to other radical republicans; Johnson’s inconsistencies, idiosyncrasies, and plan for presidential restoration as opposed to reconstruction; Johnson and Douglass as historical narrators of varying credibility; Johnson’s impeachment, including the restrictions placed on the impeachment process by Article II; and the contemporary relevance of Douglass’s “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” a rousing critique of presidential powers under the existing Constitution. During the interview with Robert, I mention a different episode with August Nimtz about Douglass. I also used “Sources of Danger to the Republic” in a recent post about what it might mean to finish Reconstruction. The image for this episode is a drawing of Thaddeus Stevens announcing the impeachment of Andrew Johnson for violating the Tenure of Office Act.

This is an edited transcript of my conversation with Kermit Roosevelt about his recent book, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story. The conversation covers several topics, including problems with the American “triumphalist narrative," Reconstruction and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as alternative foundations for American identity, shifting views of the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, how the Constitution changed and didn’t change after the Civil War, and the need for a Third Reconstruction.

Kermit: You can’t understand what the Supreme Court is doing now without putting it in a historical framework and understanding it in the context of the many evolving currents of American history. I started realizing that the way we talk about ourselves as a nation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you look closely at the founding-era documents, the ideologies those particular people held, and how they acted.

I started thinking that there was something fundamentally off about the story we tell ourselves. What’s wrong with the story we normally tell? What would a better story look like if it were more accurate?

I started understanding that there’s an ideological dimension to all of this, because we like to think, okay, there’s historical truth and then there’s ideology. But actually, pretty much every story you tell has what you could call an ideological slant, because you’re not just reciting facts. You’re linking those facts together. You’re talking about something that has meaning.

And the meaning you put on a particular historical account, the meaning constructed through that story, is not really the sort of thing that can be true or false. It’s the sort of thing that can be better or worse, that can fit the facts better or worse. But also, we’re thinking about what’s a useful story for us as a nation, what can bring people together, and what can motivate people to do the right thing, to be good Americans.

Luke: You begin the book by describing a “triumphalist story” of America that promotes the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War as either complete achievements—as things that are done and passed—or as the foundation for today’s activists to really base their work around, with the idea that we’re striving to realize these ideals. But you advise people to slow down a little bit, and you question this triumphalist narrative.

Kermit: The standard story we tell ourselves is probably familiar from civics classes and from presidential speeches about what it means to be American. It says that America is dedicated to attractive moral principles like liberty and equality, and that we have held those principles since the beginning.

In this version of the story, the nation begins in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. It is a nation, as Lincoln says in the Gettysburg Address, dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal.

That principle is understood to shape how government should treat people in society. It means equal rights under the law. It means slavery is wrong. It means segregation is wrong. So from the beginning, we have supposedly been committed to those ideals, and our history is the story of struggling to live up to the founders’ promises.

That story encourages us to locate our deepest ideals in 1776. That is a problem, because it is hard for some people to look back and see themselves in the founding. In 1776, every state recognized slavery.

If your own ideals cannot coexist with slavery, which I hope is true for many of us, then you may have trouble seeing yourself in the founding. That may not be an inspiring story for you.

The other problem is that if you believe those ideals were already there and that America has always been fundamentally dedicated to equality and universal liberty, then it can encourage complacency. Throughout our history, social movements have arisen to say that something is unjust, that some people are being treated unfairly, and that change is necessary.

Those movements usually meet two kinds of resistance. One comes from people who openly defend the existing order and say they believe it is fair. The other comes from people who say they agree with the goal, but insist the movement is being too aggressive, that it should move slowly, stay civil, and be patient.

That second kind of resistance is especially important because it suggests that progress will come inevitably if we simply wait. But that is not how change usually happens. Entrenched systems of inequality do not disappear on their own. They are often dislodged only through organized pressure, and that often means conflict.

That is part of what Martin Luther King Jr. was getting at in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” when he said that the white moderate can be a greater stumbling block than the Ku Klux Klanner. The standard story feeds that attitude by making progress seem automatic. It suggests that if you are not openly defending slavery or segregation, then you are already on the right side of history.

I do not think that is true. People and institutions committed to inequality usually have to be challenged directly. And I also think the standard story is historically inaccurate. We project a lot of present-day values back onto the past, and we project many of the ideals that came out of Reconstruction back onto the founding.

In my view, the ideals we now value most, like liberty and equality, are much more a product of Reconstruction than we usually recognize, and much less a product of the founding than the standard story claims.

Luke: You write that we’re the “heirs of the people who rejected the theory of the Declaration, who defeated it by force of arms.” What’s the alternative to this triumphalist narrative of U.S. history and race relations?

Kermit: The Declaration of Independence and its relationship to Lincoln, and to Martin Luther King Jr., is a really interesting way to think about these issues. But when I say, “we rejected the theory of the Declaration, we defeated it by force of arms,” a lot of people ask what I mean. Well, the Civil War is what I mean. And people often respond by pointing to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, where he says he is fighting in the name of the Declaration of Independence and asks whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” can long endure.

We tend to accept that as if it were obviously true. But if you think about it critically, it is a strange thing for Lincoln to be saying. What is the Declaration of Independence really about? Today, we often associate it with equality because of the phrase “all men are created equal.” But in 1776, that phrase was not treated as a radical new principle. Jefferson himself said he was not trying to invent new principles, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.

In its original context, the Declaration was mainly about independence. The colonists were saying that British authority had once been legitimate, but that King George was no longer fulfilling the basic purpose of government, which was to protect natural rights. Since he was failing that test, his authority was no longer legitimate, and they could rebel, reject that government, and form another they believed would better secure their safety and happiness.

From that perspective, the Declaration is about the right of one people to dissolve the bonds connecting it to another and assume an independent station. That matters for how we understand the Civil War, because the Confederates made the same kind of argument. They did not say they rejected America or the Constitution. They said they were the real Americans, faithful to the Constitution, and that the national government and the free states were violating the rights promised to them.

They also described themselves as the heirs of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In their secession documents, they often cited the Declaration and the Revolution, presenting their own break from the Union as the same kind of act the colonies had made in 1776.

So rather than a story of continuity, where America begins with the Declaration, carries its principles through the Revolution, and then fulfills them again in the Civil War, the alternative story says something different. It says the Revolution was a secessionist revolution based on independence, but that principle could not serve as the foundation for a stable nation if it also meant any group could leave whenever it believed it had been wronged.

That is why Lincoln’s question matters: if a nation is founded on the principle of revolution, can it long endure? In the Civil War, the answer was no. We rejected secession and rejected the idea that a people could simply dissolve the bonds connecting them to the rest of the nation.

That is also why I say the Declaration is not really the source of the principles we now value most, like liberty and equality. Those ideas were present before the Civil War, and Lincoln helped popularize a reading of the Declaration that linked it to them. But they do not enter our constitutional order in a durable way until the Reconstruction Amendments, which make those principles enforceable against the states.

So the better story is that the Revolution mattered enormously, but it was not the source of modern American equality. Reconstruction was. And getting to the America we have now required rejecting independence as the governing principle and replacing it with federal constitutional rights that all states must respect.

Luke: Is there a particular period—it sounds like perhaps leading up to the Civil War—in which the Declaration of Independence began to be read more often or began to be read through a more emancipatory lens? Is there a particular period in which people more interested in expansive liberatory projects start to incorporate the declaration?

Kermit: It’s a really interesting story how this reading of the declaration emerges. Part of it is just that people lost the context of the Declarations. So if you put the Declaration next to Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, you can follow the argument and see exactly how it works, and you can see the point of saying that all men are created equal, which is basically to reject the divine right of kings. But if you think about it outside that context, well, gosh, right? Saying that all men are created equal does seem like a pretty important thing. It seems like it might have pretty important consequences.

It doesn’t really in Locke’s political philosophy. But if you just take that phrase by itself, people understandably read it more broadly. So part of the story is a loss of the precise philosophical context.

Another part of the story is necessity. If you are an abolitionist before the Civil War and you want to say we should oppose slavery, what are you going to say? You could say, “I’m a radical fringe movement, and I want to fundamentally change our society.” But that is never really the most effective way to pursue change.

It is true that the abolitionists were a fringe movement and that they wanted to radically change society. But it is usually rhetorically more effective to say, “Here is the principle you are already dedicated to. I share that principle. We have this kinship and this common bond, and our values are stated in this wonderful document we revere, the Declaration of Independence. And it means slavery is wrong.”

If you want to make that kind of argument before the Civil War, you basically have to point to the Declaration of Independence. It would be nicer if you could say, “Look, we all signed the Constitution, and the Constitution is anti-slavery, and it has the force of law, so you have to pay attention to it.” People were trying to do that — anti-slavery constitutionalists.

But anti-slavery constitutionalism, first of all, is not the best reading of the Constitution as written in 1787, because there are a bunch of pro-slavery provisions in it: the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Clause, and the protection of the international slave trade until 1808. And historically, anti-slavery constitutionalism just was not doing very well.

If you want the dominant reading of the Constitution right before the Civil War, it is Dred Scott, which says black people can never become U.S. citizens and that Congress cannot ban slavery in the territories. The Constitution is not a good resource for abolitionists. The Declaration of Independence is much better.

What happens is that you see an abolitionist reading of the Declaration, and it starts very early. Benjamin Banneker is maybe the best example. In 1791, he wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson saying, “Here are some astronomical calculations I have performed. And by the way, don’t you think that all men are created equal means that slavery is wrong?”

Jefferson writes back and politely responds to the astronomy, but says nothing about all men are created equal. Not because he knew he had said something important and was worried about the implications, but because he did not actually think it was that important. He never used that phrase again in any essay, diary entry, letter, or anything else we have found. And neither did most of the elite in founding America.

If you look at the letters from delegates to the Continental Congress over the early republic, you find a couple of mentions of that phrase right before July 4, 1776, when they are talking about the actual Declaration, and then basically none afterward. So this reading of the Declaration appears early, but it is very marginal.

The people pushing it are people like Benjamin Banneker, a free Black man, not the political elite of founding America. Then it catches on, because there is a very strong intuitive plausibility to the idea that if all men are created equal, then slavery is wrong. The Declaration gives people powerful rhetoric for changing an unjust system.

That is what abolitionists wanted: a revolution against the “founding America” to end slavery. And ultimately, that is part of what Reconstruction gave us. The abolitionist reading of the Declaration really wins the debate.

By the time you get to the Lincoln and Douglas debates or Dred Scott, pretty much everyone seems to think that “created equal” means something about being entitled to equal rights in society, which certainly rules out slavery. So the defenders of slavery have to make what seems to me like a much weaker argument: they have to say “all men” does not really mean all men, which is what Stephen Douglas says and what Roger Taney says.

And that is completely wrong. “All men” does mean all men. It is just that “created equal” means a lot less than we think it does now.

Luke: How did the civil rights movement of the 20th century interact with the Declaration of Independence? There’s a part in your book where you ask us to wonder how much King is interpreting the Declaration of Independence through the lens of 1776 versus through the lens of Reconstruction and the Reconstruction Amendments.

Kermit: I said before that Lincoln’s invocation of the Declaration of Independence in the Gettysburg Address strikes me as very strange. What is he doing? He is fighting a war against independence. He is fighting a war against people who have declared their independence. So it seems strange that he thinks the Declaration is on his side.

But Lincoln has nothing else to point to. That is the necessity I was talking about before. If you are an abolitionist, the Constitution is not on your side, but maybe the Declaration is, so that is what you rely on.

The Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century is interesting for a different reason: the Constitution is on their side. By the 1950s and 1960s, if you want to say slavery is wrong, you are right, it is unconstitutional. You have the 13th Amendment. If you want to say segregation is wrong, you are right, it is unconstitutional. The Equal Protection Clause, as the Supreme Court said in Brown, forbids public school segregation. If you want to say denying Black people the right to vote is wrong, you are right, it is unconstitutional. You have the 15th Amendment.

So it is a little strange that Martin Luther King Jr., in the “I Have a Dream” speech, lists these things and says Black people in America are being denied rights, segregated, and treated unfairly, and that this is a breach of a promise America has made. He is absolutely right about that. But then he goes on to talk about the promise made in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the Founders, and that seems as strange to me as Lincoln invoking the Declaration against the Confederates.

If you look at the Declaration of Independence and the complaints against King George, there is a complaint that relates to what King George is doing to Black people in America, but it is not a complaint that he is segregating them or denying them the right to vote or even enslaving them. The complaint is that he is encouraging Black people in America to rebel against the colonists who are enslaving them.

So the idea that you can point to the Declaration and say it means segregation is wrong, or it means denying Black people the right to vote is wrong, seems really odd to me. And it is even stranger that King is doing this when there are constitutional provisions directed precisely at the wrongs he is talking about, but he does not mention them.

The story gets even stranger when you go back to Martin Luther King Jr. as a high school junior. In 1944, he entered an oratory competition with a speech called “The Negro and the Constitution,” where he addressed basically the same question: what determines how Black people are entitled to be treated in America? He gives the same general answer — Black people should have the right to vote, and Black people should not be segregated — but in that speech, he points to the Reconstruction Amendments.

He says, “We conquered southern armies by the sword, and now we must conquer southern hate.” And he argues that if Black people are given the right to vote as they are entitled to, they will defend the “arc of federal liberty” against traitors, even with force of arms.

Obviously, he knew that the legal rights he was seeking were guaranteed by the Reconstruction Amendments, but he still chose to talk about the founding. Why? It was a strategic rhetorical choice. As I said before, some people have difficulty seeing themselves in the founding because their ideals cannot coexist with slavery. But those are not necessarily the people whose minds King is trying to change.

King is trying to change the minds of people who cannot see themselves in Reconstruction, people who say those amendments were forced on them by the Union Army and that they do not identify with the people who ratified them. King was pursuing a strategy that we have continued to use and have almost forgotten we are using: to seek broader appeal, especially among white Americans, by locating the values we champion in the founding rather than in Reconstruction, even though those values really come to us from Reconstruction.

That is what King is doing in the “I Have a Dream” speech. I also think that later in his life, he gave up on that strategy and came to think it was a mistake.

Luke: I’m paraphrasing, but King talks about having had the support of the Constitution initially, but later, the movement left the realm of the Constitution and constitutional rights and moved into the area of human rights.

Kermit: That’s a fascinating point. Maybe what that shows is the limits of Reconstruction, and maybe the limits of constitutional law.

King was saying that there are certain practices that violate the Constitution. States are not allowed to engage in racial discrimination in voting. States are not allowed to enslave people. States are not allowed to discriminate in certain ways. And most of those provisions, although it gets a little tricky, you can pretty much enforce through litigation. So you sue the school district that is segregating the schools, or you sue the government that is denying people the right to vote. Sometimes you need federal legislation to help, like the Voting Rights Act and pre-clearance, but you can do a fair amount through litigation and judicial decision-making.

But if you want something more like a society that is not racially stratified, litigation is not necessarily going to take you there. The Constitution only binds the government. So if you have residential segregation leading to segregated schools, it is a lot harder to do anything about that. And if you are concerned about economic equality, constitutional litigation really is not going to get you very far. You can make the government stop discriminating. You can make the government neutral. But you are going to have a much harder time making the government act to redress inequality.

So if you are concerned about inequality in society, about what the facts are on the ground, constitutional litigation is not necessarily going to take you that far. You need to change people’s minds. You need legislation designed to reduce inequality. And we have never really gotten there.

We are fairly comfortable, as Americans, with saying, “We were discriminating. That was wrong. Let’s not do it anymore.” But sometimes that idea is actually used to block attempts to reduce inequality, which is what we have seen with the campaign against affirmative action. It is winning at the current Supreme Court. The idea is that our commitment to equality actually prevents the government from trying to redress inequality.

That started very early. With Reconstruction, you do get these great constitutional commitments to equality, and you get bans on various kinds of state discrimination. But you do not get enough government action to actually promote equality. You do not get land redistribution, for instance. You do not get enough economic support for the formerly enslaved to make a racially egalitarian society possible.

That is one of the reasons Reconstruction does not really stick. White supremacist violence is another enormous part of the story, of course, because most of the integrated Reconstruction governments end up being overthrown through a combination of white Democrats getting the vote back and white supremacists suppressing the vote and killing voters and political leaders.

Luke: Though the Constitution changed in important ways during Reconstruction, I think we’re still trying to break free from the framers’ Constitution. The bicameral system, a Senate that’s malapportioned, an Article V amending clause that seems almost impossible to use, and an executive whose powers have increased—these are pressing issues. Was Reconstruction a real rupture point? Did it give us a new political foundation?

Kermit: What you’re saying there is exactly right. It is important to understand the extent to which Reconstruction was a rupture, a fundamental change in the American system.

If you go back to the founding, the founders are worried that the federal government is going to become a tyrant because they are thinking back to King George. The distant general government is going to oppress the citizens, and if that happens, the states are going to stand up to defend the rights of their citizens. That is the Revolutionary War, which is basically the model built into the founders’ Constitution, maybe most notably in the Second Amendment, which is about preserving state militias as a military counterweight to the federal government.

If you read Federalist 46, to understand how people were thinking at the time, you will see James Madison trying to reassure people that the states will always be more important than the national government and will defeat it in war if necessary. He is sort of predicting a civil war and saying, don’t worry, the states will win, the South will win. And he was wrong.

With the Reconstruction Amendments, things changed dramatically because the Reconstruction Congress was not thinking that the national government was the bad guy and the states were the defenders of liberty. They were thinking the states were the bad guys and the national government was the defender of liberty. So you get a whole bunch of new individual rights that people can assert against the states, which you really could not do before, and you get more federal power.

If you think about the Constitution in terms of the cases the Supreme Court decides that people hear about, then you would say, wow, things have gotten a lot better in terms of rights. This is a great new Constitution. This is what gives us Brown v. Board of Education. This is what gives us Loving v. Virginia, striking down bans on interracial marriage. This is what is going to give us Roe v. Wade, although, interestingly, my view on that is more divided. This is what is going to give us same-sex marriage.

Basically, almost all of the individual-rights decisions that people feel good about come from this Reconstruction Constitution. There is a basis for saying, wow, we have a new constitutional understanding. We have all these great feel-good Supreme Court decisions. It is a different Constitution, it is so much better, and we should be happy.

But I have probably been guilty at times of overstating that perspective, because, as Sandy Levinson points out, there is another part of the Constitution that does not get litigated. No one goes to court over whether each state actually gets two senators because that is just the rule. That is the system we have. But that system is also very important in affecting the daily lives of Americans, because Senate malapportionment gives wildly excessive political power to small numbers of people.

If those people are randomly distributed in political terms, then it does not matter all that much. It is weird, but it is basically like taking a random 18 percent of Americans and giving them the power to control the Senate. But if they share a partisan ideology, then it becomes much more problematic, because then you are giving a minority political party or movement the power to control the Senate. And that turns out to be really undesirable, because now you are getting minority rule, which is a bad thing.

We indeed have the high-profile Supreme Court decisions and new rights, and we should feel good about that. The Reconstruction Constitution is better in a lot of ways. But structurally, we did not fundamentally change the system we had. We still have equal state suffrage in the Senate. We still have the Electoral College. We still have basically the structural system created in 1787, and we tinkered with it, but we did not fundamentally change a bunch of the anti-democratic features of the original Constitution. And those are what are causing a lot of our problems now.

Luke: What do you make of contemporary calls for a Third Reconstruction?

Kermit: Well, I love the calls for a third Reconstruction. First, because I like Reconstruction, and I’ll talk more about that. But second, because calling for a third Reconstruction surfaces the cyclical nature of American history. It also helps people understand that something else is going on that we need to reconstruct from.

You’ve got the first Reconstruction. We make great strides in the content of the Constitution, and we actually have functioning multiracial democracies in the South. And then you might wonder, what happened? The answer is that Redemption happened. This is a part of our history that we do not teach very well.

When federal military supervision was withdrawn, white supremacists and paramilitaries overthrew a whole bunch of these integrated Reconstruction governments. That period is called Redemption, and it gave us Jim Crow, segregation, and the deprivation of Black voting rights in the South. So the second Reconstruction comes after the First Redemption.

If you need a Third Reconstruction, it is because there has been a Second Redemption. A lot of people talk about the civil rights movement as the second Reconstruction. Fewer people talk about the period since 1980 as the Second Redemption, but that is how we should understand it. That is what the Reagan Revolution is. That is what, to a greater or lesser extent, most Republican presidencies have been pushing. And that is what Trump is: a backlash against the civil rights movement and an attempt to undo a lot of the gains of the second Reconstruction.

You can see this pretty clearly in Supreme Court decisions, where they overturn Roe v. Wade and invalidate most of the Voting Rights Act. It is important to understand that we are now living through the Second Redemption. We can have a third Reconstruction. But the thing about Reconstruction is that you need to have the national government on your side.

After the Civil War, you had Republicans in control of the national government. The presidency shifted with Lincoln’s assassination, but Congress was very dedicated to the ideals of Reconstruction. The radicalism of the Reconstruction Congress is what made the whole thing work, and that is how you get the 14th Amendment.

In the second Reconstruction, during the civil rights era, you again had a national government that wanted to advance the cause of equality. You had LBJ giving great speeches about the Voting Rights Act, and you had Congress enacting civil rights legislation. So you need a unified, pro-equality national government for this to work.

I would love to see that, but we are pretty far away from it now.

Luke: Yeah, it does seem hard to imagine both a government that stands behind that, or a particular party that really stands behind that, and also one that can enact the needed reforms through the existing political structure.

There are examples of that, obviously, like the Reconstruction Amendments. But what has always interested me about Reconstruction is that many of the most ardent Radical Republicans — not all of them, but some of them, Thaddeus Stevens, Sumner, I suppose — were also critiquing the structure of the government as they were trying to do these things.

Stevens was frustrated that the executive had the power to veto. One person had the power to veto what they were trying to get through Congress, and although they were able to overcome that, they kept running into these structural difficulties.

Kermit: That is an incredibly good point, because one of the interesting things about the Reconstruction Congress and people like Stevens or Charles Sumner is that they are still telling a story of continuity. They are saying, we are advancing the values of the Declaration of Independence. We are putting the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution.

That is exactly what they say. But at the same time, they are being held back by that story of continuity. If you want to declare your dedication to the founding, it is harder to say, “Hey, the executive has too much power,” or “Hey, the Electoral College,” or “equal state suffrage in the Senate” are problems, and they are anti-democratic.

I hope we can recognize that more now. And if we feel less of a connection to the founding and more of a connection to Reconstruction, maybe we would be more willing to rethink some of these structural provisions.

Luke: I wanted to ask about the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Kermit: I’ve got sort of complicated feelings about this, because on the one hand, my impulse is to say: come on, guys, the Declaration does not mean what you think it means. That is not what it meant in 1776. It is silly to think that modern America was born in 1776.

But, one, people do not really like to hear that. And two, it is true that the Declaration has come to stand for values that we love, and it has been invoked at great moments by great people. That is not necessarily a tradition you want to discard.

I would rather focus on the Gettysburg Address than the Declaration of Independence. The Gettysburg Address is better. It does not have complaints about slave rebellions. It does not have horrifying language about Native Americans. And it is pro-democracy. It talks about government of the people, by the people, for the people, which the Declaration does not.

Maybe the way I would frame it is this: let’s embrace the Declaration and understand that we have transformed it into something that is now about values we want to live up to in advance. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that what the Declaration is saying fundamentally is that if your form of government is not advancing the values you believe in, you can change it.

Let’s not celebrate the Declaration as something that ties us to the past and says you cannot change your government. The Declaration is about revolution. It is about change.

Let’s understand that what we as a nation are dedicated to is the constant pursuit of self-perfection, and that we are willing to take great risks if necessary. We are willing to make radical changes, suffer great hardships, and bear any burden, if that is what we have to do to make America the nation we want it to be.

Luke: I liked your use of the Langston Hughes poem talking about America. Hughes was also important to Martin Luther King Jr. Where do you think we can go from here? How can we sort of absorb and view those ideas within the Hughes poem?

Kermit: He’s making two great points. One is that the story of America is a story of constant change, and, one hopes, improvement. It’s not constant improvement — there are steps back as well as steps forward — but it’s fundamentally a story of change where we work within existing systems as long as we think they can get us where we need to go. If we reach a point where a system can’t deliver the results we need, Americans break it and make something new. That’s what happened in the Revolution, when we replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution, and that’s what happened in Reconstruction. These are the radical moments that often move us forward the most.

The other point is that the impetus for change usually comes from outsiders, the downtrodden, and the marginalized, because they are the ones who have a vision of a more just society. If you’re rich and comfortable, you probably don’t think things need to change much, and you’re less likely to push for transformation. It’s the broader people — not the elite, the people on the outside — who champion the values America says it’s dedicated to and actually move them forward in concrete ways.