The “Debate,” SCOTUS & the Constitutional Bind

The Debate, SCOTUS and the Constitutional Bind

Refuse Fascism Episode 208

Sun, Jun 30, 2024 6:43PM • 1:16:20

Aziz Rana 00:00

There’s a growing recognition that the constitutional system, the rules governing political and legal decision making in the U.S., really promote various kinds of anti-democratic flaws. All of those anti-democratic features are coming back with a vengeance as central elements that are causing all these problems. The Constitution became an alibi, or a growing discretionary security state apparatus that has produced various types of violence that are deeply troubling. You can see both of those in a way, paired in somebody like Trump, who embodies both the flourishing of a politics that’s ethnonational, suspicious of democracy, and that wants to use and embrace some of the discretionary tools of the presidency, of belligerent militarist nationalism, on behalf of his own destructive ends.

Sam Goldman 01:11

Welcome to episode 208 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Aziz Rana, constitutional law scholar who is out with a new book: The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them.

Thanks to everyone who rates and reviews this podcast. A special thank you to Jaybird for their comment on last week’s episode. They wrote: “I’d like to put Sam’s commentary on the anniversary of the Dobbs decision on blast.” I think he or she means that as like a good thing, like blasted out to the world, “It’s spot on. We’ve changed in two years. Too many accepting the unacceptable. They need to refuse fascism.” I made that commentary into a Tiktok. So if it resonated, give a like, comment, repost. Over on Tiktok, you can find me, SamGoldmanRF. One correction, though, last week, I said 161,000 have been forced to travel out of state for an abortion last year, the actual number was 171,000, so my apologies. You know our listeners are just the smartest!

Off of last week’s episode, Bill wrote us with this: “In addition to originalism, the key right wing doctrines the court is advancing are the “major questions doctrine” and the “delegation doctrine” and the ideology of “dismantling the administrative state.” The bump stock decision was basically the major questions doctrine, which says that the executive only has the power explicitly delegated by Congress.” Along with: “Sam, you need to address the Supreme Court’s decision on mifepristone, which is being completely misunderstood as a victory. In reality, it lays the groundwork for a national ban. At the close of Kavanaugh’s opinion, he suggests that there may be ‘No one who has standing to challenge FDA decisions.’ Not only does that protect Big Pharma, but it must be understood in light of project 2025, which explicitly calls for FDA to revoke mifepristone’s regulatory approval. If Trump wins and his FDA does that, the Supreme Court can tie this decision to deny standing to women’s groups who challenge FDA’s regulatory ban.”

Bill is so right. We’ll be sharing more on this soon, so stay tuned. Right now, many are losing their minds over what’s going on. Now is the time to connect them with this community. You’re needed! After listening to today’s show, throw in, chip in, become a patron at Patreon.com/RefuseFascism. Thanks to everyone who already does that. Or, make a one time gift, chip in over at RefuseFascism.org — see the show notes for other ways, other methods to give. And if you can’t give right now or already do, be like Jaybird, and share this show. There are so many ways to do this: writing a review, rating the show on your favorite listening platform, like Apple podcasts or Spotify wherever it is, or sharing it through your listening app, posting it on social media, commenting on our youtubes. All of it makes a difference, and all of it is appreciated.

Before the interview, we’ve gotta comment on a week that very well may shape history. How this all plays out isn’t yet determined, but we’d be shitting ourselves if we said things are looking good. Something big shifted this week. We are entering a moment where people are being forced to recognize just how bad and dangerous things are and are headed. But recognizing it isn’t enough. We have to reckon with it. No one is coming to save us. That doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. It means we are our only hope. Our courage, our conviction, can be contagious.

In the halls of the illegitimate Supreme Court, we saw government as we know it changed. They came out with remarkably evil individual decisions this week. They ushered in a stunning power grab, and they made a qualitative leap in the fascist agenda, teeing up for a Trump return to the White House, but not waiting until that happens to get moving on these policies. I’ll have more to say on this. On the debate stage, people saw fascism’s strength and the Democratic Party’s weakness, their inability to fight fascism the way that it needs to be fought.

The Democratic Party showed their vulnerability in the face of the MAGA movement, which is ready to seize power by force and enact a vengeance on their political enemies, threatening camps or execution. There is much buzz about Biden as an individual human failing in body and mind, but it’s more that his performance was, in fact, representative of American democracy in 2024. People watched the dumpster fire on wheels, slow motion car crashing, geriatric clown show, and anybody with a remote concern for the planet and humanity was like: Oh shit, oh shit!

Out of the loss for words that many felt, a lot of talking heads, propagandists and many good people who are nonetheless hopelessly bound to the status quo, focussed the attention of the nation on questions like: “Should Biden be replaced on the Democratic Party ticket?”; “Who will replace Biden?”; “How do we save the Democratic Party?” or even: “Why was there no fact checking?”; “Why was this deluge of lies from this legendary liar allowed to go unchecked?” But the problems are much deeper than that.

Why are any of us accepting any of this as legitimate? Why the hell was Trump raised up on that stage, given a podium from which to sharpen his fascist arsenal, his lies, his fanatical base of support, the private institutions like CNN that will enable this fascism through till their dying breaths, the fear and paralysis of the good people. Why the fuck are we acting like this fascist and this so called opposition are legitimate? Like the mainstream media is legitimate? Completely illegitimate that the man who tried to overthrow the last election and establish himself as a fascist strongman, yes, that orange hued maniac, Hitler admiring Nazi, up on the debate stage as, not just a legitimate candidate, but a front runner, completely illegitimate!

A man who is already responsible for the child separation policies, for the Muslim ban, for launching a violent coup attempt, for stacking the court with fascists, ending the federal right to abortion, and everything the Supreme Court has done in the last four years, who inspires stochastic terrorism against immigrants, black people and Jewish people, a man who is an exercise in lawlessness unless he is the law, who is promising and prepared to deliver so much worse — completely illegitimate! I’m not a fan of this carceral system, but he should be locked the F up, not on stage.

You can’t beat fascist mythologies with facts. You don’t allow it any space or air time. You certainly do not pretend it is acceptable or just another normal perspective, it is a crying shame that as much as people are scared and outraged, all the institutions that have enabled and normalized this have still, even now, retained such broad legitimacy and authority. This was not a debate. Of course it wasn’t about the issues, these things never are, but the roles these two old fools were auditioning for were full blown fascist and top appeaser.

Trump was given air time to spew fascism, un-rebutted unchecked. Biden might as well have been fruitlessly yelling at his TV. No good comes from debating fascists. Neither of them answered the questions because they don’t have answers. The hosts thank Trump for his lies and obfuscations, and spent every minute carefully framing their questions not to get at the truth, but to prop up a semblance of ruling class consensus, trying to maintain legitimacy of this system through manufacturing a narrative that would make just enough sense of the shit show on the stage.

The network rolled out a shoddy ripoff of the sports center graphic package to construct a truly grotesque spectacle, they took something like over 40 minutes to even mention Trump’s attempted coup, never once mentioned Project 2025, Schedule F, or the host of civil and democratic rights Trump intends to completely obliterate. Three times, Trump was asked whether he would accept the election results if he lost, and three times he refused to answer. “If it’s Fair,” undermining it in advance. Readying his troops. In classic fascist fashion, Trump cruelly blamed immigrants for everything. Trump portrayed our immigrant siblings as the worst, barely human animals, destroying the best country that there’s ever been.

In response: a sniveling defense from Biden that only a few of them are terrorists. Trump maligned and slandered women and their doctors as murderers, killing living, breathing babies, with a non defense from Biden that “We are not for late term abortion period, period.” Trump flung “Palestinian” as an epithet to label Biden as a supporter of terrorism. The layers of callous irony met with an endless stream of mindless thank you’s from the “moderators.” Think about it. No one shut down this debate. They were allowed to have it. They had it without a live audience, and that should tell us things, but they still had it.

It is completely illegitimate that this debate happened. And note that it happened on a network that had been demonized by Trump. The lives of the reporters threatened on countless occasions. This was an atrocity of normalization, where Trump had free reign to spout his white supremacy and misogyny and his fascist lies, this “debate” was not an anomaly, but a beacon showing us where we actually are, illuminating this moment in history. It wasn’t just that Biden looked like a deer in the headlights; someone who just got pushed out of the hospice and put on stage.

It’s not that the Democrats “don’t have anyone better,” it’s that he represented their political program in all its incoherence, in all its weakness at fighting fascism and its belligerence against oppressed people here and around the world. Democratic Party mouthpieces are out here saying that everyone’s talking about Biden, no one’s talking about Trump. They actually do have a point. It was remarkable that all the major so called liberal papers came out the next day, calling on Biden to bow out, but not addressing the utter illegitimacy of Trump, not calling on him to do anything — in essence reinforcing an utter inability to address the threat which they were accusing Biden of.

It was remarkable that The Philly Inquirer was the only one to say, “What about Trump quitting?” Those Democratic Party propagandists have a point, but not a solution. They have a point precisely because these institutions and millions of people who, frankly, should know better by now, are so tied into the notion that these are their only two options; that one of these will stop the other one. You’ve been fed a heaping pile of bullshit, and I’m so sorry that it’s going to continue to mount. You may feel confused, lost. You may feel a sense of profound hopelessness seeing fascism careening forward and thinking there’s nothing that we can do but spectate and be witness or victim to the horror.

But that’s not our only option. Do not let this get lost in the noise. There is enormous strength in our side, strength in numbers with the majority of this country who does not want to live in their fascist future and strength in retaining our basic humanity, our basic morality. But that strength is not like some sleeping giant ready to be woken up. No, right now, we are using that strength, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, to enable this horror show. Our collective acceptance of this nightmare is a heavy weight. So, what do we do now? Know that all the panic that you feel is a good thing, but we can’t stay there, at least not for long.

It would make a difference right now, if there were millions saying that all of this is illegitimate. Trump is an Illegitimate fascist, and anyone and anything that platforms or gives voice or normalizes it, including the Biden campaign, for agreeing to this debate, is normalizing fascism. If you’re someone who writes, now is the time for those op eds. If you’re an influencer, it’s time to fucking influence. If you’re an artist, it’s time to make art about it. People should go and bring this refusal to the RNC this month, March on the RNC, July 15, link in the show notes. And go and bring this refusal to the DNC next month.

We cannot afford to wait till November to stand up for immigrants who are being terrorized right now. We can’t wait till November to stand up for the people of Gaza who, on top of their whole families being murdered, their cities demolished, being starved and maimed and tortured, their identity is now weaponized into a slur, become like a “Palestinian.” We cannot wait for November to defend the lives of trans people under attack in places like Texas, where their Supreme Court just upheld a gender affirming care ban. We can’t wait till election day before we realize none of what I just mentioned is even on the ballot. If everyone in your break room or around your kitchen table or your group chat, we’re stunned into speechlessness. Here’s some things to say: “Illegitimate!”, “Fascist!”, “Rise Up!” and here’s some questions to ask: “Why is this happening?”, “What does this mean?”, “What role are we playing, and what is needed to change this dynamic?”

For anybody who wants to know why this is happening, what is actually happening, what this is a part of — for anyone who needs to understand the Hitlerian playbook that Trump’s pulling from and the lessons we learned from the Weimar and Vichy governments, anyone that needs to know the powerful forces that are shaping this moment in history, connect those people to this podcast — use this show, this episode, and every other as a tool to propel discussion and action. Look at what people do all around the world when faced with tyrants, and don’t wait till the last possible moment when we can no longer act. All that said, the debate was not alone in raising the temperature.

The Supreme Court went well beyond their normal awful decisions this week and changed the way government functions, with far reaching implications. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, to be sure, they also came out with a number of other decisions that could only be described as evil. They criminalized homelessness in a moment where the global dynamics of capitalism imperialism are forcing people from their homes, ratcheting up violence and dissolving community resources on an unprecedented scale, they advanced a long crusade to legalize corruption and bribery, they gave constructive feedback to fascist states trying to expand abortion bills to kill women.

But the explicit overturning of Chevron deference in Loper Bright, really illustrates how these decisions, along with everything that fascists are doing in every sphere of government and society, aren’t just awful ideas, actions, policies. They are part of a qualitative shift in governance. You don’t have to know all the details of the Supreme Court precedent of Chevron deference — I hate that it takes up the space in my brain that it does — but the only way to understand this decision and its far reaching impacts is to understand the full scope of the fascist threat we face.

What you need to know is that Chevron deference was a policy of the Court that said judges should generally defer to the expertise of government agencies, that courts don’t have the expertise of scientists or policy experts in the EPA or FDA or USDA or OSHA, etc, and they don’t need it, except in extraordinary situations. The Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference in order to decimate the “administrative state,” a move the fascist movement sees as their next milestone in bringing into being their cruel and brutal future.

This is the core of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and Trump’s Schedule F, which we’ve dissected in previous episodes to categorically end the government’s role in providing a tattered rag of a social safety net in regulating working conditions or any other aspect of industry and commerce in addressing environmental concerns, from pollution to poisons to climate change, to gear the FDA away from science and towards a fundamentalist reading of the Bible. Chevron deference is not some abstract philosophical tenet.

The effects of this precedent is entirely dependent on the political circumstances and strategy playing out in the wider world. It was actually introduced as a legal weapon against environmentalists. Essentially, the court ruled that the National Resource Defense Council, a legal organization focused on protecting the environment, could not stop the EPA in a moment when that agency chose to enable polluters. It was developed to impede citizen oversight over federal agencies via the mechanism of limiting court oversight. What’s changed? The political power and strategy of the fascist movement.

See, back then, they were working on ending welfare as we knew it, expanding the death penalty, lifting regulations on businesses, “limiting big government,” etc., but wholesale destruction at the administrative state was a pipe dream few dared to entertain. Today, the fascists aren’t concerned with the courts providing legal tools for concerned citizens, because the fascists own the courts. The table is set, the forks are out. The maitre’D has the napkins in place across Trump’s lap. The burgers are unwrapped, the filet mignon is ketchuped.

On top of this coup de gras this week, other rulings do deserve attention. SCOTUS’ SEC ruling may have hamstrung a considerable amount of the federal government’s ability to function, making a sweeping amount and variety of federal laws unenforceable. For more on this, see Ian Milhizer’s article, “The Supreme Court Just Lit a Match and Tossed it into Dozens of Federal Agencies,” in the show notes. If you read the headlines of major newspapers, you’d have thought there was a major abortion rights victory from SCOTUS in their decision regarding the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, EMTALA.

Let’s reiterate what did and did not happen. The Supreme Court allowed a district court injunction against full enforcement of Idaho’s abortion ban to go back into effect, and the legal battle to continue to unfold. This is of important consequence in Idaho, where doctors can now provide emergency abortions, but this decision has no impact on the six more states that have abortion bans that clearly violate EMTALA, continuing to jeopardize the lives of women in those states. For example, the Fifth Circuit ruling allowing Texas to go directly against EMTALA and kill women in emergency rooms, will stand.

This was not a decision on the merits of the case, and the case is continuing in federal courts, likely to return to the Supreme Court in the fall. As Jessica Valenti powerfully stated: “The dehumanization at the heart of this case remains. At the end of The day, this is about our lives being treated as political fodder and our freedom being dismissed with the bang of a gavel. That hasn’t changed.” I’ll be talking this week with Aziz Ahmed, co director of Boston University’s Law Program on Reproductive Justice, to get into more about this case and abortion rights two years post Dobbs, and I’ll be sharing that interview soon, so stay tuned. Okay, other cases:

Then there is their ruling in Fisher v. United States, where SCOTUS significantly narrowed the obstruction statute that the Department of Justice has used to prosecute more than 350 of the January 6th defendants. This could upend hundreds of cases in the immediate, opening the door to potential resentencing or retrials, while offering a preemptive shield, should they wish to coup more effectively next time. Madiba K. Dennie, in her piece, “The Supreme Court Chose to Throw January 6th Rioters a Bone,” elucidated this, stating, in reference to Roberts’s court “With Fisher v. United States, he waved a magic wand to rewrite the statute’s text in a way that, should Donald Trump lose another presidential election and again attempt to do a coup, will make it much harder to hold future insurrectionists accountable.”

While, while making it harder to criminalize those engaged in the January 6th coup attempt, they made it much easier to punish unhoused people. In SCOTUS’ Grant’s Pass ruling, they cleared the way for cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outside in public places, and in a no surprise really, the court highly implicated in all sorts of bribery, green-lighted a corruption ruling that a federal anti bribery law does not make it a crime for state and local officials to accept a gratuity for acts that they have already taken.

Monday, July 1, we find out whether presidents are immune, can do crimes, or if they just have good friends that help them get free, by delaying their cases but staying clean themselves. Even as we act now, we need to be preparing for the struggle ahead, one that it’s clear will not end on Election Day. Part of what that means is growing and strengthening this community that I’m so glad you’re a part of, getting together on a footing to respond as needed. We can do that now by discussing and sharing the show in lots of creative and bold ways. I want to hear your ideas, so hit me up — see the show notes for how. With that, here is my interview with Aziz Rana. Welcome, Aziz. Thanks for joining me.

Aziz Rana 25:00

Thanks so much for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

Sam Goldman 25:02

You are a scholar of the Constitution, and you, in your work, argue that the Constitution has embedded the problems that gave rise to Trump. We could talk about the Electoral College, but also the power of the Senate, gerrymandering, the unaccountable and extreme power of the Supreme Court and other components of U.S. democracy. I was hoping you could talk more about this, how the Constitution itself laid the groundwork for the rise of a wannabe king like Trump, or put a different way, what constitutional pathologies does Trump’s ascendancy expose?

Aziz Rana 25:39

There’s a growing recognition, and honestly, you can just get a sense of this by reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, that the constitutional system, the rules governing political and legal decision making in the U.S., really promote various kinds of anti-democratic flaws. This is everything from the Electoral College to the fact that, as a general matter, representation in the U.S. is really organized around geography, through the states, rather than the principle of one person, one vote: The Senate dramatically over and under represents specific parts of the country, we’re moving toward a situation where 70% of the population is only in 15 of the states.

The House, because of the ways in which districting is really set up at the state level, has all sorts of issues around gerrymandering. The structure of the presidency through the Electoral College and the Senate ends up then shaping who’s on the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court, you have justices, a very small number, that end up serving for life. Then all of this is constrained by the fact that it’s incredibly hard to amend the Constitution itself; far harder than other constitutional systems around the world.

To really understand how this intersects with the rise of the hard right, I think it’s important to actually push beyond thinking of this as just a question of the fact that Trump was elected despite the fact that he lost the popular vote. He was, in fact, a minority president, and so this was not a situation of “majority tyranny;” it’s minority power being amplified. The constitutional system has incentivized a particularly regressive term within the Republican Party over the course of the last 30 years. You know, I’d be happy to kind of dig into it and sort of work through that story, if you’d like.

Sam Goldman 27:20

I think that’d be very helpful.

Aziz Rana 27:22

I think the way to think about it is by just juxtaposing the difference between where the country was in 1992, and where the country was in 2022, because in 1992 the Supreme Court had a challenge to Roe versus Wade in a case called Casey, where there’s a real question about whether or not abortion rights was going to be overturned. And then that challenge came back again with Dobbs in 2022. In 1992, the Republican Party, because of all of these dynamics and features of the Constitutional system, had been able to nominate and confirm to the Supreme Court eight of the nine justices. The only justice on the Supreme Court at that time who was not nominated by a Republican president was White, who had been nominated by Kennedy and was actually on the record opposed to Roe and to abortion rights within the Constitution.

If you just did a kind of very simple bean counting, you’d have thought, well, then this means that Roe versus Wade is going to get overturned. But that’s not actually what happened. A series of anti-abortion measures were upheld at the court, but the court also ended up saying that it was going to hold on to the central meaning of Roe, which is that there’s a constitutionally protected right to abortion. The reason was because, in many ways, in the 1970s and the 1980s the Republican Party was the majority party in the country. It was politically ascendant for lots of different economic and cultural reasons.

The two most popular politicians of the latter part of the 20th century were really Nixon, who wins a landslide re-election in ’72, Reagan, who wins a landslide presidential election in ’84. These were massively popular politicians from an incredibly populous state like California. What happened between ’92 and 2022 is that the Republican Party really lost its majority status: its ideas about the economy became far less popular; its demographic composition was an intensely and overwhelmingly white composition became increasingly out of step with the growing diversity of the country, as well as the cultural shifts when it came to issues of race and membership. In many ways, it increasingly embodied a smaller part of the nation, where in ’92 it can be a kind of big tent party that meant that you could have moderate Republicans nominated to the court.

30 years later, the party meant something very different. But here’s where the constitutional system plays into it. There was a debate basically within the Republican Party, and the right generally, about, well, how is it in a context in which you’re losing touch with the society’s majority, do you hold on to power? There are two ways. You can hold on to power by leaning in, effectively to the big tent, nominating people to the Supreme Court that are at the center of political gravity, so more moderate Republicans. Trying to reach out to other demographic groups, recognizing that you’re representing a shrinking part of the country, and so thinking seriously about the problems that affect different parts of the country, urban areas, for instance.

But that’s not what the Republican Party chose to do. It instead, chose to lean into the fact that the particular structural features of the Constitutional system that we’ve just described, the nature of the Senate, the way that the Supreme Court operates, the fact that it’s very difficult to amend the Constitution, the fact that presidents can be elected as president without winning the popular vote meant that you could actually hold on to power without broadening the tent. You could, for instance, have now multiple presidents elected that lost the popular vote. You could pack the Supreme Court with hardcore ideologues to ensure that your perspectives or positions can win long after those positions have any real strong popular base of support.

All of this, I think, gets expressed by the fact that now you have a super majority on the Supreme Court of Republicans — six nominees, despite the fact that many of those were nominated by presidents that lost the popular vote — and that are very clearly ideological extremists within the context of the broad range of American legal and political perspectives. so when a case like abortion comes back to the fore, it’s a case where you have the Party and the Court understand itself really as attempting to lock in perspectives that might not be able to win politically.

In big picture, what this means is that the types of choices incentivized by the Constitutional system’s, prioritizing of a minority perspective, were choices that basically told leaders within the party that something like a broad ranging multiracial democracy is a kind of existential threat to their authority, and that what you need to do is use whatever tools exist in the Constitutional system to hold on to power, and if those tools don’t work, for instance, Trump actually just loses the election in 2020, then you can say that even elections are a kind of existential threat to the authority. In effect, it creates an incentive system that treats a type of white authoritarianism as something that is the only solution, either within the terms of the Constitution or even breaking from the law entirely, to maintaining power.

It’s not the only reason for the rise of Trump, but it’s made it far easier for an extreme brand of authoritarian politics in the U.S. to emerge and sustain itself and be vibrant than it would be if we had a more functional structure of constitutional democracy. Sorry, to jump out, but how was that as a response?

Sam Goldman 32:52

That was great. It was thorough, iot walked people through, and one of the things that it was is it was also very accessible. [Yeah, okay, good. So we can continue. I just wanted to make sure that I’m not totally off base.] Yeah, one thing I want to put a pin in in this, and we’ll return to it later in the conversation, but as you were talking, I was reminded of something that you had put in your book. Your book — this is not a surprise to you — is very provocative, because it questions some of the biggest things that Americans hold dear, the audacity to question the U.S. Constitution and its history.

One of the things that you put really frankly and simply is, I’m going to quote it for people: “Above all, the Constitution remains deeply undemocratic. Americans have a system that profoundly distorts popular sentiment.” And there’s another point where you basically just lay out that the U.S. is not and has not ever been a genuine democracy. I think that these are very provocative points, and they’re points that are not irrelevant to the conversation of what will it take to stop fascism. I want listeners to be thinking about that. You talked about some of the structures within the Constitution that give rise to Trump or Trumpism — even if there wasn’t Trump, there was a likelihood that somebody else would be in there doing the same thing for them.

There are powerful interests and a whole movement backing Trump that’s been indispensable to his success and the lack of accountability. But on another level, the majority of the country opposes Trump and everything he represents, yet all the key impediments to stopping Trump and holding him accountable are seemingly bound in the Constitution. What is it about the Constitution that protects an individual like Trump and that bolsters the fascist movement he’s leading? I’m just thinking about all the recent failures that people have seen, that people have invested that it’s all going to work out because we have impeachment, or it’s all going to work out because we’re going to get them off the ballot with this measure, it’s all going to work out because the Supreme Court won’t uphold this harebrained theory, or whatever people are telling themselves that it’s all found in the Constitution, and why none of these attempts to accountability using the Constitution have been successful.

Aziz Rana 35:06

One of the things that’s happened with the U.S. Federal Constitution over the course of the 20th century is that Americans approach their Constitution in a way that’s actually quite different than how many countries around the world do. There’s certainly some countries that have really deep, venerative attachments to their text. South Africa’s post apartheid constitution is an example of a real cultural commitment to a constitutional project.

But a lot of times, countries just treat their constitutions as systems of government. In the U.S., the Constitution has become very closely tied to a story we tell ourselves about the national project, and that’s really what a lot of my book focuses on; that the Constitution, is the thing that weaves together all of these disparate ideological commitments that are part of what we just understand to be America — a project of universal equality, a vision of civil liberties, a commitment to market capitalism, even if you have some set of government regulations and constraints, a theory of constrained representative government, extensive checks and balances, with a powerful Supreme Court and all of this as a justification for American exceptionalism, for why the U.S. should have a kind of global power on the World Stage.

You take it together, it’s a single cohesive ideology of what the American Century is amounted to, even if each one of these little elements are really quite disconnected and can be separated. But what that’s meant is that it’s very hard for Americans to think of little ‘c’ constitutionalism, in other words, a system of government in which nobody is above the law, and in which individuals enjoy basic rights so that they can flourish independent of the type of discretionary power that the state might assert, or that, let’s say, economic and business and racial elites might assert.

That this small c vision of constitutionalism, and there are many ways you can do this, have effectively been funneled into a single big ‘C’ of our federal Constitution. And the thought is that unless you just hold firm to exactly what this system is like, you can’t have any method of the rule of law. It’s why I think for many people that are left of center, and I include myself here, that there’s real tension whenever kind of Trump is out there, because on the one hand, there’s this recognition we wouldn’t have Trump at all if it weren’t for the Constitution that effectively put him into power.

It’s the Constitution that’s also promoting this defection from democracy that we’re seeing on the right, but there’s the worry that if you start criticizing the Constitution, then what tools do you have to constrain him? So there’s this continual turn to the hope that there might be some silver bullet in the text that will produce an off ramp. We started seeing this, frankly, as soon as Trump got elected. There are all of these potentially wonderful devices that are written into the text. There’s the possibility of impeachment if you engage in really serious crimes that should be something that is effective and used.

There are pieces of text, like the Emoluments Clause, that say that you’re not supposed to be basically taking bribes, engaged in corruption from either domestic or foreign actors. There’s the 25th amendment that deals with the question about whether or not somebody that’s sitting in the office is competent. There’s the 14th amendment that was a product of reconstruction, that says, you take up arms, you engage in insurrection against the government, like, for instance, attempting to subvert an election and promoting the use of revolt against the sitting government — took place in the Capital attack in 2021 — then there should be a process by which you get removed.

So there’s all of these bits of language, but they operate within a structural system that imposes a fundamental bind on whether or not any of them can be effective. Impeachment requires getting through two thirds of the Senate, but the Senate is massively malaportioned. It so dramatically underrepresents the most populous parts of the country, that it creates a permanent veto for the right over using that as a mechanism, so any kind of impeachment process dies there. Emoluments Clause:

You might want to be able to sue Trump for acts of corruption, but it has to go back through the federal courts, and guess who runs the federal courts? Because you have a president that didn’t win the popular vote that was still able to nominate and confirm three justices to the Supreme Court. Since 1968 Democrats have only been able to nominate and confirm a total of five justices to the Supreme Court. There has not been a Democratic president nominate and confirm as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court somebody since 1946. So the federal courts are basically packed with folks that are ideologically committed to the right, and so you can’t expect the courts then to be able to serve as a basis for navigating the Emoluments Clause, the nature of the 14th Amendment section three that deals with removing people from running for office if they engage in insurrection.

Effectively, there’s this language in the text that folks want to hold on to because they’re wary of giving up of the project of constitutionalism writ large, totally understandably, and they feel like, well, there are these tools there, but any effort to actually effectively use that text is checkmated by the structure of decision making that’s built into the system. Then I think a lot of left of center folks think: Well, wait a second. It was through constitutional change that we got so many of the great things of the mid 20th century, from the Brown versus Board of Education getting rid of separate but equal, to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act so that Congress was a tool for actually passing important landmark bits of legislation. But our moment is so fundamentally different than the world of the mid 20th century that that kind of analogy back ends up being a type of almost like empty nostalgia for a country that’s passed, where we’re still stuck with the structural devices that have these like profound impediments that they impose on our ability to address things today

Sam Goldman 41:21

Very helpful. I’m also thinking about the fact that you had mentioned that the world has changed since then, you know, and that has to do with also the necessities that this empire faces now that they didn’t face then, as part of the world changing. It’s also true, and oftentimes overlooked, the ways in which concessions get made being a product of fierce struggle, and not something that is just offered up by the powers that be, but there’s concessions made under the constraints of going so far but stopping before it would compromise their fundamental interests and standing in the world. You’re right, we haven’t seen that in some time. In a fundamental sense.

Aziz Rana 42:03

Part of the difficulty that Trump presents, and Trumpism, is that it cuts against what many Americans just understand to be the meaning of the country. It’s this story that I was mentioning that links together universal equality and rights protection and the U.S. on the world stage. But in a way, that’s a story that’s a really contingent product of dynamics in the mid 20th century, between the ’30s and the ’60s, and it’s a product of the New Deal and the fact that in the 1930s and ’40s, the Democratic Party was able to access a very powerful labor movement that was able to bring massive super majorities of working people to the polls to back their policies and so overcome these really intense veto points that exist in the Constitutional system.

That is an historically exceptional period. It’s also tied to the conditions of World War Two and the confrontation with Nazi Germany, and then the Cold War, where the U.S. was engaged in an ideological struggle with a profound political adversary that pushed left and right toward a kind of center, where the right in particular, was willing to make certain types of compromises because of this view, that both internationally and domestically, a lot rode on compromising in order to be able to confront the Soviet Union.

All of that was also taking place in a world that was decolonizing, where the U.S. was attempting to win hearts and minds with non-white peoples in Asia and Africa, that pressed for the need to have policies that overturned segregation, that pushed toward voting and civil rights. That’s a very particular conjunction of developments that created the circumstances in which the public could find common ground despite the problems of the Constitutional system. Really, the story of the last half century is that all of those elements have fallen away. The undermining, really, of labor, both internationally and domestically, has meant that you don’t have anything like the labor politics of New Deal liberalism.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, and also the end of the era of decolonization, facilitated a willingness of the right to basically defect from some of the compromises that had been imposed because of grand power rivalry. Also, the successes in a way of the Civil Rights Movement fed, not unexpectedly, various forms of backlash that the right could take advantage of. You end up in a situation that, in many ways, is just more like the long lure of American history, where throughout American history, a version of Trumpism, some combination of, like, populism, that’s like racially tinged a type of white populism has been a very, very powerful ideological formation, but it was contained by specific developments in the mid 20th century. Now we’re living in a world in which it’s just not contained anymore, and as in various moments in the historical past — you can think about the defeat of reconstruction, or even the era of slavery in the early 19th century — that as at various points of the American past the Constitutional system aids and abets this powerful ideological formation.

Sam Goldman 45:09

I wanted to move to this central element of your text, the idolatry, if you will, of the U.S. Constitution. Your book walks through, extensively, how this came to be, what you call “credo constitutionalism,” evolved. I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about what the impact is. First of all, what do you mean for those who may still not be fully convinced that the U.S. Constitution is seen as really a sacred document for all intents and purposes, in this country. What do you mean by that? And then, how does it really impact society and people’s not just discourse, but also their action.

Aziz Rana 45:51

Support for the U.S. Constitution is something that’s ebbed and flowed across American history, and there’ve definitely been multiple and distinct veneurative cultures around the text. So somebody like Abraham Lincoln in the early part of the 19th century, in one of his most famous early speeches — this is the Lyceum speech — talks about the importance of turning the Constitution into a type of civil religion for the country.

It’s not like I’m arguing that it’s only in the 20th century that folks have come to embrace the text, but I want to emphasize that the way Americans in recent decades talk about the Constitution is quite different. If you just were to go back to the 1850s and you think about the dominant position in the North among white politicians about the Constitution, the argument would be: It’s worth embracing, because it’s a document of compromise. This is the Daniel Webster argument, the Senator out of Massachusetts. So he’s opposed, in principle, to slavery, but he says: You know, what the Constitution does, is it’s a compromise across the regions among enslavers and non-slave-holding states, so that the country can collectively pursue a project of economic and territorial expansion.

If we just take a step back and think about that argument, that’s an argument that’s really antithetical to what Americans like myself, I was in public school in the ’80s and ’90s of the U.S., that’s not the story that we were told from teachers, from politicians, in our school books about what’s great about the country or the Constitution. That’s an argument that says the Constitution allows Americans to avoid addressing slavery so that it can engage in the theft of native land. That’s deeply immoral from our perspective as a way of justifying a constitutional project. Instead, the Constitution has become wrapped up with that story that links together all of these diverse elements.

It’s supposed to fulfill these universal aspirations of the declaration. It’s supposed to be an anti-totalitarian rights Charter, the Bill of Rights. It’s supposed to protect a vision of private property. It’s supposed to go hand in hand with this exalted Court that is a national seminar to address collective problems, and all of it is why the U.S. is different than the old European empires, why it’s different than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, why it is justified in asserting global power because its interests are effectively the world’s interests. That’s a story that, if you kind of just tease it out, should be familiar to most of your listeners, because it’s the story that we all kind of grew up with, and you just imbibed without thinking too deeply about it.

The Constitution is really at the center of explaining like, what makes Americans, and the American project, different than just any other kind of European outpost in the non European world, or any other global power. So my argument in the book is that you cannot understand the rise of that story and the Constitution’s cultural role without also understanding how the U.S. shifted in the 20th century, moved from being a regional power in the Americas to a global hegemon and a global hegemon at a time, again, of decolonization, where the European empires were collapsing, the world was becoming an increasing system organized around independent and equal nation states, white and non-white.

This reclaiming of what had been an anti-slavery, Civil War story of the country — this is the idea of the Creed — this is what makes this constitutional story a creedal constitutional one — became very central to how Americans understood their project. But this was not just cynical, and this is the plus of it, which is it was something that Americans deeply embraced and became a basis for many of the profound reforms that have transformed the nature of American society. It’s deeply tied to the successes of the civil rights movement, and so brought with it all of these great achievements of the 20th century that are absolutely worth venerating, but it came with real flaws and drawbacks; two that we’ve already sort of hinted at.

One is that it came at the cost of failing to actually grapple with not the Constitution as a symbol, but the Constitution as a structure of decision making, all of those anti-democratic features that now are coming back with a vengeance as central elements of our own kind of political presence that are causing all these problems. And then the second thing is it papered over some of the structural inequalities of American society, the ways in which conquest of Indigenous peoples, enslavement of Black people really part of the story, and how, as a result, many of the elements of how American powers operated on the global stages also kind of promoted forms of inequality and dependence.

So it’s made it very difficult for Americans to recognize how the Constitution became an alibi for a growing discretionary security state apparatus that has produced various types of violence that are deeply troubling. You can see both of those in a way paired in somebody like Trump, who embodies both the flourishing of a politics that’s ethno-national, suspicious of democracy, and that wants to use and embrace some of the discretionary tools of the presidency, a kind of belligerent, militarist nationalism, but on behalf of his own destructive ends.

Sam Goldman 51:30

One of the things that we struggle with people all the time is this notion that what we face with Trump is unAmerican, and people use the Constitution as like he’s violating this, violating that, but I think he’s very uniquely American, and the movement that he represents is America. We’ve not seen it only in America, don’t get me wrong, the fascist project is a global project, but I do think that there is a need for people to pull back a little bit or provide some pushback to the notion that this is not American, because the exceptionalism that it’s fueled by and reinforces really just justifies horror. The sooner we can come to grips with that, the sooner that I think we can be working together on a path towards liberation.

Aziz Rana 52:16

I think that’s a really good point. At the same time, it’s also really key to appreciate how it’s genuinely American — so authoritarianism is not something that happens elsewhere, but has deep ties and links to the history of our own national experience that Trump is an embodiment of. But it’s not the only thing that’s American. My first book was called ‘The Two Faces of American Freedom,’ and I really meant that as the U.S. has embedded within it a kind of history that’s very closely connected to this notion that in order for some people to enjoy the benefits of what I call Republican freedom, or freedom of self rule, economic independence, political participation, there would have to be others that were subject to really harsh forms of control; either because you had to extract land or to use the coerced labor of, for instance, enslaved persons.

But the American story, this is a kind of another parallel story, is the fact that across national history, there have been folks, both insiders and outsiders, that have attempted to think really seriously about how is it that you can universalize that account of freedom; make it equal and effective for everyone. And I think that that’s basically still the struggle today, and it’s been a perennial challenge in American life. In a way, the worry that I have with some of the politics around constitutional veneration, so like hoping that you can turn back to the text to solve XYZ problem, is that it misplaces the source of hope. The hope is not that there’s going to be a silver bullet in a particular bit of text, because the text, simply put, hasn’t served us well.

We can have a conversation about how and whether to change it. That’s a very difficult question. But to me, more important than how and whether to change it now is to instead realize that the source of hope are the underlying principles that we want to actually be committed to, which is a principle of multiracial democracy and equal and effective freedom, and then invest in the movements and coalition building that can promote those goals. That might require you strategically using bits of text. Maybe there’ll be a moment in which a part of the constitutional text can be strategically applied, but maybe it might require some fairly fundamental breaks.

But as long as Americans — and here I’m really thinking of folks that are broadly, we’re on the same side of, as long as folks that are left of center — kind of want to hold on to this, like nostalgic vision of the country as just exclusively what it meant in, like the ’50s, effectively, and to sort of venerate the Constitution as a way of venerating this official story. It’s going to be really difficult to be able to distinguish between the stuff that actually gets us to the place we want to go, and the stuff that, in fact, constrains our ability to do so.

Sam Goldman 55:04

I think that that’s exactly what we need to be propagating vastly.

I wanted to return to a question that relates to our earlier conversation. You spoke somewhat to it in your answer to a previous question, but I’ve been wrangling with how the Constitution can be a document, framework, that is, my words, enabling the worst fascist impulses, but also be the thing that so many claim is the key to saving us. So many people are like: This is what we need to stand on. I mean, is democracy as it’s conceived here, in this society, is that the thing to be used as the platform? How is that? You have fascists who are moving to convention of the states their way out to a new constitution, throwing away the constitution? So I guess maybe it’s that people cling to something because it’s under attack, and that’s why people do it.

Aziz Rana 55:59

There are a few things going on. The first thing is that Americans, really, basically, thought, struggled, died, suffered for the achievement of this project that I was referring to as a kind of creedal constitutional project. That’s the story of the two world wars, of World War Two, the confrontation with Nazi Germany, the achievements of the civil rights movement. It’s not surprising, and it’s totally understandable that folks would feel incredible and deep affection for a document that stands at the core of the achievements of the 20th century, and moreover, achievements that are associated with American global greatness.

The U.S. again, went from being a regional player to perhaps the most powerful country in the history of the world. There’s a lot of national and nationalist pride, good and bad that’s wrapped up then with the global transformations of the 20th century that were then, with the capstone of the Soviet Union collapsing, and that collapse as a kind of large scale validation for all of the elements of the American project. So this is something that has real cultural power. And even now, at this moment in which there’s a growing sense of the undemocratic features of the Constitution, it’s going to be very difficult for people to break from it. In fact, it’s still perhaps the dominant ideological formation in the U.S. I think it makes a lot of sense that people would hold firm to it.

I also think it’s a completely natural response to the rise of an extreme right, where you have somebody like Trump that’s talking about things like terminating existing election rules, even within the context of the Constitution, and there’s a sense that as flawed as the document may be and as flawed as the governing rules are, at least, it’s something that keeps at bay the very worst impulses of American life. So there’s both the romance, but then that’s that romance combined with a real fear about what it means to step into the unknown. I completely kind of understand this, and I find these to be very powerful responses to the moment that we’re living in.

My worry is that we’re also living during a moment in which the American project, both as an international project, the projection of American power in lots of different ways, and domestically through the kind of legal political system that we have, is really coming apart at the seams. It’s not clear to me — this is why I worry that some of the romance is an unproductive nostalgia — that we can just go back to the kind of imagined world that folks want, whether it’s the ’90s or the achievements of the early ’60s or whatever else.

That means that the only way to get through this moment will probably require fairly extensive forms of institutional and cultural reconstruction, including democratic renewal. That means changing the nature of how the U.S. operates overseas in a way that is far less, in my view, imperialistic, and I use that as the morally laden elements of saying that word, and then also really pretty fundamentally addressing our own domestic institutions. It’s a scary thing because it means confronting the fact that we’re in and we’re going to continue to be in an era of political struggle where the outcome is not predetermined, but it’s not clear to me that there’s any alternative. Just holding on to the story or holding onto the Constitution doesn’t feel like it’s an adequate solution.

Here, the Convention of States is a really good example, because what the right is thinking about right now is they have their version of Constitutional veneration because of the ways in which the devices embedded in the system aid their political objectives and make it easier to be able to sustain power without having majority support. But even if we get to a moment when that’s no longer possible, the views of the right are so unpopular that they can’t sustain even control in the courts or the Senate, you have politicians that are imagining a different constitutional system where they would use kind of regressive state based tools in the process of writing a new constitution that exists in the current Constitution, to then have a document that would allow, for instance, a majority of states to be able to nullify any national policy in a way that really goes back to some of the worst features of the early 19th century, and is deeply, deeply undemocratic.

In that context, it just behooves folks, even folks that want to stay committed to some version of a creedal constitutional story, to think really seriously about large scale democratic reform, and to Imagine, well, what type of coalition would make it possible and so confront the times that we live in. I worry that the difficulty of the moment creates an incentive — this is, let’s say, an incentive for left of center — to just hope that if we can somehow convince everybody to believe the story, again, that all of the problems will dissipate.

But that’s just not, unfortunately, the world that we live in. In a way, I think one of the legacies of Obama and Obama’s presidency was even the most charismatic version of the creedal, Constitutional, Cold War liberal story could not actually cohere a society marked by pretty profound internal contradictions and conflicts. Just dealing with that fact means kind of recognizing that even if what you want is to hold on to the existing constitutional system, you’re still going to have to be in the business of pretty fundamental change.

Sam Goldman 1:01:36

Reading your book and rereading some of the quotes from Obama about the Constitution, it’s quite an important reminder. I had remembered the North Star comment, but there were others that you had lifted up in your text that it feels like a lifetime ago. What usually happens over the course of generations is like: Woo, that was last week. I think it’s an important reminder and refresher, if you will. I do think that your point about this return to what people perceive as normal or or the good old days, whatever people see in that, I agree that there’s no return to that.

I’d also question people to relook at the Constitution and whether that’s something that you’d want to uphold. I think we use ‘freedom’ a lot, but whose freedom that text represents? and that idea that we can have this equality for all, including people around the world, under this system of rule. I can’t see it beyond a enshrining of exploitation and a tool for that, but I appreciate the perspective of people wanting to work for something better.

I don’t think that that’s something better would happen right now through rewriting it, but I do see the sense of people returning to a point that you made earlier: thinking about what is it that people collectively want for society? How would we want freedom to look like, very different than it is today, and then, on that basis, what’s the work that would need to be done? I really felt like that was such a — not just in terms of some idealism, but also, I think methodologically — it’s important. I want to give you an opportunity to respond, but I also wanted to pose: What would it look like if the Constitution was not venerated? If it was seen for what it is?

Aziz Rana 1:03:33

My own view is that there are many examples around the world of constitutional democracies that have different types of texts that I think are more consistent with what the needs of a multiracial democracy might be. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, moving our constitutional order closer to a system that really sort of prioritizes social democracy by: having the principle of one person, one vote at the center of representative institutions; that reforms the nature of the bench by expanding it, term limits; but also combining that with a simplified amendment process so that there are other avenues for majorities to be able to influence and shape constitutional politics, rather than the bottleneck of this really all powerful Court that has provisions that are much more expansive when it comes to socioeconomic, reproductive, environmental, Indigenous rights that are actually embedded in the text.

So we can imagine a different constitutional system. There are plenty of examples around the world that would be preferable to ours. But I don’t think, and this is the thing that you were just hinting at, that every moment in time is the moment for just, like scrapping the text and rewriting something. To be able to engage in a project of constitution writing, there needs to be a mobilized, and really transformative majority that can even step outside the rules that are established by the existing text to justify large scale change. So, if in this moment, you actually try to rewrite the text, you open yourself up to the kind of document that ALEC and the folks at the Convention of States want.

The response to me is not then to just like rally around the existing text, but to think about what in the long term would one want as a different constitutional system, and what in the immediate term can you do to build the type of political majority and to make alterations/reforms, that push the country in the direction of something like a multiracial democracy, and to me, ultimately, taking the Constitution off of its current pedestal is really about breaking from the kind of nostalgia that we’ve been describing. I think that both right and center are kind of consumed by versions of the American past, and by a desire to return to the American past.

We see this in the story of originalism, the deification of framers, the idea that the best way to solve problems in the 21st century is to make assessments about what somebody might have thought in 1868 even before women had the right to vote, or in 1788 when the vast majority of people on the North American landmass, if you include women, Indigenous peoples, Black people, had no meaningful rights at all. That’s a really destructive way of thinking about the present, and yet it’s all part of a kind of venerative culture.

Then, for the center, it’s the veneration, again, of the post-war project, in a way that’s like sands in an hourglass, slipping away, and that cannot be reconstituted. It means thinking now of like: Well, what is it, genuinely for the future? What kind of constitutional project do we want? What vision of democracy do we want to have? Who should, in fact, be empowered? Should it only be judges and lawyers that get to decide the terms of what a constitutional question is? Should the Supreme Court determine that when it comes to race, like affirmative action, which I don’t even think of as one of the ten, twenty, top issues when it comes to race that I would focus on, should be the only way that we have conversations about the meaning of race in the Constitution; not the nature of the carceral state, not profound inequalities in health, housing, in the structure of our economic institutions.

If reclaiming a kind of popular authority over the constitutional project is reclaiming a broader conversation about change, that I feel like is oftentimes treated as utopian or: Hey, you know, these are perspectives that lost in the ’30s or they lost in the ’60s, so why do it again? But the kind of narrowly pragmatic approach that says: Let’s just hold firm to this venerative culture, let’s stay confined to a conversation among judges, lawyers, over bits of text — that’s proven to be deeply un-pragmatic, in that it’s left us bereft of a capacity to actually resolve our problems through our existing institutions. In a way, this is a moment to think big, because it might be the case that a kind of utopian imagination is not utopian in the bad sense. It’s just the only way we’re going to push forward.

Here, I’d say, as part of this, there’s also a challenge to the left — and I think of myself as very much a person of the left — and the challenge is this: There’s a way in which there’s been a kind of excitement on the left about the fracturing of the creedal constitutional project since 2016 and since the rise of Trump, because of this thought that if this stuff fractures — if you can’t actually invest in nostalgia, if you have to take the Constitution off the pedestal, or really the American project off its pedestal — then something necessarily better will take place.

I think what we’re clearly seeing is that the organization of forces in American life, the weakness of labor and the institutions of the left, the rise in power of people like Trump as well as of a billionaire class more generally, means that we’re engaged in fracture and struggle in a context in which there are really destructive possibilities that are out there that could occur as soon as November, but are going to be part of our medium to long term future. Embracing a world in which we’ve sort of destabilized the national story in the place of the Constitution also requires a significant amount of ethical responsibility.

I know this is a level of abstraction, but like of understanding how to behave strategically, the importance of making alliances of building a popular front, of not just sort of like embracing crisis and chaos for its own sake, without having clarity about how your means and your ends relate to each other, what types of specific policy objectives can bring people together and that can make it harder for injustice to reproduce itself. Operating between the immediate term and the long term, and the long term, having a vision of a very different constitutional system, but an immediate term project of understanding the real dangers posed by a far right.

So, all of these are the challenges for the present. I think the right, the center and the left… here, we’re talking about the center and the left, the center and the left have different challenges for confronting this moment, but I don’t think we can get to where we want to go, unless we have a very different type of culture around the Constitution and really, by extension, around what the meaning of America came to be in the mid 20th century.

Sam Goldman 1:10:10

I want to thank you so much, Aziz for taking the time to talk with me for your book, ‘The Constituionl Bind, How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them,’ which came out not that long ago, and folks can find a link to it in the show notes. Besides reading your book, how else can people connect with you, with your work? Are there compilations of your other writings? I’ll link to your op ed.

Aziz Rana 1:10:38

It would be great to link to some of my public writing, I try to write pretty regularly. I also have a website, AzizRana.com that I should actually update more frequently, but it gives you an idea of some of the pieces that I’ve written in the past, along with the op ed in the Times. To get a sense of like some of these ideas and how they’ve developed over the last set of years. There are a few essays that I might recommend taking a look at, I wrote a series of essays for N+1 magazine, one of which was called Goodbye Cold War, that was an effort after Trump’s election to think about the political moment in the U.S. that might be useful. Another for Dissent was called Our Segregation Problem, which was an effort to think about institution building and how to create the type of cultural world in which you can have something like meaningful interracial solidarity across difference. I’m easily accessible, you can find my email address, happy to be in conversation with people.

Sam Goldman 1:11:32

Thanks again.

Aziz Rana 1:11:33

Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here.

Sam Goldman 1:11:35

I promise, promise. Shirts will be available next week. The link will first go to patrons. For those interested in learning more about originalism, briefly touched on in this interview, see my interview from last week where I chat with Madiba K. Dennie, author of ‘The Originalism Trap.’ For more on American freedom as the freedom to dominate, see my interview with Jefferson Cowie, author of the Pulitzer Prize winner, The Freedom to Dominate, A Saga of white Resistance to Federal Power. Episode 203 which was uploaded May 26. For a totally different constitution, a basic model and fundamental principles and guidelines for the nature and functioning of a very, very different society and government than now exists, see the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian, it’s a draft proposal.

Not many people are out here taking on the U.S. Constitution as directly as Aziz. This is so necessary, and I want to plant a seed in your brain. Many people, including Aziz in this interview, frame the struggle we face as a struggle to expand or universalize freedom and democracy. In this framework, the enemy is those who see the suppression and subjugation of others as necessary for their own freedom. But maybe the problem isn’t merely who is granted this freedom, but the kind and quality of the freedom itself that is fundamentally flawed.

This struggle is between a type of freedom and democracy that rests on the impression of others, a freedom which at its heart is a freedom to dominate others versus a radically different vision of freedom. Is the democracy in the U.S. genuine? I would say, yes, the U.S. is one kind of genuine democracy, a capitalist, imperialist democracy, and the forms of democracy here serve that system. Personally, I feel that there’s an urgent need for a radically different kind of freedom and a radically different democracy that serves radically different ends.

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