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| George Washington presiding over the Constitutional Convention |
by Dan Lazare
10.18.24
The one safe prediction
we can make about the upcoming presidential election is that it can only result
in a further intensification of the crisis of US democracy.
This is not Marxist
boiler-plate in which bourgeois democracy is always bankrupt and capitalism is
always in its death throes. This is the real
thing. A lot of concerns are weighing on voters’ minds as Election
Day nears, the economy, the climate crisis, inflation, and housing prices, to
name just a few. But among the most pressing is an across-the-board
constitutional breakdown that is rapidly accelerating. For example:
-- The Electoral College,
which nearly quadruples the clout of voters in lily-white Wyoming versus those
in minority-majority California, is playing an increasingly outsized
role. In the first two centuries of the American republic, the EC
overturned the popular vote on only three occasions: in 1824, 1876, and
1888. But it has already done so twice since November 2000 and may
well do it a third time next month.
-- The Senate is
more imbalanced than at any point since 1820.[1] Thanks to equal
state representation, it allows the 54 percent of the population that lives in
just ten states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other
forty. A majority can be gleaned from senators representing just 17
percent of the country while a filibuster can be gleaned from 41 senators
representing as little as eleven.
-- The House is so
heavily gerrymandered that Republicans next month may enjoy as much as a
16-seat advantage according to estimates by the Brennan Center for Justice.
-- The Supreme Court is
increasingly undemocratic not just in terms of decision making but
structure. Five of the six justices who comprise the court’s
six-member conservative majority were nominated by presidents who lost the
popular vote (i.e. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barret), while four
were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (Gorsuch,
Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas). Given that Clarence Thomas, the
oldest member of the court, is just 76, the rightwing judicial dictatorship
will likely continue well into the mid-2030s. If Trump wins a second
term, it will continue even longer.
-- Federalism is in
shambles. Since January, Texas has seized control of a portion of
the US-Mexican border in the town of Eagle Pass, 140 miles west of San
Antonio. This is outright insurrection, yet the White House is
paralyzed.
-- Racial imbalances
are growing. More than 80 percent of racial minorities live in the
ten biggest states that are outvoted in the Senate while states that are rural
and white tend to benefit most from the Electoral College. The multi-racial
urban majority thus finds itself more and more disenfranchised.
-- What makes this
even worse is that reform is essentially impossible thanks to the dysfunctional
amending clause laid out in Article V, which stipulates that two-thirds of each
house plus three-fourths of the states must consent before changing so much as
a comma in America’s holy of holies. Thirteen states representing as
little as 4.4 percent of the nation can thus veto any effort at structural
change, no matter how modest. The US is as frozen as the Celestial
Empire on the eve of the 1911 revolution.
The upshot is a perfect
impasse. All advanced capitalist states are under growing strain due
to the post-2008 “long recession” and a host of problems that go along with
it. But since no country is saddled with a constitution that is as
ancient, dysfunctional, and all-encompassing as the US version, no one faces a
mechanical breakdown of anywhere near the same magnitude. It is the
equivalent of a car with a missing headlight, a missing wheel, and a sputtering
engine. But even if it leaves Americans stranded by the side of the
road, there is nothing they can do because Article V renders them
powerless. Even a constitutional convention is a non-starter since
Article V stipulates that its decisions are merely recommendations subject to
the same two-thirds, three-fourths rule. Wealthy minority interests
are using the breakdown to impose an increasingly rightwing
agenda. Yet the democratic majority is powerless to respond.
Powerless under the
existing system, that is, but not under a new one of its own making.
There is a way out -- not
a constitutional convention as outlined in Article V, but a constituent
assembly along the lines of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917. The
difference is crucial. Where one takes place under the Constitution,
which describes how it may be called and what it can do, the other takes place
over the Constitution since it is a gathering of the constituent elements
– “we the people” and all that – who created it in the first
place. It is therefore free to operate on the Constitution as a
whole, not according to the document’s rules, but according to its own, which
is to say those of direct democracy. If the assembly votes to ditch
the Second Amendment, then out it goes. If it votes to drop the
Constitution in toto and draw up a new plan of government to take its place,
then out it goes too.
This is not a
constitutional solution, since no such solution exists. Rather, it
is a revolutionary solution whose goal is either to create a new state or
re-found the existing state on an entirely new basis. Hence, it is
one that only the industrial proletariat can implement.
The US thus faces a
classic choice between breakdown and revolution, between decay,
authoritarianism, and a deepening social crisis on one hand and socialist
democracy on the other. The founding fathers have done us the favor
of closing off all other escape routes.
As for the individual
candidates running in 2024, they are an expression of the political crisis
rather than in any sense an answer to it.
Kamala Harris is the
candidate of the center-right status quo. While she claims to stand
for change, she has made it crystal clear that she will continue White House
policies based on war, repression, economic royalism, and inaction in the face
of accelerating climate change. She represents the politics of
muddling through, of doing whatever it takes to make it from day to day without
regard to long-term considerations. When vice-presidential candidate
Tim Walz recently suggested that the Electoral College should go, the Harris
campaign forced him to recant. Even mentioning the structural crisis was
more than Harris could bear.
Donald Trump, by
contrast, is the candidate of lower-income voters who are “mad as hell and are
not going to take it anymore,” to quote the 1976 movie
“Network.” They support him not despite the fact that he is a bull
in a china shop, but because of it. In their blind fury, they can
think of no solution other than smashing stuff up and are therefore counting on
him to do it. His authoritarianism and destructiveness flow from a
political structure that is broken, irrational, and increasingly undemocratic.
For what it’s worth, this
writer rates Trump’s chances at 41 percent and Harris’s at 39, with a
20-percent chance of January 6-style chaos instead. But regardless
of who wins, the great American breakdown will continue unabated.
[1] Frances E. Lee
and Bruce L. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal
Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1999), 10-11.
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