Escaping the Constitutional Bind, Pt. 1

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In this episode, we talk with Aziz Rana about the struggle for democracy and America’s Constitutional Bind. The interview is split into two parts. Part two will be released in two weeks. You can now click on the “Send us a Text Message” link at the top of the episode description to share your thoughts on the episode. This episode's prompt: should socialists care about the Constitution? Why or why not?

Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College. He’s the author of two books, The Two Faces of American Freedom, published in 2014, and The Constitutional Bind, published in April of this year. In 2022, Aziz spoke at the Socialism Conference in Chicago about the need for a democratic constitution. That recording is available in the class episode archive. Aziz recently published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “The Constitution won’t save us from Trump,” which drew a response from Nacy Pelosi.

In the first part of the interview, Aziz talks about the inspiration for his book and lays out his primary arguments: America finds itself in a constitutional bind. We cling to an undemocratic document that does us great harm. It didn’t always used to be this way. Our “Constitutional creed” developed over time, starting around the turn of the 20th century, in the context of American imperial expansion.

Rana explains the importance of universal and equal rights to the Socialist Party of America, which exemplified pre-Cold War democratic agitation. He compares the Socialist Party of America’s (SPA) political agitation and the Black Panther Party’s Revolution Peoples Constitutional Convention in 1970 to determine how the Cold War shaped constitutional critique - for better and worse. A few subaltern voices, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Boggs, connected pre-Cold War critiques with those of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Rana also identified many interesting points regarding democracy and the Constitution in the DSA’s 2021 political system. At the end of Part One, Rana discusses the Bill of Rights and how socialists such as Crystal Eastman fought for civil liberties without supporting the Constitution.

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