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Future Hindsight
The Democracy We Never Had: Aziz Rana
01:05:35
We discuss rethinking the Constitution as a way to reimagine democracy. In addition, we examine the role of constitutionalism in exporting the principles of democracy as the underpinning of American imperialism. Aziz’s civic action toolkit...
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Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast on a mission to spark civic action. I'm your host, Mila Atmos. I'm a global citizen based in New York City, and I'm deeply curious about the way our society works. So each week I bring you conversations to cut through the confusion around today's most important civic issues and share clear, actionable ways for us to to build a brighter future together. After all, democracy is not a spectator sport. Tomorrow starts right now. Here on Future Hindsight, we've tackled the big question of fixing democracy by looking at and talking about election reform, things like ending gerrymandering, voter suppression, closed primaries, the filibuster and minority rule.
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But there's a more fundamental issue at.
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B
Hand and a bigger philosophical question that must be asked. Have we ever had true democracy in the United States? And what has the Constitution got to do with it? In a time when it's clear that we must re imagine democracy, we must also rethink the Constitution. And to give us at least a hint of the opportunities before us, we're joined by Aziz Rana. He teaches law at Boston College and is the author of the Constitutional How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them and the Two Faces of American Freedom. Welcome Aziz. Thank you for joining us.
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C
Thanks so much for having me on the show. It's great to be here.
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B
So when most people think about democracy, they picture voting and elections, but of course, that's not all. In simple terms, what does real democracy look like to you beyond just casting a ballot?
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C
So I think institutions are obviously incredibly important. But when I think of democracy, I think of an experience that individuals in shared community have. And the idea of democracy, in my view, is a society organized around the principle of equal and effective freedom for all. And what this means is that in all of the important decisions that affect your life, that deal with the big picture, structures that shape one's experience, politics, but also economics, but also but also your neighborhood or your schooling, that you're able to control those important decisions and you're able to work with others collectively to Reach choices about what serves all of you best. And in a way, this is an idea of a broad experience of something like freedom as self rule that's collaboratively shared. And it has then these concrete manifestations. So in politics it means institutions of representation so that you have electoral systems in which the idea of one person, one vote shapes who ends up making decisions within electoral institutions. They're broad spaces for deliberation and participation in economic life. It means through structures like unions that folks that are working are able to make decisions about the nature of their own workplace, so that they're not just subject to various prerogatives presented from above. And so that's a broad, let's say, principle of solidarity that connects to an idea of freedom as something that's collectively shared, that's equally distributed, and that is effective in shaping the experience of living in the world.
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B
Thanks for sharing this really broad definition. I think it's not a stretch to say that many Americans would agree that that's not what it feels like today in the United States, that this is not our experience of democracy. At the same time, we have an idea as Americans that we are the world's greatest democracy. And that's a real disconnect because of course you say in your book, actually I'm gonna quote you here, the US is not now and has never been a genuine democracy. So what's the biggest gap between how we talk about democracy, about how we conceive of democracy as everyday Americans, and how it actually works in the US today?
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C
So, I mean, obviously I think it's important to start off by saying that vision of a democratic society that I just articulated is an ideal. It's utopian and aspirational in the best sense. It's something worth having in mind, worth fighting for with understanding as a project we're all collectively pursuing, even if it cannot be reached in the here and now. But I still think having that ideal is useful and as a way of reckoning with the nature of the world in which we live in two different ways. One just as a general social experience, which is incredibly hierarchical. You know, if you think of democracy as I get to control the most important decisions that affect my life, and to the extent that those decisions are part of these complex institutions that link us all together, we make those decisions collaboratively through principles of solidarity. There are very few places in American life today where you'd say that that vision of democratic solidarity actually shapes how choices are made. Most workplaces are incredibly hierarchical, that folks are subject to at will employment they get pay, but then have to abide by prerogatives set elsewhere. Most educational settings are incredibly hierarchical. And then politics itself, even if we have elections, or broadly speaking, more or less free and fair elections, it's nonetheless the case that the structure of the electoral process, the nature of those campaigns, the decision making apparatus that proceeds outside of it, is again super hierarchical. It means that there's nothing like a general popular culture in which folks organically experience their worlds as shaped by making choices together, working in solidarity with others, and a assuming a kind of democratic background as an ethic for how institutions and relationships operate. And that's a huge problem, especially in moments like the one that we're living through where we're seeing an effort systematically to dislodge even what remains of a variety of different kinds of democratic and rights respecting practices. So that's one issue. But then there's a second issue which is even more limited, and that's the fact that our representative institutions, our legal and political system really are notoriously undemocratic, even by the standards of what we would think of as post World War II, you know, modern representative institutions. And so in that sense it's not just we live in a world that's divorced from principles of solidarity and collaboration and that decision making is incredibly hierarchical. Just as like cultural experience across a range of institutions. It's that the place that you associate with political democracy, like legal and electoral arrangements, are notoriously undemocratic by comparison with other comparable representative institutions.
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B
Well, one of the obvious ones in concrete terms is closed primaries, right? Like not everybody can elect their representative in the general election, unless depending on what state, of course. But most states are closed primaries also, of course, the barriers to participating are so high, you know, for people to say come and go to the district office. I don't know anybody who has done that, except for one person, you know, that I personally know who has volunteered to go to a district office for their local party office. And it's a little bit surprising, cause I think it's not like that in other places. But, but one of the things that you talk about a lot and your last book is really about, is that so much of our inward looking conception of American democracy is intertwined with our veneration of the U.S. constitution and the myth of American exceptionalism. And so in your book you challenge this practice of what you call creedal constitutionalism. And what you just said, you remind us in the book that the Constitution is undemocratic. It feels like this is a fundamental Disconnect, though, for most Americans. You know, we basically are in this feedback loop that keeps feeding us bad information. And so we keep glitching on the practice of democracy. And I think because we don't think about the Constitution as being flawed or needing revision, we just keep buying into it. And we think that what we need to do is nibble at the edges, or that the only thing that's possible is to nibble at the edges. For example, even if we were to undo the Electoral College, that would not be a complete achievement towards equal freedom, as you say. So tell us more about how the Constitution actually works and what are the costs of creedal constitutionalism to Americans.
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C
Yeah, so let me start a little bit with what I mean by the US Constitutional system as notoriously undemocratic. So the ways in which the US essentially fails to provide some of these basic goals of ensuring that people have control over the decision making process in a way like the place to start is just to note that rather than the principle of one person, one vote as the driving decisive feature of American representative institutions, the US system is organized instead by representation based on geography. The central unit of representation in the US is the state, and that impacts all of these different features of the system. So it's the states that have the principal control over running elections within their own particular areas. It means that you can have party leaders at the state level shape the terms of the district so as to essentially create gerrymandered House districts that are more responsive to the party in power than necessarily to the underlying population. You have a Senate in which representation is based again on state, not popular representation. And then of course there's the Electoral College that's also impacted by state based representation. And then the Supreme Court in the federal judiciary, which serves for life. And precisely because it's presidents and the Senate that do the nomination and confirmation process, that you can have minority politicians end up determining who's on the court. And this has all of these implications where increasingly geography does not match what you would think of as the broad majorities, demographically, culturally, racially that mark the country. And so that you can have small population centers that disproportionately over represent, say, constituencies. And here it's increasingly tied to the Republican Party that's fairly wildly out of step with a majority of the country and yet be able to hold on to really intense forms of political authority. So we have multiple presidents elected while losing the popular vote because of the Electoral College. We have a Supreme Court in which the majority of the Justices were nominated by presidents that had ascended to the presidency by losing the popular vote. Just to put an even finer point on it, we haven't had a Democratic president nominate and confirm the Chief justice of the Supreme Court since 1946, you know, frankly, before the modern party formations and before the civil rights revolution itself. And so all of these create various kinds of misshapen effects of the constitutional system that we can get into. It makes it exceedingly easy for rule by a very particular minority coalition that's coalesced around the Republican Party. It makes it exceedingly hard for popular majorities that represent racially, culturally diverse and more urban settings to be able to produce policy that might be broadly supported. And it also has created, because of the paralysis that oftentimes shape legislative decision making, a kind of workaround through stronger forms of executive authority, where executive action becomes an alternative to producing policy through legislative consensus building. And that's been an issue for nearly a century in the US and it's something, I think, right now that has been so intensely dramatized by the ways in which Trump is behaving, where essentially you have now a usurpatory executive that's taking advantage of the tools of executive power to break down even some of the constraints that we'd previously seen. And indeed, like the presidential turn, is especially troubling because presidents are not that effective at long term domestic lawmaking. But what presidential power is very effective at is using coercive and blunt force, either overseas or at the border, or through the kinds of impositions and constraints on the other institutions of government or the society writ large. And so we're kind of navigating all of these problems at once. And the thing that I think is striking for Americans today that are living through all of this is how different it is from what you grew up with. So if you grew up in the US at the end of the last century, at the beginning of this one, you grew up with a story that the Constitution was near ideal because it linked together all of these different principles and elements. And that's what I call the vision of the creedal Constitution. The Constitution was supposed to entrench the principles of the Declaration of Independence of equal liberty for all. So it was the concrete instantiation of those principles and the mechanism by which an inclusive vision of democracy was provided to everyone. It was supposed to go hand in hand with the vision of civil liberties connected to an anti totalitarian politics that view things like free speech and free expression and, and free exercise of religion as places for individuals to enjoy autonomy from an overweening government. It was supposed to be connected to a vision of market capitalism hedged in by New Deal achievements. And all of that was supposed to be tied to a theory of representation that was constrained, yes, but marked by various types of checks and balances, with a court that could oversee the rule of law, that ensured against any kind of overweening tyrannical majorities, and altogether then justified the US's role on the global stage, where American power wasn't just a product of its raw capacity to assert economic and military authority, but because it was founded in these constitutional principles and so was exceptional in being able to justify itself as a security and economic backstop for the world. It's that vision that in many ways stands both in contrast to the politics of the present, where it feels like every single one of these elements is breaking down, but also in a deep sense was premised on a kind of flawed read of what the constitutional system actually produces, where there's a disconnect between the vision of the US and the US and the world and the nature of the institutions, which in many ways had all of these corrosive effects that we're only now reckoning with in the present.
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Right, right.
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Well, so one of the things that people have been saying in recent years is that the United States has been ceding fascism abroad, and now it's coming home to roost. I'm sure you've heard this, and I think people don't really think you just alluded to this a little bit. They don't really think about the relationship between the projects of democracy and the way that Americans perceive themselves and the Constitution in giving them a license to take action in other countries. And so what is the link between the project of democracy and decolonization or colonization and imperialism in the way that it's looping back to us here?
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C
Yeah. So this vision of the Creedal Constitution, I'd argue, is the defining national identity of the US in the 20th century. And I want to note that all of those different elements, the commitment to equal liberty, the support for civil liberties, the account of market capitalism, this defensive, restrained government, and the Supreme Court, the vision of the US abroad, American primacy, they don't have to go together. They could actually be in pretty profound tension or conflict, but they refused into a cohesive ideology through a series of domestic and international developments, really, over the course of the first 2/3 of the 20th century. And it's one of the reasons why constitutional veneration is so natural in the us, because it's just part of the drinking water of what it means to be an American. But that's quite different, honestly, than notions of national identity that existed before, let's say, the mid 20th century. In the 19th century, the country was pretty straightforwardly a white republic organized through principles of racial exclusion and control in very explicit ways. But what happens over the course of the first 2/3 of the 20th century is that the US rises to global superpower status at a very decisive moment in world history, which is against the backdrop of the collapse of the European imperial system brought by two world wars. And relatedly, because of the collapse of that imperial system, the movement for global decolonization across Asia, Africa, South America. And what this means is that the US now becomes a global superpower at a time in which arguments for justifying power based on explicit claims about racial supremacy or racial domination just simply don't work. There's a shift away from defenses of national identity that are explicitly racial to visions of national identity that we can think of as civic or liberal that de emphasize explicit racism. The way that this plays out in the States is that it requires also an explanation for why the US is worthy of having global authority. And here a combination of a focus on liberal nationalism that's not racialized and processes of constitutionalism become central to explanations for why the US should have leadership effectively in a decolonizing world against the backdrop of a rivalry with the Soviet Union that's very clearly fighting for hearts and minds across the global South. And the claim is that the heart of the American project, going all the way back to the founding, to the declaration to the Constitution that was drafted in 1787, was a principle of constitutionalism and not of empire and extraction. And so this becomes a justification for American authority. And it has what you can think of as both soft and hard power implications. It's why American officials viewed creating the UN and multilateral institutions at the global level as so central to the national project of US hegemony. Because there were concrete expressions of the principle of constitutionalism as a way of organizing the global world. And there were a way of also producing consent. Like you can't win hearts and minds across the world through coercion alone. You also have to have mechanisms of consent that incorporate the rest of the world, in particular non white places in the world, into an American order. And then there's also like a hard power element, which is the claim that the US enjoys primacy because of its exceptional status means that the US has a right, a unique right, to exercise A kind of international police power where it can intercede wherever there are perceived threats to the global order that the US is supposed to safeguard. And it can do so to reconstruct domestic institutions to reshape life within a particular country in ways consistent with American interests, read as the world's interests. And this always produced a type of tension.
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Right?
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It's part of the reason why the US ended up developing an expansive executive presidential authority that exercises extreme forms of national security that the courts oftentimes defer to. It's also why the US finds itself engaged in continuous forms of intervention that in practice actually end up compromising local self determination and produce extreme forms of violence on the ground. But it's always still tied, both as a legitimating factor and as a matter of institutions, to this idea of the quote unquote Post World War II rules based order, that there are certain kinds of constraints that the US imposes upon itself, so it doesn't just operate based on its own sense of immediate self interest, regardless of what the institutions are.
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Right.
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C
And this linkage between constitutionalism and empire has always had within it a kind of kernel that compromises democratic practice, rights respecting practice both at home and abroad. That rather than constitutionalism and empire being these like opposed principles, that they've been joined together in the theory of American power. But at the same time it's no doubt been a kind of constraint on the worst excesses of what American power could be. And we're kind of living through a moment in which one of the two parties under the leadership of Trump has basically defected not just from the post war international order, but from the basic terms of American identity and constitutionalism that's been formulated over the course of the, let's say last 75 years. And this defection is both continuous with the types of defections, rights violations that we've seen even from the genesis of that order. Remember, that order begins in the 30s and 40s at the very same time that FDR is pursuing the internment of Japanese people. So there's a kind of continuous story of rights violations and defection, but in a way today that directly rejects or repudiates what you can think of as the consent based mechanisms for producing global buy in into the order. And the notion that the reason why the US is exceptional is because unlike other empires or other great powers, it operates through the principle of constitutionalism and self restraint.
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We'll be right back with Aziz Rana.
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So stay with us.
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B
This episode's civic spark is a can't.
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Miss so Stick around for one small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change. But first, when you think about the most successful businesses, those brands with sales going through the roof, like Gymshark or Alo Yoga, I'm sure you think about a great product and a cool brand with brilliant marketing, right? But let me tell you the super special ingredient that makes selling and for shoppers buying simple. It's the businesses behind the business. Because you cannot do it alone. For millions of businesses, that business behind them is Shopify. And nobody does selling better than Shopify. And let me tell you why. Shopify is home to the number one checkout on the planet. And there's this little secret that's not so secret. Shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way fewer carts going abandoned and way more sales going Cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, and I'm willing to bet that you are, then your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. And that's why businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level, no matter how big you want to grow. And that's what I love about Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Gymshark uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com hopeful all lowercase go to shopify.com hopeful to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com hopeful. And now let's return to my conversation with Aziz Rahna.
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B
So this administration, as you just said, is defecting from this world order that the United States itself created and relying on the Constitution. And if not now, I don't know when this is the perfect time to rethink the Constitution. Right? We have to rethink democracy writ large in the United States and across the world because there's so much feedback. I mean, America as a beacon of democracy continues to be a venerated idea across the world, even if it may be faulty. And people in Europe or in Asia are telling me, how is this happening? I don't understand why this is happening, but because it has so much power, soft power and of course, hard power. I think the idea of reimagining democracy in the United States will also reimagine democracy in other parts of the world. And if we take the hopeful take on the Trump administration, which is that this is an opportunity for us to really think. To think about what's possible after the destruction is done. Because for sure, we're only at the beginning now. We don't know how this is gonna end. You have some ideas about how we can treat the Constitution as a, what you call a necessary site of mass movement intervention. So for all of us to jump in and take part, and you refer to constitutional thinkers in the United States like Du Bois, Crystal, Eastman Shakur, and of course, Martin Luther King Jr. Tell us a little bit more about the visions that they have, the visions that are possible the way that you're thinking about it today in this time, you know, of chaos.
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C
Yeah. And just for folks that are listening, the Shakur that you're mentioning is Afeni Shakur, Tupac Shakur's mother, who was a really significant and interesting political actor and constitutional thinker in her own right. She was incredibly involved in an effort by the Black Panthers to stage, as a kind of mass power building exercise, a Constitutional Convention, like an alternative Constitutional convention, what they call the Revolutionary People's constitutional convention, in September 1970. But one step back, before getting into thinking about the vision, there's, I think, broad agreement among center to left voices that a significant part of why we have Trump in the place where Trump is right now is because of flaws in the constitutional system. It's like Trump would not have been president in 2016 if it were not for the Electoral College. Even unwinding it a little bit more, that the minoritarian dimensions of the constitutional system have incentivized, really now for a decade plus, if not longer, the Republican Party to view something like multiracial mass democracy as an almost existential threat to its ability to wield power and to use the instruments of minority rule as a way of projecting authority beyond what it might typically have. And so it's incentivized a kind of defection of partisans, party elites, and elements of a voting base from principles of democracy that Trump has basically been able to take advantage of. And then, honestly, after Trump tried to engage in an effort to overthrow an election, the constitutional system also made it incredibly difficult to hold him accountable in the ways that typically take place, frankly, in other parts of the world. We can even just think of the difference between what happened in the US and what's happened in Brazil. So it was very difficult to impeach him because of the complexities of the impeachment process afterwards. It's been very hard to pursue criminal convictions. And then even with that process, because of the way that the Constitution system's set up. It's given super majority power to the right, which then allowed Trump, through the Supreme Court, to get mass immunity, effectively a kind of blanket immunity from his own criminal conduct, and then on top of it, very difficult mechanisms to remove somebody from running in the future if they've engaged in what is effectively an effort to overthrow the government. So all of this created the stage for Trump to then come back to power and unsurprisingly, to treat the return to power as an opportunity to essentially aid loyalists, and so fear and intimidation threaten those that he viewed as his own personal opponents. And yet the tendency still remains to both understand that the Constitution is the problem, but then to hope against hope that the Constitution will save Americans, that nonetheless, this isn't the time to talk about constitutional change. That is just a recipe for failure. The idea that simply engaging in another politics of preservation will block the kind of extremism of the far right or get the US out of this, like, persistent cycle in which its institutions are effectively paralyzed just won't work. That doesn't mean that court cases right now or efforts to block the various forms of illegality that Trump is engaged in aren't important. Absolutely, they're important, but they're not important because the system should be deified. They're important because it's essential to use litigation and law to ensure that nobody in a society, including presidents, oligarchs, billionaires, kleptocrats, enjoy a kind of impunity where their own lawlessness goes unchecked. And instead the legal system becomes an exercise in them asserting violence against whoever they deem as enemies. But alongside that, I think it's absolutely now the time to think really seriously about what constitutional transformation would entail, both, like, what a genuinely more representative set of institutions would amount to and what a broader social order that's democratic would look like. And here, I think there are long traditions of social movement activists that have typically been written out of the American constitutional story that can provide us really useful advice and framing, including democratic socialists, Progressive era reformers from the teens and early part of the 20th century. They were thinking really seriously about these issues. For instance, they emphasized the centrality of having a simplified amendment process, not a, you know, an absolutely majoritarian one or an executive that tries to break through against legislative authority to pursue mass mobilization for constitutional change. The US has perhaps the hardest Constitution in the world to amend.
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B
So would you say that the number one thing to do is to amend the amendment process?
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C
If we're thinking about formal changes to the constitutional Order. A simplified amendment process is probably the most important because that's the thing that allows the structure itself to be more malleable. And then there's a whole host of other proposals that are out there on the table that I think are both constitutional and subconstitutional that are key. So making the legislative branch more functional by moving the country toward something that's closer to proportional representation, by expanding the conditions of voting rights. I think the moment that we're living through underscores the importance of expanding voting rights away, even honestly from citizenship alone to residency. I think that that's key because we have people that are long term US Residents, that are very much part of our community that are now facing extreme violence and threat. Yes, but then you have like a whole host of other kinds of institutional provisions that would make the country's representative arrangements much more aligned with what we see as mass democracies elsewhere. At the same time, I would say that these kinds of constitutional shifts, you know, reforms to the Supreme Court, change to the nomination confirmation process, probably expanding the number of Justices, simplifying the amendment process. So there are multiple venues by which you can engage in constitutional politics. It doesn't all just go to the court. Alongside all of these types of shifts, you need to build up the extra statist, so outside of the institutions of the state, intermediate, meaning making institutions that can organize mass sentiment and that can serve effectively as a kind of rights respecting framework that intercedes between powerful presidents and ordinary individuals. That any kind of formal change to the constitution, what Michael Hart, the political theorist, talks about as the formal constitution, has to go hand in hand with changes to what he would call the material constitution. And that is how the society is organized, what its civic institutions look like, and the capacity of those civic institutions to strengthen and ensure that constitutional reforms actually fulfill the needs of its citizens.
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B
Right, right.
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C
And we can talk a little bit about what I mean by that.
- [35:45]
B
Let's talk about that because, you know, our podcast mission is to inspire civic action. We want American citizens to jump in and participate. We just had a long conversation about civic life with a student of Robert Putnam's who of course concluded a decades long project of studying Italian governments, municipal governments, and discovered that civic participation is central to good governance and by extension, democracy. So you just talked about civic society. You're an advocate for a new civic culture. And I'm wondering what elements would comprise this new civic culture and how does it differ from what we have today?
- [36:27]
C
So to me, like, the civic culture connects to where we Started, which is that broader vision of what a democracy consists in. A democracy is a society in which individuals actually have control over the central decisions that affect their lives and that they can work collaboratively with others through principles of solidarity to shape the terms of the most important institutions. That's like the vision. I think it's really important to begin by sort of grappling with a global phenomenon that has had a concrete domestic instantiation. If we think about this last 15 years, from the financial crisis in particular to the present, it was marked across the world and in the US by extensive forms of grassroots progressive organizing, in my view, on behalf of a more democratic community, world community. And you can think about everything from Occupy to Arab Spring to the movement for black lives to activism across a whole range of locations. And yet, if we think about our present moment, it feels like the outcome of that activism has been intense reaction and the rise to political authority of the far right. So, like, why is that the case? And I worry that one of the takeaways of the moment, and it's part of why in some sense that there's a. There's like some despondency in the wake of the 2024 election. It's a kind of deep pessimism about politics or even cynicism maybe. Like, it's just inevitable. Like there's no point in engaging in activism because at the end of the day you just get backlash or a story that I also think can veer into a type of cynicism, which is a profound racial pessimism, in particular about the US The US has its roots in a particular form of settler politics that incorporated rich accounts of freedom for racial insiders with frameworks of native expropriation, coerced labor and subordination, especially for enslaved black people. For outsiders, this is certainly part of the history. But I worry that sometimes that history, in a moment when we're seeing right wing reaction, gets transferred into an argument that anytime you have reconstruction, effectively anytime there are positive changes, you're going to get this kind of extreme blowback. And while these are certainly dynamics within American life, I think it's critical to appreciate why across various locations, including the U.S. we've seen these developments. To me, that has to do with the fact that the last 50 plus years saw the systematic dismantling of the central civic and intermediate institutions of progressive life. What was the central institution that shaped the New Deal form, that spread something like racial liberalism and a limited version of social democracy? It was the union. And the union wasn't Just about the particular wages members get when they're part of a union. It was a democracy formation institution in American life that had all of these rich organic effects. Unions were oftentimes one of the places that were desegregated. So it brought together people of different backgrounds around shared economic commitments, created cultures of organic solidarity, pushed back against the hierarchy of collective life. Huge problems with unions. Racist, sexist.
- [40:18]
B
Also didn't used to have elections either for leadership within unions.
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C
Absolutely. But at the same time it was a central kind of intermediate institution and its systematic breakdown because of the rise of neoliberalism, the right wing turn, et cetera, et cetera, means that we live in a country in which if you're not in the public sector, 6% of workers are unionized. And one of the ways we can think about what Elon Musk and company are doing to the federal government is they're essentially trying to destroy the last bastion of union strength within the American economy.
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B
I think one of the things that's lost in this moment, that is the anti union movement from the government or from the administration, I should say, is that the desire to destroy unions have been in place since the New Deal. Basically this is, I think, the last bastion of attacks against the New Deal is to undo the unions once and for all. And at the same time, of course, we have a resurgence of union activity.
- [41:19]
C
Yeah, and a thought on that too, which is the resurgence in a context in which the climate is incredibly hostile is also not that unusual. I mean that was the story of the period before the New Deal in some ways. But just to continue, which is. So there's the unions, there's like the institutions of the black church, there's the university, especially in its sort of pre corporatized form. Like there were all of these different institutions that you can think of as meaning making and as shaping progressive politics. There was the Democratic Party again in its pre corporatized form. And the last 50 years has seen either the transformation of those institutions, party and university, in ways that make them harder basically to survive as sort of vehicles of oppositional democracy, or their absolute kind of decimation with unions. And so in that context, it's not a surprise that the far right is able to take advantage of real crisis effectively within, let's say the American kind of broader credal project or establishment economic and political life, given the failures of the Constitution, that the far right in the US has all of these institutional advantages to be able to enjoy power like you can reach power with a strong base that's not a majority. And you can exercise pretty decisive influence that it can be organized hierarchically because of a profound defection from the basic principles of democracy. And it's aligned with extreme wealth, especially like the tech billionaire class that we're seeing right now, but broader reaches of American wealth as well. And so these disparities in institutional strength have real ultimate political effects. That's not the only reason, but it underscores the need in a way for building up these meaning making institutions as a framework for asserting anything like progressive power based on democratic principles. And it also suggests. This is where I'll stop a kind of weakness to the Putnam approach to civic association. That was an argument that was thinking about social capital in general without looking at the political implications of particular kinds of institutions. So Putnam spent very little time on the union. Putnam is not thinking about like, well, what are the institutional experiences in which people would just naturally find themselves part of and so become inculcated in values that are compatible with democracy. And so part of the story of the present is to rebuild those.
- [44:04]
B
Yeah, well, we did have Thedas Kochpalan, who we've had her on twice, actually. And of course she is a scholar of unions. And she talked about how unions used to be essentially your social life, in addition to, of course, where you exercise political power, whether that's through political power within the working space in order to get better wages. But you know, they had union halls, you had your after work beer there, you had parties, you played cards. And this is a place for community and being in solidarity. You mentioned, as was, I should add.
- [44:37]
C
Sorry, as was the political party.
- [44:39]
B
As was the political party, yeah. Because today we just give $10 to the candidate, but we don't go to party activities. Like I mentioned, I just have the one friend who shows up someplace.
- [44:48]
C
Yeah, the party used to be something, you know, honestly, like late 19th, early 20th century, you'd sometimes get met, if you arrived as a European immigrant to the US by a political party boss, which would be an entree into getting access to work, to being incorporated within political units. It was commonplace in the US in the 19th century to even have voting rights before formal citizenship, if you declared an intent to naturalize. But there was a very different kind of cultural world built around the party. And that's another really significant problem right now for the present, which is the party has basically morphed from being that kind of civic association to a fundraising and get out the vote vehicle for particular politicians every two to four years. And that's been a huge Problem, honestly, for both of the parties. It's part of why Trump was able so effectively, essentially, to take it over. Right?
- [45:48]
B
Yes. It's because the party is weak, not because the party is strong.
- [45:51]
C
Exactly. And it's why the Democrats have the appearance of being so ineffectual, because everything about the Democratic Party leadership is training for a two to four year cycle, not for creating and instantiating a culture of opposition that stands effectively as almost like a parallel world outside of the formal politics of the government. You can just think of somebody like Obama in another constitutional system. Obama is the natural, quote, unquote, leader of the opposition. And that's a position that you carry with you whether or not you're in office. Right.
- [46:26]
B
And in the US but he's silent right now.
- [46:28]
C
He's. He's not just right now. He's basically been silent for the last decade. And he'll come and he'll give a speech, say that democracy is under assault, and then retreat. And that very retreat almost makes you wonder, do you believe the speech? This is not a critique necessarily of Obama, but it's. The political class has been shaped by a set of both electoral institutions and incentives and also party structures that produce certain kinds of strictures and norms about how politicians behave. And when Trump breaks them and is able to mobilize a base that disciplines voters so that he can basically determine whether or not you get removed from office. If you're a Republican, then that both, like, decimates the center right, but then it also produces a situation where the center left just doesn't know what to do, because essentially what you have is an electoral system in which it feels like one side isn't playing by the established rules.
- [47:28]
B
Yeah. So you mentioned universities also being a place, an intermediary that's under attack. And of course, it's been under attack for a long time. And in the last 18 months, it's been really easy to attack because of student protests against the government's actions in Gaza. And there has been a huge crackdown on student protests, whether they're Americans or not. And recently a green card holder was detained, buy ice and shipped to Louisiana. He's a graduate of Columbia University School of International Public Affairs. So where do you situate this kind of action, which is also complicated, of course, by people inside the university, all universities throwing stones at the institution from the inside, notably very rich donors. So how do you situate that within this crisis, if you call it a constitutional crisis, but within this crisis of democracy?
- [48:27]
C
Yeah. So there's a lot going on. I mean, I think the first thing to note is that the university, and especially elite universities, but the university in general has been within the crosshairs of the American right for a long time. And it's because of the fact that they are another kind of meaning making institution that's an intermediate site of cultural and social formation. The post 60s university that was shaped by the civil rights revolution is notable for being one of the few institutions in American life, let's say alongside the military, that has been partially desegregated. It's one of the few places where you're likely to have professors that aren't white or that are women, have university administrators that are black, brown, women. And in a way it's one of these institutions where there's a more integrated decision making apparatus and the culture of the institution is one that I think has linked pretty clearly with the emergence of where the Democratic Party has gone over these last 50 years. So it's culturally shaped the to the specific type of multiracial coalition that the Democratic Party has ended up generating. It's one of the reasons why we're also seeing these sort of extreme educational sortings between the parties where if you're somebody with a university degree holding all things constant, you're more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. I think what the right does is it thinks politically like an opposition. And it's like, what do you do if you're a political opposition? You don't just strengthen your side. You try to dismantle the institutions that provide sustenance to the groups that you view as your opponents. And that's part of the attack on labor, but it's also the attack on universities. So that's been there as in the background. And then I think one of the things that very clearly has been a product of the last year plus is that the question of Palestine has essentially divided what had been a kind of fragile liberal left coalition that exists within the campuses and within the Democratic Party writ large, where effectively the liberals, let's say, or centrists are the ones that are in charge and folks on the left are kind of a junior partner. And then there's always this like contentious back and forth. And usually the center spends a lot of time trying to repress or suppress the left. And because of the particular tensions, especially around Palestine, it created a context in which the more classic liberal formations within the university, but also within American life, the Democratic Party, were willing to participate in what I think were pretty unjustified and draconian forms of crackdown and also in a way, open space for aggressive and extreme uses of that internal tension to go after the university more generally. And so it's not a surprise that the attack on the university, which is a broad project of the right, and you can see this in all sorts of different position papers, has begun by specifying institutions that were seen as the sites of protest around Israel, Palestine, and then also targeting individuals within those institutions that were viewed as engaged in those protests. So this is like a kind of opening for a broader story, and I think it requires then a lot of soul searching about what the costs of participating in various kinds of crackdowns and dissent have been. Specifically with respect to Khalil's detention. The argument that's being proposed by the Trump administration is incredibly broad. It's an argument that comes from language in a 1950s McCarthy era statute that basically gives the Secretary of State the power to deport noncitizens for engaging in action speech conduct. Really broad latitude that's viewed as adverse to American foreign policy. It has not been used in this way because of that McCarthy history. But if it were to be a tool that this administration is interested in pursuing, that effectively is using this pressure point of Palestine and in my view, animus towards Palestinians and Palestinian identity as a way of saying that effectively, the First Amendment, classic forms of dissenting speech just do not apply to non citizens because the government, through a determination of actions adverse to foreign policy, can potentially deport any non citizen for dissenting speech based on its own determination. One would expect that the courts are going to block this. But then there's also this question about the extent to which the executive branch in the presidency is in the business at all of pretty extreme and draconian practices. I mean, this is a very, very troubling turn of events that has much broader implications, and that requires essentially, in my view, a kind of rallying around left and center to protect and preserve, again, basic principles of legality that are essential to any version of constitutional democracy, not just the one that I would promote. Part of what's made the university especially liable to these kinds of challenges at this moment in time is the fact that the American university has enjoyed a degree of wealth and independence that is pretty anomalous globally. That part of the story of the last half century and part of the reason why the university culturally is fit so comfortably within, let's say, a corporate democratic milieu or cultural world, is that the universities, through government funding, but then especially through connections to business, have just become significantly wealthier than equivalent institutions elsewhere. And at the same time, because of the way in which the university has been part of a First Amendment free speech culture in the country, faculty, students, administrators, have enjoyed a great deal of independence within the university in a way that's also unusual with other places in the world where you have routine crackdowns on dissenting speech in university context. And in a way, both the rise in the wealth of the university and the independence that the university has are kind of in tension, and they've been in a kind of uneasy tension. And what the events of the last year, plus, and then especially the Trump administration, what it's doing is, it's playing on that uneasy tension to effectively, I think, try to dismantle a site of political opposition to its own authority. Because the institutions are so wealthy, there's a lot more to lose with money being removed. You know, it's much harder to have, like, mass strikes on campuses that faculty, administrators themselves participate in. And at the same time, it means that those tools can go hand in hand with other kinds of chilling experiences that have just typically not been what American universities have faced. And so this is, I think, a really dangerous and challenging time. And it highlights to me that the university, for all its flaws, has been one of the real profound success stories of the post civil rights era. And this attack on it is something that everyone needs to take seriously and press against. Because with its dismantling, just like the dismantling of unions, it eliminates yet more sites of potential opposition. Real, meaningful check to political power that can operate in ways that are truly unconstrained.
- [57:22]
B
So every week on future Hindsight, I ask my guest to share a civic spark. One small step we can all take to be more empowered and ignite collective change. So what's a good way to turn the insights that you've shared with us today into action?
- [57:39]
C
There are many things that you can do, but I think one important step consistent with what we just described is to invest in those institutional spaces that exist within your communities. So join your union at work. Join a party formation. You might feel disempowered, angry with the Democratic Party. There's the Working Families Party, there's dsa, There's a whole variety of institutional formations that collectively are part of the framework by which you can press against policy. Participate collectively in your own neighborhood. So that might mean join a tenant union. If you're somebody that's a renter, that might mean work alongside your teachers. If you're in a public school district that you know are facing extreme forms of Cutback that, like teacher organizing, has been a central node of activism. There are all of these different potential sites where you can think of, what are the communities that are being targeted? What can I do to help them? So what might be immigrants rights activism that you can do in your own community, but also where can I get involved in shaping the terms of these institutions that can serve as meaningful checks or constraints? So if you're on a campus and you're a faculty member, faculty members typically have not thought of themselves as folks that are workers that you know, Usually the mindset is like you're an individual researcher, but this is a time to invest in institutions like the AAUP or others. That's the thing that I think is within all of our power. And what it does is it just alters the terms of the community that we're a member of and of the ideas that just are naturally floating or operating within those communities.
- [59:33]
A
Excellent.
- [59:35]
B
So looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
- [59:39]
C
There are many things that make me hopeful. So one thing concretely is that Trump and those around him have a powerful base. And that base is strengthened by the weaknesses of the constitutional system that give it disproportionate strength so it can exercise power in ways that are disproportionate to the actual popular support. But that also means that the popular support in the US for the far right is not a durable majority. The policies that are being pursued right now are deeply unpopular. Even thinking about the cuts to the old New Deal administrative infrastructure, part of why Trump rose in 2015, 2016, was because within the Republican Party, support for this kind of extreme brand of neoliberal constraint, you know, just like gutting of. Of social services and administrative politics was just not popular like old Reaganomics was unpopular. And so this means that there is a real opening over the next set of years to essentially push back, because we don't live in a condition in which there is like durable majority, let alone super majority support for either the ethno nationalist or the kind of extreme predatory capitalist version of politics that we're seeing emerge out of the right. So that's one thing. And then the second thing is that what I think I have and many people have been grappling with was this experience. So I'm in my 40s. I grew up in the 80s and 90s as a kid, and I basically thought that that was just what American life was always going to be like. And yet, in a deep way, that experience was so clearly a unique set of social arrangements. This idea of being after history, after politics, by comparison with the longue.
- [61:43]
B
Yes.
- [61:43]
C
And one thing that's destabilizing is the feeling of, okay, we're just like kind of back in history. But at the same time, if you then just look back not just at global history, but American history specifically, it's always gone through these waves. It might be the case that my vision of democracy has never been fulfilled. And my argument that the US Is not now or has never been a democracy is that even what I would think of as a more limited version of representative democracy has never been fulfilled in the U.S. but nonetheless, we've had periods of profound achievement, of profound organizing, of profound success. And it just happens to be the case that the challenge that we face now is being thrown back into history where we have to engage in those struggles again, understanding that it might be the case that the circumstances are difficult, they've always been difficult for meaningful reform. But that does not mean that they're impossible, nor that change isn't something that is continuously achieved and yet even if it faces pushback continuously there for us to seize.
- [62:56]
B
Yeah. Hear, hear. Well, I have been thinking recently that democracy is a little bit more like justice. We're always going to be in pursuit of democracy like we're always going to be in pursuit of just. And it's going to be something we do forever for the rest of our lives. Thank you so much, Aziz, for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
- [63:16]
C
It was great to be on the show. Thanks so much for having me.
- [63:20]
B
Aziz Rana teaches law at Boston College. He's the author of the Constitutional How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them and also the author of the Two Faces of American Freedom. Remember, civic action doesn't have to be complicated.
- [63:39]
A
It's about small steps that spark progress, like sharing this episode with a friend. Let's recap this week's Civic Spark and.
- [63:47]
B
Fire up our collective power. Invest in the institutional spaces that exist in your community. For example, you could join your union at work or a tenants association. If you're a renter, take a second to recognize the community you live in and the role you play within it.
- [64:03]
A
Lean into that and lean on each other. Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Natalie Monbiot. She's a strategist and pioneer in AI and virtual human technologies. She's the founder of Virtual Human Economy as well as a co founder of Alpha. She also writes the Augmented Human blog, Finding the Human in the Era of AI and exponential technologies.
- [64:32]
B
You know, people talk about like, is AI evil? Is AI good? It's like AI is none of those things. It's what humans choose to do with it. And it's a great amplifier of whatever your intent is.
- [64:42]
A
That's next week on Future Hindsight Now. Be sure to follow us on your podcast app. We're here every week with brand new episodes to help you stay engaged. And I know that you don't want to miss a beat, follow Future Hindsight now. So we'll be in your rotation every week. And if you need that extra push, because let's be real, we all do, sign up for the newsletter@futurehinsight.com thanks for tuning in. And until next time, see clearly, act boldly, and spark the change you want to see. This episode was produced by Zach Travis and me.
- [65:28]
C
This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.