The Constitutional Bind

"Americans today are increasingly uneasy about the democratic weaknesses of their Federal Constitution. But for most of living memory that very Constitution has been idealized as near perfect. How could it be that this flawed system came to enjoy such intense veneration? In a striking reinterpretation of the American constitutional past, Aziz Rana connects the spread of a distinctive twentieth century American relationship to its founding document to another development rarely treated alongside it: the rise of the U.S. to global dominance. In the process, he highlights the role of constitutional veneration in shaping the terms of American power abroad, with ultimately transformative effects at home for narratives of nation and ideas of reform. In the process, Rana also explores the remarkably diverse array of movement activists-in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics-that struggled to imagine a very different constitutional horizon, one grounded in equal and effective freedom for all and able to overcome the basic limitations of the consolidating legal-political system. These voices of opposition, including to the Constitution itself, have overwhelmingly been excised from constitutional memory. And yet they offer essential insights for making sense of our present difficulties, in which Americans find themselves bereft of the constitutional sureties that have long shaped collective life"--