THE SUPREME COURT HAS TAKEN A POLITICAL BEATING lately over its rulings on abortion, guns, and affirmative action. Yet even liberals who attack the court tend to aim at these decisions and the justices who issued them, not the institution itself. More often than not, they accuse the Roberts court of betraying the Constitution and the legacy of earlier, more liberal justices. The Constitution itself remains a source of justice and guidance—at least in the hands of the right interpreters. Yet there are cracks in this structure of liberal feeling. It is common knowledge that under the Electoral College system created by the Constitution, Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 even though he’d lost the popular vote, and that the Constitution apportions US Senate seats in a way that weakens the bigger states and empowers the smaller ones. Still, for most liberals, these problems elicit only a momentary disorientation, which is quickly followed by a return to faith in the Constitution as the keystone of the country and the safeguard of American democracy.
In his fascinating and powerful new book, The Constitutional Bind, Aziz Rana calls this faith in the Constitution’s essential goodness “creedal constitutionalism” and urges Americans to reject it, perhaps along with major parts of the Constitution itself. His book is much more than a progressive critique of Constitution worship: Rana presents a sweeping history of constitutional politics from the late 19th century to the present that reverses much of what Americans have learned to accept about the Constitution’s meaning. He portrays creedalism as a relatively recent phenomenon, a product of the 20th century, and contends that putting the Constitution at the center of American civic culture has abetted authoritarian and repressive agendas as much as it has upheld civil libertarian or democratic ones. And against the assumption that the Constitution is purely a domestic matter, he finds key moments in our constitutional culture developing through the United States’ imperial adventures and geopolitical contests.
Rana also proposes an alternative constitutional politics—one that draws from the history of progressives, populists, labor organizers, socialists, communists, and Black and Indigenous activists and thinkers who have contended that for Americans to be free, they must transform or even entirely overcome the Constitution. This idea has taken many, mutually incompatible forms—which have been embraced everywhere from the centers of power (by figures as varied as Woodrow Wilson and Felix