University of Chicago Press
Review by Brian Tanguay
Why do Americans revere the Constitution? Why do many of us believe that this founding document, written by mortal and fallible men in the latter part of the eighteenth century, is somehow infallible? How did Americans come to put such faith in the Constitution? These are among the many questions constitutional scholar Aziz Rana asks in his monumental study, The Constitutional Bind.
It’s difficult to argue in 2025 that the Constitution has delivered on its implied promise to protect the nation from tyranny. The hallowed framework of checks and balances that was supposed to prevent too much power from falling to one of the three branches of government has failed. The balance held for much of our history even though presidents often exceeded their authority and the courts exceeded theirs. Nonetheless, the Constitution was presented to the world as a pillar of American exceptionalism.
Something has gone terribly wrong, and yet, it’s not an entirely novel phenomenon. Since its ratification, acceptance and respect for the Constitution has waxed and waned. At various junctures in American history, laborers, formerly enslaved African-Americans, women, and the once viable Socialist Party of America have railed against the Constitution’s flaws and anti-democratic bias. As Rana observes, the constitutional order promotes a kind of paralysis at best, while at its worst it entrenches the interests of “a wealthy and largely white minority coalition, which enjoys power well beyond its actual popular support.”
With some justification, Americans venerate the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but why, as the subtitle of the book suggests, do we idolize a document that doesn’t come close to achieving one of its stated goals, promotion of the general welfare? Through meticulous research and incisive writing, Rana charts constitutional ebbs and flows and the domestic and international forces that contributed to them. The book is a “large-scale historical reconstruction of the Constitution’s role and meaning in American political experience.” To those whom the Constitution has favored what most matters is fidelity to its original intent. For others, like Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, the document could evolve to reflect contemporary reality, including the end of chattel slavery and the integration of African-Americans into mainstream society.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, when labor unrest reached a fever pitch and Americans were unnerved by fears of mass immigration of socialists and anarchists from central and southern Europe, it was widely believed that the country’s future depended on renewed patriotism and respect for the constitutional order. Thus did patriotism become tied up with reverence for the Constitution. This creedal belief was central to being a “real” American. Voices calling for structural change were deemed disloyal or subversive; to assail the Constitution was to assail America itself.
Well into the 1930s, skeptics on the center-left — academics, lawyers, activists and New Deal supporters — continued to shed light on the Constitution’s flaws and shortcomings, but when the US entered World War II, the document was once more employed to provide evidence of American exceptionalism, the solid, unwavering foundation that made it possible to defeat fascism in Europe and Japanese imperialism in Asia and emerge from the conflict at the top of the world order. This national experience once again altered the prevailing view of the Constitution, aligning it with anti-totalitarianism, a market economy, and an expanding national security state. As durable structures go, this one would last until the Soviet Union foundered and collapsed. There was a last gasp of constitutional questioning in the early 1970s, but the impulse faded with the decline of the political left.
In our time, constitutional worship carries profound limitations. As Rana explains, “It ignores how today’s pathologies are not simply unintended and contingent consequences. Instead, these effects can be seen, at least in part, as a product of the framers’ own hostility toward real democracy.” Delving deeper, Rana notes that our constitutional culture upholds an uneven playing field, blocking consideration of certain proposals and arguments, no matter how sound or popular they might be with the electorate.
What is to be done about the anti-democratic and minoritarian elements baked into the Constitution, from the Electoral College to the geographic apportionment of the US Senate? Not surprisingly, Rana points to the same method that won labor rights, voting rights, and civil rights: a dynamic and coalitional mass movement that “integrates a constitutional politics within movement efforts aimed at overcoming the vast array of today’s hierarchies.”
In the face of an ascendant authoritarian regime that is attacking and degrading our institutions, amid extreme political polarization and mistrust, this represents a daunting proposition. But such a bottom-up project has never been more necessary. If we wish to bring about a society that extends meaningful freedom to all citizens at home, we must vigorously confront the perennial obstacles to revising America’s political identity and practices. This, as Aziz Rana so brilliantly argues, is the project of our times.
