The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them

Some in the United States today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the worst features of U.S. politics. Yet for as long as anyone can remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in U.S. political culture, which ties ideals of liberty and equality to assumptions about the inherent goodness of the text’s design. The Constitutional Bind explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted life in the United States.

Author Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of U.S. global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home.

Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind also sheds light on an array of movement activists — in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics — who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights. [Adapted from publishers’ description.]

ISBN: 9780226350721 | University of Chicago Press

Praise

The Constitutional Bind removes the cloak of veneration to reveal a tragically flawed document and generations of critics for whom the U.S. Constitution was an obstacle to democracy, a safeguard of white settler rule, and a barrier to universal freedom. In doing so, Rana has unearthed a dynamic history of alternative democratic movements and imaginaries within the U.S. and beyond. A genuine masterpiece. — Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Rana’s skeptical historicism is important. His book is readable and lively, a kind of scholarly ‘people’s’ history of the Constitution since 1887. If more people understood the complexity and multivalence of our constitutional tradition, that would be terrific. There is value in acknowledging that the Constitution is flawed, both as a document and as a set of historically unfolding social practices. —Noah Feldman in The Chronicle of Higher Education

In his fascinating and powerful new book, 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. — Jedediah Britton-Purdy in The Nation