The one safe prediction we can make about the upcoming presidential election is that it can only result in a further intensification of the crisis of US democracy.
This is not Marxist boiler-plate in which bourgeois democracy is always bankrupt and capitalism is always in its death throes. This is the real thing. A lot of concerns are weighing on voters’ minds as Election Day nears, the economy, the climate crisis, inflation, and housing prices, to name just a few. But among the most pressing is an across-the-board constitutional breakdown that is rapidly accelerating. For example:
- The Electoral College, which nearly quadruples the clout of voters in lily-white Wyoming versus those in minority-majority California, is playing an increasingly outsized role. In the first two centuries of the American republic, the EC overturned the popular vote on only three occasions: in 1824, 1876, and 1888. But it has already done so twice since November 2000 and may well do it a third time next month.
- The Senate is more imbalanced than at any point since 1820.1 Thanks to equal state representation, it allows the 54 percent of the population that lives in just ten states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty. A majority can be gleaned from senators representing just 17 percent of the country while a filibuster can be gleaned from 41 senators representing as little as eleven.
- The House is so heavily gerrymandered that Republicans next month may enjoy as much as a 16-seat advantage according to estimates by the Brennan Center for Justice.
- The Supreme Court is increasingly undemocratic not just in terms of decision making but structure. Five of the six justices who comprise the court’s six-member conservative majority were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote (i.e. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barret), while four were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas). Given that Clarence Thomas, the oldest member of the court, is just 76, the rightwing judicial dictatorship will likely continue well into the mid-2030s. If Trump wins a second term, it will continue even longer.
- Federalism is in shambles. Since January, Texas has seized control of a portion of the US-Mexican border in the town of Eagle Pass, 140 miles west of San Antonio. This is outright insurrection, yet the White House is paralyzed.
- Racial imbalances are growing. More than 80 percent of racial minorities live in the ten biggest states that are outvoted in the Senate while states that are rural and white tend to benefit most from the Electoral College. The multi-racial urban majority thus finds itself more and more disenfranchised.
- What makes this even worse is that reform is essentially impossible thanks to the dysfunctional amending clause laid out in Article V, which stipulates that two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states must consent before changing so much as a comma in America’s holy of holies. Thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the nation can thus veto any effort at structural change, no matter how modest. The US is as frozen as the Celestial Empire on the eve of the 1911 revolution.
The upshot is a perfect impasse. All advanced capitalist states are under growing strain due to the post-2008 “long recession” and a host of problems that go along with it. But since no country is saddled with a constitution that is as ancient, dysfunctional, and all-encompassing as the US version, no one faces a mechanical breakdown of anywhere near the same magnitude. It is the equivalent of a car with a missing headlight, a missing wheel, and a sputtering engine. But even if it leaves Americans stranded by the side of the road, there is nothing they can do because Article V renders them powerless. Even a constitutional convention is a non-starter since Article V stipulates that its decisions are merely recommendations subject to the same two-thirds, three-fourths rule. Wealthy minority interests are using the breakdown to impose an increasingly rightwing agenda. Yet the democratic majority is powerless to respond.
Powerless under the existing system, that is, but not under a new one of its own making.
There is a way out — not a constitutional convention as outlined in Article V, but a constituent assembly along the lines of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917. The difference is crucial. Where one takes place under the Constitution, which describes how it may be called and what it can do, the other takes place over the Constitution since it is a gathering of the constituent elements – “we the people” and all that – who created it in the first place. It is therefore free to operate on the Constitution as a whole, not according to the document’s rules, but according to its own, which is to say those of direct democracy. If the assembly votes to ditch the Second Amendment, then out it goes. If it votes to drop the Constitution in toto and draw up a new plan of government to take its place, then out it goes too.
This is not a constitutional solution, since no such solution exists. Rather, it is a revolutionary solution whose goal is either to create a new state or re-found the existing state on an entirely new basis. Hence, it is one that only the industrial proletariat can implement.
The US thus faces a classic choice between breakdown and revolution, between decay, authoritarianism, and a deepening social crisis on one hand and socialist democracy on the other. The founding fathers have done us the favor of closing off all other escape routes.
As for the individual candidates running in 2024, they are an expression of the political crisis rather than in any sense an answer to it.
Kamala Harris is the candidate of the center-right status quo. While she claims to stand for change, she has made it crystal clear that she will continue White House policies based on war, repression, economic royalism, and inaction in the face of accelerating climate change. She represents the politics of muddling through, of doing whatever it takes to make it from day to day without regard to long-term considerations. When vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz recently suggested that the Electoral College should go, the Harris campaign forced him to recant. Even mentioning the structural crisis was more than Harris could bear.
Donald Trump, by contrast, is the candidate of lower-income voters who are “mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore,” to quote the 1976 movie “Network.” They support him not despite the fact that he is a bull in a china shop, but because of it. In their blind fury, they can think of no solution other than smashing stuff up and are therefore counting on him to do it. His authoritarianism and destructiveness flow from a political structure that is broken, irrational, and increasingly undemocratic.
For what it’s worth, this writer rates Trump’s chances at 41 percent and Harris’s at 39, with a 20-percent chance of January 6-style chaos instead. But regardless of who wins, the great American breakdown will continue unabated.
-Dan Lazare
