An eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the
Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and
around the world.
Some
Americans today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped
to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the
worst features of American politics. Yet for as long as anyone can
remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in
American 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 American life.
In
a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, 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 US
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.