In recent years, the anti-democratic flaws of the U.S. Constitution have become increasingly apparent. Commentators now routinely worry over the system’s exaggerated checks on popular authority: the lopsided grant of power to certain states, an impassable constitutional amendment process, widespread voter disenfranchisement, and of course the dramatic control exercised by a tiny group of lifetime federal judges.
And yet, if you grew up in the United States around the turn of the twenty-first century, the dominant culture was that of almost religious textual devotion. Even Occupy Wall Street was launched on Constitution Day, September 17. One might well have assumed that the American constitutional system stood at the apex of liberal-democratic ideas. Given its manifest flaws, how did Americans come to idolize this document and what have been the political consequences of this reverence?
My new book, The Constitutional Bind, attempts to make sense of this striking tension in our collective life. It argues that the substance and implications of modern constitutional veneration have not been continuous since the founding. They are, instead, a distinctively twentieth century development. Over the past century, the text became constitutively joined to what Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 famously labeled the “American creed”—the idea that the U.S. stands for the promise of equal liberty for all. Such creedal constitutionalism was then further augmented by a series of additional commitments: civil libertarian values, market capitalism, constrained representative government with an empowered Supreme Court, and—crucially—the belief that these principles explained why the U.S. should direct the global order.
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