'Democracy with American Characteristics' is what brought us here

Bad News for Liberal Opponents of Donald Trump: The U.S. Constitution Doesn't Love You Back

“Hands off our democracy” may seem like a reasonable response to the shameless authoritarianism of President Donald Trump, and his trashing of domestic and global U.S. political / geopolitical norms in place since after World War 2. Even for the proper left (look it up, it’s doesn’t mean MSNBC of the Democratic Party leadership) the importance of popular-front broad unity around a minimal anti-fascist consensus is a critically important lesson from Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s — a lesson even the proper left in America today would do well to heed, given the prevailing circumstances.

At the same time, it behooves the left (that lives outside the Punch ‘n Judy simulacrum of U.S. political media) to understand the ways in which “our democracy” has brought us to this point: Donald Trump has not seized power in a coup; he has won an election staged within the rules of the 18^th century settler constitution that liberals have blindly venerated for much of the past seven decades. Trump is able to enact his agenda because of the degree of control of the legislature the Constitution allows his followers, and because the courts tasked with interpreting that Constitution are effectively chosen by the party holding power in the minority-rule U.S. Senate .

What Trump has unceremoniously torched was the shabby remnants of the bipartisan elite consensus that had shaped domestic and international U.S. governance from the onset of the Cold War. The reorganization of U.S. domestic politics and Washington’s geopolitics on the basis of a feverish dread-imaginary of a Soviet threat to America’s way of life required constructing an American national identity laying claim to being a more free, fair and inclusive society than the USSR. “Our democracy”, then, locked in mortal combat with the totalitarian threat of the invader stalking the horizon, his Fifth Columns probing freedom’s defenses and searching for structural weaknesses to exploit. It was in line with this elite consensus that the high court and establishment politicians began reading the Constitution as mandating an ever expanding democratic inclusiveness despite its narrow settler-colonial origins. It allowed judges to drive progress on reversing some of the more egregious stains of America’s foundational racism by desegregating schools, guaranteeing voting rights and advancing other civil rights. And it allowed politicians of both parties to concur on socio-economic model designed to take the rougher edges off free-market capitalism’s rapacious toll on its working population. (Remember Richard Nixon’s “we’re all Keynesians now!”?)

The Cold War consensus, of course, began to quickly unravel in the years that followed. And following Joe Biden’s efforts at a kind of zombie revival, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to what had been the elite imperial consensus that had promised a basic continuity in domestic and geopolitical governance for decades.

To understand the historical context making sense of all of this I can’t strongly enough recommend reading the work of the indispensable Aziz Rana, both his essay interventions and his magisterial book, “The Constitutional Bind”.

The Indispensable Mr. Rana

Rana shows how an 18^th Century constitution, designed by rich white settlers to prevent democracy rather than enable it, and which they made nigh impossible to amend, has been a major factor bringing us to this point.

Perhaps it’s simply coincidental that the recentering of Republican Party politics away from Cold War liberal interventionism and towards domestic white nationalism has been accompanied by a systematic effort to roll back many of reforms that had been designed to shore up the Cold War home front by addressing key grievances — the New Deal/Great Society programs aimed at protecting the working class from the vagaries of market capitalism that had stirred the specter of revolution in the Depression Era, or the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts aimed at heading off the growing rebellion against systemic racism in the 1960s.

And here’s where Rana’s work is essential, in locating the liberal order of U.S. domestic and international engagement (being unceremoniously torched today) as a product of the Cold War-era, and a set of shared elite assumptions that began to erode with the end of that era.

“Republicans and Democrats understood themselves as jointly stewarding an American hegemonic project against the Soviet Union. Officials could toast their electoral foes across the partisan aisle, because whatever their internal differences, politicians and judges both had drunk deeply from the well of American exceptionalism. Whatever the election outcome, both sides were bound, above all, by a common national narrative.

“… Constitutional change does not typically occur through formal alterations to the 1787 document, let alone through its wholesale replacement, but through shifts in court-based interpretations of the existing text along with the implementation of landmark pieces of legislation that establish new terms for collective life. Indeed, the present order was consolidated through the passage of key mid-century bills – the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Medicare Act – in conjunction with Supreme Court rulings that upheld their constitutionality. Together, Congress and the courts broke substantially from the preceding racial and economic order. Yet, crucially, this meant that there was no rewritten twentieth-century Constitution separate from an earlier one.

“At the same time, the shared story about these legal shifts was that they represented the fulfillment of an inherently liberal national essence. In truth, the consolidation of this order had been a contingent product of domestic and global mid-twentieth-century developments, diverging markedly from the long-established structures of explicit white-settler supremacy in the United States. But that reality did not fit with the emerging national narrative – which presented the US as committed, from its founding, to the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence, and thus on an ineluctable path to this new model.”

What Rana makes clear is that rather than operate outside of its rules, Trump is exploiting inherent weaknesses in the U.S. constitutional system, designed as it was to maintain the power of wealthy white men.

“How did the US get here?” he asks. “First of all, it is vital to appreciate that American legal-political institutions are infamously undemocratic. They are organized around a state-based system that assigns representation geographically rather than to actual people, and entails extensive veto points that fragment the power of the vote. This fragmentation is achieved through the Electoral College, the Senate, the structure and appointments process of the federal judiciary, and the capacity of the states to gerrymander districts, limit voting rights, or otherwise thwart popular national agendas. As we have seen, it was only under the extraordinary circumstances of the mid-twentieth century that the New Deal’s limited welfare state and racial liberalism were constitutionalized. It required a remarkably high degree of labour organizing and power against the backdrop of the Great Depression. And later, it relied upon the specter of the Soviet Union, so that political elites were willing to pursue cross-party compromise on behalf of racial reforms, understood by centre-left and centre-right alike as a national security imperative.”

It ought to have been obvious for years now that Republicans have relied on constitutional institutions – the courts, the U.S. senate, the absence of uniform electoral laws that effectively leaves state-level elected bodies the power to choose their electorate, and more – to effectively stymie any legislative progress towards a fairer America, constitutionally thwarting governance reflecting the will of the majority of citizens. So “our democracy” has been not quite democracy, then. Or, to repurpose a formulation from Deng Xiaoping’s phrasebook, it’s more like “democracy with American characteristics”.

Still, it is the electoral system, despite its anti-democratic provisions and possibilities, that establishes and maintains a degree (shrinking, though it has been throughout the 21st century) of popular consent by the governed to those who govern.

Hence the importance, in Trump world, of maintaining the lie that the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden was “stolen”. It’s always been important for Trump to present himself as chosen by the voters, and denied by the elites. And there has long been a racist overtone in this claim, as Adam Serwer pointed out when unpicking the “stolen election” Big Lie:

“The majority of people who make such declarations [of a stolen election] understand that in fact, Trump did not win… (But) to Trump’s strongest supporters, Biden’s win is a fraud because his voters should not count to begin with, and because the Democratic Party is not a legitimate political institution that should be allowed to wield power even if they did.

“(They believe) the true will of the people is that Trump remain president, (and) forcing that outcome, even in the face of defeat, is a fulfillment of democracy rather than its betrayal. The Republican base’s fundamental belief… is that Democratic victories do not count, because Democratic voters are not truly American. It’s no accident that the Trump campaign’s claims have focused almost entirely on jurisdictions with high Black populations… Black votes are considered illegitimate even if they are legally cast... (Trump supporters believe that) demanding that Black votes be tossed out is not antidemocratic, because they should not have counted in the first place.”

Doing whatever is legally and constitutionally possible to prevent poor Black, Latino and Indigenous citizens from casting a vote has, for the past two decades at least, been a central part of the Republican playbook. And it turns out that in our “democracy with American characteristics”, quite a lot is constitutionally possible to enact this apartheid agenda.

Despite his popular vote win in 2024, Trump knows his margin of victory was relatively narrow, and fueled by a massive anti-incumbent backlash among millions of voters not particularly grounded in the MAGA ideology. Trump’s policy choices are likely to have a powerful negative effect on large segments of the population that voted for him, raising the prospect of Republicans themselves facing anti-incumbent headwinds at the next elections. That may be why Trump has tasked Elon Musk’s DOGE with planning a new, centralized attack on the electoral system. It’s not a new campaign – reversing the racial inclusivity of the Cold War era has been part of the GOP playbook since the 1990s, the racist dog-whistle of “voter fraud” being the fiction invoked to justify massive purges of mostly Black and Brown voters from the rolls. But DOGE promises new levels of efficiency in the task.

Establishment liberals expect us to imagine that the electoral system is the only path along which Americans can change their society, but that’s wishful thinking: It’s not hard to see how all progress towards social justice in U.S. history came despite, and originated outside of the electoral system. That progress has always been driven by social movements rooted outside of party politics and the election calendar.

Rana writes:

“The paralyzed nature of the constitutional system, complete with an unworkable amendment process, meant that many of the country’s democratic achievements – from Reconstruction to the New Deal – themselves required some degree of norm-breaking. The great social movements of the past, from abolition to civil rights, labour to women’s suffrage, famously called for the defiance of unjust court judgments that sustained slavery, segregation and disenfranchisement, or criminalized union organizing. Considering the current right-wing control over the courts, the left may find itself in a similar place in the coming years, calling for civil disobedience of judicial authority.”

To recognize the fundamental flaws and limits of America’s constitutional system is not to advocate abandoning that terrain: On the contrary, the lessons of the 1930s should leave no doubt of the centrality of broad-based defensive struggles against authoritarian attack. Despite its flaws and limits as a democratic charter, it can’t be forgotten either that the extent of political rights thus far achieved under its rubric were achieved by mass struggle.

Thus the gymnastics of the present, in which the left is called upon to at once vigorously defend existing spaces of political expression from fascist attack, at the same time as recognizing that “our democracy”, i.e. the electoral and juridical mechanisms of “democracy with American characteristics” can provide important respite, a (albeit increasingly fluid) level of protection from the whims of the powerful, even some defensive wins. But it is wired for rich, white minority rule.

The institutions created by the U.S. Constitution are not sufficient to achieve popular sovereignty and government based on the will of the people. They were designed to limit that. Apologies to Gandhi, then, but American democracy would be a good idea.

Still, defending “our Democracy”, in concert with all who share that goal, remains critically important, despite all of its fundamental flaws. It’s not an end in itself nor an exclusive pursuit, and the forms of engagement it allows — elections and court actions — won’t win a genuine 21st century democracy that empowers its citizenry. But it remains one of the key platforms and spaces in which citizens can proclaim and popularize that longterm struggle, which, as the history of U.S. social justice progress shows, will depend more on mass struggle outside of the corridors of power than on legislating or litigating the achievement of democracy in chambers rigged to maintain the power of a tiny minority of very rich men. Defending “our Democracy”, then, while working for a real one.