In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Aziz Rana about his brilliant and bracing article recently published in New Left Review, “Constitutional Collapse.” They talk about how the Trump administration and its enablers are shredding a liberal “compact” which was established in in the 1930s through the Sixties and extending an imperial presidency abroad to an authoritarian one domestically. They discuss the current constitutional crisis, but also the need for, and manifestations of, a politics which is at once a genuine membership organization and social community. As Aziz Rana powerfully argues, “its aim should be to transform the world people organically experience.” This is exactly the analysis and message so many of us need in these dark times.
Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College Law School, where his research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, his work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding.
Rana’s first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press) situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. His new book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century -- especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority -- and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.
Aziz Rana has written essays and op-eds for such venues as n+1, The Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Dissent, New Labor Forum, Jacobin, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, Jadaliyya, Salon, and The Law and Political Economy Project. He has articles and chapter contributions published or forthcoming with Yale and Oxford University Presses, The University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum, among others.
Aziz Rana on Historical Shifts in American Constitutional Meaning
In the US, we have this idea that exists as a kind of popular cultural sense. The country has basically had the same constitution—a document ratified in the 1780s, and it has really been in effect since then. However, one of the things that's distinctive about the US Constitution is that it is perhaps the hardest in the world to formally amend. It is incredibly difficult to change the actual terms of the text, even during times when we've had pretty profound changes to the language. Here, we can think about the Reconstruction period with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.
This period required massive social upheaval and interesting deviations from the existing process. What this means is that the Constitution and its meaning have actually changed quite dramatically over time, oftentimes through mechanisms that we can consider fairly informal. In the 20th century, the basic way that constitutional change has taken place has been through landmark pieces of legislation—ordinary laws that are passed, which courts then interpret to be consistent with constitutional meaning in ways that dramatically alter the terms of collective life.
In particular, between the 1930s, during the New Deal period, World War II, and the early Cold War—especially over the course of three decades from the 1930s to the 1960s—American constitutional meaning shifted dramatically. This transformation took place through key bits of legislation, such as the Social Security Act, which established certain provisions for individuals in the context of the New Deal. The National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act, established collective bargaining. Additionally, we can think of Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. All of these laws established terms that were ultimately upheld in the courts, forming what can be understood as the 20th-century constitutional compact.
We can think of this compact as having five elements. The first is a strong commitment to racial liberalism, which becomes a key ethical core of the 20th-century project. This idea is expressed in the equal protection clause of equal rights for all, which undermines the persistence of segregation. With Brown v. Board of Education, the courts established a precedent, and especially in the wake of McCarthyism, there emerged strong commitments to civil liberties, particularly regarding speech protections and various types of religious protections. This emerged from a juxtaposition between the US, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany—an idea that certain kinds of autonomous space should be left for individuals, free from various types of threat.
By the end of the 1960s, the US had an incredibly permissive dissent and speech regime established through a case called Brandenburg. Alongside these two elements was also a vision of market capitalism, constrained by a new administrative state shaped by the New Deal order. The administrative state is built on the idea of independent agencies established by Congress, which are not solely subject to the whim of the President, thus maintaining some degree of distance from presidents who might impose particular political ends.
This framework includes an account of checks and balances that emphasizes a very strong Supreme Court as an arbiter of constitutional meaning, especially given the fact that the text is so hard to formally amend. All of this is tied to a defense of American global power that is built around an imperial president, whereby the president enjoys extreme forms of discretion overseas, but that discretion is supposed to be limited domestically.
This combined framework is what constitutes the American constitutional model, which, even if it is quite different from what the initial text stipulated in the 1780s and 1790s, is what many Americans who grew up in this country at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this one would intuit as the meaning of the American constitutional project.
However, this compact has its own profound weaknesses and has been chipped away bit by bit over the past several decades. Individuals such as Trump and the core of real extremists surrounding him are pushing these elements to the breaking point, systematically attacking each one of these constituent elements.
Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.
Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:
“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times. This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”
David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
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