Summary: A growing body of American scholars believe democracy in the United States is flawed, and blame the Constitution itself. In a pre-election 2024 piece, left-leaning outlet EL PAÍS lists three faults: the Electoral College, which gave George W. Bush (2000) and Donald Trump (2016) the White House with fewer votes than their rivals; the structure of the Senate; and the Supreme Court. Amendment needs two-thirds of both Houses plus three-quarters of the states, and the last one came in 1971. Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky even imagines a “peaceful divorce” into separate countries, with a West Coast “Pacifica”, while Steven Levitsky calls America “still a democracy, but a very sick one”.
Why it matters: The country that grades other democracies, Bharat’s included, is described as “very sick” by its own constitutional scholars, one of whom sketches its break-up into separate nations. Any Western lecture on democratic standards deserves to be answered with this record.
Source: “Why America is a flawed democracy” by Iker Seisdedos, EL PAÍS English, 26 October 2024.
In his new book, Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky envisions a solution to the problems he believes stem from the virtually unreformable U.S. Constitution: “A peaceful divorce, by mutual agreement, might come about where two or more countries would emerge,” he writes in No Democracy Lasts Forever. The West Coast states would form a new nation, called Pacifica, which could be joined by Democratic territories on the other coast, “and even Illinois.” Meanwhile, the Republican-majority regions of the South and Midwest would form their own country. Although Chemerinsky suggests an agreement between these new blocs to allow for free movement of citizens and trade.
Something is wrong when legal experts are forced to think like science fiction novelists. For Chemerinsky, it is the U.S. Constitution that is wrong. And he is not the only one who thinks this way. It’s a sentiment echoed by many voices, particularly on the left, who argue the flaws in this foundational document are a significant threat to the future of the world’s longest-standing and most stable democracy, which has enjoyed over two centuries of prosperity and freedom. According to this perspective, the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1787 and left largely unchanged for 50 years, gives rise to three major problems: the establishment of the Electoral College, the structure of the Senate, and the functioning of the Supreme Court.
These problems — along with issues such as voter suppression and the influx of dark money in political campaigns — are not new. However, they gained a new dimension with Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2016, the same year The Economist index reclassified the United States from a full democracy to a flawed one. “We are still a democracy, but a very sick one,” notes Steven Levitsky, whose recent book, Tyranny of the Minority, co-authored with Daniel Ziblatt, serves as a stark warning about this decline. With the upcoming elections — arguably the most significant in recent memory — there is a crucial opportunity to analyze the system’s failures and propose potential solutions with insights from experts.
Read the full article at EL PAÍS English →
