No Democracy Lasts Forever

The Constitution has become a threat to American democracy. Due to its inherent flaws—its treatment of race, dependence on a tainted Electoral College, a glaringly unrepresentative Senate, and the outsized influence of the Supreme Court—Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law School and one of our foremost legal scholars, has come to the sobering conclusion that our nearly 250-year-old founding document can no longer hold.

Much might be fixed by Congress or the Supreme Court, but they seem unlikely to do so. One might logically conclude that amending the Constitution would solve the problem, yet logic seldom takes precedent, given that only fifteen of the 11,848 amendments proposed since 1789 have passed. Chemerinsky contends that without major changes, the Constitution is beyond redemption in that it has created a government that can no longer deal with the urgent issues, such as climate change and wealth inequalities, that threaten our nation and the world.

Yet political Armageddon can still be avoided, Chemerinsky writes, if a new constitutional convention is empowered to replace the Constitution of 1787. Just as the Founding Fathers replaced the faulty Articles of Confederation that same year, we must, No Democracy Lasts Forever argues, rewrite the entire Constitution from start to finish.

Still, Chemerinsky goes further than that, suggesting that without serious changes Americans may be on the path to various forms of secession based on a recognition that what divides us as a country is, in fact, greater than what unites us. No Democracy Lasts Forever asserts with exceptional clarity that if the problems with the Constitution are not fixed, we are ineluctably heading toward a crisis where secession is, indeed, possible and where it will be necessary to think carefully about how to preserve the United States as a world power in a very different form of government.

Despite these troubles, Chemerinsky remains hopeful, revealing how the past offers hope that change can happen. The United States has been through enormously challenging and divisive times before, with a civil war and the Great Depression, and Chemerinsky ultimately shows that it may still be possible to cure the defects and save American democracy at the same time.