No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States

by Erwin Chemerinsky

A groundbreaking work from one of America’s leading legal scholars, No Democracy Lasts Forever audaciously asserts that the only way a polarized America can avoid secession is to draft a new Constitution.??

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.??

• Publish Date: 20 August 2024
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: WW Norton & Co
• Imprint: Liveright Publishing Corporation
• Edition: Kindle Edition
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 232
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

Unoriginal Hyper-Leftist Wet Dream. In all honesty, had I known that Chemerinsky was the Dean of the Berkely School of Law, I probably would never have picked up this book to begin with. I would have already known most of what he was going to say... and now having actually read it, I can positively say that 95% of my assumptions would have been correct.

 

Basically, however you feel about the Citizens United ruling, recent SCOTUS decisions, packing the Court, the Electoral College, and the well-debunked "Russian Collusion" conspiracy theory from the 2016 Presidential Election is largely how you're going to feel about this book. It honestly reads as little more than hyper-leftist dreams about everything that has gone "wrong" with America for the last decade or two. Thus, some of you are going to sing this book's praises from the highest places you can as loudly as you can. And some of you are going to want to take a window to those places just so you can be assured that you will be able to defenestrate this book from those places.

 

Chemerinsky *does* get *close* to some genuinely good ideas, ideas that could *actually* solve a lot of the problems he names... and then quickly backs away from them, for the most part. His one consistent good idea is that the process of "Winner Take All" as it relates to Electoral College votes does in fact need to end - a stance I've had for much of my adult life, particularly my politically engaged adult life. The more interesting things that he addresses but then thinks *secession* is more viable are as they relate to the number of Congressmen. Chemerinsky correctly points out that the only thing limiting the size of the US House to 435 members is a US law passed less than a century ago - and laws can be overturned in a number of ways. Here again, one weakness of Chemerinsky is that in proclaiming the Constitution a threat - and even spending quite a bit of the text here decrying the SCOTUS as a threat - he openly advocates for SCOTUS to take action against this law. But even this idea is hardly original, as people across the political spectrum have been proposing it for many years already.  

 

Another point Chemerinsky gets truly close to a near-original idea (it has been proposed by at least one writer) is when he proposes - briefly, before quickly retracting it and dismissing it as unworkable - that States be broken into "smaller States". But if "Democracy" is truly the end goal, and Chemerinsky wants everyone across the US to be as truly even as possible, why isn't he going full-bore here? As others have written, first, build the House up to its Constitutionally mandated maximum size - every Congressman represents exactly 35,000 people, the Constitutionally mandated minimum number of people per Representative. That gives us something like 11K US Representatives. Now, take Chemerinsky's own note here that "smaller States" would each get 2 US Senators... and make every single one of those US Rep Districts its own State. That would mean that every US Rep represents 35K people... and every Senator represents 35,000 / 2 == 17,500 people each. Meaning that for every 35,000 people, on average 1 Congressman of some level represents just under 12,000 people. Which in some urban areas is considerably less than an entire block, and in some rural areas could be several hundred square miles of territory. But Chemerinsky doesn't go here, instead he just continually reiterates hyper leftist talking points rather than seeking actual solutions to the problems he decries.

 

Ultimately, I deducted two stars from this book - the first is for the dearth of a bibliography, clocking in at just 12% of the text I read weeks before publication. Even being generous and lowering my 20-30% standard, as I've been trying to do of late, I just can't justify allowing such a small bibliography against such grand claims. Even here, the bibliography itself is quite cherry picked and doesn't show the full scope of what is going on through many of Chemerinsky's claims, but I've never really addressed that issue in other reviews and won't really address it here either.

 

The other star really was for the lack of objectivity and just how unoriginal very nearly everything about this book was. If you've seen nearly any left-leaning politician or activist speak in the last 20 years, they're all saying much of the same things Chemerinsky is saying here - including more and more of them openly talking of secession, which would be ruinous on us all.

 

Again, at the end of the day your feelings about this book are largely going to hinge on just how ideologically aligned with extreme leftist US politics you are, so know that when making your decision to read this book. Some of you are going to LOVE this book, and others are going to HATE it, and it will largely be for exactly the same reasons.

 

Recommended.