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.

"Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, pushes the tradition of constitutional criticism to new heights with 'No Democracy Lasts Forever.' In this brief mix of political commentary and legal analysis, he confidently argues that the time has come to replace the Constitution entirely. His work provides a compelling critique of the current state of American democracy and its foundational document, revealing tensions within the Constitution that are often overlooked by the general public." -- Samuel Goldman - Wall Street Journal
"Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley's law school, still seemed to place considerable faith in the Constitution, pleading with fellow progressives in his book "We the People" "not to turn their back on the Constitution and the the courts. By contrast, "No Democracy Lasts Forever" is markedly pessimistic. Asserting that the Constitution, which is famously difficult to amend, has put the country "in grave danger," Chemerinsky lays out what would need to happen for a new constitutional convention — and, in the book’s more somber moments, he entertains the possibility of secession... He hopes that any divorce, if it comes, will be peaceful... The prospect of secession sounds extreme, but in suggesting that the Constitution could hasten the end of American democracy, Chemerinsky is far from alone." -- Jennifer Szalai - The New York Times
"Chemerinsky does make, forcefully, valid points... he’s probably right that, in a highly polarized electorate like ours, we are apt to see this happen fairly regularly. The problem is not so much that the wrong person wins as that the public loses faith in the process. " -- Louis Menand - The New Yorker
"[Chemerinsky’s] highly readable and timely book makes abundantly clear how the Constitution, far from serving as a bulwark against democratic backsliding, is contributing to the current political woes in the US" -- Lawrence Douglas - The Times Literary Supplement

Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. The author of Presumed Guilty, The Conservative Assault on the Constitution, and The Case Against the Supreme Court, among many other works, he lives in Oakland, California.

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