No Democracy Lasts Forever

Deeply troubled by the US Constitution’s inherent flaws, Erwin Chemerinsky, the renowned dean of Berkeley law school, came to the sobering conclusion that the nearly 250-year-old founding document is responsible for the crisis now facing American democracy. Pointing out that just fifteen of the 11,848 amendments proposed since 1789 have passed, Chemerinsky contends that the very nature of our polarisation results from the Constitution’s “bad bones”, which have created a government that no longer works or has the confidence of the public. Yet political Armageddon can still be avoided, Chemerinsky writes, if a new constitutional convention is empowered to replace the Constitution of 1787, much as the Founding Fathers replaced the outdated Articles of Confederation. If this isn’t possible, Americans must give serious thought to forms of secession—including a United States structured like the European Union—based on a recognition that what divides the United States is, in fact, greater than what unites it.