More and More People Are Saying It: Scrap the Constitution

Review of No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States by Erwin Chemerinsky (Liveright, 2024)

Criticism of the US Constitution’s antimajoritarian and undemocratic nature has long been a staple of left-wing thought and commentary. But now, no less mainstream a figure than Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, has joined the chorus of voices calling for a new constitution.

His new book making this argument, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, has gained significant attention. It’s been reviewed by major outlets like the New York Times (twice), the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, MSNBC, and the Guardian have all published reviews. And an apparently alarmed Elon Musk tweeted in response, “They want to overthrow the Constitution.”

Chemerinsky was not always a constitutional critic. Even rather recently, notes Jennifer Szalai in her New York Times review of his latest book, he was “pleading with fellow progressives . . . ‘not to turn their back on the Constitution and the courts.’” However, like fellow academics Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die (2018) and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (2023), Chemerinsky has changed his mind.

Considering the facts, it is hard to imagine how honest people could fail to reach the same conclusions as Chemerinsky. Take the Senate. Thanks to the Connecticut Compromise that…