Aziz Rana discusses his new book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them, with comments by Nikhil Pal Singh and moderated by Sandipto Dasgupta.
Some Americans today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the worst features of American politics. Yet for as long as anyone can remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in American political culture. In The Constitutional Bind, Aziz Rana explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life. The book shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance, and how the constitution unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home. The Constitutional Bind also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons, and whose voices have been excised to memory.Â
Presented by the Politics Department at The New School for Social Research.
Aziz Rana's research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, Rana’s work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding of the country. Rana is the author of The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2010), and his writings have appeared in n+1, Dissent, The Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times, New Labor Forum, Jacobin, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, Jadaliyya, Salon, and The Law and Political Economy Project amongst others.
Nikhil Pal Singh works at the intersection of contemporary US history and political theory. His first book, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004) was recognized as the best book in US civil rights history by the Organization of American Historians. His second book Race and America’s Long War (University of California Press, 2017) examines the relationship between race, war and policing in US domestic life and overseas conflict. Along with several colleagues, Singh helped to create and develop the NYU Prison Education Program (PEP), serving as its founding faculty director from 2014 to 2023. He has been interviewed and published widely, including at Jacobin’s The Dig podcast, in the Nation, the Intercept, Dissent, the Verso blog, the New Republic, Salvage, the New Statesmen, and the Boston Review.
Sandipto Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
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