Title:
The constitutional bind : how Americans came to idolize a document that fails them / Aziz Rana.
ISBN:
9780226350721
Personal Author:
Publication Information:
Chicago, IL : The University of Chicago Press, 2024.
©2024
Physical Description:
xii, 805 pages ; 24 cm
Contents:
Preface : three centennials -- American constitutional romance -- I. Disagreement and experimentation in the Gilded Age, 1887-1917 -- Settler crisis and constitutional uncertainty -- Class narratives and the high tide of "constitution tinkering" -- Socialist constitutional alternative -- Developing universalist empire in the Philippines -- II. The spread of a new constitutional citizenship, 1917-1945 -- World War I, the security state, and constitutional loyalty -- Inclusion and exclusion in interwar Americanism -- Transformation and preservation in the New Deal -- Good war and constitution worship -- III. Consolidating the American model, 1945-1965 -- Launching the American century -- Red scare constitutionalism -- Cold War reform and the reframing of American identity -- Constitutional myths and the victory of the court -- IV. Alternative paths and constitutional erasure, 1965-1987 -- Left resurgence and the decolonial project -- Rise of originalist America -- Conclusion : constitutional accounting.
Summary:
"Americans today are increasingly uneasy about the democratic weaknesses of their Federal Constitution. But for most of living memory that very Constitution has been idealized as near perfect. How could it be that this flawed system came to enjoy such intense veneration? In a striking reinterpretation of the American constitutional past, Aziz Rana connects the spread of a distinctive twentieth century American relationship to its founding document to another development rarely treated alongside it: the rise of the U.S. to global dominance. In the process, he highlights the role of constitutional veneration in shaping the terms of American power abroad, with ultimately transformative effects at home for narratives of nation and ideas of reform. In the process, Rana also explores the remarkably diverse array of movement activists--in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics--that struggled to imagine a very different constitutional horizon, one grounded in equal and effective freedom for all and able to overcome the basic limitations of the consolidating legal-political system. These voices of opposition, including to the Constitution itself, have overwhelmingly been excised from constitutional memory. And yet they offer essential insights for making sense of our present difficulties, in which Americans find themselves bereft of the constitutional sureties that have long shaped collective life"-- Provided by publisher.
Geographic Term:
Genre:
OCLC Number:
on1389887487
Availability:
Eagan - Wescott~1
