In a recent wee hours open thread, commenter Martin flagged an article published in Dissent magazine that had the following title and subtitle:
The Case for a Third Reconstruction
The scale and depth of the attack on our institutions means that there is no simple way for a pro-democracy coalition to flip the lights back on after Trump. We need transformative thinking.
Refreshingly, the topic of that article isn’t about messaging, personalities or policy, i.e., the usual stuff political nerds fight about, but rather structure. In a nutshell, the question is what kind of governing theory should the opposition Democrats adopt as they contemplate how to fix the shit Republicans broke and prevent the rise of another democracy wrecker like Trump?
Martin raised it as a potentially interesting discussion here, and I thought it would be too, so I asked Martin if he’d be interested in writing up guest commentary on the topic as a conversational hare for the baying Balloon Juice hounds. He generously agreed, and his submission follows:
So, I was going to write a whole piece, but Jamelle Bouie found the same blog I’d been reading so read him – he’s smarter and a better writer: What Is the Left’s Theory of Power? (Link goes to Bouie’s 3/21 column at a non-paywalled archive site.)
On this site we talk a lot about candidates and policy and not much about structure. Personally, I don’t see how any potential Democratic president in 2028 armed with any possible policies would reverse the damage done under Trump as all such work will sit on a foundation of sand.
Changes in governmental structure and power seem essential at this point. So some of us are interested in seeing more discussions of how Democrats wield power – the recent shift on redistricting being a good example of Democrats identifying that they need to wield power here – temporarily at least reversing a view that power should reside with the electorate. We’ve talked about Supreme Court reform many times. We don’t talk much about Congressional reform other than expanding the House and the filibuster.
Trump had project 2025, which laid out that structural shift toward a unitary executive at the expense of states rights and the free market, and Democrats will need a comparable effort if only to wind back what Trump implemented, let alone establish our “core claims about who should wield state power and on what terms.”
So the starting questions seem to me to be: What are our core claims? Who should carry those on behalf of the party? The Heritage Foundation did this for the GOP. How would this get implemented in the time frame of probably a single Congress? And how hard should we push for Democrats to support and fight for these claims over typical policy positions, as this is likely to not align with our usual notions of left/right or even insider/outsider?
There’s a lot of reading around this over at the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project Blog, and I think a good starting point is The Case for a Third Reconstruction.
Emphasis added by me. As context for such a discussion, I second Martin’s recommendation of the Bouie column, linked above to an archive site where, presumably, his employer won’t record a click. Bouie cites a post at the LPE blog by law professor Beau J. Baumann called “What Would a Russell Vought of the Left Look Like?”
Bouie juxtaposes a left theory of power with that adopted by Republicans, which Bouie describes as “neo-Bonapartism, with Trump as the man on horseback.” Here’s a brief excerpt of Bouie’s commentary for folks who won’t leave the boat:
So where does the left find power? And how does it root this authority in the constitutional order? What, again, are the constitutional politics of the left?
Baumann’s answer is Congress, and so is mine. Last year, I wrote briefly of the need for an imperial Congress, by which I meant a legislature that claims the full suite of powers and prerogatives granted to it under the Constitution.
This would be a Congress that could radically reshape the executive branch, seizing power back from the president. A Congress that could curb, curtail and discipline the Supreme Court. It could marshal public support behind a broad-based political and economic agenda and take a leading role in governing the nation.
We all realize this will be a heavy lift, as Bouie (and everyone else linked above) acknowledges. But I think he’s right to note that we need a theory of the case, and Baumann and Bouie make a good case for reinvesting power in Congress, as laid out in the Constitution. What do y’all think?
Open thread.
*Please note that “left” in this context means any political actor who is left of center, from Michigan U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin to Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-FL). So, here, at least, “left” may include but is not defined by your annoying ex-friend who went scorched earth over Bernie in 2016.
The Seat of Left* Power: Feat. Guest Commentary from MartinPost + Comments (136)
