Peaceful Political Revolution in America

Welcome back to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.

It has been pointed out on this podcast by more than a few people, that our Constitution is as much an economic or class document, as it was a political one. For starters, our colonial era Constitution was designed to protect the interests of the slavocracy, to favor the individual accumulation of wealth and property over the collective well-being of society. In short, the framers created a political system to protect their interests. We see the economic impacts of that system all around us. We can study the economic and social impacts this system has had on labor in America, on our natural resources and environment, our infrastructure, our foreign policy, and our communities. In America, money is to politics as wealth is to influence. The framers were well aware of that, and it is no wonder why they had a disdain for democracy.
Richard Wolff's name has come up more than a few times in this podcast. His ideas have caught the attention of a lot of people. I thought it would be insightful to talk with professor Wolff about the relationship between democracy and capitalism because his message, more than most, suggests there may be a better and more democratic future for humanity. Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, NYC. He is also the founder of Democracy at Work and host of their nationally syndicated show, Economic Update.

If the Sickness is the System, we have some serious problems. Are we all still living and working under a modern form of slavery? Do we ourselves need to be emancipated? If so, how would we do that, and what kind of society would we create?
More and more people are listening to Richard Wolff's message. His vision of democracy in the workplace is based on an extensive understanding of economics as seen through the lens of capitalism, marxism, and socialism, and he is here today to talk about his extraordinary new book, The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself.

In the last episode, I talked with Juliano Benvindo about the similarities between the January 6th Capitol Insurrection and the more recent attack on all three branches of government in Brasilia. It turns out that Brazil has the greatest level of inequality in Latin America. Inequality in North America has also reached historic highs. It was bad enough that America had imported over 300,000 slaves from Africa. Brazil imported over 5 million. Inequality remains a serious problem for the 2 most populis Democracies in the Western Hemisphere, and that should alarm us all, especially when America is thought to be the leader of the free world.

We might not think inequality is such a dangerous threat to our democracy when it is normalized by public policies, and an economic system based on profit, which is then reinforced by corporate donors and advertisers promoting a pretty lavish and carefree lifestyle. But, is it leading to the collapse of democracies around the world? Do Americans believe in equality anymore? I wanted to talk to someone who might give us a little insight into the history of inequality.

Frances Chiu completed her doctorate in English Literature at Oxford University and currently teaches literature and history at The New School in New York City. She is the author of The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man (2020) and has written extensively for Occupy.com. She taught the first class in America devoted to Thomas Paine and his contemporaries, and she is currently completing her book on The History of English Inequality.
I am happy to say that she is also the first woman to be on the podcast, and I am fully aware that's long overdue!

Welcome back to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America Podcast

I thought I'd jump ahead a little and discuss some of the basic changes we could make to our constitution which would actually make it a more democratic system of government. In this episode, I have the genuine pleasure to interview one of the leading experts on democratic forms of government. His seminal book, Patterns of Democracy is probably the best analysis in comparative democracies available today. We all need to know why.

Arend Lijphart's research focuses on comparative politics, elections and voting systems, institutions, and ethnicity and politics. His work has had a profound impact on the study of democracy and he is widely considered the leading authority on consociationalism. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (1977), Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries (1984), Power-Sharing in South Africa (1985), Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences (1986), Parliamentary versus Presidential Government (1992), Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies (1994), and Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (1999; 2nd ed., 2012). Lijphart has received numerous awards throughout his prestigious career in recognition of his groundbreaking research, including the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, Aaron

Wildavsky Book Award, and honorary doctorates by the University of Leiden, Queen's University Belfast, and the University of Ghent. He was elected to serve as president of the American Political Science Association in 1995 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the Netherlands Academy of Sciences. Most recently, in 2010, he received the Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeritus Award in recognition of his unique and extensive contributions to the University of California, the discipline, and the world. He is also an acquaintance and I am especially happy to be having our first official Zoom meeting since we began exchanging emails almost 3 years ago. Welcome, Arend to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America Podcast. It's so wonderful to have you here.
Top Fixes to Our Constitution, in order of discussion:

Change Presidential System for Parliamentary System

Proportional Representation or Mixed Member Proportional Elections

Gerrymandering

Statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico

Mandatory Voting

Abolish the Electoral College

Uniform National Voting Standards

Expand the Court to 17 Justices, Term Limits

Abolish Primaries

Fewer Elections

Term limits for Judges

Abolish the Senate

Any serious discussion about a peaceful political revolution in America would be incomplete if it did not include a conversation with today's guest. Sandford Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law.

Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is currently Professor of Government at the University of Texas in Austin. Levinson is the author of over 400 articles and book reviews as well as six books, including, Our Undemocratic Constitution; Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance; and co-author of the graphic novel along with Cynthia Levinson of, Fault Lines in the Constitution. He has edited or co-edited several leading constitutional law casebooks, including; Processes of Constitutional Decision making; Responding to Imperfection; Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies; Legal Canons; and The Oxford Handbook on the United States Constitution.

Levinson has taught law at Georgetown, Yale, Harvard, New York University, Boston University, as well as the Central European University in Budapest, Panthéon-Assas University, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, London, Auckland, and Melbourne. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has argued that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution limits the government's authority to regulate private gun ownership. Levinson has called for term limits for Supreme Court justices along with a growing list of scholars across the ideological spectrum. He is also a vocal critic of the unitary executive and excessive presidential power. In the magazine Dissent, he argued that "constitutional dictators have become the American norm." He wrote an essay titled "The Decider Can Become a Dictator" in which he criticized a system which allows presidents to make dictatorial decisions of great consequence without providing ways to discipline those who display bad judgment.

Levinson has criticized the Constitution for what he considers to be its numerous failings, including an inability to remove the President despite a lack of confidence by lawmakers and the public, the President's veto power as being "extraordinarily undemocratic", the difficulty of enacting Constitutional amendments through Article 5, and a lack of more representation in the Senate for highly populated states such as California. He has often called for a Second Constitutional Convention and the "wholesale revision of our nation's founding document."

Levinson participates in a blog called Balkinization which focuses on constitutional, First Amendment, and other civil liberties issues, as well as a blog, called Our Undemocratic Constitution. With Jeffrey K. Tulis, he is co-editor of the Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought and also of a new series, Constitutional Thinking at the University Press of Kansas. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association in 2010.

I began my quest for a genuine solution to the political dysfunction in the United States over ten years ago when I first opened the cover of his book, Framed. It has proven itself to be not only relevant today but required reading for anyone interested in addressing the failures and shortcomings of our uniquely undemocratic American Political system.

Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America Podcast.

In the last episode, we talked about our frozen republuc, and how to our detriment, it has not been improved upon in over 230 years. It was designed to be an unbreakable contract between Americans, protecting sectoral rights and the individual accumulation of wealth and property. The slavocracy wanted protection from the intrusion of the north. They did not want their lavish and profitable lifestyles interrupted. Their constitution, the southern planters in particular, was to remain fixed. It was never meant to be changed.
We also discussed some of the reasons why our constitution has become even more rigid over the past century.
I'm going to continue the discussion today about our American political system with Dean Steven Taylor on his book, A DIfferent Democracy. A comparative study of the American political system with other more modern and more effective democracies from around the world. This kind of comparative analysis you might suspect would be common, but on the contrary, it is actually quite rare, even within the broad spectrum of political science.
The American system of government is thought of as exceptiona l and as such it is studied in its own distinct light, apart from other democracies around the world. Not only did our constitution prove victorious in WW2, it also gave rise to the post-war boom and the great middle class, or so it seemed. America was prosperous and thriving. Infused with the spirit of victory while other nations struggled to rekindle their devastated homelands by creating new and more effective democratic governments, America sank into another constitutional coma. We turned our backs on the kinds of constitutional changes that would empower the democratic spirit in America as if the economic spirit was all that mattered, and we remained captured by a political system no living American would think logical in today's world.

There are many democratic institutions and dynamics which could make our government much more effective and fully democratic. Those more democratic institutions however are completely dismissed by organizations like the NCC and the ACS. Many of our best constitutional scholars seem either uninformed or dismissive of the democratic achievements of the 20th-century in Europe and elsewhere. To them, the American constitution has some kind of immortal standing. It cannot be challenged, even with empirically established facts.
The concept of American Exceptionalism is a big topic and I am not sure I can get through the first chapter of A Different Democracy in one hour, let alone the entire book, but to put us on the trail and set our minds to the hunt is Steven Taylor, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Troy University in Alabama. He is also co-author along with Matthew Shugart, Bernard Grofman, and Arend Lijphart, on A Different Democracy. The American government is a 31 country perspective.
Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in American Podcast, it’s great to have you here!