The Constitution Is a Plutocratic Document
There’s no reason to venerate the framers of the US Constitution. The document they created was explicitly designed to check the democratic will of ordinary people and protect the plutocratic interests of the propertied elite.
The US Constitution was designed to protect capitalist social relations from democratic challenge. (Getty Images)
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the notorious far-right congressperson from Georgia, recently made headlines for her call for a “national divorce” between red and blue states. This did not stop her, of course, from showing up in lower Manhattan to protest the arraignment of former president Donald Trump and to garner more media coverage for herself.
Whether the likes of Taylor Greene actually believe what they say is somewhat beside the point. Such calls for a national breakup are a recurrent feature of US politics — we fought one of history’s bloodiest civil wars in the 1860s — and remind us of the uneasy compromises that underpinned the drafting of the Constitution in 1787.
US political culture venerates the Constitution for its supposed genius in setting up a system of government that could last forever, if only we could abide by its timeless wisdom. The conflict and dysfunction that plagues our political system, in this view, stems from a heedless disregard of the framers’ intentions, not the system itself.
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