No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States

A groundbreaking work from one of America’s leading legal scholars, No Democracy Lasts Forever audaciously asserts that the only way a polarized America can avoid secession is to draft a new Constitution.
The Constitution has become a threat to American democracy. Due to its inherent flaws―its treatment of race, dependence on a tainted Electoral College, a glaringly unrepresentative Senate, and the outsized influence of the Supreme Court―Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law School and one of our foremost legal scholars, has come to the sobering conclusion that our nearly 250-year-old founding document can no longer hold.

Much might be fixed by Congress or the Supreme Court, but they seem unlikely to do so. One might logically conclude that amending the Constitution would solve the problem, yet logic seldom takes precedent, given that only fifteen of the 11,848 amendments proposed since 1789 have passed. Chemerinsky contends that without major changes, the Constitution is beyond redemption in that it has created a government that can no longer deal with the urgent issues, such as climate change and wealth inequalities, that threaten our nation and the world.

Yet political Armageddon can still be avoided, Chemerinsky writes, if a new constitutional convention is empowered to replace the Constitution of 1787. Just as the Founding Fathers replaced the faulty Articles of Confederation that same year, we must,