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

The book is well written, well supported by a reputable individual. Dr. Chemerinsky provides essential and fact based historical insights, identifies the problem and offers hope in the form of practical solutions. I recommend it, Dr. R.

This is knowledge every American should have. It’s a must read. Changes will be needed to strengthen the Union.

As a kid I used to pore over atlases, particularly the maps of US states, and assume that each county would have 2 state senators the way each state has 2 US Senators. This was before I knew about Reynolds v. Sims, the 2nd or 3rd most important case decided by the Warren Court, which foreclosed such an absurd result by ensuring that every district in the same house of a state legislature would have roughly equal population. This is of course not the case in the US Senate. We can't even get there by amending the Constitution, as Erwin Chemerinsky points out early in "No Democracy Lasts Forever," because the US Senate's rendition of states rather than individuals as equal parties for representation was expressly placed beyond amendment in the original Constitution.Do we want this state of affairs to continue? The interests of states are of course placed above those of individuals every time a state (through a jury) criminally convicts an individual; but do we want states to count above individuals in the field of everyday representation? If not it is really unnecessary to address the points Chemerinsky makes in the rest of the book. A new Constitution is required to ensure one person, one vote. If the US wants to be congruent with most other democracies it should either have a unicameral legislature (as Nebraska already does) or emasculate the Senate (for example as the UK did its upper house with the Parliament Act 1911).Every country is of course exceptional in the sense of having a unique national character (well almost unique, Israel's matches ours in more ways than I can count) so what's wrong with American exceptionalism? Was Justice Scalia really wrong when he says the US should be exceptional or we would have to jettison things like the exclusionary rule (if not the whole of the Fourth Amendment)? That may be the best defense of American exceptionalism I have ever read.The question is should a country be exceptional in ways that are in conflict with its publicly expressed values? Russia is not for example in the sense that it publicly expresses the value of collectivism (the whole over the parts; see Putin's written expression a few years ago of Russia's national values). The United States publicly expresses the value of the individual to be the supreme value. However, for most of our history people were willing to kill to ensure that states' rights would be supreme over those of individuals (which is how we retained slavery and created Jim Crow). The one time a large portion of our people were willing to themselves die for this idea the military KIAs alone amounted to 2% of our population at the preceding national census. Nobody was COUNTING the civilian deaths which is why we don't really know how many people were killed by the Civil War.By not prohibiting things like partisan gerrymandering, life tenure of all members of the judiciary and the Senate filibuster (which Chemerinsky tells the story of at a length and with a detail I've never seen before), the United States Constitution ensures the US will not only be exceptional but will not live up to the values expressed by the Warren Court, whose legacy is probably the greatest issue in American politics today. The Warren Court was a unique moment in American legal history where the Constitution was interpreted to maximize individual liberty. With this book Chemerinsky has finally realized that there can't be a conservative assault on the Constitution itself (as he argued in the title of a previous book) because the Constitution is the perfectly adapted weapon for conservatives' assault on everyone else. Five stars.

This book raises some very important questions in a time of uncertainty. The divisions in the country and the breakdown of trust stem primarily from the Constitution itself. Having been written at a time when the framers distrusted democracy and were not representative of the majority of the people, (only white men, not women, Blacks, or Native Americans were allowed to participate in the system) it was written for those white men. From the severely restricted franchise to a senate based not on population which unfairly represents states with a small population, to a Supreme Court which has very little accountability, to the electoral college which invalidates the concept of one man one vote, our system is in big trouble. As the population has grown, so have the problems that it spawned. And the problems do not end there. The filibuster in the senate has come to mean that minorities control the body and gerrymandering has rendered the House completely unrepresentative in many states. Add to those things, the fact that the amendment process is nearly impossible.The author presents the solutions for these issues but acknowledges that none of the solutions are easy and it may be impossible to implement them peacefully. It is possible to call a constitutional convention but that in itself is extremely difficult and even if possible, no one knows what kind of document we might end up with. We could pass amendments to overturn some of the more atrocious court decisions like Citizens United or the Dobbs Decision but the process is extremely difficult. In some cases, legislation could alleviate some of the problems but with the filibuster, even that is nearly impossible in a country where the parties are so far apart in their beliefs.This is an excellent book but it did not leave me very hopeful about meaningful change in the near future.

An outstanding work on the failings of the American Constitution. The author succinctly and compellingly lays out the six or so crucial deficiencies that have brought about the obvious disfunction of our Constitutional system.