This past weekend, the United States marked its semiquincentennial. Under different circumstances, this would be cause for celebration: a democratic experiment that has endured for a quarter of a millennium. Yet for many on the American left, the anniversary arrives at an uncertain moment, bringing two imperatives into view at once.
The first is constitutional: how to confront an order distorted by the concentration of power in the executive branch and by judicial supremacy run amok, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The second is international: how to reorient American foreign policy away from the bipartisan commitments that have produced endless war. After the Biden administration’s cynical and unaccountable complicity in the Gaza genocide, the need for a thoroughgoing reckoning within the Democratic foreign-policy establishment was clear. But the widening arc of war and Israeli impunity across the Middle East, intensified by the Trump administration’s catastrophic blunders, has made the need for a new foreign-policy orientation ahead of the midterms starker still.
The challenge is more acute now than it has been in a generation. Democrats must mobilize voters against a reactionary government in the midst of deepening constitutional and geopolitical crises. But mobilization around what? What account of constitutional democracy can they offer when the Supreme Court has become an engine of democratic contraction? What account of global order remains credible when appeals to American leadership have lost all purchase after Gaza, Ukraine, and now the war with Iran? And what would it take to build a left foreign policy that is not merely national security liberalism with softer edges, alongside a constitutional politics that is not simply nostalgia for the Warren Court?
These questions make this an especially apt moment to return to Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind. The book helps us see that two inherited languages of American liberalism are now exhausted together. The first is the language of constitutional redemption: the belief that the American constitutional order, despite its exclusions and failures, contains within itself a democratic promise that can be restored through courts, rights, and fidelity to founding principles. The second is the language of liberal international leadership: the belief that American power abroad, however imperfectly exercised, remains the indispensable condition for global order, rights, and democracy. Rana’s central contribution is to show that these languages were forged from the same fire. And if the Democratic Party is to think seriously about its constitutional orientation, its relationship to the Supreme Court, and the possibility of a genuinely left foreign policy, they may have to be abandoned together.
The Constitutional Bind is an indispensable entry point into these questions because Rana shows that the dominant American attachment to the Constitution was never merely domestic. What he calls “creedal constitutionalism” joined veneration of the 1787 Constitution to a national story of unfolding equality. In this account, the United States was always, at some deeper level, committed to liberty, self-government, and equal citizenship, even when it betrayed those ideals in practice. Constitutional politics became a drama of redemption: the nation gradually coming to honor commitments that were present from the beginning.
Rana does not deny the power of this language, which many emancipatory movements have used to expose domination and press for inclusion. But he insists that the redemptive story is deeply incomplete. The rise of creedal constitutionalism cannot be understood apart from the United States’ rise to global primacy in the twentieth century. Constitutional veneration helped Americans explain to themselves why their country’s expanding power was not imperial, why their intervention could be described as tutelage, why capitalist democracy could be presented as the universal form of freedom, and why the United States should lead the world.
The American Constitution supplied a geopolitical narrative through which the United States distinguished itself from older empires while exercising forms of domination that often looked very much like more of the same. In the Philippines, in Latin America, in the Cold War Global South, and later across the Middle East, American power repeatedly presented itself not as conquest but as constitutional instruction, or as a necessary defense of the free world. The constitutional creed transformed hierarchy into pedagogy and coercion into guardianship.
The problem with American liberal internationalism, as Rana’s book helps us see, is not only that it has sometimes failed to live up to its ideals, but that those ideals have often been structured by American primacy itself. The United States claimed to defend democracy while protecting authoritarian clients and claimed to defend legality while treating international law as binding on others and optional for itself. The constitutional story of American freedom did more than coexist with empire; it made empire morally intelligible to Americans.
That history bears directly on the Democratic Party’s present impasse. For decades, Democratic foreign policy has been caught between two poles: a national security establishment committed to American military predominance and a liberal human-rights vocabulary that too often supplies humanitarian reasons for maintaining that predominance. Even when Democrats criticize reckless wars or authoritarian excesses, they often leave intact the underlying assumption that the United States must superintend world order.
The Iran war may mark the exhaustion of that framework. Whatever its immediate military outcome, it has exposed the limits of a world in which the United States purports to enforce regional order by coercive means while retaining the legitimacy of a benign hegemon. The conflict has disrupted energy markets, shaken Gulf economies, intensified global insecurity, and revealed how quickly a regional war can radiate outward through food, fuel, migration, finance, and political instability. The war has also shown that American power now operates in a more openly multipolar environment, where rivals, partners, and nonaligned states are less willing to accept U.S. narratives at face value.
The significance of multipolarity is not that it will necessarily produce a better order — a world of rival great powers can be brutal, transactional, and indifferent to the rights of smaller states and peoples. But multipolarity does mean that the old American habit of treating primacy as a permanent prerogative is no longer sustainable. The United States can still inflict enormous harm, but it can no longer assume that the world will understand these acts through the old constitutional romance of American leadership.
That collapse of legitimacy should force a reckoning on the left. A left foreign policy cannot simply be anti-interventionist in a narrow sense, although opposition to preventive war, regime change, civilian immiseration, and blank-check militarism is essential. Nor can it be merely realist, although realism’s skepticism toward crusading wars and unipolar fantasy can be tactically useful. A genuinely left foreign policy must begin from a different question: what would internationalism look like if it were not organized around preserving American dominance?
Rana’s book points toward an answer by recovering traditions that refused to separate democracy at home from anti-imperialism abroad. Black internationalists, Indigenous sovereignty movements, Third World radicals, labor organizers, feminists, and antiwar movements repeatedly saw that American constitutional democracy was limited not only by domestic exclusions but by the global architecture of American power. They understood that racial capitalism, militarism, border control, policing, and foreign intervention were connected. They also understood that constitutional imagination does not stop at the border.
This is the transnational commitment at the heart of The Constitutional Bind. Rana is not asking readers to abandon democracy in favor of abstract cosmopolitanism. He is asking us to notice that the American “we” has always been constituted through exclusions that are both domestic and global. Indigenous peoples, enslaved and colonized peoples, migrants, occupied populations, and communities subjected to American-backed violence abroad have all been governed by American power without being recognized as authors of that power. If popular sovereignty is to be more than a national myth, then constitutional politics must account for those whom the constitutional order affects but does not include.
That insight also reframes the left’s relationship to the Supreme Court. The problem is not only that the current Court is conservative, anti-labor, anti-regulatory, hostile to voting rights, and comfortable with minority rule. The deeper problem is the long-standing liberal fantasy that constitutional democracy can be secured by judicial guardianship. Rana shows how Cold War constitutionalism elevated courts and rights precisely as mass democratic politics came to be seen as dangerous, unstable, or potentially totalitarian. Judicial supremacy became part of a broader political settlement that narrowed the meaning of democracy while presenting that narrowing as liberty.
For Democrats facing the midterms, this history should be clarifying. The answer to a reactionary Court cannot be a return to court-centered constitutional faith. Instead, the moment calls for a democratic constitutional politics capable of confronting the institutions that enable minority rule: the Senate, the Electoral College, partisan gerrymandering, the malapportioned amendment process, voter suppression, and the judiciary itself. Court reform has to be at the center of a larger shift away from constitutional veneration and toward popular constitutional power.
The same is true in foreign policy. The answer to Trumpist unilateralism or bipartisan Beltway belligerence cannot be a restoration of respectable imperial management. Democrats need a foreign policy that rejects the security-state consensus rather than merely administering it more competently. That means arms restraint, serious limits on executive war-making, an end to unconditional support for partners engaged in systematic rights violations, a presumption against sanctions that devastate civilian life, meaningful refugee protection, and support for democratic self-determination even when the resulting politics do not align neatly with U.S. preferences. Moreover, the redistributive obligations that follow from American power should be placed at the center of our political debates, beginning with climate finance and debt relief.
Rana’s book also helps us see why this is both necessary and politically difficult. American primacy has benefited elites while also shaping the material expectations and national self-understanding of ordinary Americans. The postwar settlement linked domestic prosperity, however unevenly distributed, to dollar hegemony, military power, global markets, and the containment of alternatives. A left politics that challenges empire will therefore provoke resistance from defense contractors, foreign-policy professionals and, more troubling, from a broader culture accustomed to thinking of American power as the background condition of national well-being.
That is why a left foreign policy requires movements, institutions, and forms of political education that reconnect domestic and international struggle. The labor movement, climate justice movements, migrant justice movements, racial justice movements, Palestine solidarity movements, and antiwar organizing all have pieces of this analysis. What remains difficult is building a durable political formation that can translate these insights into governing power without being absorbed back into national security liberalism.
This is where The Constitutional Bind is most hopeful, despite the force of its critique. Rana recovers repressed traditions as resources rather than historical footnotes. The Panthers’ revolutionary constitutionalism, Black internationalist appeals to the decolonizing world, Indigenous refusals of creedal nationalism, feminist critiques of capitalism and empire, and labor radicalism all show that American constitutional politics has always contained more than the official story admits. These traditions were marginalized, domesticated or crushed. But they reveal that another constitutional imagination is possible: one that treats democracy as collective self-rule rather than reverence for inherited institutions, and freedom as incompatible with empire.
The midterms offer an opportunity to begin a left reorientation in the direction of these alternatives. If Democrats respond to the present by promising to restore constitutional normalcy and manage American power more responsibly, they will miss the deeper lesson of the moment. The old constitutional and international settlements are unraveling together. Rana’s achievement is to show how Americans came to mistake constitutional veneration for democratic freedom and imperial leadership for internationalism. The Constitutional Bind asks us to see that the crisis of American democracy and the crisis of American empire are one crisis. And it suggests that one way forward is to reclaim the legacy of earlier suppressed traditions that knew freedom would have to be made against the grain of both constitutional idolatry and imperial power. The task before us now is to build a politics of freedom that is democratic rather than court-centered, internationalist rather than imperial, and capacious enough to make solidarity across borders, constituencies, and struggles the ground of a new constitutional imagination.
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For more on Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind, check out our 2024 series, featuring Aziz, Maggie Blackhawk, Willy Forbath, and David Pozen.
