Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: Democracy in America is being undermined in all three branches of the government: the electoral college, the filibuster, gerrymandering, extremist courts.So it’s time to write, and ratify, a new constitution: that’s what Erwin Chemerinsky says.  He’ll make the case, later in the show.
But first: How Kamala surprised everybody. Harold Meyerson will explain–in a minute.

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With 10 weeks to go in the campaign, I want to start today by looking at where we’ve been, and all the surprises. We were surprised by Biden’s disastrous debate. That was June 27th. Of course, we were surprised when Trump was almost assassinated on July 13th, and we were surprised when Biden dropped out on July 21st. All that came in four incredible weeks. 
And then came what in many ways was the biggest surprise of all: Kamala turned out to be a great candidate. That was the Kamala surprise. How did that happen? For comment we turn to Harold Meyerson. Of course he’s editor-at-large of the American Prospect. Harold, welcome back.

Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here.

JW: Kamala has completely transformed the election. She leads in most national and battleground state polls. Her rallies fill stadiums, her fundraising is awesome, and all of this surprised pretty much everybody, including Donald Trump. But you say the first thing we need to understand is not about a change in Kamala, it’s about the change in the Democratic Party. Please explain.

HM: Well, yeah, I mean, when she was running for president in 2019, the campaign was such a disaster it didn’t even make it into 2020, which is when the elections were held. She was sort of toggling uneasily between left and center in the Democratic Party. She was Medicare for All on the one hand, and she had a record as a more centrist on the other hand and it was difficult for her to navigate this.
Since then, over the last four years, and this is probably the single greatest political achievement of Joe Biden, there has been kind of a center-left mushing together. When Biden was preparing to be inaugurated, he set up some committees with backers of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They made recommendations for appointments, and you can see those kinds of progressives on Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, in the Labor Department, at the Federal Trade Commission, at the National Labor Relations Board.
There was sort of a real coming together around, among other things, the unenacted Build Back Better bill that Biden put before Congress. And so this kind of uneasy tightrope walk that Kamala was doing in 2019 really is no longer necessary.
And she really does give voice to what is overwhelming consensus in the party, that we need to tax the rich more and use the proceeds to create more affordable housing, more affordable childcare, a bigger child tax credit, more affordable college, et cetera.
In other words, the mainstream of the party has pretty much rejected many of the tenets of its neoliberal past, which certainly were brought to mind, at least minds like ours when we heard from speakers like Bill Clinton during the convention, and moved on to a realization of a more suitable role I would say, for the state to counter the inequalities of the market. And so she to begin with, inherited all of that and is doing very well articulating its various points.

JW: Pay to families with kids, provisions for medical and family leave, making childcare affordable, helping with housing costs – that does not sound much like the campus left of the last decade or so.

HM: Well, there’s also, for lack of a better term, a kind of post-identitarian aspect to what have become I would say, real world Democratic Party politics. The left has been in a kind of identitarian phase for some time now, particularly on campuses. And there’s sort of all kinds of good reasons why that’s been the case, but it is not the way to build a political majority and in many ways it doesn’t fundamentally address really what’s basically wrong with the huge levels of inequality and economic inequality in American society.
Whereas the kinds of things that Kamala is talking about, derived in part from the kinds of things that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and others like them were talking about, do address these things. So there’s a kind of, you should pardon the characterization, the kind of policy and electorally irrelevant sorts of leftism that one has encountered on campuses. And then there’s I think the real world, not radical, but leftism that we’re hearing out of the Harris-Walz ticket.
We have construction upstairs, and we may be hearing a little bit of it. Anyway, those are noises from upstairs, not for instance, my stomach.

JW: Okay. So the Kamala program is – we call that basically the care economy, but in her convention speech, Kamala paired that with a militaristic tough guy stance towards the rest of the world. A lot of my left-wing friends really did not like that part. Why did she do that?

HM: I think anytime a woman is running for the head of government office, there’s almost an inherent pressure to bring out, or in this case maybe create out of whole cloth, a kind of Maggie Thatcher version of toughness. In this case not the kind of neo-imperialist bellicosity that we associate with Maggie Thatcher. But that there are a lot of voters, swing voters in particular, who need to be reassured that a woman will defend the national interests. And like it or not, I think that is unfortunately an electoral necessity for any woman running for head of government.

JW: And then of course there was Gaza, the biggest issue for her critics on the left. The Gaza protesters in the streets of Chicago and elsewhere are not going to vote for Trump, but they’ve been saying they will not vote for her. At the convention she said, “Now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done.” And she described a post-war future in which Palestinians can “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” That was much farther than any of the other speakers at the convention, much more than AOC, more than Bernie, but was that enough to bring in at least some of those who have promised to stay out?

HM: Let’s also acknowledge that the demonstrations outside the convention were really underwhelming. And those of us who attended the convention had to go through the security perimeters that were many blocks away from both the United Center where the convention was held, and then McCormick Place where there were all these breakout sessions, anticipating a far greater turnout than in fact happened. I suspect in general that Trump concentrates the mind. I do not think there will be that many left holdouts as a result of the level of balancing of concerns, et cetera, that we heard in Kamala’s speech. Now, it’s also the case that she benefits simply from not having been Joe Biden. I’m sure the demonstrations would’ve been far larger had the convention proclaimed Joe Biden was the nominee. Just by virtue frankly, of not being Joe Biden she defuses a share of that. I think there is expectation without her specifically saying it, that she’s willing to scale back aid to Israel in some sense, at least some offensive weapons, in a way that Biden has not been.

JW: I want to remind our listeners of some of the most memorable lines from the convention. Michelle Obama said, “Until recently, I have mourned the dimming of hope. Maybe you’ve experienced the same feelings, a deep pit in my stomach, a palpable sense of dread about the future,” but she said, “America, hope is back.”
And we had Oprah, who said something really powerful. “If you do not have autonomy over this,” she said, pointing at her body, “if you cannot control when and how you choose to bring your children into this world and how they are raised and supported, there is no American dream.”
I thought those were wonderful moments.

HM: Yeah, well, I mean, I think Michelle Obama’s speech was probably the best speech of the convention eclipsing not just her husband’s, but just about anyone else’s as well. It was really, I think the definitive anti-Trump take down of any kind that we’ve ever heard. And Oprah’s was so classically perfectly delivered. It was almost like a musical performance. It was really very striking. I thought it was almost cruel and unusual punishment for Tim Walz to have to follow Oprah. I mean, I don’t think anyone could have followed Oprah.

JW: The biggest slogan of the DNC was “We’re not going back.” I take that to mean, first of all not going back to Trump being president, but more broadly, we’re not going back to the America that MAGA wants to restore, the white man’s country where women don’t claim equality and people of color don’t challenge the status quo. Is there more to “We’re not going back.”

HM: There is. I think it’s also; we’re not going back to two old white guys rehashing what they’ve been saying for a number of years already. This sense of joy at the convention. I’ve been to joyous conventions. I’ve been to a lot of conventions. There was joy at the convention that nominated Bill Clinton. There was joy at the convention that nominated Barack Obama. There was joy at the convention that nominated Hillary Clinton. What sets this apart is first an almost cosmic sense of relief that these delegates who frankly were prepared to be depressed throughout a convention that was renominating Joe Biden or else were thinking of not even showing up, that this huge burden had been lifted from them on top of which you have what you, I think adequately characterized at the start of our talk, as the surprise of Kamala coming out as a really pretty terrific campaigner.
So in addition to the historic aspects of her convention and the sense that the catastrophe of the Trump presidency may now be averted, that produced a high, a kind of elation that I’ve never seen before at a convention. And I think counting both parties, I have probably been, I think, to 17 conventions.

JW: Oh my goodness. Well, certainly we thank you and we salute you for putting up with 17 conventions.

HM: Yeah, well, the first one I was 10 years old. It was at LA in 1960 that nominated John Kennedy, and my parents had tickets to that, so I went to that. So I’m adding, that’s part of the 17.

JW: You didn’t write about that for the elementary school newsletter?

HM: Fourth grade. I probably talked about it with my fourth-grade buddies.

JW: I want to contrast that sense of joy that you report with the way we felt on July 13th. That was the day of the assassination attempt. A lot of us thought that afternoon that Trump had just won the election, and a couple of days later at the RNC, the first 20 minutes of his acceptance speech seemed to confirm that. But all that is gone now. It’s almost like it never happened, and even the Republicans barely mention it. Vance tested a line last week at a rally in Asheboro, North Carolina. He said, “They couldn’t beat him at the ballot box, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison, and they even tried to kill him.” J.D. Vance last week. But it didn’t go over that well.
Obviously, the Democrats did not try to kill Trump. And Jamie Raskin replied by reminding Vance that the people who said they wanted to kill his predecessor, “Hang Mike Pence” – they were Republicans, and Vance has not used that line, “They tried to kill him” since that Asheboro rally a week ago as far as I can tell. So the assassination attempt has almost been forgotten in this campaign. That’s another big surprise. How do you think that happened?

HM: I think the public’s view of the coming election was a real sense of depression and almost resentment that it was Trump versus Biden. And the injection or the substitution of Kamala Harris for Biden really almost said, 

I think really Kamala’s coming out as it were, was like a new birth for this particular election. And to carry that perhaps to an absurd length, there is almost a born-again quality to Democrats.

JW: Okay.

HM: Since she has replaced Biden.

JW: And finally, we have some new polls. We’re speaking here on Tuesday afternoon. Right now, the 538 forecast, which takes into account not only the poll but structural factors like the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, and various other so-called objective measures; the 538 forecast right now says Kamala’s chances of winning are about 60%. They think right now she would carry Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, plus Arizona and Nevada, and they have her tied now in Georgia and North Carolina, which would give her a total of something like 289 electoral votes to 249 for Trump.
Kamala and Tim Walz will campaign in Southern Georgia this week, Wednesday and Thursday ending with a big rally in Savannah. The reports say there are now 35,000 Kamala volunteers in Georgia, 174 staffers, 24 campaign offices across the state. That sounds pretty impressive to me.

HM: That’s probably more people on the side of decency in Georgia than any time since Sherman marched through it.

JW: [Laughter] Harold Meyerson writes for The American Prospect at prospect.org. Thank you, Harold.

HM: Always good to be here, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: American democracy is in serious trouble, and the underlying problem is the Constitution itself: that’s what Erwin Chemerinsky says. He’s dean of the Law School at UC Berkeley, he’s a frequent contributor to The New York Times and The LA Times, and he’s the author of 15 books, most recently, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States. Erwin, welcome back.

Erwin Chemerinsky: Such a pleasure to talk with you.

JW: We all have a vague sense that nobody is really happy with the way the American government is working these days, but you have some evidence about this from surveys of confidence in the institutions of American government. What can you report?

EC: The Pew Research Institute does a survey every year about confidence in government. They’ve done it since the 1950s. The high-water mark was in 1964, when 77% of those surveyed expressed confidence in government. In the last survey, in October of 2023, only 20% expressed confidence in government. Congress and the Supreme Court have the lowest approval ratings in history.

JW: And what groups in particular have lost faith in democracy? Is it mostly the older white people who didn’t go to college and who vote for Trump?

EC: Just the opposite. What I’m most frightened by is it’s people in their 20s and 30s who’ve expressed the least confidence in government. In fact, one survey had 20% of those in that age group thought the dictatorship would be an appropriate form of government under some circumstances.

JW: Of course, the greatest failure of our democracy has been the failure to elect the president who got the most votes twice in the last 24 years. Al Gore in 2000 beat George W. Bush by about half a million votes, and of course, Hillary in 2016 beat Trump by three million votes. And of course, the reason is the Electoral College, which of course is the giant problem we face right now in the next, what is it, eight weeks?
I think everybody knows that the winner-take-all rule for states means that the election will be decided by six or seven states, the swing states, the battleground states. Now we all kind of know them by heart: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina.
Why don’t we have majority rule in presidential elections? Was this just a slip-up by the Founding Fathers when they wrote the Constitution?

EC: Of course not. It was a deliberate choice, and it was a choice for reasons that should make us very uncomfortable with the Electoral College. Some of it was that the framers of the Constitution distrusted the people. Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers explained that’s why they wanted the Electoral College, so the elites could choose the president. But even more pernicious, the Electoral College was created to help southern states with large, enslaved populations get more political strength. The Constitution provided that enslaved individuals would count as three-fifths of a person in allocating seats in the House of Representatives. Well, the number of electors that a state gets is its representatives plus its senators.
This isn’t just something we realize in hindsight. Hugh Williamson, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from North Carolina, praised the Electoral College because it’d give North Carolina more political strength because its enslaved population would count in determining the electors it got. James Madison from Virginia at the Constitutional Convention praised the Electoral College for the same reason.
But rarely in American history, until this century, does the Electoral College matter. Never in the 20th century did the loser of the popular vote become president because of the Electoral College. Unfortunately, population shifts, and partisan shifts mean that it’s likely to happen often in the 21st century. You mentioned 2000 and 2016, but in 2004, if John Kerry had won Ohio, he would’ve been president, even though he lost the popular vote. In 2020, if 42,000 votes came out different in three states, and that’s less than the number of people who fit in a baseball or football stadium, Trump would’ve been president despite losing the popular vote by 7 million votes.

JW: But the Constitution does not require that the winner of a state’s popular vote take all the electoral votes of that state, and that’s why there are a lot of proposals to reform the Electoral College. My favorite is that each state should allocate its electoral vote in proportion to the popular vote. That would still give more power to the smaller states, but it would be a lot more democratic than what we have now, and it would not require a constitutional amendment. All it requires is that the states decide to do it on their own. So how about reforming the Electoral College?

EC: The ideal would be to eliminate the Electoral College, but since a constitutional amendment is unlikely, your approach, eliminating winner-take-all makes great sense. There’s data that shows if winner-take-all is eliminated, it’s unlikely that the loser in the popular vote would win in the Electoral College.
The problem is that the mechanism that you described will never happen. States won’t do this on their own. No state wants to practice unilateral disarmament. California is not going to give a proportionate share of electors to Republicans. That’s the number of votes in the state. Texas isn’t going to give a proportionate share of electors to Democrats in the state.
So the way to do this would be Congress would need to pass a law that says that the allocation of seats in the Electoral College shall be by congressional district, or proportional to the votes in the state, and that at least would greatly reduce the likelihood that the person who loses the popular vote could end up as president of the United States.

JW: The next big obstacle to democracy is the Senate, which was created to be explicitly anti-democratic, not based on majority rule. Originally, senators were appointed by the state legislatures. Another thing that’s not just a slipup of the founding fathers, but the Senate has gotten a lot worse very recently because of the filibuster. Is the filibuster in the Constitution?

EC: No, the filibuster is not in the Constitution. It’s not in federal statutes. It’s created by a Senate rule. But I want to back up before we talk about the filibuster.
When the Constitution was written in 1787, the difference between the most populous state and the least populous state was 12 to 1. Now the difference between the most populous state, California, and the least populous state, Wyoming, is 68 to 1. To show the practical effect of this, in the last session of Congress, there were 50 Democratic senators and 50 Republican senators. The 50 Democratic senators represented 42 million more people than the 50 Republican senators, and this then is made worse by the filibuster.
And the filibuster changed in the 1970s, and I’ve learned that most people aren’t aware of that. People, at least of our generation, think of the filibuster with Jimmy Stewart and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington where he held the podium against corruption until he literally collapsed. Now it’s a virtual filibuster. The filibuster doesn’t actually take place with somebody holding the podium. If a senator indicates a desire to filibuster, it takes 60 votes to end the filibuster. The Senate goes on with its business, there’s no delay, no obstruction of Senate business, and unless there’s 60 votes, no legislation will ever pass, except for budget legislation.
This, I think, contributes to why government isn’t dealing with social problems and why people have lost confidence in government.

JW: The next big obstacle to democracy is gerrymandering of the House of Representatives. The House was designed to be based on the popular vote. What went wrong? Why isn’t gerrymandering prohibited by the Constitution?

EC: Gerrymandering is not prohibited by the Constitution. It’s gone on since early in American history. It takes its name from a governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry. But what’s changed is that because of sophisticated computer programs and detailed voter analysis, it’s possible to engage in partisan gerrymandering with far more precision than ever before.
Take one example, North Carolina’s a purple state. It went for Obama in 2008. In 2020, Trump beat Biden in North Carolina by 1.35%. When Republicans took the North Carolina Legislature, they engaged in gerrymandering of congressional districts. They were open. They said, ‘There’s 10 congressional districts. We want to give Republicans control of at least 10, and if we can do more, we’ll do that.’
Well, they ran 3,000 different maps through a computer of how to draw districts. They picked the one that was most likely to give Republicans 10 of 13 seats. Not surprisingly, it worked. In both 2016 and 2018, Democrats and Republicans who were running for Congress in North Carolina overall got almost exactly the same number of votes, but Republicans won 10 of 13 seats. And I can show you this in state after state.

JW: And finally, the last huge problem for democracy, the Supreme Court. It was created by those founding fathers to serve as a check on the excesses of majority rule. How’s that going?

EC: Certainly, the Supreme Court, at times, has been a check on majority rule, but there’s also ways in which the Supreme Court, especially in the last two decades, has undermined democracy. Take Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010. It said that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money to get candidates selected or defeated. This has contributed greatly to cynicism about our political system, and especially in state and local elections, to lower visibility, it can be shown that corporate expenditures have a key role in determining the outcome.
Or we can talk about Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court decision from 2013. It gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I think of the Voting Rights Act as the most important laws adopted in our lifetime. One of the crucial provisions said that for jurisdictions with a history of race discrimination in voting, they needed to get pre-approval from the Attorney General before significantly changing their election systems. Hundreds of changes in election systems that have disadvantaged minority voters were blocked through this. But Shelby County, the court struck down the pre-clearance requirement.
Immediately, North Carolina, Texas, and other states put into effect discriminatory election rules that had previously been blocked.

JW: You’ve only left out one thing, immunity from prosecution for presidents. Care to comment on that?

EC: Sure. Of course, this book manuscript was finished last fall. The Supreme Court’s decision about immunity was on July 1, 2024. It’s Trump v. United States. I think there should be a hall of shame of terrible Supreme Court decisions. Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. United States, the ones I just mentioned. Trump v. United States belongs in that hall of shame.
The Supreme Court said that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for anything done carrying out official duties under the Constitution or statute. As Justice Sotomayor said in her dissent, if a president orders the Navy SEALs to assassinate a political rival, he’s exercising power as commander-in-chief. The court says his motives don’t matter. Absolute immunity. The president orders the Justice Department to engage in prosecutions for political retribution, something that Donald Trump has been clear he wants to do if he’s elected, absolute immunity from the president. The president takes bribes to issue pardons, absolute immunity for the president.
I think a core idea of the Constitution, or the rule of law is that no one, not even a president, is above the law. This case so much says the president is above the law.

JW: And what was the vote in this case?

EC: The vote was six to three.

JW: Now, does the Constitution require nine justices?

EC: No. The number of justices, as you know, is set by federal statute. It’s varied from five to 10 over the course of American history. Nine is a historic accident from the late 1860s. Congress could, if it had the political will to do so, increase the number of Supreme Court justices.

JW: And it’s certainly been proposed, especially since the immunity decision, that Congress expand the court to 11 or 13 justices ,and that term limits be imposed, and of course that presidential immunity could be eliminated. That sounds like a good idea.

EC: In terms of expanding the size of the Supreme Court, it’s not going to happen with a Republican House of Representatives. They’re not going to give the Democratic president more seats to fill on the Supreme Court. And I worry that even if there’s a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate, a Democratic House, the filibuster by Republicans in the Senate would preclude this from ever happening.
In terms of overcoming the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, the Supreme Court was clear in Trump v. United States that Congress cannot override the president’s immunity, so I don’t think there’s anything to be done short of a constitutional amendment.
I fear the same is true of term limits. I strongly favor term limits for Supreme Court justices, but I think it would take a constitutional amendment. Article III is always understood to say that justices have their positions for life unless they retire or are impeached and removed.

JW: Okay. So we have major problems with the way we elect the president, with the Senate and the filibuster, with the gerrymandering of the House, and with the Supreme Court. That’s all the branches of our constitutional government, all of which have been working against democracy, against majority rule. It sounds like we need a lot of amendments to the Constitution. How many of these problems could actually be fixed by passing constitutional amendments?

EC: All but one could be fixed by constitutional amendment. The only one that couldn’t be fixed is two senators per state. Article V of the Constitution, which deals with amendments, lists two provisions that couldn’t be changed by amendment, and that’s one of them.
But I want to go to a step earlier. I think most of these problems could be fixed by statute without needing a constitutional amendment. Winner-take-all could be fixed by a federal statute. I think expanding the House of Representatives would help. That could be done by federal statute. The filibuster, as we said, could be eliminated or modified by a change in the Senate rules. I think there’s a good deal that could be done with regard to overcoming the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, campaign finance reform, just done by statute, federal, state, or local. I think Congress could pass a much stronger voting rights act to get over Shelby County v. Holder. In fact, in the last session of Congress, the House of Representatives passed some bills to do this, but they died in the Senate because of Republican filibusters.
Beyond what can be done by statute, there can be constitutional amendments, though of course it’s very hard to amend the Constitution. My book focuses on the problems in the Constitution. One of them is the framers made it far too difficult to amend. The Constitution has been amended only 17 times since 1791, and one of those was to create and another to appeal prohibition.

JW: Well, if it’s hard to amend the Constitution, it’s hard even to imagine starting over with a new one, a constitution, but that’s what you have done in this book. My first worry, the worry of a lot of people, is that if we did have a constitutional convention, there are powerful forces in America that would like a new constitution to declare that the United States is a Christian republic. That fetuses have rights. They want to abolish birthright citizenship for children of immigrants. They want to protect, in the Constitution, the right of individuals to own virtually any gun. Are you sure a constitutional convention wouldn’t make things worse?

EC: No, I’m not sure. A constitutional convention could also make so many things better. The constitutional convention could create a constitution that’s far more suited for the 21st century. And let’s start with the reality. It’s absurd that our country is governed by a document written in 1787 for a small agrarian society, small in population, small in geography. The more the current Supreme Court says that the Constitution today means what it did in 1787, the more absurd it is to be governed by it.
You raise serious threats that could exist through a constitutional convention, but what I get hope from is the constitutional convention can’t change the Constitution by itself. Whatever it proposes would have to be adopted, and my hope is it would have to be adopted through a vote of the people as it’s done in many foreign countries, and my hope is that if there were a constitutional convention, the men and women there would live up to their roles. It’s not that those in 1787 were divinely inspired, they weren’t more brilliant than people today, but they saw responsibility, a role to draft a constitution that could be adopted.
And so I would hope that those who would be part of this constitutional convention would fulfill that role, but in the end, the check is the vote of the people. And I have enough confidence in the people that what you described wouldn’t get adopted as a constitution, so I don’t think it would even be drafted as such.

JW: One of the most interesting things about your new book is you actually lay out very clearly what you think the steps would be to accomplishing this. For example, who would call a constitutional convention and how would delegates be chosen?

EC: I think Congress could call a constitutional convention, and I think it would need to be a statute that provided for the choice of delegates in a way that was bipartisan and would be able to secure approval of people all across the political spectrum.
Now, let me be clear, this isn’t what Article V of the Constitution prescribes for a constitutional convention. Article V says two-thirds of the states can call for a constitutional convention, and what it provides and recommends would need to be approved by three-quarters of the states. The problem is, if we use that mechanism, we’re never going to eliminate the Electoral College. The small states will never go along with doing that. We’ll never eliminate two senators per state and so on.
Under the Articles of Confederation, it will take unanimous agreement of the states to modify it. When there was the convention in 1787, it was called just to modify the Articles of Confederation. They took it on themselves, drafting a new constitution, and they said it would be deemed approved if three-quarters of the states ratified it. They weren’t following the procedures of the existing Constitution, nor do I think we have to do so today.
And again, I’m not saying this is going to happen anytime soon, but I do think if ever we’re going to have a constitutional convention, we’ve got to start talking about it and recognizing it really doesn’t make sense to be governed by a document from 1787.

JW: And if we don’t create and ratify a more democratic constitution, what do you think will happen then?

EC: I don’t know, but I’m afraid. We might continue to muddle along, but how long can a government survive without confidence of the people? How long can a government survive when the population is so deeply polarized? I worry that the United States could drift, as other countries have, to authoritarianism. We’ve certainly seen a rise in authoritarian countries around the world. The title of the book says, “No Democracy Lasts Forever.” I think it’s foolhardy to believe that the United States can always resist the pressures to authoritarianism that have been so powerful in other countries.
Or it’s possible that we’ll start talking about secession. I’ll make a bold prediction. If Donald Trump wins in November and there’s a Republican majority in the Senate and the House, I think we’ll hear serious talk about secession. It’s not going to happen now, but the underlying question people face is – is what unites the country still greater than what divides us?

JW: Erwin Chemerinsky – his new book is No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.  Erwin, thanks for all your work – and thanks for talking with us today.

EC: Jon, thank you so very much.