No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States
Erwin Chemerinsky
No Democracy Lasts Forever argues that the Constitution has become a threat to American democracy and must be dramatically changed or replaced if secession is to be avoided.
Deeply troubled by the Constitution’s inherent flaws, Erwin Chemerinsky, the renowned dean of Berkeley law school, came to the sobering conclusion that our nearly 250-year-old founding document is responsible for the crisis now facing American democracy. Pointing out that just fifteen of the 11,848 amendments proposed since 1789 have passed, Chemerinsky contends that the very nature of our polarization results from the Constitution’s “bad bones,” which have created a government that no longer works or has the confidence of the public. Yet political armageddon can still be avoided, Chemerinsky writes, if a new constitutional convention is empowered to replace the Constitution of 1787, much as the Founding Fathers replaced the outdated Articles of Confederation. If this isn’t possible, Americans must give serious thought to forms of secession—including a United States structured like the European Union—based on a recognition that what divides us as a country is, in fact, greater than what unites us.
(Goodreads.com)
Per Google AI: the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that unilateral secession (a state leaving the Union without the consent of the other states or a constitutional amendment) is not legally permitted.
I think Chereminsky’s approach is wrongheaded anyway. The fundamental problem, in my view, is that a substantial majority of Americans have lost a clear idea about the fundamental principles upon which the U. S. is based, and I don’t mean just Republicans!
I don’t think that enough Americans accept unequivocally that all humans are created equal. Without that, much of the moral framework of the US is a sandcastle that comes and goes with the tides. And we see, today, that it is going out with the Trump tide.