Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them

022635072X rar An eye-opening account of how Americans came to revere the Constitution and what this reverence has meant domestically and around the world. Some Americans today worry that the Federal Constitution is ill-equipped to respond to mounting democratic threats and may even exacerbate the worst features of American politics. Yet for as long as anyone can remember, the Constitution has occupied a quasi-mythical status in American political culture, which ties ideals of liberty and equality to assumptions about the inherent goodness of the texts design. The Constitutional Bind explores how a flawed document came to be so glorified and how this has impacted American life. In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that todays reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home. Read more