![]() ![]() By contrast, he explained that popular sovereignty “focuses on the fact that a lot of people are occupying a given territory, and they are not united by national characteristics.” All nationalism, he said, is “basically dangerous” because it is based on the idea of shared national characteristics. Levinson praised the book for distinguishing between nationalism and popular sovereignty. So, this depends obviously on how one defines populism.” “And I’m certainly hostile to those political elites who either praise the Constitution or simply say, we shouldn’t worry about the Constitution so much, because other things are so much more important that the Constitution basically becomes nugatory. “If one really defines populism as being anti-institutional, then I suppose the answer has to be ‘kind of,’” he said. Constitution and proponent of a new constitutional convention, Sanford Levinson, a professor of law at the University of Texas Law School and a visiting professor at Harvard, mused about whether his stance makes him a populist. “So, I just wonder whether, in the context of thinking about what a constitution is, there isn’t more work to be done about the relationship between constitutionalism, the liberal constitutionalism you’re describing, and majoritarianism as an essential qualification for it,” he said.Ī self-described critic of the U.S. Senate and the Senate filibuster, which he says means many decisions in that body are controlled by “21 states representing 21% of America’s population.” Lessig argued that democracy in the United States is more minoritarian than majoritarian due to several factors, including gerrymandering, which helps determine the compositions of state legislatures and the House of Representatives population imbalances among the states that are reflected in the Electoral College and the U.S. is in many ways ruled, he said, by a minority of the people. He also questioned one of the central elements of constitutionalism the authors lay out in the book, the idea that policies must be determined by the preferences of the popular majority, and whether it aligns with the reality that the U.S. “This is a feature of a system because the more they can enrage us and polarize us, the more profit they make.” In response, we need, he said, “to be realists about how the people are engaged, or how they understand what they are engaging with, so that we can guide … the process in a way that brings out the best of them when they are playing their role.” He took particular aim at social media, which he said exists to “drive people into partisan corners.” Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig argued that any analysis of populism should not ignore the question of how voters access information about the issues they are asked to decide at the polls. He also noted, however, that the book showed that not all people who run as populists end up governing that way. “One of the things that I think we observe with lots and lots of populist movements…,” Ginsburg observed, “is a desire to shrink that space, that is to actually undermine the institutions” that underpin democracy. Responding to the book, University of Chicago Law School Professor Tom Ginsburg said that, while he is convinced that populism “in some forms can be pluralistic,” he nevertheless remained “a little skeptical of most populism.” The problem, he said, is that most populists aren’t grounded in the institutions and technocratic bureaucracy that makes democracy work. While they found instances of “populists dressed up as autocrats,” who violate constitutional norms, the authors also came to believe that “sometimes populism is a needed corrective to anti-democratic tendencies in current politics around the world.” Opening the program, Bugarič said he and Tushnet had intentionally set out “to challenge the mainstream, the dominant view, that populism is always in every instance antithetical, inimical, incompatible with constitutionalism.” To do this, they examined a series of case studies of populism across the globe and tried to draw empirical conclusions. ![]() Mark Tushnet and Bojan Bugarič, authors of “Power to the People: Constitutionalism in the Age of Populism”
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