On The Jacobin’s Interview with Aziz Rana: "Constitution v. Democracy"

“The spell is broken. The shell remains. What comes next must be built—not on faith, but on function.”

There are moments when critique becomes construction. Aziz Rana’s The Constitutional Bind is one such moment. We suggest you listen to his recent interview with The Jacobin’s Behind The News

—it is a lucid demolition of the myths that have kept Americans paralyzed as authoritarianism metastasizes. But critique alone is no longer enough. The question is no longer what failed, but what must be built while the center dissolves. Rana delivers a foundational framework—tracing “creedal constitutionalism” to its anti-majoritarian roots and specifying how intermediary institutions can be mobilized—and while doing so, comes to some conclusions which are highly amenable to points we hold dear.

Radical Federalism begins where Rana’s indictment leaves off. Like him, we recognize that the Constitution, venerated as sacred text, has been treated as scaffolding while we built a cage.1 But where he ends with the call for intermediary resistance, we begin in earnest. Because the intermediary is not just where culture and institutions resist—it is where sovereignty survives.

█ Rana dismantles the national myth; now we must repurpose the ruins into architecture.

Aziz Rana is unflinching in his diagnosis: the American constitutional order, structured and worshiped as infallible, enabled Trump’s rise and now guarantees his resilience.
The presidency, once hemmed by law, has become a monarchical weapon—supercharged by Cold War security doctrines and the bipartisan imperial consensus.
The Senate and Electoral College, originally designed to suppress popular rule, have calcified into engines of minority autocracy.
The Supreme Court, architected with the same anti-majoritarian suspicion, has not defended democracy but rather validated executive impunity.
Congress, designed weak and timid by founders wary of the mob, has retreated from governance into spectator status, ceding its authority to the executive out of habit, ideology, and cowardice.

Behind all of this lies the dead heart of creed: the idea that America’s redemption lies not in action but in the veneration of a document. The Constitution, Rana argues, has ceased to be a living framework and become a theological idol—a belief system he names “creedal constitutionalism.”

This creed is not merely mistaken. It is fatal.

█ The Constitution is not broken because Trump broke it—Trump is the outcome of its design functioning as intended.

Where Rana ends, Radical Federalism takes its first real steps.

Facing constitutional collapse, Rana lays out tactics for bottom-up leverage—union bargaining campaigns, bar-association ethics challenges, AAUP motions, civil-rights litigation, and local political coalitions. He points toward the middle layer of civic infrastructure as the last redoubt against authoritarian consolidation.

Radical Federalism names this same territory the intermediary scale, and here our frameworks converge. We see it not merely as a fallback space but as the true ground of continuity. We distinguish between the Mesh—rhizomatic protest networks, cultural insurgencies, mutual aid webs—and the Institution—the state governments, local courts, municipal bodies, and utilities that still command operational authority.

Where Rana envisions professional associations mobilizing moral pressure, we envision those same bodies—and the unions, bar associations, AAUP chapters he names—becoming operational jurisdictions that reclaim authority.

Where he calls for civil society to defend itself, we call for sovereign shelter to be constructed in advance.

He is right: the federal core cannot be salvaged. The future is not written by those clinging to Washington’s ruins, but by those who build from the middle outward.

█ The intermediary scale is not just a fallback space—it is the strategic terrain of democratic continuity and counterpower.

Here, however, Radical Federalism advances where Rana hesitates.

While he correctly diagnoses the moral bankruptcy of the constitutional order, Rana leaves legitimacy itself implicit. Nonetheless, he powerfully focusses on concrete specifics—rooted in social movement vitality, professional integrity, or cultural resurgence and providing detailed blueprints.

Radical Federalism treats legitimacy as central. It is not mystical. It is material—a stored resource, a strategic tool, a tangible architecture.

Governors can wield it by refusing to act as federal vassals and instead standing as stewards of constitutional life. Tribes, cities, and counties can claim it through protection, provision, and jurisdictional independence. The people themselves can restore it by building parallel institutions that outperform the collapsing empire.

Legitimacy is won not through faith but through function—by keeping order, delivering justice, and preserving life when the center no longer can.

█ Where Rana sees civil society, we see prefigurative government—structures that can outlive the empire and outgovern it.

Rana rightly rejects the fantasy of constitutional reform. He then urges a robust, intermediary‐scale network of unions, professional bodies, legal groups, and other organized institutions to check authoritarianism.

Radical Federalism builds on that institutional foundation—treating those same networks not just as sites of resistance but as the core elements of a parallel, jurisdictional governance architecture.

We argue that intermediary institutions must be hardened into sovereign infrastructure. Professional associations must become not just advocates, but jurisdictional frameworks. Lawsuits must be paired with legal defense networks ready to defend communities when federal protections dissolve. Protests against deportations must evolve into sanctuaries backed not just by churches or nonprofits, but by state compacts and alternative governance.

Failover governance must be constructed now—before the storm overtakes what remains.

█ Survival is no longer theoretical; it is logistical, infrastructural, and jurisdictional—and it begins now.

Aziz Rana brings us to the precipice. He strips away the illusions of mid-century harmony and elite consensus, showing that the brittle constitutional system was never inevitable, never stable, and never enough.

What remains is not merely a battlefield of ideas, but a battlefield of infrastructure. Power now lies in the hands of those who control jurisdictions, who maintain vital systems, who shelter communities through the storms to come.

State governors who act not as administrative managers but as constitutional architects will anchor the coming federated future. Unionized workforces will form the operational backbone of survival. Local courts and public defenders who refuse to abandon justice will become the final legal guardians when the federal courts collapse into servility. Civil society must move beyond advocacy and into the construction of real, living institutions that will replace the empire’s broken machinery.

Rana has cleared the ground. Now we must lay brick and wire.

Because the intermediary scale is not merely the fallback space—it is the construction site of the next republic.

█ We do not await collapse—we build through it, beneath it, and beyond it, knowing the future will be federated or not at all.

Aziz Rana dissolves the illusion that constitutional faith can save a republic already hollowed from within. He names the internal contradictions that made authoritarianism inevitable rather than anomalous.

Radical Federalism accepts this diagnosis but refuses paralysis. We take Rana’s insight and forge it into blueprint. We take his critique and bind it into construction. We take his despair and hammer it into doctrine.

The shell is cracked. The center is hollow.

What survives will be what we build next—at the edges, in the middle, and with our own hands.

█ The bind is real—but the blueprint is ready.