The Anti-Oligarchy Popular Constitution

In The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Foundations of American Democracy (2022), Joey Fishkin and William E. Forbath seek a restoration to American politics of a coupling of political-cultural dispositions long in evidence here but recently gone out of style: for a casting of debates over economic and social policy in a “political-economy” frame, where political-structural dependencies and consequences routinely figure as primary considerations, along with those of economic efficiency, productivity, growth, and so on; and correspondingly for a pitch of those debates at a level of always immanent “constitutional” resonance and import. “Today,” lament Fishkin and Forbath, “structural political-economy arguments tend to strike [us] as policy arguments” -- as distinct, they mean, from “constitutional” ones -- in a world where “constitutional” has come to signify “for courts to decide” while “policy” means for legislative free choice. They say this ruefully, even as they recognize how that very tendency has generally been seen from the Left as more advantageous than detrimental for the progressive cause. Fishkin and Forbath urge powerfully that such has been the Left’s mistake. They urge on us a push toward a restoration of political economy to a constitutional level of attention and concern in American politics. In this commentary on their important book, I ask, inter alia: Do the authors see in such a restoration an important gain for the value and quality of our political democracy, aside from effects on the prospects for a bluish turn in prevailing policy directions -- even if, say, the resulting advantage would accrue to supporters of a classical-liberal political economy?