The

The Hello and welcome to behind the news. My name is Doug Henwood.

Once again, contravening all that is traditional, just one guest today.

Aziz Rana, the masterful critic of the U.S. Constitution, on how the political system crafted by that document,

and the reverence with which it's been regarded, have not only given us Trump, but also have constricted our ability to fight him.

Watching Trump and the diffuse attempts to resist his lunge towards serious authoritarianism

made me think of Aziz Rana's critique of the Constitution, a document that has achieved

a status of near-sacred text in American political life despite its anti-democratic thrust.

Madison and the other founders were quite explicit in the Federalist

papers about devising a governing structure that would incorporate elements of democracy,

but all within a system that constrained popular power in the name of preventing mob rule.

Thus, the electoral college and the abomination that is the Senate. Yet this document is

venerated to a degree with few parallels elsewhere in the world.

The Mormon Church officially believes it to be divinely inspired, a belief shared by 37% of white

evangelicals and 18% of the overall U.S. population.

The framers of the Constitution also aimed, as Aziz will tell us, to prevent the presidency

from turning into a monarchical office, but Trump is doing

his best to overcome those limits. The groundwork for his assertion of dictatorial power was

laid by decades of expanding executive reach. Of course, to say that is not to deny that Trump

is a serious turn for the worse, but these things don't come out of nowhere. How did this constitutional system and the reverence

for it lead us to this miserable place? There's just no and better place to explore that question

than Aziz Rana. Last year, Aziz, a professor of law at Boston College, published the

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