President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers built their politics around this tradition, winning the fight against the “economic royalists” and “industrial despots.”īut today, as we enter a new Gilded Age, this tradition in progressive American economic and political thought lies dormant. During Reconstruction Radical Republicans argued in this tradition that racial equality required breaking up the oligarchy of the slave power and distributing wealth and opportunity to former slaves and their descendants. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to fight for the constitutional right to form a union. But as Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show in this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought.įishkin and Forbath demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this “democracy of opportunity” tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it has almost nothing to say about this threat. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the “republican form of government” the Constitution requires. Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. In this gold mine of historical discovery and legal insight, Fishkin and Forbath recover and renew the lost Constitution of strong democratic opportunity for all.” The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy
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