This is a recording of NPEC's panel event with Aziz Rana and Matt McManus about the left's approach to the Constitution. Topics include how the left navigates terms like “bourgeois democracy," and how it should approach the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with its promises of equality and universal rights. The conversation asks us to push beyond conventional framings of constitutionalism and question what a genuinely democratic politics should look like today. A question-and-answer period follows the conversation.

Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College. He is the author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them and The Two Faces of American Freedom.

Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College. His books include Against Post-Liberal Courts and Justice and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. 

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