THE CONSTITUTION VS. AMERICA

On Erwin Chemerinsky’s ‘No Democracy Lasts Forever’

A demonstrator dressed as a handmaid from The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, carries a copy of the U.S. Constitution on November 9 in Washington while protesting what she sees as the nation’s growing slide toward authoritarianism. / Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images.

No Democracy Lasts Forever by the legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky has an ominous title and the message it delivers is similarly devastating. It examines the present threat—there’s no other word for it—posed to the country by the Constitution itself. It’s a counterintuitive idea—America’s most sacred document is synonymous with our notion of democracy—and a frightening one.

Chemerinsky is the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and the author of nineteen academic books, most of which deal with the Supreme Court and the Constitution. No Democracy Lasts Forever was published last year, before President Donald Trump’s re-election, by Liveright. Chemerinsky argues that the grave divisions in the United States today—especially those exposed by the foreign and domestic policies of the Trump administration—may signal nothing less than secession along political lines.

Chemerinsky points out that the Constitution was written by the educated elites, some of them slaveowners, and favored the post-Revolutionary status quo. They were men who essentially distrusted democracy. He writes: “Of the four institutions of government created by the Constitution—the president, the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the House of Representatives—only one, the House, was democratically elected or accountable. The president was and still is chosen by the Electoral College. The Constitution does not even require that states allow people to vote for president or that they accord their electors to the winners of the popular vote. It is hard for us to fathom, but in the early decades of American history, in some states it was their legislature, not the voters, that decided who would be that state’s electors in the Electoral College.”

It was John Eastman, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, who understood the vulnerability of the Electoral College and recommended to Trump when the 2020 election was won by Joe Biden that he urge Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification of electors in enough states to overturn the result. It had happened before, as Eastman knew. Pence was awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2025 for having the political backbone to refuse to do so and to allow the constitutional process to continue. Eastman in 2024 was disbarred in California. He has also been preemptively pardoned by Trump for any possible federal charges to do with subverting the 2020 election.