Constitution Day Speaker Discusses Modernizing Democracy

By Dr. Jesse Richman

University's Constitution Day commemoration took place on September 17,2020 with a lecture from Virginia Beach native Jamelle Bouie. A recording of the virtual event will be available soon.

David Uberti, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, describes Bouie as "one of the defining commentators on politics and race in the Trump era." When the Times added Bouie to its lineup of columnists in January 2019, it noted that he has "consistently driven understanding of politics deeper by bringing not only a reporter's eye but also a historian's perspective and sense of proportion to bear on the news."

Before joining the Times, Bouie, a Virginia Beach native who graduated from Kellam High School, was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He also worked at The Daily Beast as a staff writer and held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazines.

Bouie used he speech to argue that a key flaw in the Constitution involved its handling of political parties. While the framers were concerned about party polarization and the risk that rival factions could destroy their republic, the electoral system adopted (the only model available at the time) facilitated the creation of two rival parties rather than a more diverse system.

The risk in such a system is that polarization and conflict between the parties can create escalatory spirals in which each party begins to see the other as an existential threat. This produced the Civil War, Bouie argued, and another a partisan escalation spiral seems to be in place again in recent decades.

The solution, Bouie argued, should follow from Madison's Federalist 10 insight that a key way to tame the "mischiefs of faction" is to have more of them. By reforming the electoral system to encourage multiple parties through some form of proportional representation, the parties could be divided, and hopefully the partisan escalatory spiral broken.

ODU observes Constitution Day and Citizenship Day annually on Sept. 17 to commemorate the signing of the Constitution in 1787 and to "recognize all who, by coming of age or by naturalization, have become citizens."