What Is the Left’s Theory of Power?

Writing for the blog of the Law and Political Economy Project, Beau Baumann, a professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, has a provocative question for would-be left-wing political reformers: What is your theory of constitutional politics?

By “constitutional politics,” Baumann means “a movement or coalition’s core claims about who should wield state power and on what terms.”

As Baumann observes, the most successful political movements in American history typically match their political demands with a theory of who ought to wield power. For Andrew Jackson’s democracy, it was a racially circumscribed polity of white men, whether landowners or laborers, represented by a broad-based political party whose leader — Jackson — could act as the embodiment of their will. For the radical Republicans of Reconstruction, the locus of state power was an almost imperial Congress, which wrote the political and ideological settlement of the Civil War into the constitutional order. And Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal centered power in both a quasi-independent administrative state and a vastly empowered managerial presidency, which also sought to represent the will of the whole people.

The MAGA right, and its tribune, Donald Trump, also has its constitutional politics.

The right, Baumann writes, has chosen to “treat the presidency as the authentic embodiment of popular will, work systematically to sideline Congress, selectively weaken administrative capacity and subordinate the bureaucracy to executive control.”

The MAGA right’s constitutional politics are essentially a neo-Bonapartism, with Trump as the man on horseback. No less than Vice President JD Vance has said as much. Here he is quoted in a 2022 Vanity Fair profile of the new right intellectuals who would eventually coalesce behind Trump in the 2024 presidential election:

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

The left, by contrast, has no clear vision of constitutional power and authority. If anything, it remains tied to the New Deal vision of “expertise-based authority and legal liberalism,” which Baumann calls the “dead gods of the New Deal,” essentially closed off by a Supreme Court whose members are deeply hostile to the administrative state. The problem is that to center a theory of power around the executive branch would be to leave a future left-oriented political project vulnerable to conservative reaction.

So where does the left find power? And how does it root this authority in the constitutional order? What, again, are the constitutional politics of the left?

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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.

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