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........

© The New York Times