Checks and Balances Won't Save Us Now. What Will?

Amid the brazen attacks of Trump’s first 100 days in office, courts have played a leading role in resistance to the authoritarian onslaught.This issue—the first in Boston Review’s 50th anniversary year—warns against relying on them to defend democracy and lays out a better response to the crisis we face.

Leading a forum, political scientist Lisa L. Miller argues that liberal hopes in checks and balances are badly misplaced. Far from a safeguard of democracy, America’s constitutional order has always been at odds with it. Doubling down on it, even at this moment, will only make things worse.

Trump does not represent a majority of Americans, Miller stresses. From health care to the minimum wage, most people want much more from government. But time and again, powerful elites exploit the system to block desperately needed reforms and protect the status quo. Too many checks and balances are what got us here, breeding discontent with the system. And only broad-based mass movements can get us beyond it.

Forum respondents include historian Lily Geismer, organizers Eric Blanc and Kelly Hayes, journalist Maya Schenwar, sociologist Gianpaolo Baiocchi, and legal scholars Marcus Gadson, Aziz Huq, and Samuel Moyn.

Also in the issue, Judith Levine reports on mutual aid as resistance, Troy Nahumko writes from Spain on the global right’s war on memory, and Debbie Nathan traces the insidious history of the national security exception fueling Trump’s deportation machine.

Plus, Benjamin Balthaser examines Jewish dissent from Zionism and American liberalism’s identity crisis. Emily Baughan chronicles the demise of Liverpool’s working class, a harbinger of workers’ obsolescence in the United States and elsewhere. Vietnam veteran and activist David Cortright draws lessons from the antiwar movement for opposing Trumpism. Alex Gourevitch vigorously defends the right to protest on campus. And in a special archival feature for our anniversary year, John Ganz reflects on G. M. Tamás’s essay “On Post-Fascism,” originally published in our Summer 2000 issue—among “the most prescient and insightful political texts,” Ganz says, “of the new century.”