The New Yorker Radio Hour - Russia’s No-Good, Very Failed Coup, and Jill Lepore on Amending the Constitution

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow last weekend, which killed more than a dozen Russian soldiers, fizzled as quickly as it began, but its repercussions are just beginning. The Wagner Group commander issued a video from Belarus claiming that he did not attempt a coup against Putin but a protest against the Defense Ministry.  David Remnick talks with Masha Gessen and the contributor Joshua Yaffa, who has written on the Wagner Group, about what lies ahead in Russia. Both feel that by revealing the reality of the war to his own following—a Putin-loyal, nationalist audience—Prigozhin has seriously damaged the regime’s credibility. If an uprising removes Putin from power, “there will be chaos,” Gessen notes. “Nobody knows what happens next. There’s no succession plan.”  Plus, Jill Lepore on amending the Constitution: suggesting a constitutional amendment these days is so far-fetched, it’s almost a punch line, but the Framers intended the document to be regularly amended, the historian Jill Lepore tells David Remnick. She argues that the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment sank the country into a political quagmire from which it has not arisen, and her latest historial project brings awareness to the problem of amendability. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. 30-some years ago, in August 1991, as a Russia correspondent for the Washington Post, I watched a coup unfold with tanks on the streets of Moscow. The coup was plotted by Soviet hardliners in the KGB and the military, and it aimed to force Mikhail Gorbachev from power. after three days it failed. But history was made.

The coup itself became yet another nail in the coffin of the old Soviet empire. So a lot of things were going through my mind a week ago as we watched a rogue commander's tanks seized control of a southern Russian city, a major city, and then race north from Moscow. Then it was over as quickly as it had begun. But its repercussions are just beginning to be felt in the Kremlin and throughout Russia. And to understand those repercussions, I'm talking with two of our contributors, Masha Gessen, who has written deeply about Putin's autocracy in Russia, and Joshua Yaffe, who's been covering the war in Ukraine. Josh has written on the Wagner Group, the mercenary army

that was headed by Yvgeny Pregozhen. I spoke with Masha and Josh last week. What was Pregozhen thinking? He now talks about it in terms of a protest, but hardly it seems like the march on Washington. rarely do protests involve tanks and armored personnel carriers. So what did he have in his head? Not that I really have any idea, but nonetheless, since that would be disappointing, for all concerned, I'm going to hazard a guess,

and I hope an informed guess, which is that rather remarkably, to a large degree, I think Progoshan was making it up as he went along, or rather he had a certain idea when he started, And I'm convinced that idea was not to take power in Russia, not to overthrow Putin. And he was actually sincere when he said at the beginning he wasn't directing this mutiny uprising, whatever you call it, against Putin. He was really trying to get Putin's attention.

I mean, a pretty remarkable sort of insane way to get someone's attention, right? To march your private army across the border, take charge of a military headquarters and sort of try and blackmail your interlocutor into speaking with. But I think that that is what Progosian intended. He really thought, however crazy in hindsight, this idea, is that he could send his mercenary force across the border from Ukraine where they had been fighting into Russia, take control of this very important military headquarters in Rostov in southern Russia, and that somehow that would convince Putin to engage him in a conversation about what Progosian really wanted, which is agreeing

about the future status of Wagner, his mercenary group. So it's like a marital spat in which you throw 16 dishes at your spouse's head to get their attention. Exactly. And, you know, if you had tanks, you'd throw the tanks. In certain arguments, yes. I agree. And I think that it's actually very important that not only was he not challenging Putin's hold on power, but he was strictly staying within this mythology that Putin's hold on power, but he was strictly staying within this mythology that

Putin makes all the decisions in Russia. And if he makes bad decisions, it's because someone has given him bad information. Or the czar didn't know. The czar didn't know. So, you know, so he was marching to Moscow to give Putin better information. So, Moshe, what are the political ramifications? What's been unmasked here and how consequential is that? Well, the bizarre thing that we've seen is we've seen people acting politically and people acting with force, right, in a field that had been monopolied by Putin. Putin has, over the course of his nearly 24 years in power, monopolized all political space. And certainly his main claim to stability is a monopoly on force.

And it turns out there's another option, not necessarily a better option. Is there enough? What's the option here? I'm not convinced that Prigogian is an option, right? What I'm saying is that there's the option of having more than one actor in this space. And that's shocking to Russia. There's an entire generation of people who've grown up without ever having seen anything like that. Without ever having seen even something like this bizarre conversation that looked most like a mafia's sit down in what seems to be the courtyard

of the headquarters of the southern military district between Prigogian and two generals, you know, with a Kalashnik of dangling between Prigogian's legs. So cramps. And, you know, they look like they're... haggling over some criminal deal, and they sound like it too, but it's an unscripted conversation about people who wield actual power, and Russians got to see it. And it's shocking to sort of to the eye and the ear. No, and it sounded like nothing more than a sit-down in the sopranos between members of two families. I agree. What Russians saw over the weekend was, you know,

that incredible exchange between Prigogian and two generals, Shoygoo's deputy and the deputy, a deputy of Valeré Gerasimov, the head of the general staff. And Prygozhen says, you know, I want Shoygo and Gerasimov. I want the two top military officials in the country. And one of their deputies says, take him. It sort of spreads his arms wide. And people saw that.

Josh, we often describe the regime in Moscow as a personalist regime, as Putin incorporated, Kremlin incorporated. Are people beginning to imagine what that looks like without the key player? You know, I think the truth is that people have been imagining that for a while now, that there certainly is talk in Moscow about what comes next. And the events of this weekend absolutely will have accelerated that conversation. Putin's power depends on a kind of myth of power, an aura of power in which Putin is the ultimate arbiter of all of these clan factions that you talked about, that there's no one else who can settle these disputes, there's no one else who the different clans can go to and whose power they acknowledge as somehow being absolute, almost Zeus-like, and they don't really question it. After last weekend, I think more people are going to start to question it. Like Masha, I'm not suggesting that that means next weekend he's going to be overthrown in a coup that really works. No, it could happen next year, in two years, or never, but I think that it's going to accelerate some conversations in Moscow about a future hypothetical transition of power. Is it not possible that Putin now, in a rage and in a desire to reassert his authority, does two things. He doubles down in Ukraine best he can, in the bloodiest way possible and carries out a purge in Moscow?

I'm more inclined to believe that he escalates in Ukraine if to the extent that he can, right? I mean, the options there are horrifying, right? Because he is not, it seems, equipped to escalate conventionally, right? We're talking about something like blowing up the Zaporozegrogy nuclear power plant or or using tactical nuclear weapons, right? It's the prospects are... Which are now based conveniently in Belarus. In neighboring Belarus, right next to where Pitigoshan's new compound.

It's very reassured. And, you know, I doubt that there's going to be a significant purge at home. I'm sure his paranoia is going to intensify. Part of what's kept him in power is his paranoia. He's always two steps ahead of whatever threat there is. And, you know, in fact, he's generally resists. responded to the threats disproportionately, right? He jails protesters who have no way of really challenging his power.

He jails poets and theater directors. What I think is going to happen is that he's going to jail more poets and theater directors. There's going to be, I think, an information crackdown because he's very upset that people saw this. Well, stop on that. To what extent did they see it? Because we've been hearing for a year and half about the extent of the propaganda totalism in Moscow and then unless you're a clever user of the internet and VPN and all the rest, you're really watching state television and the propaganda is intense.

Do average Russians know what happened and to what extent, and did they react to it anyway? I think average Russians know what happened for a couple of reasons. You know, one of the main ways that people get information, both state-approved information and independent information is through telegram channels. and Telegram has the disadvantage of... In Telegram, we should explain, is a messaging app that has lots of individual channels

and pre-Gosion, in fact, used it, among others. Right. And I think that the Kremlin hasn't worried too much about Telegram, well, partly because Telegram, as it turns out, is almost impossible to block because it has a very clever distribution system. and at the same time, you don't get channels that you can't imagine exist, right? So if you ask for it, you'll read independent media.

But most people don't. And so it's a small enough crack in the propaganda monopoly for the Kremlin not to worry about it, except when one of their own starts using it. Prigogian was somebody that pro-war, pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukrainian, really rabid-naut. nationalists Russians were listening and watching and reading, right? And suddenly this comes out on Prygosin's channel. This kind of thing, I think, really unnerves Putin and destabilizes his basic ideas about how information space works.

So I think, you know, really extreme measures are possible up to just shutting off the Internet. Just shutting it down. Yeah, that's very easy. And it's the only way to really get rid of telegram. Josh, you agree? Yes, though, all of this is made more difficult by the fact that Russia is a war, a war entirely of Putin's choice. But that makes the circumstances in which he's trying to navigate this political moment much more difficult. And unlike anything he's faced previously, you know, Russian politics, you both have written about this so well and so extensively, you know, for 20-plus years was ruled by a kind of

kind of air of almost make-believe. Russia was the ultimate postmodern autocracy, in which everything was done as a kind of winking, cynical, almost pretend game. And when you had to carry out repressions, as Masha said, you targeted people like poets and theater directors who wasn't so hard for your security apparatus to go after. Well, those sorts of games don't work on the battlefield of a real war. A real war that I think it's fair to say Putin has staked his legacy to and his political survival, maybe personal survival, to the outcome of this war. And that limits what Putin can do in terms of a crackdown. What can he do? Can he really purge the army? You know, can he really

carry out measures that would impact Russia's ability to wage the war in Ukraine. As Masha said, there aren't really a whole lot of good conventional options left for Russia anyway. And so I just don't know what really Putin can do at this point. And it's not so much about his progosian problem. I don't really think Putin has a progosion problem per se. Progosion, by all accounts, has already left Russia, reports that he's arrived to Belarus. Will he stay there? Will he travel onward? I don't know. But I think the progosian phenomenon, as it is narrowly or personally defined, is if not over, at least kind of a now fading relevance. And I think Russians will quickly move on and the story will move on. Does progoshin get to keep any access to his soldiers,

or is just progosian going to Minsk and maybe they'll send them a nice savings account in a life insurance policy? Well, we'll see. I mean, I think if progosion gets to as the old saying about Bolsheviks goes, die in his own sheets or die in his own bed, that will be a real victory for him. I think if he can get that, he'll have come out ahead from this whole story. I don't think Putin will allow Progoshan

to have another go at assembling a private army, even if it's in neighboring Belarus. But it almost doesn't matter. The deeper processes that Progoshin has not necessarily unleashed, but rather, I think, brought to the, surface are going to remain. And what he's revealed is there's a huge appetite, however strangely, right? I mean, in other words, I say that sarcastically, this could have been predicted. This

happens in any society. There's a real demand for the truth, essentially, right? And I think that and I think that's what made progocheon so in a way, I don't know, I don't even want to say popular, but it's what made his message resonate with people. He's vile, he's nasty, he's a war criminal. I I don't mean to paint at all a rosy picture of him, but he spoke to Russians in a plain, honest way, told them the real horrors and cost of the war. As Putin used to. As Putin lost that ability, you know, the waste them in the outhouse, as Putin said about Chechen's 20-plus years ago. Right. crude, awful, uncouth language. Putin has kind of lost himself, I think, in the palace halls a long time ago. And progoshin has a way of speaking to the people.

But he Goshen didn't just talk about the incompetence of the Russian army. What he did in the latter days of this drama, and this is what stunned me, because it seemed contradictory from a soldier of the war. He came out and said the war itself was nonsense, that it's being fought under false pretenses. It didn't have to happen. So on the one hand, he's a war hero, to some.

And on the other hand, he's denouncing the war in incredibly, a bold language. That surprised me. There's an interesting logical construction there because he didn't actually say that, he didn't denounce the war for a second, right? What he said was that Putin had been given bad information on the basis of which he

started the war. NATO was going to, wasn't going to attack Russia, Ukraine wasn't going to attack Russia, Putin was misinformed, right? He didn't actually draw the conclusion from that that the war shouldn't be fought. As far as Prigosin is concerned, everything. You know, every war is valid.

The more we take, the better, right? In his post-failed unintentional coup attempt address, he talked about how, hey, when we fought in Africa, where we were told we should take more of Africa and then, you know, we didn't get enough, right? I mean, that's sort of his logic. But he also pointed out that in the space of one day he traversed as much disembursed as much distance as there is from the eastern border of Ukraine to the western border of Ukraine, and so if he'd been allowed to run the war effort, they would have taken Ukraine in a day.

Now, here's a kind of question that's straight out of the 1960s Kremlinology Handbook, but it is a question that is going to arise. We might as well dig in on it right away. Putin's been in power for 23 and a half years, something like that? Almost 24. And there are all these what we call clans that are not just big institutions, but there are clans within institutions. There are clans within the FSB, the successor to the KGB. There are clans within the Interior Ministry and the military and the government apparatus.

The great liberal hope is wasting away in jail. Alexei Navalny. He's, by all reports, Putin seems to want him to, not only die, but maybe be in horrible pain and suffer a great deal before that happens. And he's not the only one. Vladimir Karamazza and others join him in prison. What are the main clans? What could succeed Putin when and if, Masha?

There will be chaos. Nobody knows what happens next, right? There's no succession plan. Putin has always acted as though he is eternal. And also nobody knows what the best way to grab and wield power would be. But I think that whoever comes to power after Putin, it's not going to be Alexei Navalny in the immediate future, right? It's not going to be anybody who articulates liberal values. It's going to be some sort of Putinism without Putin.

But it's not going to be Putinism. Josh. I think that what the VASU, the armed forces of Ukraine, can do or not do this summer, is actually maybe the biggest political X-factor for Putin. And what they are able to do or not this summer, I think, could have huge political resonance in Russia and for Putin, more than perhaps the machinations of political players or want to be political players back in Moscow. And if on the one extreme, the Russian front line collapses, the forces are demoralized, the Ukrainian army backed by NATO equipment, Western training proves too formidable and marches across the whole of the front, maybe even all the way to Crimea, that creates a political reality for Putin that I don't know exactly how he survives that or would certainly set in motion a whole series of events that I think could even overshadow the events of last week. If somehow the opposite of that happens, and by the fall, Ukraine hasn't advanced more than a few kilometers, no significant territory has been recaptured, and as a result, the West begins to pressure Ukraine to make some kind of negotiated settlement.

Then, at home, at least, he can sell that as a kind of victory. It would be harder for his enemies to mobilize. and I think he can eke out an X more years in power. You can read both Joshua Yafa and Masha Gessen on the war in Ukraine and much more at New Yorker.com. I spoke with Masha and Josh last week. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Each year as we wait for the Supreme Court to hand down its decisions in June, It feels more and more like waiting forward from an almighty power, a power above Congress, above the presidency, and above public opinion, but one that affects us in the most basic and intimate ways. One reason for our intense focus on the court is partisan gridlock in Congress, which works against the passage of any new legislation. But another key fact here is that the Constitution hasn't been amended in a truly consequential. control way in more than 50 years. That's when the voting age was set at 18. Talking about a constitutional amendment these days, it seems so far-fetched that it's almost a punchline. And it wasn't supposed to be that way. If you were thinking about what is the original and the tension of the framers with regard to the 1787 Constitution, it was that it would be

open to amendment. The historian Jillipur, who's a staff writer at the New Yorker. And the bar, although set quite high, was much lower than it later became, just because of polarization and because of the number of states. The idea that what one should do is return to the original Constitution is itself inconsistent with the idea that the Constitution was never meant to be frozen in time in the first place. So Jill and a team of her history students undertook a project that they're calling amend. they've compiled more than 12,000 proposals for amendments introduced on the floor of Congress since the founding of the country. And all those proposals are searchable in a website that they've launched this week. Jilipur wants to bring some context to our current and fairly dismal state of trust in government. Well, what are the craziest ones?

Oh, the most famously crazy one is from 1893, which is to rename the United States of America, United States of Earth. But it actually was serious. It was kind of the age of American imperialism, right? It's like a Spanish-American, Philippine-American War. Well, at least they don't want to rename it Murray or something like that. The original implication is that, I think, and maybe the founding implication here, is that the Constitution was meant to be a lot more flexible and amendable than it's turned out to be. Yeah, I mean, so Americans, in a sense invented the written Constitution as a popularly ratified frame of government. And it is the great.

and signal contribution of American political history to democracy. But what made constitutions, written constitutions, legitimate? Because if you're going to write it down, it's going to be a problem pretty quickly. Like, as anyone knows who's ever had, like, an arrangement over who's going to vacuum the stairs and who's going to empty the dishwasher? You're like, you put the chore chart in the refrigerator, and you have to amend it every year. Because, like, you know, someone complains that washing the dishes is harder than emptying the dishwasher or whatever. You know, everyone knows you have to amend any kind of an agreement that you make because this is not going to last.

So fundamental to that idea was always a commitment to revising it. And it's an important factor that our Constitution was written in the aftermath of a revolution. Yeah, because the idea behind amendability is, well, you want to have a way to change the government that is a little bit short of violent insurrection. It seems that amendments come in flurries, as you write. during the struggle over the Constitution itself, when its critics secured ratification of amendments 1 through 10, which is the Bill of Rights, then during the Civil War and Reconstruction,

second founding, and so on. That seems to be how it works. Yeah, so it's a pretty distinguishable pattern and constitutional scholars talk about this all the time that there are these essentially political revolutions that need to achieve a political settlement through constitutionalization, and that, up until fairly recent,

happened by a way of amendment. And there's a lot of ways to change a constitution. The court can interpret it differently. The executive branch can decide to deem something constitutional that we previously thought was not. But amendment is the one democratic means. And just remind us, what are the requirements in Congress to get an amendment ratified? An amendment has to pass both houses of Congress by a two-thirds majority. And then it has to pass three quarters of the states. And the last big, big drama in that, in that attempt was the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, which was essentially the last leg of the Progressive Era amendments from the 19th

the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, granted women the right to vote, and three years later introduced into Congress was the Equal Rights Amendment, guaranteeing women equal constitutional rights. It took a long time to get out of Congress. It wasn't sent to the states for ratification until 1972, but at that point on the heels of the women's liberation movement and second wave feminism, it seemed likely

to secure a fairly quick ratification. But instead, the ERA in the 1970s met with a tidal wave of political opposition led by Phyllis Schlafly in the Stop ERA movement. So the required

number of states did not ratify by the time of the deadline set by Congress. That deadline was extended but expired in 1982 and the area was really just short of the required 38 states. The question that the courts and Congress have been facing and the National Archivist as well in recent years is whether Congress even had the authority to set such a deadline and whether Congress could now, if it chose to lift that deadline. So this is a debate that's been going on recently, especially in the last couple of years in the courts. Just recently, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, made some headlines by proposing a constitutional amendment on gun control.

He's saying that he knows it doesn't stand much of a chance, but he just doesn't know what the heck else to do. He just doesn't know what else to do. This seems to speak to the feeling of political desperation that you are laying out and that kind of underlines a lot of the project. Yeah, and I assume that he's undertaken that action as part of a really long tradition of people calling for a constitutional amendment for the sake of giving a lot of national attention to an issue on which we're really stuck. On the other hand, it's not as though there's never been a proposal before with regard to the Second Amendment. The data set that we have has a great proposal, I mean, great and sense of fascinating to me from 1913. So in the 19-teens, progressives were extraordinarily successful. That is progressives across parties when progressivism crossed parties.

They got through four constitutional amendments in a decade. And they're all really significant ones. But one that didn't make it was proposed in Congress in 1913. And it proposed to add to the second amendment, which is a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed. It added to that, provided. that Congress shall have the right to regulate in the territories in the District of Columbia,

and the legislatures of the several states shall have the right to regulate for themselves, the keeping and bearing of small arms that may be concealed about and upon the person. Well, that would have been better. I guess I just find it really interesting. I didn't know that. It's fun to see what's in there if you go fishing around. Fun and tragic at the same time. It's kind of tragic at the same time.

Some of the really interesting examples are amendments that were proposed by precedents in the modern era. I'm thinking of one, particularly of Ronald Reagan, who push for an amendment to require a balanced federal budget. Take us to that battle. So the movement for a balanced budget amendment, which is basically like a Milton Friedman amendment, starts in the 1970s with these supply-side economics guys. and they start introducing it into Congress, I think maybe 77 or so. It's a very serious effort, and it is kind of the number one priority of a brand of a kind of Reagan conservative. So again and again and again, it gets introduced in Congress. And then in 1982, Reagan is going to put the power of his bully pulpit behind it in a public speech at a rally in Washington.

Well, my fellow citizens, today we come together on historic grounds to write a new chapter in the American Revolution. And the balanced budget amendment never made it out of Congress. No army on earth can stop an idea whose time has come and our time is now. Those supporters turned their attention instead to calling for a new constitutional convention. We don't come as a special interest group pleading for personal gain. We're messengers of a united people demanding constitutional change. We mentioned the Equal Rights Amendment before the ERA, which would guarantee equal rights regardless of sex, is probably the biggest failure in our lifetimes, if you've lived long enough.

Now, Virginia recently passed it, becoming the 38th state. Is there any life in the ERA effort? I think there probably is. I tend to agree with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on this point. I don't know, obviously like an ardent supporter from back in the day of the Equal Rights Amendment, she was at the height of her powers as a litigator in the early 70s when it was in Congress and went to the states. I think if it won in a legal battle, it's a substantial amendment to the Constitution. I don't think it should be settled in the courts in that way. way. I mean, I think Bader Ginsburg's point was, I would like the ERA to be ratified, but I think it has to go through the process again. From the start, because the deadline question is so technical that it's illegible. It's illegible to a democratic polity. I mean, I will say this. I just think that Equal Rights Amendment is a political and constitutional settlement that is essential to the stability of American democracy. And I think as a historian that a lot of our political instability since the 1970s, including polarization, a lot of which is attributable to the issue of abortion, and do I think it's, you know, mirror opposite, which is the issue of guns, has to do with the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. I just, I don't, I don't think we get to a new era of political civility and civil society without its ratification.

So it pains me to say, I don't think that kind of getting it through the courts will work. That's interesting. You think the ERA is almost the founding reason for this terrible polarization in modern times. I think it's the linchpin on which that turns. Because I also think that the originalism is itself, right, a consequence of the women's rights movement. and of the reproductive rights decisions of the Supreme Court. Like when Robert Bork invented originalism in 1971, he was complaining about Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision

that lifted the prohibition on distribution of contraception. I just think a lot in our politics comes down to these questions. And I think for the generation of young women who are aghast and astonished at the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs, you know, this is ancient history. It's hard to understand its significance, but I think there's just a kind of unmooring of the ship of state at that moment. When in the wake of the civil rights movement, in the face of an era of loss of gains that were made by the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the turning against reproductive rights and equal constitutional rights for women is, just the wrong turn in American history that we're still stuck in. And it's very hard to fix that and to fix all that comes with it without being able to amend the Constitution and without having a constitutional history that just to kind of get back to this project that

includes a record of these failed attempts. Because the consequence of the dominance of originalism on the current Supreme Court and in the federal judiciary more broadly is a reliance on the historical record to decide all manner of constitutional cases, interpretations, constitutional rights, fundamental law. And that historical record that originalists are using is from the vantage, I'm a historian. And I look at what these guys say, counts as history. And no, you get an F. No, like that. Not even a C. For example, though. So, you know, what, how do you interpret the Constitution if we want to get to its original intention or its original public meaning? Well, we have the Constitution itself. We have James Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention. We have the records of the ratifying conventions, state ratifying conventions. But that's kind of, that's kind of it. And if I had a student turn in a paper about 1787 and these were the sources, and this purported to offer me an interpretation of, public understanding of constitutionalism.

It would just be laughably bad paper. Like, one of the things that this project includes are some 9,000 petitions submitted to Congress by people generally who are disenfranchised. The right to petition is the only thing you can do if you can't vote, right? You still have a right to all persons have a right to petition. So people petition Congress for all kinds of things

that they could never achieve. But if we actually want to understand, in a democratic sense, right, not just look at the records left behind by the people who were fully enfranchised, then we have to expand the historical record. And I don't think in the present moment, if we're stuck with a court that has, as its only putative source of constitutional authority, an entirely asymmetrical and impoverished and unfair historical record.

As justification. As justification of interpretation, and its interpretation is the only mode of constitutional change available, then we're really in a pickle. So the reason for the project, which doesn't have a constitutional agenda, but I just like, we ought to have a fuller historical record. If history is going to be deciding whether we can carry concealed weapons into classrooms, we ought to have a much fuller historical record. Well, Jill, every once in a while in presidential debates or some other form,

somebody will speak up meekly or otherwise. We need a constitutional convention at long last. What would be required to do that? Is that just a kind of thing people say, or is it a real political possibility at some point in our future? It is a real political possibility in some point in our future. The American appetite for holding such meetings has really diminished. So states used to hold constitutional conventions.

You probably remember, I remember states holding constitutional conventions all the time. a number of states have trigger clauses in their constitutions that every 10 years a referendum issue is put on the ballot should we have a constitutional convention. And that hasn't had it hasn't. Those votes have been held, but no state has held a constitutional convention since I think it was Rhode Island in 1986. Americans are pretty terrified of sitting down and talking to one another about any kind of fundamental questions about how we should organize our political lives. So I Because we have lost the habit of doing so I mean I it used to be there are some sort of Famous left wing legal scholars who support a constitutional convention

On the theory that it is inevitable it will eventually happen and it would be good if Progressives had a constitutional amendment agenda for such a meeting So a lot of that actually is going on now since it's It seems like it really is within the realm of the possible that such a convention will be held. What I find worrying about it is less the agenda or the rules because I think people will work those things out. But the unfamiliarity of the process. You seem most despairing about that, Jill. In this conversation, in earlier ones we've had, most despairing of the inability for people to, do you just think we've lost a habit of,

but forever? Is it exacerbated mainly by events since 2016? What's caused this kind of American crackup in your view? Yeah. Well, this is a whole cottage industry of people trying to offer explanations for that. And I think it's easily overstated, right? Like, it's easier to have those meetings when it's just a bunch of guys who have the same opinions, right? So if those meetings are harder to have now because more people would need to be in them and they disagree with each other,

other more vehemently, that's only an improvement. But that's not exactly what's happening, right? People are just refusing to meet because they disagree so vehemently. And we'll instead, you know, issue statements and resign from organizations. And, you know, there's a lot of what we do, right? A lot of, a lot of that level of what would have been some kind of an assembly of deliberation is now a series of statements. Do you see this in your own life and your academic life? Oh my God, it's everywhere. It's everywhere.

There's never, let's have a meeting to talk about this thing that's going on that could be really a problem for some of us and maybe for all of us and we have different views on. There's, will you sign this letter? Will you resign from this organization? Like, there's just the huff. It's a politics of huff. and I'm as huffy as the next person. I'm perfectly capable of being huffy. But that's no way to run an organization.

That's no way to build a political community. That's no way to cultivate civil society. So what worries me about the constitutional convention, you need to walk before you can run. And that's a really big, important. That's like going to the Olympics without ever having, you know, gotten out of your stroller. Jillipur, thank you so much.

Thanks a lot, David. Jillipore is a contributor to the New Yorker and a professor of history at Harvard University. The database that she and her students have created, documenting 12,000 proposals for amendments to the Constitution, is at Amendmentsproject.org. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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