Join us for a wide-ranging conversation with Aziz Rana and Matt McManus on the past, present, and future of the Constitution and its meaning for left politics. Together, we’ll ask: How should the left navigate terms like “bourgeois democracy”? What would it mean to treat the struggle for democracy as both a domestic and international project? And how should the left approach the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with its promises of equality and universal rights? This discussion will push us to think beyond conventional framings of U.S. constitutionalism and ask what a genuinely democratic politics should look like today. A question-and-answer period will follow the conversation.

Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College. He is the author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them and The Two Faces of American Freedom.

Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College. His books include Against Post-Liberal Courts and Justice and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism.