Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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14 politics and governance
wealth, especially that of the founders. That may not have been
as true as Beard assumed for the founders, but it is clear that “By
the middle of the nineteenth century the legal system had been
reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry at
the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful
groups within the society” (Horwitz, 1977, pp. 253–254).
More recently, political scientists Robert Dahl, Sanford Levinson,
Daniel Lazare, and Larry Sabato have questioned the inclusiveness
of the Constitution as well as its effectiveness and future prospects.
Dahl, for example, argues that undemocratic features were built
into the Constitution because the founders “overestimated the
dangers of popular majorities . . . and underestimated the strength
of the developing democratic commitment among Americans”
(Dahl, 2002, p. 39; Lazare, 1996, p. 46). While somewhat pessimistic
about the prospects for greater democratization, he argues that
“it is time—long past time—to invigorate and greatly widen the
critical examination of the Constitution and its shortcomings”
(pp. 154–156). Constitutional law expert Sanford Levinson agrees:
“the Constitution is both insuffi ciently democratic . . . and suffi -
ciently dysfunctional, in terms of the quality of government that
we receive . . . [that] we should no longer express our blind devotion
to it” (Levinson, 2006, p. 9). Accordingly, he proposes a new
constitutional convention “to do what the framers of 1787 did,”
by which he means update and improve the document based on
the experience of other democracies and the two centuries and
more since the founding (p. 173). 1
Beyond issues of democracy and inclusiveness are other questions
about how well the Constitution works relative to the
climate and the environment. The environment is a complex,
interactive, and nonlinear system. But the structure of the Constitution
favors “decentralized, fragmented, and incremental lawmaking,”
in legal scholar Richard Lazarus’ words (2004, p. 30). As
a result, laws, policies, agencies, and whole government departments
often work piecemeal and at cross-purposes, without due