The Spirit of "We the People"

In this age of unchecked hubris, "We the People" suffers not only from neglect but apostasy. Our billionaires have no use for it, for understandable reasons. If you are worth 186, 220, or 700 billion USD, as Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk are, you do not need the social contract. It simply does not make sense when everything can be bought or dominated. The security it provides cannot be comprehended by someone whose whims are catered to every moment. The notion that people contract with each other to determine what rights have priority, what rights they will fight for as a political community, is alien. The thought experiment of a "veil of ignorance" which resolves us to gather as much freedom and equality for each other as possible cannot be conceived.

But billionaires are not the only ones with no use for "We the People." Reactionaries and racists despise the phrase. Reactionaries, like billionaires, do not like the plurality of it. "We" has a sovereign distaste, but unlike a billionaire, they do not want to reduce it to "I." They want it narrowed, gated. The purest of the pure are to enter and reign. The purest understand their fantasies: their families worked the hardest and suffered the most, their religion and only their religion is the truth, and only they see the facts. Racists, despite their protestations to the contrary, never liked the United States. This does not mean, at times, they would not fight and die serving it. It does mean they have another priority. In their case, "We the People" fails because it is incompatible with a culture of constant bullying. A truly democratic republic must listen to its most vulnerable, not just those who are disliked but are disempowered. It serves not as a call to dominance but cooperation.

The billionaires, reactionaries, and racists have won a great victory against "We the People." They have convinced us to neglect these words, to forget that a great many of us are descended from immigrants. To forget that the vast majority of us reside on stolen land. "We the People" has an inherent sense of justice–it is not meant for Nazis and those cosplaying Nazis–as it goes hand in hand with an equality affirming collective decision making. It is not a phrase for tyrants, cranks, or those who refuse to control their hate. But nowadays, we just assume that citizenship means some people have rights and everyone else can go to hell. The incredible ignorance required to make this assumption isn't just a matter of not knowing the law. It entails a deep disdain for history, an outright contempt for how any of us are free. This I term "apostasy." Some enjoy the citizenship of this country and refuse to learn anything about it so they can pretend to be correct. They hold this is their "right," and it is not only disgraceful but a herald of the end. The United States, as of this writing, holds hundreds of children in disease-ridden detention camps.

The outstanding question is by what right I have to say anything about "We the People." An outraged sense of justice does not confer legitimacy by itself. It spurs action, creates a space for discussion and thought, pushes others to react. That may not develop the power and authority we need, wherein the moral force of the words prevents people from treating citizenship as a deadly game. As of now, the game involves creating suspicion around anyone's legal status. That suspicion alone pulls the trigger on the security apparatus of the United States. The potential involvement of the security apparatus makes some second-class citizens while visiting violence on those assumed to have even lower status. This is, as some have noted, white supremacy in action. When the pre-Civil War South insisted on the return of fugitive slaves, it pushed states where slavery was illegal to aid in catching them. In the name of destroying the rights of one, others must lose their rights too. Domination never ends with only one subject.

The moral force required has to pull us away from domination. To this end, the words of Joshua Villanueva in The Jurist are invaluable. I urge you to read "Who Counts as 'We the People' Will Determine America's Future." Villanueva speaks of the man who gave us "We the People" having a disability himself, then takes us through various considerations for interpreting the phrase. How the 14th amendment must be considered alongside it, how certain cases do not restrict it to certain classes of people, how equal protection entails strict scrutiny, and how birthright citizenship is non-negotiable. These are essential points, but they assume this country can be restored to a prior state which was more sensible. Even if the Supreme Court could be trusted to not make Donald Trump immune from consequences, the inaction and cowardice of Congress which brought us to this point should not be forgotten or forgiven. State violence was normalized by our institutions well before it exploded into the problem we confront today.

I hold we need to turn to history in a different, fuller sense than we normally do. History is not a thing that happened you should know. It does not concern facts which prove I am right or curiosities which occupy us. It is a sense of what the past accomplished, what our ancestors strove for, which demonstrates the best humanity has to offer. History is not objective or neutral and cannot be. (1) If you treat it that way, someone else's agenda will predominate. With that in mind, I want to go beyond a legal definition of "We the People," one restricting it narrowly, say, to citizens and nationals. What exactly is involved in citizenship? How should we see the best efforts of those who came before and build on them? I believe three considerations should stand at the forefront when discussing "We the People." No serious use of the phrase can happen without them:

• At some point in their history, 40 states have granted voting rights to non-citizens.
• The 14th Amendment entails a commitment to multiracial democracy while granting non-citizens "due process" and the "equal protection of the laws." That non-citizens have rights which must be respected is non-negotiable.
• The right to petition shows a robust tradition existed of non-citizens being able to appeal to their representatives directly.

Taken together, we see that the current talk about "We the People" in everyday discourse proceeds on dishonest lines, lines partial to white supremacy. Each of these considerations has something to teach us, something that deepens our ability to understand what we owe each other.

Wikipedia informs us that "Before 1926, as many as 40 states allowed non-citizens to vote in elections, usually with a residency requirement ranging from a few months to a few years" (2). The 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania, which Wikipedia helpfully cites, shows how states could be genuine laboratories of democracy, places where we learn to live together and govern our communities properly. The relevant language: "all free men having a sufficient evident common interest with, and attachment to the community, have a right to elect officers, or to be elected into office." I cannot stress enough the openness of this; compare with the constant fearmongering and racist propaganda we are bombarded with daily.

In 1790, after the adoption of the Constitution as we know it today, the State of Pennsylvania used this language:

In elections by the citizens, every freeman of the age of twenty-one years, having resided in the State two years next before the election, and within that time paid a State or county tax, which shall have been assessed at least six months before the election, shall enjoy the rights of an elector: Provided, That the sons of persons qualified as aforesaid, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-two years, shall be entitled to vote, although they shall not have paid taxes.

What we see are residency requirements and payment of taxes; we see a degree of involvement in the community as enabling. There is no discussion of skin color or exclusion of the Chinese or Natives. Eventually that changes among the states, as people became scared of immigrants and used the law to target them. Some contrarians might argue that the history of the U.S. is plenty racist: why can't we turn to that history for inspiration? Why can't we understand "Manifest Destiny" as a positive thing, a vindication of ethnonationalism? And the answer is simple but needs to be said aloud: at times, some who made the laws could think bigger and empower others. They did not need to hurt others to feel better about themselves. They could glimpse the universality of rights, the inherent dignity all humans have, even if they were imperfect themselves. We look to those voices because this is the only way to have a country. A hate movement masquerading as a country can have enormous power. It can have institutions we must study, even aspects of a legacy. But in the end, it only exists relative to those who strove for more. We understand rights intuitively because we understand they apply to all people. Racists and reactionaries want to limit that, and in doing so, limit both their understanding of rights and humanity.

To go further, the 14th amendment is not subtle. Birthright citizenship absolutely means to prevent narrow readings of the "We the People." I like to think of the Reconstruction Amendments as a political revolution, a statement that the Constitution of 1787 had collapsed of its own weight. Half the country warred with the other half; most of American history, to that point, was nothing but fighting over slavery. If the United States was not privileged with one of the greatest leaders in human history, the country was as good as dead, a failed experiment in the rights of man.

So the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments should be seen as enormous and interpreted in a generous spirit. We note that the Supreme Court did not always share this generous spirit, as it enabled Jim Crow. And when we read the first sentence, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside," we immediately recall that a Senator asked if an ethnically Mongolian child born on this soil would be a U.S. citizen and received the answer "yes." (3) Those who saw racism's murderous consequences knew the war they suffered could not happen again. I have said before that the opposite of democracy is not exactly tyranny. It is racism or a racism-like phenomenon. One that takes majoritarian rule and inverts what it should do. Instead of a majority understanding its power and trying to expand itself, working to include more and benefit all, it devolves into scapegoating and punching down. To some, this has the appearance of collective virtue: uniforms, badges, and guns are liberally distributed as books are burned and dissidents jailed. The habits of trying to win trust and build relationships and aim higher are discarded for the cheap thrill of winning politically at any cost. We note the nation is particularly eager that children should suffer nowadays.

One of the most stunning things about our current era is the combination of ignorance and hate driving most of our fellow citizens. Right after saying that "citizens" shall have "privileges and immunities" which states cannot violate, the 14th amendment is crystal clear about what rights all people in the U.S. have: "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." It is abundantly clear the 14th amendment gives all people on U.S. soil the protection of "due process of law," and that "equal protection of the laws" is for everyone. You can hear the frothing of bigots as I say this. They are foaming at the mouth, ready to declare that we are being invaded, that the army must be deployed to the border and every major city, that the 14th amendment is "woke." And you know their screaming exists for one reason only: to drown out the protections the Constitution offers everyone. They have to tell lurid stories of so-called migrant crime, they have to create panic, because the law and the sense of justice underlying it are so obvious.

A third consideration is the "right to petition." At the end of the First Amendment, there are two separate rights speaking to a greater theme: "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The theme is self-evident. We have a right and duty to complain and our lawmakers and officials had better hear us. In older democratic theory, this is even less subtle. Machiavelli speaks of how the Roman republic worked before it collapsed into empire. (4) The plebians would riot and the Senate had to take them seriously. When the Senate got so rich that it no longer cared, when it established friendships with members of various Triumvirates, the republic was finished.

The right to petition is a right to get an official on the record about your cause. Here, it is worth quoting John Inazu and Burt Neuborne at length about how it worked in the early American republic:

The right to petition plays an important role in American history. The Declaration of Independence justified the American Revolution by noting that King George III had repeatedly ignored petitions for redress of the colonists’ grievances. Legislatures in the Revolutionary period and long into the nineteenth century deemed themselves duty-bound to consider and respond to petitions, which could be filed not only by eligible voters but also by women, slaves, and aliens. John Quincy Adams, after being defeated for a second term as President, was elected to the House of Representatives where he provoked a near riot on the House floor by presenting petitions from slaves seeking their freedom. The House leadership responded by imposing a “gag rule” limiting petitions, which was repudiated as unconstitutional by the House in 1844. (5)

The "right to petition" was no less than a reason for the American Revolution! The King ignoring petitions from the colonists started a war. And in the 19th century, legislators "deemed themselves duty-bound to consider and respond to petitions." Note who could get a yes/no answer from an official on the record: "women, slaves, and aliens." What happened to this right? The Supreme Court rendered it obsolete, as if it never existed. For further consideration, someone mentioned that our elite class could not stand hearing from us directly on Twitter, thus precipitating much of the current crisis. Faced with poor people who knew what they were talking about, they decided to pump money into surveillance tech, reactionary demagogues, and an expansion of policing. It would seem a robust right to petition is critically necessary for navigating a time when our leaders can be bought. Please never forget to remind anyone and everyone about the "gifts" some on the Supreme Court get.

In any case, the "right to petition" strongly implies that people living in this country have substantial rights. One's legal status isn't a matter for angry citizens or corrupt politicians to play with. And that brings me to a final point to summarize what we should bring to "We the People." "We the People" does not exist comfortably with the current conceptualization of the border. (6) This does not mean the United States has no borders, but it means that how we use the border nowadays–indeed, how we have historically used the border for imperial and colonial excess–is a stain on the body politic. Billionaires, reactionaries, and racists only believe in boundaries inasmuch as they benefit from them. They want walls to keep people out and imprison others. They do not want community but dominion, and this pathetic vision of living has become a vision of the good life for a number of us. Those in conservative news bubbles have their border. They have their podcasts, their social media, their YouTubers, and of course, Fox News. Their gated content which only allows a selection of facts and a fraction of voices. I get it: if you have nothing, this feels good. Maybe the guy chasing likes on Facebook by posting grisly execution videos will be your friend! Maybe those on Fox's The Five care what you think! In a way, this is the preserve of the richest of the rich, who get to hear what they want all the time. This is the border, the ability to put a wall around yourself, to be a god who need never listen to the world they created. Against that is the reality of "We the People." The glorious chaos of cities, the workers who make food possible and hospitals run, the children who are the only future.

References

1. I always wonder what I'm doing reading Nietzsche and Heidegger. This notion of history is not dissimilar to remarks they make.
2. Wikipedia. 2026. "Non-citizen Suffrage in the United States." Wikimedia Foundation. Last modified February 5, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizen_suffrage_in_the_United_States.
3. "From 1866, when the Senate Was Debating the 14th Amendment:." Reddit. Accessed February 13, 2026. https://www.reddit.com/r/asianamerican/comments/1i6pbh1/from_1866_when_the_senate_was_debating_the_14th/
4. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy Book 1 Chapter 4: "I say that those who
   condemn the tumults between the nobles and the plebs, appear to me to blame those things that were the chief causes for keeping Rome free..."
5. Inazu, John, and Burt Neuborne. "From 1866, when the Senate Was Debating the 14th Amendment:." constitutioncenter.org. National Constitution Center, Accessed February 13, 2026. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-i/interpretations/267.
6. For more, see Nate Holdren on how the "slave power" and the "border power" are similar problems: https://buttondown.com/nateholdren/archive/against-the-border-power/