OPINION:
The rifts in America’s body politic run deep. Indeed, America at times appears to be coming apart at the seams as the divisions deepen between those on the political left and right. The center of the political spectrum shrinks.
With the extremes on both sides becoming more entrenched, if not gaining strength, as 2026 begins, it’s not beyond the pale to worry about America’s ultimate fate. If we worry thus, we should ask ourselves: How might we, as American citizens, revitalize our sense of common purpose (of “the general Welfare” as the Constitution’s preamble puts it) while reconciling a wide diversity of opinions on matters of public importance?
In 2026, the year in which we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, I suggest an excellent place to begin is with a reflection on the Constitution’s first three words: “We the People.”
For the Constitution’s drafters, the phrase “We the People” was not chosen casually. Those three words needed to be more than a memorable opening. They needed to be an expression of the sovereign will of the people. Consistent with Lockean social contract theory familiar to the Constitution’s framers, “We the People” was intended to signify, at the document’s very beginning, that the powers exercised by America’s new government would be derived from “the consent of the people,” not from a monarch or even from the government itself.
In its very first sentence, the Declaration of Independence, issued 11 years before the Constitution was drafted, refers to “one People,” not unlike the Constitution’s “We the People.” The Declaration goes on to proclaim that governments derive “their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” This foundational precept at the core of individual liberty and a free society means that the exercise of ordinary politics, not force, threats of violence or government diktats, must be the way in which political differences among us are resolved.
After the American Revolution, which secured independence through much spilled blood and spent treasure, the embodiment of popular sovereignty in the Constitution was crucial to laying the foundation for the new American democracy. Recall that the Constitutional Convention meeting in Philadelphia in 1787 was attended by only 55 delegates, and not all of them attended at the same time. Only 39 of them signed the Constitution on Sept. 17, a truly small number indeed.
Given the small number of delegates and the fact that the drafting process was closed to the public, the idea that the Constitution was based on the consent of the people was essential for it to gain legitimacy as a source of authority for what was to become the fundamental law of the land.
In an important way, this legitimacy rested on the requirement that, for the Constitution to take effect, it had to be ratified by at least three-fourths of the states. Notably, the state ratifications had to occur through conventions in each state composed of delegates elected by the people themselves. The requirement for this exercise of popular sovereignty was specified in the Constitution itself in Article VII.
Although the ratification process was the formal means by which the Constitution’s legitimacy was achieved, I submit it would be wrong to underestimate the enduring emotive power of the Constitution’s first three words — then and now — to signify what ought to be the unity of purpose of America’s citizens in binding themselves together freely “in Order to perform a more perfect Union.”
In times like the present, when America’s citizenry seems bitterly divided, a resolve to engage in deep reflection on what it means to be part of “We the People,” as each of us is, is a worthwhile resolution for the new year. Deep reflection is another worthwhile resolution for the 250th celebration of the American experiment in democracy.
• Randolph May is president of the Free State Foundation, a free-market-oriented think tank in Potomac, Maryland.
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