We Are Still ‘We the People’

Few Americans know that September 17 is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, commemorating the 1787 signing of the Constitution in Philadelphia. But for me, celebrating citizenship and the Constitution together is the right way to appreciate the promise of America. 

I’m an immigrant. When I was eight years old, my parents, brother, sister, and I came to the United States from Israel and settled first in Philadelphia (though I mostly grew up in New Jersey). We came above all for economic reasons: My parents had a small construction business, and the collapse of the Israeli economy in the ’80s destroyed it. America offered the chance to start over. 

My father had also long been drawn to the broader promise of America. Even as a child growing up in Israel, he had felt the appeal of American culture, of the economic freedom available here, and of the ideals this country represented. Like many immigrants, my parents were answering both a push and a pull. 

But at first, I didn’t grasp any of that. All I knew was that I was about to start the third grade, knew no one, and didn’t speak a word of English. Like many immigrants, I tended to think of Americans as “them.” My teachers and classmates were spectacularly welcoming, and I picked up the language pretty quickly. But I was undeniably a stranger in their midst, and I understood myself mostly in contrast to them. 

By the time I became an American citizen, just 11 years later at the age of 19, I was thoroughly one of “them.” I was a college student in Washington, D.C., studying American government and working part time for a member of Congress. The citizenship ceremony took place at the Federal Building in Newark, and I remember a kind of warm amusement at hearing dozens of people from every corner of the world struggling to pronounce in assorted accents—I by now had a generic American one—our Naturalization Oath: 

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. . . ”  

The judge who administered the oath delivered a brief speech to us. I was a patriotic history buff by that point, and when he began to speak I assumed he might quote George Washington or talk about equality or liberty. But he didn’t do any of that. He told us that from that day on, we needed to think and speak about America “in the first-person plural.”

I’m sure I wasn’t the only new citizen there who didn’t know what he meant, and was glad it wasn’t on the English test we had just had to pass. But he explained: We needed to use words like we and us, not them and their, when we talked about the United States.

Back then, I was disappointed with his short remarks. But here I am, almost three decades later, recounting them, because what he said was profound. His words were exactly what we needed to hear, and what we still need to hear—not only we immigrants, but we Americans. 

We is an exceptionally important word in the American political tradition. It is the first word of that glorious second sentence of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It is the first word of the Constitution, which established the legal and political framework for our life together: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This is not a coincidence. These two documents speak on behalf of a people taking joint ownership of their common fate, and they can still help us do that today.

Americans now have real trouble speaking of this nation in the first-person plural. Each side of our politics imagines that our country is on the verge of being hijacked by the other, which it understands as “them”—a nefarious faction of Americans with whom we have and want little in common.

Politically engaged Americans spend a lot of time talking about “them,” and very little time actually talking to or with people with whom we disagree. We are so divided we just can’t imagine we belong together.

That failure of imagination is rooted in a misimpression about what belonging together would mean. The “we” in those founding documents is an aspirational pronoun. Americans were not one harmonious people at the end of the eighteenth century, any more than we are now. We were divided and diverse then, too, if along different lines. 

But we could see some common ground, which still exists, and we could see that owning our common fate together means not so much agreeing about what our future should be as finding ways of working through our disagreements that give us each a part to play in a larger American whole.

That basic common ground is still there. Across deep divisions, even today, Americans really do believe that human beings are equal and endowed with basic rights. We often accuse political opponents of violating or rejecting this conception of the human person—and we know our society has at times failed miserably to live up to it—but almost no one in American politics now openly rejects it.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of The 1619 Project, points to the extraordinary commitment to those ideals evident in the lives and struggles of those Americans who were most cruelly denied their protections. “Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals,” she writes. I disagree with much in The 1619 Project, but Hannah-Jones has this point exactly right. And her writing it is evidence of the way in which the core commitments of the Declaration describe the boundaries of even our most intense disputes.

But that is only a beginning. We disagree intensely about what exactly the founding documents demand of us, and what kinds of laws, policies, and prudential judgments our government should make. Our politics exist to help us work through such disagreements. In the Constitution, the founders delivered to us a remarkably foresighted framework for resolving disputes. 

Our first-person plural Constitution is built on the insight that deep disagreement is a permanent reality but need not make unity impossible. This is because, in a free society, unity doesn’t mean thinking alike; unity means acting together.

How can we act together when we don’t think alike? This is the question to which the Constitution is an answer. It responds to disagreement by compelling competing factions into structured processes of negotiation. It doesn’t simply empower the narrowest of majorities to exercise power. Significant government action must be preceded by a huge amount of bargaining and accommodation—in the states and nationally, within and between the houses of Congress, among the branches of government, and in every facet of the system. A politics of coalition-building and negotiated bargains compels us to see political opponents as policy partners, and as fellow citizens.

Or at least it can. Our politics doesn’t do this nearly well enough today, in no small part because we have lost sight of this purpose of our system. When we express frustration with our Constitution now, it is too often for failing to empower narrow majorities, rather than for failing to broaden them. We are aggravated that we have to live with cultural and political rivals, even when we beat them on Election Day.

This leads some contemporary critics of the Constitution to insist that our differences should just be resolved by simple majority votes, and to dismiss our system’s complex arrangement of powers as undemocratic. They want to make American government less dependent on bargaining and negotiation, and more responsive to narrow, momentary majorities. They want to make Congress more like a European parliament, to consolidate more power in the presidency, and even to make the courts more amenable to public pressure. 

This kind of critique presents itself as an argument for democracy, but it advances the most simple-minded imaginable conception of the term—a conception that downplays the fact, unavoidable to anyone who considers our history or that of any other democracy, that majority power can endanger minority rights.

Our Constitution makes possible a democracy that takes account of that fact, and so can empower majorities while protecting minorities through the very institutions that require us to act together even when we don’t think alike. 

The Constitution’s critics often accuse it of being an antiquated relic, insufficient to the complex demands of the twenty-first century. But the Constitution is more sophisticated than its critics about the most complicated challenge confronting every modern democracy: the challenge of sustaining cohesion amid diversity. 

If we follow its lead, that document signed 237 years ago, to which I happily declared an oath, could help us to better meet that challenge, and so to truly understand ourselves as “we.” 

Yuval Levin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. His new book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again, has just been published.

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