| Our political troubles begin with the first three words of the U.S. Constitution: “We the People.” According to Randy Barnett, Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University, those who favor a Democratic approach to the Constitution read “We the People” as a group or collective entity. And, those who favor a Republican interpretation view “We the People” as individual persons. |
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It is clear from the founding documents, and the Founder’s affinity to the philosophy of John Locke, that individual liberty was the main guiding principle in the creation of the United States. The Constitution was designed to implement the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and functions as the institutional device to secure our natural rights of life, liberty, and property. For the Founders, “We the People” meant, not a collective entity, but each one of us as an individual citizen. Yet, as George Will points out in “The Conservative Sensibility”, our choice of one or the other of these different understanding of “We the People” has enormous political consequences.
Under the collective interpretation, “We the People” expresses the desires of a majority of the people, where the will of the majority prevails. Thus, the Constitution becomes a mechanism for the will of the collective, where the only legal individual rights are those granted by the will of the majority. In contrast, the “We the People” as individuals interpretation sees the Constitution as a tool for restraining government, and limiting laws discordant with our natural rights as individuals.
The American ideal is more than majorities having their way. Our fundamental rights are not subject to democratic vote or to the outcomes of elections.
As Professor Barnett formulates it, “The great divide in America today is between those who believe, as the Founders did, that first come rights and then comes government and those who believe…that first comes government and then come rights.” Government is not the creator of our natural rights, and majorities have no right to violate our natural rights. Our rights supersede democratic majority.
At the core of these beliefs is the doctrine of natural rights. Natural rights are those that are not dependent on laws or government. Natural rights pre-exist government and can be discovered by reason. We construct governments to secure our natural rights. We are rights-bearing individuals, and the United States is a rights-based government. And thus, the legitimate function of our government, as affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, is to secure our natural rights. Government’s function is to protect our life and liberty so that we may pursue individual happiness. The goal of a democratic government is freedom, not the other way around.
The Founding Fathers believed that majority governments were inherently dangerous to our individual rights. As noted by George Will, “Of the major institutions created by the Constitution – Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court -- only one half of one of them, the House of Representatives, was, in the Framer’s original design, directly elected by the people.”
Consequently, for about 150 years following the founding, political discussions often began with a debate concerning whether the federal government was entitled to take some action under its constitutionally enumerated powers. Today, as George Will notes, “almost nobody in either the legislative or executive branch believes that there is any subject, any sphere, from which the federal government is constitutionally excluded.” This is unfortunate, because our natural rights must take precedence over the power of the majority to govern.
History has been defined as the record of the struggle between freedom and authority, and James Madison identified tyranny of the majority as a political evil that democracy could produce. “We the People” does not mean our ethnic, racial, political, or sexual groups. We are not, as “identity politics” requires, defined by accidents of birth or socialization. We are not whatever our group is. We are not a society of politically sedated collectives. Individual opinions are necessary for a healthy democracy. We must reclaim our Founder’s “We the People” as individual persons to define ourselves as independent participants in a free society.
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