“Who are ‘We the People’ Today?”
Christopher J. Voparil, Ph.D.
Cohort Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty
Contemporary political theorist Sheldon Wolin once used the word “mythistorical” to capture the admixture of historical and mythical elements that characterizes retrospective moments in our civic discourse. Certainly occasions such as Constitution Day are historical in nature. But they are surely more than this. As Wolin put it, while these events appear to celebrate the past, their most important function is “to fix the collective identity in the present.” What one is likely to encounter in the public discourse around Constitution Day, on this view, are attempts to define “an official story that narrates a past to support an image of collective identity that confirms a certain conception of the present.” 1
So what would it mean to see the Constitution through the lens of successive attempts to forge a collective identity as Americans, and what can this tell us about America and Americans today? To see what Wolin means by calling a constitution a way of constituting a people, one need look no farther than the famous opening words of the Preamble, “We, the people of the United States…” As historical fact, this assertion of collective identity was not particularly inclusive. As myth, however, like the mythical “We” that flowed from Jefferson’s pen in the Declaration of Independence who thought it “self-evident” that “all men are created equal,” these words set the terms of a story that Americans tell about themselves, a story that over time is told and retold, and sometimes contested in the process.
The idea of America as an ongoing project, realizing its destiny through the continual retelling of narratives of collective identity and self-creation, is as old as America itself. Its origins can be traced as far as John Winthrop’s sermon onboard the Arbella during its 1630 voyage to the New World, where he asserted, “wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill.” After the immortal phrases of the founders, we have Walt Whitman’s glorious efforts in his "Leaves of Grass" to spur America to realize the full potential of its poetical nature, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” More recently, James Baldwin in A Fire Next Time exhorted that “we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation – if, we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, […] to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country.” Each instance reflects an attempt to fix a collective identity that authorizes collective power for social and political change.
These attempts to retell the story of America in a more inclusive way are drawn from literary sources. Yet we can see the legal text of the Constitution itself as a site of the effort to augment and codify the We of “We the people.” Think of the post-Civil War amendments to the Bill of Rights, including the 14th Amendment’s apparent restatement of the obvious: “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.” Or the 15th Amendment’s pledge that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Sixty years later in 1919, the 19th Amendment removed another barrier to the expansion of citizenship rights by adding “on account of sex” to the prohibition to deny the vote. Nearly a century after the 15th, the 24th Amendment was required to prevent “reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax” to function as a denial of inclusion in this mythic and now legal “We.” In 1971 it was expanded yet again via the 26th Amendment, this time to include those “who are eighteen years of age or older.”
The failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to receive the required support of three-fourths of the states in 1982, after a decade of struggle, is testimony that these attempts to fix a collective identity can be regressive as well. Assertions of a collective “We” often mask or suppress actual difference, in ways both good and bad. As Jane Mansbridge put it in her classic study, Why We Lost the ERA, the “we” in her title “also represents the entire American citizenry, including those who opposed the ERA and those who did not care.” While the social movements that advance these political projects “become ‘movements’ only by building on common values and common dreams, they may hope to include everyone someday, but they cannot, by definition, do so today.” 2 This inherent limitation of collective projects cuts both ways. In recent years the voice of suppressed difference has upset attempts to fix a collective identity that would underwrite an array of constitutional amendments directly aimed at constricting the “We” in “We, the people of the United States”: the Birthright Citizenship Abolition Amendment (2005), the English Official Language Amendment (2005), and the Federal Marriage Amendment (2003). 3
The question begged by this history of the contested character of the American collective identity of course is, who is included in the “We” when the Constitution is reflected upon today? Being months away from an election season where there is an increasing likelihood that top billing on the ticket of a major party may be either a woman or an African-American gives this question added historical and symbolic weight. What mythistorical story will Americans tell about themselves when they enter the polls in November 2008?
This remains to be seen. That the candidates will engage in mythistorical storytelling is certain. Presidential campaigns, as Wolin explains, function as “rituals of renewal” of these stories or myths: “What the society expects from the two rivals, is not only a demonstration of prowess, but, equally important, a restatement of collective identity. The people want to be reassured of who they are, where they have come from historically, what they now stand for, and what is to be done about the perils and possibilities that lie ahead of them as a people.” 4 So who are ‘We’ at the dawn of the 21st century?
As Baldwin well knew, it comes down to what in our past we as a people are willing, are mature enough, to face. The late American philosopher Richard Rorty similarly understood that “[t]hose who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself” must remind their country not only of “what it can take pride in,” but “what it should be ashamed of.” 5 As an ideal, Whitman’s notion in Democratic Vistas, borrowed in part from John Stuart Mill, of “a truly grand nationality” that offers “full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions” is hard to beat. For us to get there, though, Wolin is right that “We the People” must become an active political subject, rather than a passive object of power. In the words of the Preamble, to “establish justice” would be a good place to start.
Dr. Voparil received his Ph.D. in political theory from The New School for Social Research. He is the author of Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision (Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2006).
1 Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pp. 2-3.
2 Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. x, 185-186.
3 A list of unsuccessful amendments is available at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Unsuccessful_attempts_to_amend_the_United_
States_Constitution.
4 The Presence of the Past, p. 14.
5 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century American. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 3
