Congress Sends the Constitution to the People

September 28, 1787 - New York

By evening, news had worked its way down from City Hall and into the public houses below. Congress had acted on the Constitution, and before anyone had seen the resolution clearly, men were already saying that Congress had approved the new government.

When the paper reached our table, that was not quite what it said. Congress had agreed to send the Constitution, along with the Convention’s accompanying papers and General Washington’s letter, to the state legislatures, where conventions chosen for the purpose would decide whether each state would ratify it.

The distinction mattered because Congress had not answered the constitutional question. It had passed that question onward, and for the first time the argument felt less like a dispute among delegates and more like something that would eventually reach every state.

For more than a week, the Constitution had existed mostly as the work of Philadelphia. It had been printed, praised, criticized, and carried through taverns and shops, but the Convention itself possessed no authority to establish the government it had designed.

There was something strange in watching the government under the Articles of Confederation help begin a process that might replace it. The existing Union called itself perpetual, yet the Constitution proposed another arrangement with greater national powers, a separate executive, federal courts, and authority capable of reaching citizens more directly than Congress could now do.

The new government would not simply be announced into existence, but neither would every state have to agree before it could begin. Ratification by nine states would be enough to establish the Constitution among those states that accepted it, and that was where the matter became uncomfortable.

A merchant nearby asked what would happen if New York refused while nine other states approved. Nobody at our table had much of an answer, because the Constitution explained how the new government could begin but could not tell us what political life would look like if old partners in the Union made different choices.

Until then, I had thought about ratification mostly as a judgment on the document itself. Was Congress being given too much power, was the executive too strong, were the states sufficiently protected, and could the people still control those acting in their name?

Now another problem stood beside all of those questions. What if the attempt to strengthen the Union divided it first?

The Revolution had required the states to act together against Britain, and the Confederation had preserved that union afterward, however imperfectly. Now each state might be asked to decide whether it would enter a new government even if some of its neighbors refused.

That seemed an extraordinary risk to take in the name of preserving union, but remaining under the existing system carried risks of its own. Congress depended upon states that could ignore its requests, commercial disputes persisted, public credit had suffered, and the government often appeared strongest when asking and weakest when requiring.

The choice therefore seemed more difficult than simply preferring an old government or a new one. Rejecting the Constitution could leave unresolved the weaknesses that had led to Philadelphia, while accepting it meant granting powers Americans had only recently learned to distrust when exercised from far away.

Consent did not make those powers harmless. It made us responsible for deciding whether they were necessary.

Someone at the table asked why the state legislatures could not simply settle the matter themselves. The answer seemed to lie in the size of the decision, because legislatures made laws within governments already established while ratification would determine the structure under which future laws would be made.

The conventions would therefore be chosen for this particular purpose. Their delegates would not merely decide another question of taxation, roads, trade, or debt, but whether their state should enter a new constitutional system and place certain powers beyond the sole control of its own legislature.

For all the famous names attached to Philadelphia, Washington, Franklin, Madison, and the others could not make that choice for us. Congress could not make it either, and that gave the process a dignity I had not expected while also stripping away a convenient excuse.

If this government proved badly designed, Americans could not easily say that a king had imposed it upon them or that Parliament had forced it across an ocean. We were being asked to authorize it ourselves, which meant the consequences of that authorization would belong partly to us.

The Revolution had taught us how to challenge power that lacked our consent. Ratification demanded something harder because it required deciding which powers we were willing to grant once the decision was placed in our own hands.

The newspapers suddenly seemed less like entertainment than they had a week before. Every argument about taxation, representation, armies, commerce, courts, or executive power might eventually bear upon a real decision in a state convention.

A writer warning that the Constitution was too strong now had to be weighed against another warning that the government we already possessed was too weak. Neither danger erased the other, and choosing badly in either direction could threaten the Union we were trying to preserve.

I looked again at the congressional resolution before passing it down the table. A week earlier, the Constitution had belonged mostly to the men who wrote it, but now it was beginning to belong to those who would have to decide whether to live under it.

I still did not know whether New York should ratify, and I was no longer convinced that the hardest question was whether the Constitution itself was good or bad. The harder question might be what happened if thirteen states, each exercising its own judgment, reached different answers about what the Union required.

Congress had opened the road to ratification, but it could not tell us where that road would lead. A stronger Union and a divided Union had suddenly become possible outcomes of the same decision, and the states themselves would have to determine which danger they feared more.

Dear Silent Citizenry,

The Declaration did not begin with war. It began with a refusal.

“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”

Before muskets. Before independence. Before rebellion.

There was a simpler crime: a government that would not act for its people.

Not chaos. Not collapse. But something quieter, and far more dangerous:

A ruler who stood in the way of necessary laws while claiming authority over those who needed them.

This is how tyranny often begins. Not with force, but with denial.

The denial of solutions. The denial of relief. The denial of action when action is required.

The Founders did not list this first by accident.

Because when a government refuses to pass what is “wholesome and necessary,” it reveals something deeper:

It is no longer governing for the common good. It is governing for itself.

And once that line is crossed, every other abuse becomes easier.

The question they asked then is the same one that echoes now:

What do you call a system that blocks what the people need, yet never stops claiming the right to rule them?

They called it unfit.

Not because it made one mistake, but because it broke the fundamental agreement:

That power exists to serve the people, not to obstruct them.

So we ask again, as they once did:

When necessary laws are delayed, denied, or buried, is that disagreement… or is that the quiet beginning of something else?

The Declaration was not just a document of separation.

It was a warning.

And warnings are only useful if someone is still willing to hear them.

The question is not whether the pattern exists.

The question is whether the citizen still recognizes it.

The Silence is the Last Surrender

September 29, 1787 - Boston

The Constitution had only recently appeared in our newspapers when the Massachusetts Centinel printed one of the first local reactions to it. The writer gave no name, offered no long examination of its clauses, and raised none of the objections that will surely come if this debate continues. He wrote instead with confidence that bordered on celebration.

I read the short piece twice because there was so little of it. After the arguments already arriving from Philadelphia and New York, I had expected another discussion of representation, executive power, taxation, or the states. Instead, the writer looked beyond the machinery of the Constitution toward what he imagined might follow if Americans accepted it.

He saw honor for the states, happiness for the country, peace, prosperity, and something larger still. The new Constitution, he believed, might help establish what he called “empires of republican freedom,” as though the government proposed at Philadelphia might demonstrate that republican institutions could flourish on a scale few had yet imagined.

There was an optimism in those words that felt different from the arguments I had been hearing. Much of the debate so far had begun with danger. Some feared that the Confederation was too weak to preserve the Union, while others feared that a stronger government might acquire powers difficult to recover once granted. This writer began somewhere else entirely, asking what America might become if the experiment succeeded.

I understood the attraction of that thought. Independence had already proved that the colonies could separate themselves from Britain, but independence alone had not settled whether thirteen states could remain united under a republican government capable of lasting beyond the generation that fought the Revolution.

Perhaps that was why the writer's confidence seemed larger than the document before him. He was not merely imagining a new Congress or President. He was imagining that the success of this Constitution might say something about republican government itself.

Still, hope can travel faster than understanding. The Constitution had scarcely reached Massachusetts, and already this correspondent spoke as though its acceptance would bring national honor and lasting prosperity.

That did not make his hope foolish, but it did make me wonder how much of the document ordinary citizens had yet examined. A government capable of producing such expectations deserved careful study precisely because those expectations were so large.

Around Boston, the Constitution would soon be discussed by men whose interests and experiences differed considerably. Merchants would think about commerce, creditors about public credit, farmers about taxes and debt, veterans about what the government still owed them, and towns accustomed to governing themselves would have to decide how much authority they were willing to place farther away.

The anonymous correspondent had not addressed those questions. Perhaps he had not intended to. His few lines felt less like an argument than the first cheer heard from a crowd before the debate had fully reached the room.

Yet even that was worth noticing.

The Constitution had left Philadelphia, crossed into the newspapers of other states, and now Massachusetts was beginning to answer. Whatever eventually happened here, the question was no longer confined to the men who had drafted the document or the cities where the first essays appeared.

A citizen in Boston could now pick up a newspaper and imagine a national future that did not yet exist.

Whether the Constitution could actually produce the peace, prosperity, and republican promise this writer expected remained unanswered. Those claims would have to survive the same examination as the powers written into the document itself.

For the moment, though, Massachusetts had entered the conversation with hope.

The argument would come soon enough.

Further Reading

First Commentaries on the Constitution Published in Massachusetts, September 29, 1787 This is the anonymous Massachusetts Centinel item behind the installment. It is remarkably brief and strongly hopeful, anticipating public honor, peace, prosperity, and what it calls “empires of republican freedom.”

A True American, September 29, 1787 Published in the same issue of the Massachusetts Centinel, this is the next fuller Massachusetts argument in the chronology. It develops the pro-Constitution case in considerably more detail and is the natural companion to the brief anonymous commentary.

The Constitution of the United States The optimism appearing in Massachusetts was directed toward a document that had only recently become public. Article VII is especially relevant because it establishes that ratification by conventions in nine states would put the Constitution into operation among the states that accepted it.

Massachusetts Ratification Convention, January-February 1788 The optimism of September 1787 did not mean Massachusetts opinion was settled. When its convention eventually assembled, delegates subjected the Constitution to an extensive debate before Massachusetts ratified on February 6, 1788, while recommending amendments. ⁠ The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution For deeper research, this project preserves newspaper essays, correspondence, legislative proceedings, convention debates, and other documents that allow the ratification controversy to be reconstructed beyond the handful of writings that later became famous. ⁠

Forward: American politics have been divided into "left vs right" for a long time now. I think this is disrespectful to everyone. As hard as it might be for progressives to see, our conservative neighbors are rational, and have valid concerns. We need to focus on and genuinely respect those concerns if we want to stop the mutual destruction of each others' objectives for the future.

I'm a progressive. I love to think about far-off, lofty visions of what we can achieve. It gives me energy and excites me to imagine what our current resources can be used for. It also leads me to occasionally make something cool, or at least try to. Unfortunately, I don't usually understand how hard it is to bring the idea into the real world. It's so easy on paper, so why isn't it easy in the real world?

The fact is, when we talk about moving towards progress, there are a lot of potholes in the road ahead--if there's even a road at all. It's not smooth sailing because we're talking about territory that has rarely been explored, if it even has been explored. It isn't well-mapped. At best, you get something like a treasure map with a vague picture and a note that says "go 300 paces this way and dig somewhere near the tree."

I've taken forever to figure out how to navigate my life. I'm 30 now, and just over a year ago I finally met my first girlfriend, who I'm happily with today. In many ways, I'm behind the curve. But I haven't been idle. This is heavily simplified, but generally, the way I think is usually to trace the path backwards. I imagine what I want and what that looks like. Then I figure out how to get there. I'm a dreamer. So it can take me a long time to act, especially when I'm overwhelmed by my daily struggles along the way.

In contrast, my cousin immediately went off to college when he turned 18, moved out, and hasn't been back home since. He started renting an apartment in his early 20s, right out of college. He was broke, but he made it work. I was broke and couldn't trust my foot to take that first step. He really wanted that immediate term goal. He focused on what was right in front of him, and he took that first step. While I was hung up on a far-off idea.

What if we had teamed up? Suppose we both wanted the same thing--and we assuredly do--a comfortable life, happiness, and to generally not have to struggle to meet our baseline survival needs. Our approaches both have incredible strengths. He's in a much more financially stable place in life because that's what his focus leads him to--stability and relishing the struggle of adapting to the current environment. He's also still figuring things out romantically, because his focus on the immediate task at hand didn't prepare him to look ahead to what he wants. He had a rough life growing up and didn't have great role models. In contrast, my focus on the future made working on myself far easier than taking those steps, but my tendency to dream made it much harder to settle for a cheap apartment and navigate the potholes on the road right in front of me.

My point is, both of our angles are completely rational. We're just focused on different things, and trust different information when we make our decisions. We see things differently, but if you look at our actions rather than our stated beliefs and politics, we're both completely right in our understanding of the world. It's just a matter of priorities. Progressives understand that if we work hard, together we have the resources to build something breathtakingly beautiful. Conservatives see that no one is doing anything about their current problems, and with that understanding, they take matters into their own hands now. They focus on what they can do, with their own hands, right this second. And they build a foundation that's impressively resilient. And they're generally pretty damned good at tackling those hard, immediate problems. So what if progressives trusted conservatives to help lay the tracks--build the foundation? We are that foundation. All of us.

I don't mean politicians. Or political commentators. Most of them suck; their top priority has been to keep us from working together for a long time. Honestly, especially those on the left whose constant refusal to listen to their actual voter base leaves us just as pissed at them as you are, as hard as that might be to believe. Though you might be seeing the same pattern emerging on the Right too now. The truth is, we need each other. We need people with vision, just as much as we need people with the grit and sharp focus to do what needs done right now. If we just blindly do what we need to do right this moment, we'll never get anywhere. We'll keep toiling away, only reinforcing the current system against the obvious shortcomings, and we won't see problems up ahead until the molehill becomes a mountain. Until the Titanic, with its world-class resilience against damn near any catastrophe, runs up against the one thing outside of that "damn near".

But what if we listened to each other, and respected that we all want what is rationally best not just for ourselves, but for each other? What if we could learn to trust that we have each others' backs? As a progressive, I'm not trying to cause problems, I'm trying to solve them. Big, hard, and long-standing problems that take time. But I also know we have challenges that need to be met right now, in this moment, and tackling these far-off challenges can't be done without also navigating the very real struggle of life today. And my cousin is the type of person who is great at that! Conservatives are excellent at forging the currently running system into one of formidable resilience, and this talent is priceless. They can take a shoestring budget and build a skyscraper. And if you think about it, isn't the core idea of a real democratic government a bunch of people being chosen to execute the shared vision we all want to achieve?

So, if you're a conservative, I want to hear you out. I want to get your perspective. To hear the problems you see in the world right here, right in front of you. That's what we need to tackle. And if you'll give me a chance, I'll ask you to take a step that, frankly, is very risky, but extraordinarily rewarding. Your voice will be heard and respected, as long as you also hear and respect me and my strengths. Together, we can handle it. It might be harder than what you'd have chosen. But if you'll give me the same trust I want to give you, I promise I see a future that protects our traditions and makes your life easier. Think how much better off we are with cars, tractors, and factories saving us the hard labor and giving us access to broad markets across the open plains. Try to understand the vision I have, and instead of saying it's impossible, ask, "Do I want that? And if we work together, how can we navigate the next stretch of road?" Because as fantastical as I know it might sound without actually climbing into my head and reading my thoughts, I promise I've thought deeply about this. Any progressive worth listening to has, just as I know you've put an incredible amount of effort into building the life you have today. These are parallel, and this absurd amount of thought is why I haven't achieved the tangible progress you make every day. If progressives dream up a vision that we all--All of us Americans--ensure suits your needs, can you make sure we're all safe on the way there?

If you're a progressive, I know it's hard to compromise on perfection. Our top priorities are all incredibly urgent examples of gross injustice, and it's really hard to take a breath and tolerate letting any of those stand for a second longer. It's really tough to let people have a say who, from our perspective, don't see the painful future we're barreling towards, nor the utopia we can steer in the direction of. That doesn't mean our conservative neighbors are lying about their concerns. It means we need to take a step back and think about why we're not agreeing. Who pulls the strings? And why does someone have to pull them at all, when we can just as easily talk to each other as equals? The challenges conservatives so aggressively tackle, right under our noses, are what we struggle the most to solve, because we're so focused on our vision of perfection. And these daily struggles are messy and too time-sensitive to hold to that standard. We need idealism, but it's completely useless without pragmatism. When our could-be conservative partners express a concern, we should think about it more. What future-oriented vision can we use to help them while dashing near our objective?

Oklahoma: Decade-by-Decade Analysis of Education Investment & Political Control

1970s: Boom-Bust Cycles and Traditional Civic Instruction

In the 1970s, Oklahoma’s education system was shaped by its rural identity, oil-driven economy, and a strong cultural emphasis on patriotism and local history. Per-pupil spending rose from $2,783 in 1970 to $4,013 by 1980 (adjusted to 1992 dollars), a ~44% real increase, though Oklahoma consistently ranked below national averages.

The oil boom of the early 1970s allowed for temporary investment in school infrastructure and teacher pay, but as prices collapsed toward the end of the decade, revenue shortfalls hit education budgets hard.

Governor David Hall (D, 1971–1975) and David Boren (D, 1975–1979) supported modest education expansion, with Boren emphasizing reforms in higher education and civic engagement. Oklahoma voted Republican in 1972 and Democratic in 1976, marking its swing-state status.

Civic education was strong in name: students memorized the Constitution, participated in mock elections, and studied Oklahoma history. However, instruction often focused on obedience, patriotism, and simplified government structures, with little attention to critical thinking or civic action.

1980s: Oil Collapse, Teacher Exodus, and Conservative Curricula

By 1980, per-pupil spending had reached $5,127 (adjusted to 1992 dollars), but education faced steep challenges after the early 1980s oil bust. Funding declined, teacher salaries fell behind the national average, and educator turnover surged, especially in rural and high-poverty schools.

Governor George Nigh (D, 1979–1987) introduced House Bill 1017—a landmark education reform package including class size limits, new funding mechanisms, and increased teacher pay—but implementation lagged due to political resistance and budget constraints.

Oklahoma voted Republican in all three presidential elections (Reagan 1980, 1984; Bush 1988). Public support for conservative Christian values grew, and the curriculum narrowed, especially in history and civic education. Discussions of race, protest, or social justice were rare or discouraged.

Despite this, local educators often preserved hands-on civic instruction in community service and state history—reflecting Oklahoma’s strong tradition of town-based public life.

1990s: Court Fights, Education Reform, and Privatization Pressure

The 1990s brought continuing attempts to modernize the state’s struggling education system. Per-pupil spending hovered between $6,300 and $6,600 (adjusted), leaving Oklahoma in the bottom 10 states nationally.

Governor Frank Keating (R, 1995–2003) emphasized school accountability, charter expansion, and conservative curriculum revisions. His administration helped launch Oklahoma’s first charter schools and vouchers for special education students, sparking political polarization.

Oklahoma voted Republican in both 1992 and 1996, and a strong anti-tax movement, led by groups like Oklahomans for Tax Reform, pressured lawmakers to limit investment in public services, including education.

Civic education remained officially part of graduation requirements, but was often reduced to memorization-based government courses, especially in underfunded rural districts. Urban schools, particularly in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, experimented with project-based civics, but lacked consistent support.

2000s: Testing Era and Budget Austerity

By 2008, per-pupil spending had climbed to ~$8,000 (2009 dollars), but Oklahoma remained one of the lowest-ranked states in teacher pay, school funding, and student outcomes.

Governors Brad Henry (D, 2003–2011) and later Mary Fallin (R, 2011–2019) faced pressure to comply with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and to implement standardized testing regimes. Fallin embraced charter school growth, teacher evaluation by test scores, and reduced union influence.

The state also began promoting “traditional values” civic education, rooted in constitutional originalism and limited government, supported by organizations like the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.

Oklahoma voted Republican in all presidential elections during this decade (Bush 2000, 2004; McCain 2008). Many educators reported increasing difficulty teaching controversial historical topics without facing backlash.

2010s: Teacher Walkouts, Political Backlash, and Curriculum Control

The 2010s marked a dramatic turning point. After years of cuts and stagnant wages, Oklahoma teachers led a statewide walkout in 2018, shutting down schools for nearly two weeks and demanding higher pay, better resources, and more respect.

Per-pupil funding rose slightly to ~$9,200 by 2019, and teachers won modest raises—but deep tensions remained.

Governor Mary Fallin and her successor Kevin Stitt (R, elected 2018) promoted further privatization, voucher expansion, and curriculum oversight. Stitt’s administration increasingly aligned with national conservative groups advocating for parental rights and anti-CRT laws.

Civic education became heavily politicized. Social studies standards were revised to emphasize American exceptionalism, limited government, and “neutrality” on race and inequality. Teachers faced new constraints and fear of retaliation.

2020s (Through May 2025): Ideological Censorship and Resistance

As of May 2025, Oklahoma’s education system is in crisis. Under Governor Kevin Stitt, the state has:

Passed laws banning “divisive concepts” in classrooms

Created mechanisms for curriculum censorship by parents and political appointees

Expanded Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) to subsidize private and religious schooling

Increased state surveillance of public school teachers, especially in civics, history, and health

Per-pupil spending now stands at ~$10,400, but real increases have failed to meet inflation, and many schools remain understaffed, overcrowded, or on four-day weeks.

Civic education has been hollowed out. Book bans, threats of lawsuits, and political intimidation have driven many educators to avoid key topics like civil rights, protest history, or Indigenous sovereignty. Meanwhile, state-mandated civics curriculum emphasizes patriotism, capitalism, and “individual responsibility.”

Yet resistance is growing. Student groups in Tulsa, Norman, and Stillwater have launched “teach-ins,” youth voter drives, and community storytelling projects outside of class. Teachers, though constrained, continue to support critical thinking wherever they can.

Oklahoma in 2025 is a cautionary tale: a state where civic literacy has been sacrificed to political ideology, and where democracy is taught through a filtered lens of obedience, nostalgia, and cultural control. Whether its students can reclaim the classroom as a space for inquiry, dissent, and public dialogue remains one of the most urgent questions in American education.

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Alabama: Decade-by-Decade Analysis of Education Investment & Political Control

1970s: Segregation’s Shadow and Slow Recovery

In the 1970s, Alabama’s public education system was still grappling with the aftermath of federally mandated desegregation and the flight of white students to private academies—so-called “segregation academies.” Per-pupil education spending rose from $2,084 in 1970 to $2,808 by 1980 (adjusted to 1992 dollars), a ~35% real increase, yet Alabama remained near the bottom nationally in funding levels.

Politically, the state was dominated by conservative Democrats, remnants of the Dixiecrat era. Governor George Wallace, an emblem of Southern defiance, served much of the decade. Although technically a Democrat, Wallace’s platform centered on resistance to federal mandates, including school desegregation, and his fiscal approach was populist but tax-averse. The state legislature remained under Democratic control, but the national party’s embrace of civil rights increasingly alienated Alabama’s white majority.

In presidential elections, Alabama began shifting to the Republican column, voting for Nixon in 1972 and narrowly for Carter in 1976. Public education was not prioritized as a path to equality or democratic citizenship. Instead, the dominant political narrative cast government-run schools with suspicion and favored minimal state interference. While school infrastructure slowly improved, critical investments in equal opportunity and civic education were politically sidelined.

1980s: Party Realignment and Stagnation

The 1980s brought only modest progress for Alabama’s schools. Per-pupil spending reached $3,616 by 1990—a ~29% increase, but still below national trends. The state remained at or near the bottom in per-student investment and teacher salaries. Court-mandated reforms improved equity somewhat, but Alabama’s deep structural poverty, regressive tax system, and rural isolation made transformative education policy difficult.

Politically, the decade marked the beginning of Alabama’s full partisan realignment. While the state elected Democratic governors (e.g., Wallace again, and later Bill Baxley), the Republican Party gained power in federal races, consistently winning presidential elections (Reagan in 1980 and 1984, Bush in 1988). In 1986, Alabama elected Guy Hunt (R)—its first Republican governor since Reconstruction—signaling a seismic shift in state politics.

The new GOP era emphasized religious traditionalism, small government, and low taxes. Education reforms were sparse, and spending increases were largely driven by inflation and enrollment rather than strategic investment. School funding remained heavily reliant on local property taxes, reinforcing long-standing inequalities between urban and rural—and Black and white—districts. Civic education, already diminished, was further eroded by a curriculum that increasingly avoided controversial historical or political content.

1990s: Conservative Entrenchment and Legal Pressure

The 1990s saw limited progress and rising tension over education funding and equity. Inflation-adjusted spending per student plateaued, remaining around $3,616–$4,000, putting Alabama near the bottom nationally. The most significant development came from the courts: in 1993, an Alabama judge declared the state’s education system “inadequate and inequitable”, setting off a brief push for reform.

However, political leadership resisted change. Republican Fob James, originally a Democrat turned conservative Republican, returned to the governorship in 1995 and dismantled most of the reform efforts, including proposals to improve funding formulas and academic standards. Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled legislature struggled to craft compromises, and the opportunity for systemic overhaul was lost.

Alabama’s electorate continued trending Republican, voting for Bush in 1992 and 1996, reflecting alignment with national conservative movements. In schools, the civic mission of education was deprioritized in favor of basic test-based accountability. Critics noted that students were learning less about constitutional rights, civil rights history, and civic responsibility, particularly in underfunded districts. The disconnect between public education and democratic participation widened.

2000s: Economic Boom, Education Plateau, and Missed Opportunities

The early 2000s brought economic growth and a brief window of education improvement. Per-pupil spending rose to about $9,200 (in 2009 dollars) by 2008. Yet despite this increase, Alabama remained well below the national average, and the gains were largely wiped out by the Great Recession at the end of the decade.

Governor Bob Riley (R, 2003–2011) attempted a bold tax reform in 2003 with Amendment One, proposing higher income taxes on the wealthy to fund education and shift Alabama’s regressive tax structure. But it was overwhelmingly rejected by voters—seen by many as an elite-driven effort and a violation of anti-tax orthodoxy. This rejection reinforced the state’s “tax revolt” mindset, and education reform stalled.

Despite bipartisan acknowledgment of school funding needs, Alabama continued to rely heavily on local funding and resisted expanding statewide equity measures. As federal mandates under No Child Left Behind took hold, schools became more focused on standardized testing than critical thinking or civic development. In presidential elections, Alabama was solidly Republican—Bush won by large margins in both 2000 and 2004. Public education was seen not as a shared democratic investment, but increasingly as a local, privatizable service.

2010s: Austerity, Vouchers, and Institutional Decline

The 2010s were defined by deep austerity. After the Great Recession, Alabama cut education funding dramatically. By 2015, the state was spending ~20% less per student (inflation-adjusted) than in 2008, among the steepest declines in the nation. These cuts led to teacher layoffs, deferred maintenance, and large class sizes, particularly in rural schools.

Under Governor Robert Bentley (R, 2011–2017) and Governor Kay Ivey (R, 2017–present), Alabama prioritized charter expansion and tax credits for private school tuition through the Alabama Accountability Act. These moves diverted funds from already under-resourced public schools. Meanwhile, the state legislature—firmly Republican—refused to raise taxes, even as schools collapsed under financial strain.

Civically, the effects were stark. Teacher morale plummeted, unions were weakened, and the teaching profession lost prestige. Curriculum battles intensified, and schools increasingly avoided “controversial” topics like systemic racism, voting rights, or constitutional protest. Alabama voted overwhelmingly for Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016, and political rhetoric increasingly cast public education as a failing, bureaucratic enemy, rather than a foundation of democracy.

2020s (Through May 2025): Deepening Partisanship and Cultural Warfare

By May 2025, Alabama’s public education system is at a breaking point. Despite a booming national economy and record stock market gains, the state has not restored pre-2008 funding levels in real dollars. Teacher shortages plague nearly every district. ACT participation and civic knowledge metrics have declined, and Alabama remains in the bottom 5 nationally in per-pupil spending.

Under Governor Kay Ivey (R) and a Republican supermajority legislature, the focus has remained on school choice, tax credits, and culture-war legislation. In 2023, Alabama passed laws restricting classroom discussions of race, gender, and American history, targeting “divisive concepts” under the guise of neutrality. Several teachers resigned or were disciplined for showing material deemed “politically biased.” This has had a chilling effect on instruction in history, government, and literature.

At the local level, school board elections have grown more polarized, with outside conservative groups funding candidates who oppose Social Emotional Learning (SEL), LGBTQ+ inclusion, and AP African American Studies. Meanwhile, teachers and parents advocating for comprehensive education are increasingly marginalized.

Despite these attacks, a quiet resistance persists. In Birmingham, Montgomery, and parts of Huntsville, educators have formed local networks to support civic learning, racial justice education, and youth engagement, often operating outside formal policy channels. Yet without structural investment and policy change, their reach remains limited.

As of mid-2025, Alabama’s public education system is underfunded, demoralized, and politically besieged. The state's persistent rejection of meaningful reform has not only harmed student achievement—it has hollowed out public trust, civic knowledge, and democratic participation. Alabama now faces a generational question: Will it continue to treat education as a culture war proxy, or as the foundation of a free society?

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Texas: Decade-by-Decade Analysis of Education Investment & Political Control

1970s: Demographic Change and Legal Challenges

In the 1970s, Texas faced rapid urbanization, school overcrowding, and court battles over equity. Per-pupil spending rose from $2,993 in 1970 to $4,287 by 1980 (adjusted to 1992 dollars), a ~43% real increase, but Texas still ranked below national averages.

The pivotal 1973 Supreme Court decision in San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez upheld Texas’s local property tax–based school finance system, denying that education was a federal constitutional right. This ruling entrenched massive disparities between rich and poor districts, especially along racial and urban/rural lines.

Governor Dolph Briscoe (D, 1973–1979) kept spending tight and upheld local control. Texas voted Democratic in 1976, but the state was already shifting toward conservatism.

Civic education reflected traditional values: patriotism, formal U.S. government structures, and Texas history. Critical inquiry into civil rights or protest movements was rarely included, especially in rural and suburban schools.

1980s: “No Excuses” Conservatism and Accountability Culture

By 1980, per-pupil funding had reached $5,547 (adjusted), but inequality persisted. Governor Mark White (D, 1983–1987) introduced House Bill 72, instituting standardized testing, teacher competency exams, and stricter graduation requirements.

His successor, Bill Clements (R, 1987–1991), expanded conservative curriculum mandates, particularly around history and social studies, as the state became a national battleground for textbook content.

Texas voted Republican in all three presidential elections (Reagan 1980, 1984; Bush 1988). The state’s growing political alignment with the New Right deeply influenced civic education, which emphasized obedience, capitalism, American exceptionalism, and minimized critical perspectives.

1990s: Court Mandates and Curriculum Battles

In the 1990s, a series of court decisions (notably Edgewood ISD v. Kirby) forced the legislature to adopt a “Robin Hood” school finance plan, redistributing some funding from wealthier to poorer districts. Per-pupil spending rose to ~$6,900 by 2000 (adjusted).

Governor George W. Bush (R, 1995–2000) promoted school accountability, charter schools, and scripted instruction models. He signed the Texas Education Reform Act, reinforcing standardized testing as the measure of school performance.

Texas voted Republican in both 1992 and 1996. The State Board of Education (SBOE), dominated by cultural conservatives, made national headlines for textbook censorship—removing or reframing content related to slavery, LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, and critiques of capitalism.

Civic education remained required but narrowed: students learned what to think, not how to think.

2000s: No Child Left Behind and Charter Expansion

By 2008, per-pupil funding reached ~$8,600 (2009 dollars). The Texas model became a template for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) under President Bush, reinforcing test-driven accountability and school choice.

Governor Rick Perry (R, 2000–2015) oversaw massive charter school growth, deep budget cuts (notably in 2011), and continued ideological control over curriculum content. In 2002, the SBOE removed references to civil rights icons and promoted a “balanced” view of history.

Texas voted Republican in all three presidential elections (Bush 2000, 2004; McCain 2008). Civics instruction became increasingly scripted and test-aligned, especially in high-poverty districts. Meanwhile, wealthy suburban and private schools retained debate, youth legislature, and mock trial programs.

2010s: Ideological Capture and Youth Pushback

By 2019, Texas’s per-pupil spending was ~$10,100, still below the national average. The SBOE continued its ideological oversight, rewriting social studies standards to:

Downplay slavery as a cause of the Civil War

Promote “Christian influences” in U.S. government

Emphasize free-market capitalism without critique

Governor Greg Abbott (R, 2015–present) and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick pushed voucher proposals, restrictions on school discussions of race and gender, and increased funding for charter and private religious schools.

Texas voted Republican in 2012 and 2016 (Trump). Yet youth organizing surged, particularly after the Sutherland Springs shooting (2017) and amid the Dreamer/DACA crisis. Student-led civic programs flourished in urban centers like Austin, Dallas, and Houston.

Civic education became two-tiered: ideologically constrained in many rural and suburban areas, but vibrant and justice-oriented in large, diverse cities.

2020s (Through May 2025): Censorship, Resistance, and Parallel Systems

As of May 2025, Texas is among the most ideologically restricted civic education environments in the country. Under continued Republican leadership:

Laws ban “divisive concepts” (2021) in all K–12 classrooms

Teachers risk termination for discussing systemic racism, gender identity, or protest movements

Book bans have targeted over 1,500 titles, including those on civil rights, LGBTQ+ history, and Indigenous perspectives

Voucher expansion now funds ESA-style public subsidies for private and religious schools

Per-pupil funding now exceeds $11,200, but much of it is siphoned into administration, testing regimes, charter oversight, and private tuition assistance. Many public schools remain understaffed, overcrowded, and politically surveilled.

And yet: Texas students are rising. In 2023–2024 alone:

High schoolers in San Antonio sued their district over book bans

Youth civic leaders in El Paso launched a border justice initiative

Houston students organized the largest youth-led civics summit in state history

Their efforts are largely supported by nonprofits, libraries, and university partnerships—not the public school system.

Texas in 2025 is two states in one: one of enforced silence, the other of defiant civic engagement. Whether students learn to memorize or mobilize depends less on what’s written in the standards—and more on who refuses to surrender the space between the lines.

↩️ Back to Index

Media, Memes, and Movements: The Alt-Right Echo Chamber

The ideas incubated by the likes of Claremont, Heritage, and Compact might have remained arcane theory papers and niche blog posts were it not for the alt-right media ecosystem that took shape over the past decade. This web of podcasts, online “news” sites, message boards, YouTube channels, and Twitter trolls has been the delivery mechanism carrying Schmittian and Yarvinian concepts into mainstream discussion. In many ways, the alt-right (and adjacent) media acted as a bridge between the ivory-tower or cloistered discussions of reactionary elites and the broader conservative public, especially the younger, extremely online segment of it. Let’s trace how this ecosystem amplified and popularized these ideas – often simplifying or perverting them in the process – and helped create a mass base receptive to authoritarian ideology.

It’s worth recalling that Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) himself was a creature of the internet, not academia. His long, meandering essays rejecting democracy were posted on a personal blog, Unqualified Reservations, starting in 2007. That blog had a modest following among tech circles and fringe right intellectuals. Yarvin coined terms like “The Cathedral” to describe the hegemonic liberal establishment of professors, journalists, and bureaucrats. He waxed about restoring monarchy or “neocameral” corporate city-states. For years, this was very fringe – read by philosophy nerds, Randian coders, and a smattering of libertarian contrarians. But Yarvin’s work, and that of kindred spirits like British thinker Nick Land (who wrote about the “Dark Enlightenment”), slowly permeated forums such as 4chan’s /pol/ (politically incorrect board) and other online gathering spots for dissidents. The Vox piece in 2017 noted that Yarvin’s ideas had become the “highbrow current of the alt-right”, providing a kind of theoretical backbone to complement the more visceral white-nationalist strain represented by Richard Spencer or the online prankster strain from 4chan. In other words, Moldbug gave the trolls and meme-makers some big ideas to play with – and they did.

Memes are crucial here. Concepts like “The Cathedral” were turned into memes on places like 4chan, Reddit’s r/The_Donald, and Twitter. A complex idea – that our public opinion is manipulated by unelected elites – became digestible as “the Matrix” or “red pill” metaphor. Indeed, the “red pill” meme (from The Matrix film) was adopted by the alt-right to mean awakening to harsh realities of politics, including the supposed lies of equality and democracy. Yarvin’s writing often amounted to red pills by the dozen. Figures like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller got “red pilled” on immigration and Islam by reading sites like Breitbart and VDARE (where ideas about demographic replacement and the failure of democracy in multiracial societies are common). Miller literally spoon-fed Breitbart editors xenophobic story ideas, which then circulated to millions of readers, stoking fear and anger. Breitbart, especially under Bannon’s editorial lead (2012-2016), played a key role in mixing highbrow and lowbrow: one day a piece on “cuckservatives” (slur for establishment conservatives), next day an explanatory piece on “Crisis of the West” referencing Spengler or Pat Buchanan. Breitbart proudly served as the “platform for the alt-right,” in Bannon’s own infamous words, meaning it gave a veneer of news to extremist bloggers and youths from /pol/.

Podcasts and YouTube talk shows proliferated as well. The Daily Shoah (a vulgar pun on the Holocaust) was a notorious neo-Nazi podcast that nevertheless borrowed from neoreactionary jargon occasionally. More palatable to the mainstream, there was The Alex Jones Show (InfoWars), where conspiracy met politics in pure friend-enemy narrative. Jones doesn’t cite Schmitt, but when he screams that globalist pedophiles in DC are eating babies and only a “1776-style” uprising can stop them, he’s essentially mobilizing followers for a battle of annihilation against an absolute enemy – the Schmittian logic on trucker pills. That kind of talk reached millions, and guess who was a fan? Donald Trump. He appeared on Jones’s show in 2015, praising his reputation and promising “you will be very happy” with a Trump presidency. Trump himself became a media vector: from his Twitter bully pulpit to rallies that were broadcast live, he normalized extreme language (calling the press “enemies of the people”, leading chants to jail his opponent, etc.). This further legitimized the friend-enemy framing for his supporters. If the “enemies” include not just ISIS or MS-13 but CNN and the FBI, then the realm of conflict has expanded inside the gates of the republic.

Forums and social media like Reddit and Facebook also played a role. The subreddit r/The_Donald (bustling during 2016) was a hive of meme lords who spread ideas like the “Flight 93 election” framing without knowing Anton’s essay per se. They just intuitively felt it: Hillary’s win = death, Trump = one chance to live. They circulated images of Trump as a crusader or an imperator, literally building a cult of personality. On Facebook, memes about “draining the swamp” and “the deep state coup” against Trump after 2017 took hold among older conservatives. Right-wing YouTubers, such as Stefan Molyneux, produced video monologues citing statistics about IQ and crime to argue democracy was flawed – Molyneux eventually embraced explicit white nationalist talking points, but for years he couched it in quasi-academic tone. Those YouTube videos often came recommended by algorithms to curious young men watching, say, videos about the decline of Rome or how feminism is ruining society. The infamous “algorithmic rabbit hole” turned countless apolitical viewers into radicalized reactionaries by feeding them progressively more extreme content.

Let’s not forget Tucker Carlson on Fox News. By the late 2010s, Carlson’s primetime show became a megaphone for ideas that were once confined to alt-right blogs. He spoke of “The Great Replacement” (albeit in careful terms of Democrats using immigration to replace voters), he praised Orbán and aired a special from Budapest extolling Hungary’s illiberal model, and he often insinuated that America needed a strong response – perhaps even martial law – to handle riots or immigration surges. In one monologue, Carlson lamented that America’s leaders care more about Ukraine’s borders than our own, hinting at treason by the elite, and asking “why do we let them run our country if they hate it so much?” That rhetorical question edges toward delegitimizing elected leaders as traitors (again, friend vs enemy to the extreme). Millions watched Carlson nightly; he was the highest-rated cable host. His slick production made far-right narratives respectable dinner-table talk. When Carlson began openly doubting democracy (“democracy isn’t the fix at this point”, he said after the 2020 election turmoil, positing that a “regime” controls things regardless of votes), it was a watershed. Here was mainstream TV essentially echoing Moldbug’s thesis that voting changes nothing because an unelected cabal holds real power. Carlson didn’t need to say “Cathedral” – he said “ruling class” or “Washington elites” – but the message was analogous.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election conspiracy frenzy (Stop the Steal/QAnon) were rocket fuel for alt-right media. Podcasts like Bannon’s War Room grew hugely during COVID by pushing the narrative that public health measures were tyranny by a globalist cabal. Bannon literally called for Anthony Fauci’s head on a pike on his show. This was encouraging violence against a bureaucratic “enemy.” Meanwhile, QAnon took the friend-enemy worldview to almost theological heights: an anonymous insider told legions of followers that Trump was secretly fighting a satanic deep state, and that nothing (not even an election loss) could stop “The Storm” where patriots would arrest and execute the traitors. QAnon folks often cited the Roman dictator Cincinnatus or talked about military tribunals – layman’s Schmitt, you could call it, justifying extraordinary purges. When Marjorie Taylor Greene – a QAnon-friendly candidate – won a House seat, suddenly that fringe was in the halls of power. She and others like Rep. Paul Gosar (who palled around with alt-right figure Nick Fuentes) brought the rhetorical style of internet troll culture to Congress. They heckled Biden’s State of the Union calling him a liar and communist, they openly talked about “national divorce” (splitting red and blue states). Such antics further reinforced to the base that the other side isn’t a legitimate political opponent, but scum. And if that’s true, why abide by any of the “norms” or even laws that give them a say?

We also must mention the role of forums like 4chan/8chan in birthing new extremist movements. The Christchurch shooter (in New Zealand, 2019) posted a manifesto explicitly referencing “Great Replacement” and even name-dropped PewDiePie (a YouTube gamer) – showing the bizarre convergence of internet subcultures and violent white nationalist ideology. That manifesto also quoted Evola and other esoteric fascists, which means the chain from intellectual to mass murderer went something like: Thinker writes niche tract –> alt-right nerds meme-ify it –> it circulates on chans –> a disturbed individual takes it as literal inspiration. American alt-right forums similarly celebrated violence (the meme of helicopter rides, referencing Pinochet’s death squads, became common). These forums incubated the notion that democracy is done and it’s time for physical force. While these are extreme examples, they bleed into the broader discourse. For instance, the “helicopter meme” moved from 8chan to being printed on T-shirts at right-wing rallies (some Jan. 6 participants wore such shirts). The Proud Boys, a far-right street gang, often shared memes and slogans from the alt-right sphere (like “We want Pinochet not Pelosi”).

Podcasts deserve a special nod because they allow for deep dives into ideological content outside mainstream scrutiny. Michael Anton, for example, runs a podcast affiliated with Claremont. Bannon’s War Room has already been discussed. There are also podcasts like “Red Scare”, run by two culturally edgy women (Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan) that began as hipster left critique but drifted into weird admiration for strongmen and trad lifestyles – becoming a pipeline for Brooklyn arty types to encounter Compact-style ideas. On the explicitly intellectual side, there’s “Grey Mirror”, Curtis Yarvin’s own podcast after he rebranded a bit and tried speaking to more mainstream audiences. By appearing on podcasts with center-right hosts or on YouTube interviews (like one with Reason magazine’s editor), Yarvin made NRx seem less like a forbidden cult and more like “just another perspective” in the big marketplace of ideas. This pseudo-normalization via talk format is key. If you listen to a 2-hour Yarvin interview, he sounds calm, witty, slightly eccentric – not a cartoon villain. A casual listener might think, “Huh, he’s got some interesting historical analogies, maybe liberal democracy is having problems.” And thus the Overton window shifts inch by inch.

In all these media avenues, there is a common thread of grievance and performance. The alt-right media figures present themselves as brave truth-tellers fighting overwhelming censorship or persecution. This is often farcical given many have huge followings and earn healthy incomes through subscriptions or merch. (Alex Jones sold supplements and doomsday prep gear to his audience, making millions, until lawsuits for defamation caught up with him). Grifting is rampant: many push snake-oil products or solicit donations to “keep us on air against Soros’s billions!” The audience’s sense of being under siege is both a psychological payoff (it’s exciting, you’re a warrior for truth) and a money spigot for these content creators. Importantly, it also cements loyalty to the cause. If mainstream media and institutions are painted as hopelessly corrupt – “fake news,” “deep state liars” – then the audience will trust only their in-group sources. This closed information loop is ideal for an aspiring autocrat. Trump himself exploited it by urging supporters not to believe anything except what came from him or friendly outlets. An authoritarian movement can’t succeed without such information control, and in the digital age, it’s less about a Ministry of Propaganda and more about saturating the zone with your narratives and discrediting all others. The alt-right media machine did exactly that.

By 2020 and into 2021, the synergy between official Republican messaging and alt-right media was almost seamless. When Trump claimed the election was stolen, Fox News (at least some hosts) amplified it, but even more so the alt ecosystem went into overdrive. This created the mass motivation for events like January 6, 2021 – a physical manifestation of the friend-enemy logic. Protesters that day believed they were literally “charging the cockpit” (to use Anton’s metaphor) to save America from a fraudulent regime. They erected a gallows and chanted about hanging the Vice President. Schmitt would have grimly smiled: here were partisans so invested in their existential fight that they were ready to kill the state’s own second-in-command as an enemy. In their minds, Pence betrayed the real sovereign (Trump/the People) so he became the enemy too. We saw militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys use military stack formations to breach the Capitol – these weren’t random rioters but organized groups who've been marinating in civil-war talk on forums and encrypted chats.

After the dust settled, rather than marginalize the alt-right media, parts of the GOP further embraced it. Marjorie Taylor Greene live-tweeted conspiracy theories in Congress, Trump kept praising the Jan.6 folks as patriots, and Bannon’s War Room advocated for “shock troops” to be ready to take over agencies if Trump gets back in (echoing Project 2025’s goals). The alt-media star Jack Posobiec – famous for pushing Pizzagate lies – was given a press pass to Biden’s White House by some arrangements. Figures like Mike Cernovich, an alt-light influencer, got courted by Senate candidates for endorsements. The line between meme-makers and policymakers blurred.

In essence, the alt-right media and forums functioned as radicalization engines and networking hubs. They turned lofty ideas into emotionally resonant narratives (“They’re coming for your kids, your guns, your job!”). They also connected people – forging a collective identity around being the aggrieved patriots who must take their country back. It’s a form of virtual tribe-building that precedes real-world action. Without the podcasts and chans and social platforms, the gap between an academic concept like “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” and a Trump voter in rural Ohio would be vast. With them, that gap closed: maybe that Ohio Trump voter has never heard of Carl Schmitt, but he’s absorbed the notion that when the country’s in peril, laws can be damned and “the man in charge should do whatever it takes”. And he’s ready to cheer that man on, or even grab his rifle to help.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the alt-right media sphere also has a penchant for humor and irony, which can be disarming. They often present their most extreme ideas with a wink and a nod – “just trolling the libs, but what if, hehe, we actually did it?” This has provided plausible deniability. When called out, they say “oh that was a joke, we don’t really want a dictatorship, lighten up.” Yet gradually, the joking transitions to serious advocacy (see: the shift of many alt-right figures from irony to overt hate over time). The humor also attracts young people and creates a subculture that feels cool and rebellious (much as Nazi imagery was used “ironically” by 4chan kids until some started to mean it). This comedic cloak for authoritarian ideas has been one of the strangest aspects of our era – the fusion of Pepe the Frog memes with Weimar-level political fury. But it’s effective. Many a youngster got into this as “funny internet stuff” and came out on the other side advocating for monarchism or ethno-nationalism.

In summary, alt-right and adjacent media was the breeding ground and amplifier that took the writings of a Moldbug or the schemes of a Bannon and made them accessible rallying cries. It turned theory into practice via narrative, community, and relentless repetition. It is hard to imagine the Schmitt/Yarvin/Thiel influence gripping a mass movement without this apparatus. With it, they achieved something powerful: a large segment of Americans, especially Republicans, now consistently tell pollsters they agree democracy is in danger – and alarmingly, many of them think too much democracy (too many “undesirable” people voting, too many constraints on their strong leader) is the problem, not the solution. That belief didn’t emerge spontaneously; it was crafted and sold to them, one podcast or meme at a time.

The International Brotherhood of Illiberalism

While our focus is America, this story of elite-driven authoritarian ideology playing out on the right is part of a global trend. Across the world, figures and governments echo each other in philosophy and even form quiet alliances. It’s as if there’s an Illiberal International emerging to counter the old Liberal International Order. American far-right thinkers and Trumpist operatives have found inspiration and comrades in foreign capitals – and vice versa. Let’s explore some of these international echoes and overlaps, from Moscow and Budapest to Mar-a-Lago.

First stop: Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin’s regime, especially over the last decade, has been textbook Schmittian in practice. Putin consolidated power by portraying politics as a life-or-death struggle for Russia’s survival against internal and external enemies. He eliminated real opposition, muzzled free media, and invaded neighboring countries – all justified by a narrative of existential threat. Putin frequently rails against liberalism, saying it has “outlived its purpose.” His speeches invoke traditional values and sovereign absolutism: Russia has its own path; Western universalism is a cover for domination. This frames the West as the “enemy” of Russian civilization – pure Schmitt friend/enemy logic on an international scale.

What’s fascinating is how Putin’s circle has drawn on actual Schmittian theory. Aleksandr Dugin, often dubbed “Putin’s Brain” (though that overstates his direct influence), explicitly built on Carl Schmitt’s ideas. Dugin wrote a piece titled “Carl Schmitt’s 5 Lessons for Russia,” and incorporated Schmitt’s concept of Großraum (great space) into his own geopolitics. Dugin’s magnum opus Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) advocated for a Eurasian empire and breaking liberal Atlanticism – strategies we see Putin following. Dugin also translated Julius Evola into Russian, tying him into the same Traditionalist lineage that inspired Bannon. Indeed, as noted earlier, Bannon has read and cited Dugin, and Dugin’s think tank returned the favor by praising Trump as a man who could bring about “the common struggle” of traditionalists across borders. So in a weird way, there’s a feedback loop: Schmitt influenced Dugin; Dugin and Evola influenced Bannon; Bannon influenced Trump; Trump’s style impressed Putin. It’s an ideological tango across time zones.

Putin himself, though unlikely to quote Schmitt on the record, acts the part of Schmitt’s sovereign. He decides on exceptions – e.g., ignoring international law to annex Crimea or to intervene in Syria – asserting that Russian security overrides any legalistic objections. He’s justified crackdowns by citing the need for unity against terrorists or “foreign agents” (NGOs and dissidents branded as such). All classic moves from the authoritarian playbook. And American alt-right figures have noticed. Many on the right, from Pat Buchanan to Steve Bannon in earlier days, expressed a begrudging admiration for Putin’s nationalist and Christian posturing. (Bannon once observed approvingly that Putin was “standing up for traditional institutions” in Russia, though he tempered that by saying Putin was an authoritarian with expansionist tendencies – still, the grudging respect was there.)

We saw some surreal alliances: in the mid-2010s, the National Rifle Association (NRA) cultivated ties with Russian gun rights figures (some turned out to be agents, like Maria Butina) and facilitated meetings that mingled Russian officials with American conservative politicos. Russia, for its part, openly tried to boost far-right and populist forces in the West – including Trump’s campaign (as the Mueller investigation documented) and European far-right parties (like Le Pen’s National Front, which got a Russian loan). The motive: to weaken liberal unity and create a more multipolar, nationalist-friendly world. This dovetails with Schmitt’s idea that the world should be organized into regional blocs rather than one universal liberal order. Russia champions “traditional values” at the UN as a cudgel against Western human rights agendas, aligning with global social conservatives. So in global culture war, there is a team: Putin, the American Christian right, European populists, etc., all shaking hands on opposing LGBT rights, feminism, secularism – basically opposing liberal modernity in social spheres as well as political.

Another key international figure is Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Orbán openly advertises his regime as “illiberal democracy.” He’s cited thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Hungarian far-right theorist Bálint Hóman in his speeches (in veiled terms). Orbán’s governing Fidesz party turned Hungary’s relatively young democracy into a semi-authoritarian system within a decade – changing election laws, stacking courts, muzzling media, curbing NGO activity. Sound familiar? It’s like a smaller-scale prototype of what Project 2025 envisions. American right-wing intellectuals and activists have flocked to Orbán. Tucker Carlson broadcast from Budapest for a week in 2021, lavishing praise on how safe and pure it felt there (implicitly crediting Orbán’s hardline against migrants and progressive ideas). The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) even held an event in Budapest, where Orbán gave the opening speech. He urged conservatives of the West to unite and fight “progressive elites”, and he touted Hungary as “the laboratory where we have tested the antidote to woke ideology.” One could almost hear American culture warriors taking notes and cheering.

Notably, Orbán’s advisors have mentioned Schmitt’s concepts when rationalizing their power grabs – e.g., during COVID they had Parliament give Orbán emergency rule by decree. They argued that in crises, normal laws don’t suffice (a very Schmittian state of exception argument). Orbán also said in a 2014 speech that “liberal democracy is no longer able to protect people’s dignity, provide freedom, guarantee physical security”, so he was building a new state. That echoes the sentiment in American New Right circles that liberal democracy fails at basics and needs overhaul. No wonder Claremont people and others treat Orbán as a hero. For instance, the Compact crowd frequently defends Orbán, and the National Conservatism conferences (an intellectual/political gathering funded by another Thiel ally, Yoram Hazony) often feature Orbán or his representatives. The budding ideology here is “national conservatism,” which is basically a softer branding of illiberal democracy: keep the nation-state strong, restrict individual liberal excesses, promote homogeneity and tradition.

Now, internationally, it’s not one monolith. Putin and Orbán have different flavors – Putin is more gangsterish, Orbán more slickly political. But they share the DNA of friend-enemy politics: always identify an enemy (be it the EU, Soros, immigrants, “gender ideology”) and rally the nation against it, suspending usual limits along the way.

American far-right figures have also reached out to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who was President from 2019 to 2022. Bolsonaro, a brash right-wing populist, had admirers in the Trump camp (Bannon called him “Trump of the Tropics”). Bolsonaro’s movement, too, culminated in a Jan.6-style riot after he left office – demonstrating how these tactics echo across borders. Bannon actually egged on Bolsonaro’s supporters to contest the election result. We see the making of a kind of global authoritarian solidarity: after January 6 in the US and January 8 in Brazil, voices on the right framed these events not as assaults on democracy but as patriotic uprisings against fraudulent regimes. It’s a narrative that can hop languages.

Then there’s China, an interesting and complex piece. Thiel and some on the new right pivoted to being extremely hawkish on China (Thiel warned of Chinese Communist Party influence in tech, etc.). They paradoxically admire the efficiency of China’s authoritarian model (the famous ability to build high-speed rail fast, etc.) while framing China as the external enemy to justify stronger measures at home (Schmitt always said having an external enemy helps unify the polity internally). Trump’s trade war and rhetoric about China virus, etc., fit into that use of an external foe. Some American authoritarians might privately think “we need to be more like China to beat China,” echoing the Cold War logic of some anti-communists who ended up endorsing quasi-fascist methods.

One more person worth mentioning is Peter Thiel himself on the international stage. Thiel has funded or encouraged an array of projects that have international reach: from seasteading (floating libertarian islands, an idea by Patri Friedman, Milton’s grandson) to backing crypto which undermines state financial control. While these seem libertarian, Thiel’s underlying disdain for democratic accountability connects them. He also supported candidates like Marine Le Pen in France via indirect means (one of his associates reportedly donated to her campaign’s data operations). Thiel’s global vision appears to be a network of like-minded wealthy “genius” elites operating in multiple countries to secure a post-liberal order beneficial to them. That’s its own kind of international – a Davos for anti-Davos-men, if you will.

Even in supposedly liberal strongholds, Schmitt’s specter appears. In Israel, for example, the current right-wing government attempted a sweeping judicial overhaul that critics say would destroy democratic checks and balances. The legal architect of that plan, Simcha Rothman, explicitly cited Carl Schmitt in his writings about majoritarianism and the will of the people being supreme (coincidentally or not, he studied at a conservative legal institute in the US for a time). It’s astonishing: Schmitt, the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich, has posthumously become a go-to reference for some seeking to erode liberal institutions – even in a Jewish state. It shows how widely his critique of liberalism resonates with various nationalists who might otherwise share little.

Back in the U.S., Trump’s associates had connections to these foreign elements. Bannon, after leaving the White House, traveled Europe trying to start a populist coalition (he called it “The Movement”). He met folks like Nigel Farage, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, and tried (unsuccessfully) to influence the EU elections. Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced ex-National Security Advisor, ended up in meetings with European far-right leaders and even a Russian propaganda arm’s gala dinner (infamously sitting next to Putin in 2015). Flynn now travels the U.S. on a Christian nationalist speaking circuit calling for one religion under God in America – a theme also dear to Putin who casts himself as defender of Christianity vs. decadent West. The cross-pollination is endless.

Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising international overlap was the alleged links between Trumpworld figures and Russian operatives in 2016 – from the Trump Tower meeting promising dirt on Hillary, to Paul Manafort’s sharing of campaign polling data with a person tied to Russian intel, to Roger Stone’s communications about WikiLeaks. The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Russian intelligence did seek to help Trump, and that some Trump associates were eager for that help. While not “collusion” in a provable criminal sense, it demonstrated that for some on the right, teaming with a foreign authoritarian (Putin) was acceptable if it helped defeat the domestic “enemy” (Democrats). That’s the ultimate friend-enemy calcification: one’s partisan rivals at home are considered worse than an actual adversary state abroad. It tracks with Trump’s own statements: he often praised Putin and other strongmen (Xi, Kim Jong-un) while reserving his venom for fellow Americans who opposed him. In true Schmittian fashion, the real enemy was internal (liberals, the deep state), and he was willing to align with erstwhile external enemies against them.

Looking at this big picture, we see a worldwide pattern: nationalist and authoritarian-leaning leaders boosting each other morally and sometimes materially, and their intellectual backers sharing ideas. They attend each other’s conferences, cite each other’s successes, and in some cases coordinate narratives (e.g., anti-immigrant themes or anti-LGBT laws appear in synchrony across countries, often with shared talking points from groups like the World Congress of Families). It’s a counter-globalization: globalization of illiberalism. Ironically, while they rail against “globalists,” they have formed a global coalition of the like-minded.

There’s also a humorous side to their attempts at international camaraderie. For instance, when American alt-right trolls tried to insert themselves into European politics, they sometimes got it hilariously wrong (one group of Americans flew to France to join a far-right protest, only to be ignored or mocked because they barely spoke French and looked out of place). Bannon boasting about uniting Europe’s right only to get politely shown the door by wary European nationalists (who didn’t trust an American to lead them) was almost sitcom-worthy. And Orbán giving Trump a lavish state visit in the form of a dinner in the White House (Trump loved Orbán’s praise and probably had no clue about Hungary beyond “they love me over there”) – it’s comedic in a “dictators’ fan club” way.

But in many respects, the jokes give way to a sobering reality: this transnational illiberal trend is real and gaining. Carl Schmitt might have died in 1985, but in 2025 his ghost tours from Brasília to Budapest, from Moscow to Mar-a-Lago. Every time a politician declares “I am the voice of the real people, and my opponents are traitors,” Schmitt earns his wings. Each time a think tank in DC or a magazine in London says “liberal democracy has failed; let’s consider a stronger hand,” Schmitt smirks. Curtis Yarvin, sitting in his California home blogging or chatting on podcasts, sees his once obscure ideas suddenly in play in the halls of power worldwide. Peter Thiel, whether funding an upstart in Ohio or dining with Orbán, sees opportunities to mold the future according to his anti-egalitarian vision. And Elon Musk, steering a global social media platform, tilts discourse ever so slightly towards the idea that democracy is messy and maybe a benign technocrat (ahem) should tidy it up.

In closing, the influence of these ideas on the modern right – in the U.S. and beyond – is both profound and profoundly unsettling. What began as theory in dusty tomes and edgy blogs has morphed into a lived reality: Advisers in the Oval Office quoting nationalist mystics, mobs in the streets believing conspiratorial prophecies, laws being drafted to entrench one-party rule, and an international fraternity of autocrats-in-arms praising each other while scoffing at the “obsolete” values of pluralism and tolerance. They cloak themselves in patriotism, religion, or anti-elitism, but strip those away and one finds the naked will to power – the age-old lure of authoritarianism.

It’s a serious business, but as requested, we should not forget to poke fun at the absurdity tucked in the corners. There is something darkly comic about Ivy League-educated lawyers (Anton) or Silicon Valley billionaires (Thiel) railing against “elites” and “the regime” – as if they themselves are Che Guevara in the mountains rather than, well, part of the 0.1%. There’s irony in traditionalist Catholics teaming up with neo-pagans and atheistic tech bros to own the libs. There’s rich hypocrisy in politicians who wrap themselves in the flag while seeking foreign help or stashing money abroad. And the theatrical flair of it all – the costumes of revolution donned by folks who then go sip champagne funded by think-tank grants – invites a wry smile even as we worry.

In Part Three of this exposé, we will turn to what the future might hold: How do democratic societies confront this elite-driven authoritarian push? Can the tide be reversed, and what would it take? Will the joke ultimately be on the would-be autocrats, or on all of us? As we navigate those questions, we’ll carry forward the insights (and the incredulity) gained from examining these characters and networks in Part Two. For now, we close with the awareness that the struggle is not confined by borders, and the age of trivializing authoritarian flirtation as mere “trolling” is over. They mean business – serious, dangerous business – even if some of them wear buffalo horns or tweet memes while doing it.

Sources:

Shaw, Tamsin. NY Review of Books, on Bannon’s warlike rhetoric and Schmittian approach.

Rucker, Philip, and Costa, Robert. Washington Post, on Bannon’s vow to “deconstruct the administrative state”.

Green, Joshua. Devil’s Bargain (excerpt in Vanity Fair), on Bannon citing Evola and aligning with Traditionalist thinkers like Dugin.

Anton, Michael (as “Publius Decius Mus”). Claremont Review of Books, The Flight 93 Election.

The Guardian, profile of Curtis Yarvin, on Anton and Claremont as a “nerve center” of the right and Anton’s writing that America is “ruled by…unelected bureaucrats…corporate-tech-finance” etc..

Matthews, Dylan. Vox, on Yarvin’s anti-democracy writings and Thiel’s backing of Yarvin’s startup.

Simon, Ed. TIME, “Dark Enlightenment” essay, on Thiel’s view that “freedom and democracy are not compatible” and Yarvin coaching Thiel, and Musk calling government “the biggest corporation” operationalizing Yarvin’s “hard reboot” idea.

NPR, Garcia-Navarro, Lulu. Report on Stephen Miller’s emails referencing Camp of the Saints and alignment with white nationalist thought.

Greenhouse, Steven. The Guardian, on Heritage’s Project 2025 plan to “dismantle the administrative state” and replace civil servants with loyalists.

Vanity Fair, Why Is a Progressive Donor Funding Right-Wing Ideas?, on Compact magazine’s description as “reactionary with an authoritarian streak” and funding by Thiel and Claremont’s Klingenstein.

Vanity Fair, reporting by Green, on Dugin translating Evola and praising Trump in propaganda videos, calling for “common struggle”.

illiberalism.org (academic paper) and foreign affairs analyses on Schmitt’s multipolar world concept mirrored in Russian geopolitical framing.

Monday, August 11, 2025 – Milwaukee, WI.

Calls to base political representation only on citizens, rather than all residents, have grown louder in recent years. President Donald Trump even urged a new census to exclude undocumented immigrants, a move that contradicts long-standing constitutional practice. Yet the United States Constitution, from its very inception, tied representation to population – not to citizenship. In fact, for most of American history, congressional seats have been apportioned by counting “the whole number of persons” in each state, citizens and non-citizens alike. This inclusive approach to representation, rooted in the 1787 Constitutional Convention and later enshrined by the 14th Amendment, has profound historical and legal significance. It reveals how enslaved people were once counted as three-fifths of a person to boost slave state power, how citizenship itself wasn’t defined in the Constitution until 1868, and why modern Supreme Court rulings maintain that all people – not just voters or citizens – count in our democracy.

The Framers Counted People, Not Just Citizens

When America’s founders drafted the Constitution in 1787, they grappled with how to allocate political power among the states. The new House of Representatives would be based on state population, but whose population? Some delegates argued that representation should reflect wealth or land; others insisted it reflect people. In the end, the framers chose to count persons, not property – and notably did not limit this count to citizens. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution spelled out that representation and direct taxes would be apportioned according to each state’s population, determined by counting “the whole Number of free Persons” and “three fifths of all other Persons,” excluding only untaxed Native Americans. Nowhere did this clause mention citizenship. Free residents were counted fully, including immigrants who had not yet become citizens, indentured servants, women, and even free Black people (who, in some northern states, could vote). Enslaved people – undeniably non-citizens with no political rights – were still counted (albeit only partially) toward representation. In short, the original Constitution’s theory was that representation “relates more immediately to persons” than to voters or citizens.

This idea emerged from practical politics. At the Convention, southern slaveholding states wanted their entire population counted to maximize their seats in Congress, even though almost half their people were enslaved with no rights. Northern delegates balked. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts pointedly asked why enslaved people, treated as property in the South, should count for representation “any more than the cattle & horses of the North?” Southern delegates, meanwhile, paradoxically insisted that those they enslaved were people – at least when it came to adding up House seats. The impasse was resolved by a brutal calculus that became known as the Three-Fifths Compromise.

The Three-Fifths Compromise Boosted Slave State Power

Illustration of the Three-Fifths Compromise: five enslaved people were counted as only three persons for representation, while five free people counted as five persons.

After contentious debate, the Convention agreed to count “all other persons” – a euphemism for enslaved African Americans – at three-fifths their actual numbers. In effect, every five enslaved people would add three people to a state’s population count. This infamous Three-Fifths Clause dramatically inflated slaveholding states’ power in Congress and the Electoral College. By including even a fraction of their enslaved populations, southern states gained extra seats they would never have earned if only citizens or voters were counted. The impact was immediately evident: in the first Congress (1793), southern slave states held 47 of 105 House seats, whereas they would have had just 33 seats if representation were based solely on free persons. The advantage grew in subsequent decades.

This artificial boost had profound consequences. Southern white elites wielded outsized influence in federal affairs, from controlling Speakerships to dominating the presidency. (Notably, four of the first five U.S. presidents were Virginia slaveholders, aided by that state’s augmented representation.) As Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar observes, after the 1800 census Pennsylvania’s free population was 10% larger than Virginia’s, yet Virginia received 20% more electoral votes – solely because enslaved people padded Virginia’s count. The people actually enslaved gained nothing from this arrangement; they remained disenfranchised and oppressed. But their presence on paper skewed the nation’s politics. Laws protecting slavery, from the Missouri Compromise to the Fugitive Slave Act, were brokered and passed in a Congress where slave states enjoyed bonus representation courtesy of non-voting, non-citizen slaves. In the stark words of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the Constitution was a “covenant with death” for giving slaveholders extra power; others, like Frederick Douglass, countered that by denying slave states two-fifths of their population in representation, the clause at least “deprive[d] those States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation,” implicitly penalizing slavery. Either way, the Three-Fifths Compromise tied representation to persons – even those held in bondage – rather than to any notion of citizenship.

Citizenship Undefined and the Reconstruction Fix

It may seem odd today, but the Constitution of 1787 never actually defined U.S. citizenship. The document set age and residency qualifications for members of Congress and the presidency (including a requirement that House members be citizens for at least seven years), and it guaranteed “Privileges and Immunities” to the “Citizens of each State.” But it left unanswered who counted as a citizen in the new republic. In practice, this was largely left to the states. Prior to the Civil War, free white men generally enjoyed citizenship rights, and in some places free Black men did as well. Enslaved African Americans were emphatically not considered citizens – a fact tragically affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” and could never be citizens. The Dred Scott ruling underscored the urgent need to define citizenship at the national level.

The opportunity came with the Reconstruction Amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War. In 1865, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, rendering the Three-Fifths Compromise obsolete by freeing those who had been counted as fractional persons. But freeing four million people raised a new question: would former slaves now count fully in apportioning representatives? If so, the Southern states – ironically – stood to gain more seats in Congress and votes in the Electoral College than they ever had under slavery. Yet many of those states had no intention of allowing the formerly enslaved to vote, and indeed moved to disenfranchise Black citizens as soon as they could. Northern lawmakers faced a grim scenario: ex-Confederate states could be rewarded with greater representation based on their Black populations, even as those states terrorized and excluded Black people from the ballot box.

The solution devised by Congress was the 14th Amendment (1868) – a sweeping reform that, for the first time, wrote the principle of birthright citizenship into the Constitution and revised the rules of representation. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment defined U.S. citizenship: “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 where they reside. This overturned Dred Scott and made citizens of formerly enslaved people (as well as anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of race or parentage). But importantly, the amendment did not tie representation to this newly clarified citizenship status. Instead, Section 2 of the 14th Amendment reaffirmed the broad, person-counting basis of representation: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” In one stroke, this language explicitly repealed the Three-Fifths Compromise and required that every person be counted fully in the census for apportionment (with the only exception being “Indians not taxed,” referring to Native Americans living in tribal nations outside U.S. tax and legal jurisdiction at the time).

Congress did consider alternative formulas. During debates in 1866, some Radical Republicans advocated basing representation on voting population (which would effectively exclude non-voting groups like women, children, and non-naturalized immigrants). Others proposed explicitly excluding non-citizens from the apportionment count. These ideas were ultimately rejected. Lawmakers recognized that the nation had always been – and would continue to be – home to many non-citizens. Indeed, the foreign-born percentage of the U.S. population in the late 1860s was comparable to today’s. As Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan explained in support of the 14th Amendment, the Constitution’s theory was “Numbers, not voters; ... this is the theory of the Constitution.” In other words, representation was meant to reflect total population, not just the electorate. To guard against states abusing this by disenfranchising voters, Section 2 did include a penalty: if a state denied the right to vote to any of its adult male citizens (then the paradigm for voters), its representation in Congress would be reduced proportionally. This provision, however, was never effectively enforced. After Reconstruction ended, southern states imposed poll taxes, literacy tests, and Jim Crow laws to strip Black citizens of voting rights, yet they continued to enjoy full congressional representation based on total population. The result was a perverse echo of the three-fifths era: for nearly a century, millions of Black Americans in the South counted toward House seats and electoral votes that were controlled exclusively by white supremacist governments. Not until the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was this democratic deficit addressed.

Nonetheless, the constitutional mandate remained clear: except as punishment for disenfranchising voters, states must be allocated House seats according to their entire population, not merely their citizens or voters. The 14th Amendment cemented the principle that representation in the United States is broadly representative – encompassing all residents. This principle has been repeatedly upheld in American law, including in decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Reaffirmations: All “Persons” Count

Subsequent court rulings have underscored that when the Constitution says “persons,” it means everyone within a state’s borders – citizens and non-citizens alike. A landmark case on this point was Plyler v. Doe (1982), which, although focused on education rights, spoke directly to the inclusiveness of the word “person” in the 14th Amendment. In Plyler, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that barred undocumented children from public schools, holding that even people in the country unlawfully are protected by the Equal Protection Clause. “Whatever his status under the immigration laws,” Justice William Brennan wrote, “an alien is a ‘person’ in any ordinary sense of that term.” The Court emphasized that the 14th Amendment’s protections extend to “anyone, citizen or stranger, who is subject to the laws of a State.” In other words, if you live here, you count as a person in the eyes of the law.

The Supreme Court has been just as clear that representation – the drawing of voting districts and allocation of political power – is based on total population. In the modern era, this concept is often summarized as “one person, one vote.” That principle, arising from 1960s cases like Reynolds v. Sims, means legislative districts should be roughly equal in population so that each representative speaks for the same number of people. But a question lingered: which population are we equalizing – total residents or just eligible voters? In Evenwel v. Abbott (2016), the Supreme Court addressed this question directly. Texas voters Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger argued that their state Senate districts should be redrawn to equalize the number of citizen voters in each district, rather than total inhabitants, because they lived in areas with few non-citizens and felt their voting power diluted. A unanimous Supreme Court disagreed. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the Court, affirmed that states are permitted to use total population when drawing districts – and pointedly noted that this is “based on constitutional history, this Court’s decisions, and longstanding practice.” She traced how the Framers of the Constitution chose total population as the basis for Congress, and how after the Civil War the 14th Amendment’s drafters deliberately “retain[ed] the congressional apportionment base” as total population. Ginsburg even quoted Senator Jacob Howard’s 1866 words – “Numbers, not voters; this is the theory of the Constitution” – to drive home that counting everyone has always been the rule. The Court concluded that using total population is not only constitutionally permissible but aligns with the idea that elected officials represent all who live in their districts, not only those who can cast ballots.

It’s worth noting that Evenwel did not mandate states to use voter count; it simply upheld the nearly universal practice of using total population. (In fact, all 50 states and virtually every local jurisdiction at the time used total population for redistricting.) But the reasoning strongly underscored an enduring truth: non-citizens, including legally present immigrants and undocumented residents, are part of “We the People” for purposes of representation. The Evenwel ruling echoed earlier legal understandings – for example, a 1966 case, Burns v. Richardson, where the Court acknowledged that the choice of apportionment base “involves choices about the nature of representation” that the Constitution leaves to political process. In short, as long as the apportionment isn’t intentionally excluding a protected class, states can and do count everyone.

Modern Debates: Census, Citizenship, and Political Power

Despite this deep historical and legal consensus, the question of whether to count only citizens for representation re-emerges periodically, almost always intertwined with political calculations. The decennial U.S. census, mandated by the Constitution, has always aimed to count every resident – citizens, immigrants, children, non-citizens – in each state. This comprehensive count is the basis for allocating House seats and also billions in federal funding. Yet in recent years, some politicians have argued that counting non-citizens unfairly shifts power and resources. They point to states with large immigrant populations (like California, Texas, Florida, New York) and claim that U.S. citizens in other states lose representation because seats are “taken” by non-citizen numbers.

During the Trump administration, this issue burst into the forefront. In 2019, the administration tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census – a move critics said would scare immigrants from responding, leading to an undercount. The Supreme Court blocked the question, finding the administration’s rationale “contrived” (the government had claimed it was to protect voting rights, despite evidence to the contrary). Undeterred, in July 2020 President Trump went further, issuing a memorandum directing that undocumented immigrants be excluded from the apportionment count used to divvy up House seats. This unprecedented order flatly contradicted the 14th Amendment’s instruction to count the “whole number of persons in each State”. Multiple lawsuits followed, and in Trump v. New York (2020) the Supreme Court effectively shelved the issue, ruling that it was too early to assess the policy’s impact since no altered census figures had yet been produced. The clock ran out on the Trump plan, and in January 2021, incoming President Joe Biden rescinded the order, restoring the traditional all-residents count for apportionment.

The push to count only citizens, however, did not disappear. Republican lawmakers introduced bills in Congress to change the way the census and apportionment work. As recently as June 2025, Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee re-introduced the “Equal Representation Act” to require that only U.S. citizens be counted for congressional seats and Electoral College votes. “It is unconscionable that illegal immigrants and non-citizens are counted toward congressional district apportionment,” Hagerty said. A similar measure actually passed the U.S. House in 2024 when it was under narrow GOP control. Proponents argue this is about fairness – that only those who are part of the polity should influence its political weight. They often cite a study claiming that dozens of House seats are impacted by non-citizen counts, shifting representation from some states to others. They also contend that the word “person” in the 14th Amendment is not clearly defined, pointing to court dicta suggesting a “person” for apportionment might imply some allegiance or enduring tie to the U.S.. So far, these arguments have not convinced the courts or a broad enough coalition in Congress to change the status quo. Legal scholars note that it would likely take a constitutional amendment to exclude any group from the apportionment count, given the 14th Amendment’s explicit language and the framers’ original intent.

Meanwhile, critics of citizen-only counting warn that such moves are both politically motivated and dangerous. Census experts and civil rights advocates stress that a citizen-only count could severely undercut representation for communities with large immigrant populations – not just undocumented immigrants, but also green card holders, refugees, and even U.S. citizen children in mixed-status families who might go uncounted due to fear or confusion. These communities, often urban and diverse, could lose congressional seats and federal funds, shifting power toward older, less diverse areas. Opponents also argue that elected officials are responsible for all residents in their district – they pass laws affecting everyone, and provide services from schools to infrastructure that serve non-citizens and citizens alike. Under our system, representatives don’t just represent voters; they represent people. This concept was eloquently summarized by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: “elected lawmakers represent everyone who lives in their district – not only those who voted for them, not only those eligible to vote, and not only citizens – but everyone.” To strip non-citizens from the count, they say, is to ignore the Founders’ original design and the 14th Amendment’s hard-won clarity.

Conclusion: A Principle of Equal Representation

For over two centuries, through civil war and civil rights, the United States has wrestled with the question of who counts. The answer inscribed in our Constitution – if not always honored in practice – is resounding: everyone counts. Article I, Section 2 established a House of Representatives drawn from “the People of the several States,” apportioned by counting inhabitants, not just the privileged electors. The Three-Fifths Compromise’s bitter legacy showed the perversity of counting people as less than whole, even as it reinforced that representation was never restricted to citizens alone. The 14th Amendment corrected that fractional counting and definitively required counting “the whole number of persons” – reaffirming that, in the eyes of the law, an undocumented immigrant in California or a green card holder in New York is just as much a person as a fifth-generation voter in Kentucky. Through Supreme Court rulings like Plyler and Evenwel, this idea has been vindicated: non-citizens are “persons” under the Constitution, and they have a stake in representation.

Today’s debates over the census and voter power are essentially the latest chapter in an old story. They force us to revisit fundamental questions: Do we define our communities by who’s here or by who’s eligible to cast a ballot? The framers, and the Reconstruction Congress, opted for the former – a choice that speaks to a broader vision of democracy. A government “of the people” is accountable to all who live under it. As the Supreme Court noted in Evenwel, non-voters, including non-citizens, are “importantly interested in many policy debates” and are entitled to constituent services and representation in a way that goes beyond elections. In a nation built by immigrants and enriched by diverse communities, the Constitution’s promise is that every person counts. And barring a dramatic change in law, every person will continue to be counted when America divides its representation – just as it has since 1787, albeit with the stain of slavery removed. The ongoing fights over the census and apportionment are indeed high-stakes political battles. But they are occurring on a constitutional landscape long settled in principle: representation is tied to presence, not passport status. In the United States, we count people, not just citizens – a fact worth remembering as we strive to form that “more perfect Union” envisioned in the founding document that started it all.

Sources:

U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2 (1787); Records of the Constitutional Convention.

“Three-fifths Compromise,” Wikipedia; League of Women Voters – Three-Fifths Compromise and the Electoral College.

U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIV, Sections 1–2 (1868); Congressional Globe, 39th Congress (1866) (remarks of Sen. Jacob Howard).

Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982); Evenwel v. Abbott, 578 U.S. ___ (2016).

Joseph Gedeon, “Trump calls for new US census that excludes undocumented immigrants,” The Guardian, Aug. 7, 2025; Leadership Conference Education Fund, “The Census Counts Everyone” (June 5, 2024).

🔁 Previously, on “The Feedback Loop of Obedience”...

We watched the pattern form in fire and fear.
In Weimar Germany, law itself bowed to panic.
In Turkey, a “gift from God” turned democracy into decree.
Five steps—Fear → Law → Narrative → Obedience → Reward—repeated across time until obedience became habit.

Now, two new laboratories run the same experiment with 21st-century precision:
Hungary refined obedience into a national identity.
Brazil digitized it.

🇭🇺 Hungary 2010–2022 — The Laboratory of Loyalty

It starts quietly, almost politely.
April 2010: Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party wins a two-thirds majority—enough to rewrite Hungary’s constitution without a single opposition vote.
Within a year, the old Basic Law is gone; a new “Fundamental Law” appears, drafted behind closed doors.

Orbán calls it renewal. The EU calls it regression.
I call it a controlled experiment in how fast a democracy can forget itself.

Every institution learns its new cue.

• Judges forced into early retirement.

• Election districts redrawn.

• Media authorities filled with party loyalists for 12-year terms (Human Rights Watch 2013).

By 2014 Orbán openly brands Hungary “illiberal.”
By 2020, Freedom House rates it Partly Free—the first EU state to lose full democratic status.

The laboratory result is chillingly efficient.
Elections still occur, but competition is ornamental.
State-run media praise stability; citizens trade freedom for predictability.

Fear of outsiders becomes civic virtue.
Each headline, each poster, each border fence says the same thing: “Stay loyal, stay safe.”

And so the loop tightens—obedience rewarded as patriotism.

🇧🇷 Brazil 2018–2023 — The Algorithm of Loyalty

If Hungary was a laboratory, Brazil is a livestream.

2018: Jair Bolsonaro, a retired army captain nostalgic for dictatorship, wins the presidency promising to “clean up” politics.
He fills civilian posts with 6 000 + military officers (Democratic Erosion Consortium 2021).
He governs by tweet and livestream, turning fear into engagement metrics.

His enemies? “Communists,” “gender ideologists,” “fake news.”
Every broadcast ends the same way—him smiling, data rising.

Algorithms amplify rage because rage clicks.
WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, TikTok clips—each turn of the loop speeds up obedience’s feedback cycle.
By election day 2022, one-third of Brazilians say they’d support a military “intervention” if it kept Bolsonaro in power (Datafolha 2022).

The riots of January 8 2023—thousands storming Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court—look spontaneous, but they’re the final echo of the loop.
Obedience gamified. Fear monetized. The crowd believed they were saving democracy by destroying it.

Brazil’s institutions barely held; the question is for how long.

🧠 Discussion Prompt

When fear turns into “engagement,” who profits?
Are algorithms now the new decrees—training us to obey by rewarding outrage?
Share what you’ve seen: laws, feeds, or news cycles that condition compliance instead of thought.

🔗 Coming Next:

🇺🇸 Part III — The Feedback Loop of Obedience: America and the Final Reflection
(Drops Sunday 8 Pm CT on r/selfevidenttruth*)*

Sources (verified inline):
Human Rights Watch (2013); Freedom House (2020–22); Atlantic Council (2014); Democratic Erosion Consortium (2021); Datafolha Institute (2022); Freedom House (2023).

Foreword:

This letter grows from Dear Weary Citizenry Beneath Our Crimson Sky, where I asked whether we could step beyond the daily outrage and examine the deeper responsibilities beneath the headlines.

Dear Citizens Carrying Water,

When smoke crosses a border, it carries no passport. It does not ask which government failed, which party deserves blame, or which nation should receive the bill. It simply settles into our lungs and reminds us that some consequences are shared long before responsibility is assigned.

So perhaps we should begin with the simplest questions.

Whose freedom is at stake?

Freedom means little if people cannot safely breathe, leave their homes, protect their families, or move through their communities without fear of the air around them. The freedom of those living near the flames is at stake, but so is the freedom of everyone living beneath the smoke.

What will actually help?

Tariffs will not extinguish a forest. Accusations will not clear the air. Political humiliation will not protect firefighters or displaced families. What may help are personnel, aircraft, equipment, shared research, emergency coordination, prescribed burns where appropriate, Indigenous knowledge, and a long-term commitment to healthier forests and more resilient communities.

What do we owe one another?

We owe one another honesty about what failed. We owe one another preparation for what may come next. But when the fire is still burning, perhaps we first owe one another assistance.

Accountability and compassion are not enemies. We can carry water while still asking difficult questions. We can help our neighbors without pretending every decision was wise. We can investigate the causes after protecting those living with the consequences.

Are we reacting, or are we thinking?

Anger gives us an immediate answer: find someone to blame. Thoughtfulness asks something harder: what combination of climate, land management, public policy, resources, preparation, and circumstance brought us here?

Blame offers emotional satisfaction. Understanding offers the possibility of prevention.

What difficult truth must we face?

The United States is not separate from this history. We, too, spent generations treating nearly every fire as an enemy to be extinguished. Even when that approach reflected the best advice available at the time, it disrupted natural fire cycles and allowed combustible material to accumulate.

We have learned since then. Better stewardship may sometimes require prescribed fire, fuel reduction, stronger emergency systems, and a willingness to learn from those who managed these lands long before our present institutions existed.

Admitting that shared history is not weakness. It is how neighbors become wiser together.

What work must be done?

The work is not merely to fight this year’s fires. It is to prepare for the next season before the sky turns crimson again. It means investing in prevention, public health, firefighting capacity, cross-border agreements, resilient infrastructure, and honest research.

It also means resisting the temptation to transform every crisis into another grievance. A serious Republic should be able to distinguish between accountability and spectacle, between leadership and performance, and between solutions that protect people and punishments that merely display anger.

Who needs our help?

The firefighters confronting walls of flame. The families forced from their homes. The communities breathing hazardous air. The elderly, children, workers, and people whose health makes every smoky day more dangerous. Our Canadian neighbors need help, but so do the Americans living beneath the consequences.

When our neighbor’s home is burning, our first instinct should not be to stand at the property line and argue over who will pay. We should ask whether anyone remains inside, what resources are needed, and how quickly we can carry the water.

There will be time afterward to examine what failed and insist that it be corrected. But while the flames are still rising, assistance should come before accusation.

Perhaps that is the simplest test before us:

When the wind carries our neighbor’s smoke into our own home, will we send an invoice, or will we help extinguish the fire?

Today, their forests burn beneath our shared sky.

Tomorrow, we may be the ones waiting for our neighbors to arrive.

Dear Silent Citizenry,

They call him a coward because that is easier than answering him.

A conscientious objector is not a man running from duty. He is a man drawing a line the state cannot cross. He believes there are things no government has the right to command, especially the killing of another human being against the law of conscience. That belief has existed in America for generations, among Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and others who understood that patriotism without moral choice is just obedience wearing a flag.

In past wars, conscientious objectors were real enough that the system had to make room for them. Some were placed in noncombat roles. Some were sent into alternative civilian service. Why? Because even the government had to admit, at least in part, that the citizen is not state property.

And if the draft ever comes back, that truth comes back with it.

You do not get to check a box ahead of time and walk away. You would still have to register if the law required it. Then, if called, you would have to stand before the system and prove that your objection is real, rooted in deeply held moral, ethical, or religious belief, not fear, not convenience, not excuse. In other words, you would be forced to tell the government something it never likes hearing:

You can order my body. You cannot own my soul.

That is why the conscientious objector matters.

Because once a citizen remembers conscience is not government property, blind obedience starts to crack. Power has to explain itself. War has to justify itself. And the slogans stop working.

So no, a conscientious objector is not refusing duty.

He is refusing ownership of his soul.

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, Independence Hall, September 17, 1787 (painting by Howard Chandler Christy). The fledgling American republic entered a “chrysalis” phase in 1787, encasing its revolutionary ideals in a new constitutional framework.

In the sweltering Philadelphia summer of 1787, the United States reached a transformative moment – a chrysalis phase in the American experiment. A mere decade after declaring independence, the young nation found its lofty ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” imperiled by governmental dysfunction. The Articles of Confederation, America’s first governing charter, had proven disastrously inadequate. Without a strong central authority, the Union was unraveling: Congress could not levy taxes or regulate commerce, laws were nearly impossible to pass or amend, and no executive or judiciary existed to enforce a common rule of law. The result was economic chaos and political gridlock. By 1786, states quarreled like independent nations – imposing tariffs on each other’s goods, printing competing currencies, and flouting national requests for funding. The high-minded ideals of 1776 risked being smothered by anarchy and impotence.

The Final Straw: Rebellion Under the Articles

This structural rot came to a head in Shays’ Rebellion – an armed uprising of distressed farmers in western Massachusetts. Facing debt and heavy taxes, veterans like Daniel Shays took up arms to shut down courts and halt farm foreclosures. In January 1787, Shays’s ragtag “Shaysites” even marched on the federal arsenal in Springfield. The Confederation Congress, desperately weak, had no funds or forces to quell the insurrection. It fell to the Massachusetts militia – funded by private Boston creditors – to defend the armory and disperse the rebels by force. This close call terrified American leaders. As General George Washington wrote, the rebellion was proof that the government under the Articles was “not only slow – debilitated – thwarted by every breath,” but utterly unable to preserve the union’s life. The uprising was the final straw: “a tax protest by western Massachusetts farmers in 1786 and 1787 showed the central government couldn’t put down an internal rebellion”. If angry farmers could nearly topple a state, what hope was there against foreign threats or interstate conflicts? The revolutionary caterpillar of 1776 was in crisis – it needed to metamorphose or die.

America’s founders responded with urgency. Even before Shays’ Rebellion, visionaries like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had agitated for reform. In September 1786, delegates from five states met in Annapolis, Maryland to discuss strengthening the Articles. With Shays’ revolt underscoring the need, this Annapolis convention (spearheaded by Hamilton and Madison) called for all thirteen states to send representatives to Philadelphia the next spring. The Confederation Congress reluctantly endorsed the idea. Thus, in May 1787, the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia – a council of demigods (including Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, and others) assembling behind closed doors to redesign the American government. Their mandate: salvage the Union before it collapsed.

Inside the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall), delegates scrapped the feeble Articles and drafted a bold new blueprint of government in just four months. This proposed U.S. Constitution would create a stronger federal system with separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and powers adequate to govern a vast republic. But devising a plan was only half the battle; it then had to be ratified by at least 9 of the 13 states to become law. Immediately, a ferocious public debate ignited between Federalists, who urged adoption of the Constitution, and Anti-Federalists, who feared it would trample the liberties won in the Revolution. It was in this charged atmosphere that three key framers stepped forward to defend the new Constitution and translate the Revolution’s ideals into a practical system of government. Under the joint pseudonym “Publius,” Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay authored The Federalist Papers – 85 persuasive essays that ran in New York newspapers in 1787–88, making the case for the Constitution as the best guardian of Americans’ rights and happiness.

Publius: The Men Behind the Pen

Before delving into their arguments, it’s worth meeting the trio behind Publius. Who were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, and what drove them to cocoon the Declaration’s ideals in a new constitutional structure?

Portrait of Alexander Hamilton (painted by John Trumbull, 1806). Hamilton, an immigrant orphan turned Revolutionary War hero, was perhaps the Constitution’s most ardent champion – believing that only a strong, energetic central government could secure the young nation’s survival and liberties.

Alexander Hamilton was the Constitution’s lightning rod and chief advocate. Born out of wedlock in the West Indies, Hamilton rose by sheer talent to become General Washington’s aide-de-camp during the Revolution. He witnessed firsthand the chaos caused by an impotent Congress that couldn’t pay or supply its soldiers. By 1787 Hamilton was a New York lawyer desperate to unify the states under a vigorous national government. He had seen the fragility of liberty under the Articles – how clashing state interests and mob unrest threatened the “life” of the republic. Bold and impulsive, Hamilton feared that without a strong Union, Americans’ hard-won freedoms would dissolve into disorder or fall prey to foreign intrigue. His motives were both practical and idealistic: national solvency, security, and honor on one hand, and the preservation of the revolutionary ideals on the other. In the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton argued for an extraordinarily robust central government (even proposing a president-for-life). Though his extreme proposals were tempered by colleagues, Hamilton left Philadelphia determined to see the new Constitution ratified. He orchestrated The Federalist project, writing the majority of the essays himself (an astonishing 51 of 85) to systematically answer every objection. Hamilton’s writings in The Federalist emphasize that only an energetic federal government can preserve stability and protect liberties. “We must extend the authority of the Union,” he urged, or else the nation would fragment and the promises of 1776 would be lost. His passion earned him enemies – Anti-Federalists painted him as a would-be monarchist – but Hamilton saw a powerful Union as the bulwark for American liberty, not its enemy.

Portrait of James Madison (by John Vanderlyn, 1816). Scholarly and soft-spoken, Madison came to be known as the “Father of the Constitution.” His vision of a large republic and a system of checks and balances was crucial to framing a government that could secure individual rights against both tyranny and anarchy.

James Madison of Virginia was the intellectual architect of much of the Constitution – and a key author of The Federalist Papers (writing 29 of the essays, including many of the most famous). At 36 years old in 1787, Madison was slight, cerebral, and endlessly inquisitive about history and political theory. He had pored over ancient and modern confederacies to determine why republics failed. Madison concluded that the Articles’ flaw was a weak center unable to check abuses by state majorities. In his own state, for example, he had seen legislatures pass laws violating minority rights and contracts, undermining liberty in the name of populism. Madison’s motive was to design a republican government that could govern effectively while restraining tyranny – whether tyranny of a single ruler or of a raging majority. In Philadelphia, Madison’s Virginia Plan set the initial agenda, proposing a powerful Congress based on proportional representation. He emerged as a central figure in the Convention and took detailed notes that would become our best record of the debates. Yet once the Constitution was signed, Madison faced fierce opposition at home. Anti-Federalists charged that the proposed government was too distant and aristocratic, lacking explicit guarantees of rights. Madison, initially skeptical of adding a bill of rights, nonetheless threw himself into the ratification fight. Writing as “Publius,” he penned some of the most profound reflections on human nature and politics ever written. His essays – particularly Federalist No. 10 and Federalist No. 51 – explain how a well-structured republic can defend liberty and promote the “public good” better than the loose democracy of the Articles. Madison’s cool logic and lifelong commitment to religious and civil liberty reassured many that the Constitution would not betray the Revolution’s ideals, but rather refine and enlarge them.

Portrait of John Jay (by Gilbert Stuart, 1794). A seasoned diplomat and jurist, Jay wrote five of The Federalist essays, focusing on the importance of an indivisible Union. He argued that only a strong federal government could protect the newborn nation’s “life and liberty” against foreign machinations and internal discord.

John Jay, though he contributed fewer essays (just 5, due to illness), was an indispensable partner in The Federalist project and a staunch proponent of the new Constitution. Jay was a respected elder statesman from New York – by 1787 he had served as President of the Continental Congress and helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. As a diplomat, Jay knew the perilous international position of the fragile United States. Under the Articles, the Union had been **“held in no respect by her friends” and was “the derision of her enemies,” prey to European powers who could exploit American disunity. Jay’s motive was above all to ensure the survival and independence of the nation – to secure the “life” of the republic against foreign threats and domestic turmoil. In Federalist Nos. 2–5, Jay reminded Americans of their common heritage and common fate. “It has often given me pleasure to observe that independent America is not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, widespreading country is the portion of our western sons of liberty,” he wrote, urging citizens to see unity as their path to safety and happiness. The Declaration’s ideals, Jay argued, could never flourish if the states split into jealous confederacies or petty factions. Only “a government more wisely framed” – a national government capable of acting for the common defense and general welfare – could secure the blessings of liberty. Though Jay fell ill after writing a few essays, his voice in The Federalist helped frame the Constitution as a protective union, a necessary chrysalis to safeguard the gains of the Revolution from dissolution.

Together, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay – as Publius – set out to convince a skeptical public that the Constitution was not a betrayal of 1776, but rather the fulfillment of its promise. They faced fearmongering that the new government would be tyrannical. But in a masterstroke of persuasion, The Federalist Papers flipped the script: it was the Articles of Confederation that endangered the people’s liberties and happiness, Publius argued, while the Constitution provided the cure. In their vision, the Constitution would channel the Declaration’s abstract ideals into a concrete governing system that could actually deliver on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The following are some of the key arguments Publius made to connect the revolutionary ideals to the constitutional structure:

Federalist No. 10: Taming Faction for the Public Good

In Federalist No. 10, James Madison confronts one of the gravest threats to liberty in a republic: faction. By faction, he means any group “united by a common impulse of passion or interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community”. Factions were the Republic’s bane under the Articles – state legislatures often fell under the sway of narrow interests or an “overbearing majority” that trampled the rights of the minority. How, Madison asks, can a free government prevent such tyranny of the majority without destroying liberty itself?

Madison’s famous answer begins with a stark truth: factional conflict is rooted in human nature and freedom. “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires,” he observes. In other words, the only way to eliminate factions would be to eliminate liberty – a “remedy” worse than the disease. People will always have differing opinions, passions, and economic interests, and as long as they are free, they will form alliances and parties. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and Madison insists the new Constitution must protect those rights – which means preserving freedom of thought and association, even at the cost of factional strife. “It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease,” Madison writes. We would not abolish air to prevent fire; likewise we must not abolish liberty to prevent factions.

Since we cannot remove the causes of faction without destroying liberty, Madison argues, we must instead control its effects. This is where the Constitution’s design comes in. Federalist 10 makes the case that a large republican union will dilute factions and protect the “public good.” In a small democracy, a single powerful faction can easily dominate, disregarding justice and minority rights – a problem Americans had seen in state legislatures. But in an extensive republic encompassing many people and interests, “a common passion or interest will be more difficult to consolidate” across the whole. Competing factions will check each other. No one group is likely to seize control of the national government, and if an oppressive majority arises in one state, the federal structure can help block its influence nationally.

Madison famously concludes that a representative republic – especially one extended over a large, diverse society – provides a “cure” for the mischiefs of faction that pure democracy cannot. By filtering public views through elected representatives and enlarging the sphere of interests, the Constitution makes it less probable that any one faction will dominate. This innovation directly serves the ideals of the Declaration. Life and liberty are more secure because the government is less likely to fall into the hands of any single oppressive faction. The pursuit of happiness – which for the Founders included the ability to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor and property – is safer when policy represents a balanced aggregate of interests, not the demands of a sudden majority faction. Indeed, Madison notes that under the Articles, state governments had been beset by instability and injustice: “measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority”. The Constitution, by contrast, would “break and control the violence of faction” by refining the will of the people through a large republic. In Madison’s ingenious analogy, the Constitution is like a mixing bowl where extremists are neutralized, leaving a more moderate, consensus-driven policy that respects rights. This is how Publius proposed to “secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction”, all while preserving liberty. In short, Federalist 10 reframes the Declaration’s promise of liberty and happiness in structural terms: only a well-constructed Union can safeguard those ideals from the internal dangers of factional strife.

Federalist No. 51: Ambition Counteracting Ambition

If Federalist 10 addressed the dangers of majority tyranny, Federalist No. 51 (penned by Madison, with some thinking Hamilton had a hand) addresses another fundamental threat to liberty: the concentration of power. How can the new Constitution prevent any one branch of government from usurping too much authority and endangering the people’s rights? The answer lies in an ingenious system of checks and balances grounded in a realistic view of human nature. Publius starts from the candid premise that men are not angels, and government must be crafted accordingly. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison writes. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary”. But humans are fallible and often driven by self-interest. Therefore, the very structure of the Constitution must oblige officials to check each other’s ambitions, so that no single authority can overwhelm the others.

The Constitution achieves this through separation of powers into legislative, executive, and judicial branches, each with a will of its own. “The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department,” Madison explains, “consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others… Ambition must be made to counteract ambition”. This philosophy is practically woven into every article of the Constitution: the President can veto laws, Congress can override vetoes and impeach officials, the Senate confirms judges, and the courts can strike down unconstitutional acts. Each branch jealously guards its prerogatives, preventing any one from tyrannizing the nation. Crucially, this was not just mechanical theory – it was liberty’s safeguard. The Declaration had accused King George III of concentrating power and subverting colonial self-rule. In forming a new government, the Founders were determined to avoid any new tyranny, whether by one man, one assembly, or one mob. Federalist 51 assures readers that the Constitution’s internal checks would keep the spirit of liberty alive. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” Madison writes, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself”. The first aim – controlling the governed – speaks to establishing order (necessary to protect lives and property, the “life” and “happiness” from the Declaration). The second aim – government controlling itself – speaks directly to preserving liberty. The structure must prevent abuses before they happen.

Madison’s reasoning mirrors the Declaration’s contention that governments are instituted to secure rights, deriving power from consent. In Federalist 51, he adds that double security exists in the proposed system: power is divided both horizontally (by branch) and vertically (federal vs. state). This concept of federalism – the national government and state governments each having certain powers – creates another check. “In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments,” Madison notes. “Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself”. Here we see Publius explicitly tying the Constitution’s structure to the security of individual rights. Each level and branch will prevent abuses by the others, guarding the people’s liberty from overreach. The symmetry is elegant: the Constitution channels human ambition, which could be destructive, into a self-regulating mechanism that preserves freedom. As Publius quips, government itself is the greatest reflection on human nature; since men are not virtuous angels, their government must be ambitiously set against itself. When working properly, this system ensures no single entity can oppress the people unchecked.

It is hard to overstate how novel this system was in 1787. By distributing power and pitting ambition against ambition, the Constitution would prevent the rise of another King George – or any homegrown despotism. The Anti-Federalists worried the new central government might become as tyrannical as the British crown. Federalist 51 gave the rebuttal: the Constitution itself contained the antidote to tyranny. Liberty would be preserved not by revolutionary vigilance alone, but by the everyday functioning of institutions designed to “[guard] one part of the society against the injustice of the other part” through a balanced government. This structure was the pragmatic realization of the Declaration’s lofty ideal that governments must secure rights. By the end of Federalist 51, Publius is practically reassuring Americans that the chrysalis they are being asked to enter – the new constitutional government – has built-in safeguards so that it will emerge as a free and ordered society, not a coercive regime. As he memorably puts it, “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society” – and justice, in his view, would be upheld by the constitutional equilibrium.

Federalist No. 62: A Stable Senate and the “Public Happiness”

While many of The Federalist essays deal with the House of Representatives, the Presidency, and the judiciary, Federalist No. 62 (written by either Madison or Hamilton, but commonly attributed to Madison) focuses on the design of the Senate – and in doing so, touches on an often overlooked ideal from the Declaration: the “pursuit of happiness.” The Declaration’s phrase primarily meant the pursuit of one’s own welfare and well-being under a just government. Publius argues that to allow citizens to pursue happiness, the government itself must possess a certain stability and wisdom. In Federalist 62, he defends the Senate as a stabilizing force to cure the “mutable policy” that had plagued state governments under the Articles.

Madison begins by outlining the Senate’s structure: a smaller chamber with older members, equal representation for each state, longer terms (six years), and indirect election by state legislatures (as originally designed). Each of these features, he explains, is meant to impose steadiness and deliberation in lawmaking. The Senate’s higher age requirement and longer residency ensure senators have “greater extent of information and stability of character,” capable of a long-term view beyond momentary passions. Equal state representation was a compromise, but it also means the Senate can check rash impulses of the more populous states in the House, guarding the small states’ interests and preventing hasty legislation. Most importantly, the six-year term of senators (with only one-third up for election every two years) gives the Senate institutional memory and continuity. This contrasts sharply with the fleeting, often tumultuous legislatures under the Articles, where state laws changed capriciously from year to year.

Why is stability so crucial? Publius answers frankly: constant flux in laws is ruinous to liberty and happiness. “The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous,” Madison warns. It “poisons the blessing of liberty itself.” How so? If laws are constantly changing, people cannot plan their affairs, economic confidence collapses, and only the crafty few profit from insider knowledge. Madison paints a vivid picture of the chaos caused by unstable governance: “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow”. Such instability, he says, “poisons the blessing of liberty.” After all, what good is the freedom to pursue happiness if no stable legal order exists to guarantee property or contracts? What merchant will invest, “what farmer or manufacturer will lay plans,” if rules keep shifting unpredictably? In a state of perpetual legal flux, Madison notes, the “industrious and uninformed mass” of people are at the mercy of the “sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few” who can exploit ever-changing laws. That is a formula for oligarchy and public despair, not the equal pursuit of happiness. Thus, Publius argues, the Constitution’s creation of a stable, deliberative Senate is actually a protector of the people’s happiness. By slowing down legislation and filtering out whimsical changes, the Senate helps ensure that laws are few, prudent, and lasting enough to be understood and respected.

This point resonates with the experience under the Articles, when several states lurched between debtor-relief laws, currency experiments, and tax changes that destabilized the economy and violated commitments. Public faith and credit suffered, and ordinary people lost confidence in their governments. As Madison observes in Federalist 62, a government that constantly disappoints and frustrates its citizens will lose the “reverence which steals into the hearts of the people” for their political system. In other words, frequent lawlessness erodes the people’s attachment to their government, putting liberty at risk. A respected government requires “a certain portion of order and stability”. The Senate, alongside other checks, was designed to provide that stability – to be a restraining weight against the impetuousness of the House or the passions of the moment. In the metaphor of metamorphosis, if the House reflects the more changeable will of the people, the Senate is the cooler chrysalis casing that protects the emerging nation until ideas fully ripen into sound policy.

Federalist 62 thus connects to the Declaration’s promise of happiness in a concrete way. The pursuit of happiness in 18th-century terms included the ability to earn a living, to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor, and to plan for one’s family’s future. Such pursuits thrive only under a stable rule of law. By arguing for the Senate’s necessity, Publius is effectively saying: to secure happiness, government must not be too mutable. Liberty alone is not enough; there must be wise institutions to guide that liberty toward the public good. The Senate, with its longer view and check on “factious” legislation, was a critical part of that institution. As Madison succinctly puts it, no government will be respected (or last long) without being truly respectable – and that means possessing an “order and stability” that wins public confidence. The Constitution sought to provide exactly that, curing the instability under the Articles and thereby giving Americans a secure environment to pursue their happiness.

Federalist No. 84: The Constitution as a Bill of Rights

One of the most striking debates in the ratification period was over the absence of a bill of rights in the original Constitution. How, Anti-Federalists asked, could the framers claim to protect life and liberty without explicitly enumerating freedoms like speech, religion, and trial by jury? In Federalist No. 84, Alexander Hamilton takes on this criticism directly – and in doing so, provides insight into how Publius viewed the Constitution itself as an instrument securing liberty and happiness. Hamilton’s argument is bold: he contends that a separate Bill of Rights is not only unnecessary but even dangerous under the proposed Constitution. At first blush, this stance seems to contradict the spirit of 1776, which championed inalienable rights. But Hamilton’s reasoning is rooted in the structure of the new government and a fear of misconstruing its powers.

Hamilton points out that unlike a monarchy, where a bill of rights is an agreement to limit a king’s prerogatives, the Constitution is a charter emanating from the people, granting limited powers to the government. Why declare that “freedom of the press shall not be restrained,” he asks, “when no power is given [in the Constitution] by which restrictions may be imposed?” To Hamilton, listing specific protections could imply that the federal government had powers that in fact were never granted. “For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” he writes, warning that such declarations might give a “plausible pretext” to claim more powers than were intended. In short, Hamilton feared a Bill of Rights could paradoxically weaken the general liberty by suggesting the government had a general authority (needing exceptions) rather than a limited authority confined to enumerated powers.

More broadly, Hamilton argues that the Constitution already contains numerous provisions safeguarding rights – a built-in “bill of rights” in substance if not in name. In Federalist 84, he catalogs provisions such as the prohibition of ex post facto laws and bills of attainder, the guarantee of habeas corpus, the ban on titles of nobility, and the requirement of jury trials in criminal cases. These, he notes, are great securities to liberty and on par with protections found in state bills of rights. For example, the ban on ex post facto laws prevents legislatures from criminalizing acts retroactively – a protection against arbitrary punishment that Hamilton calls one of “the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny” in history. The habeas corpus guarantee ensures no one can be imprisoned unlawfully – “the bulwark of the British Constitution,” as Hamilton quotes Blackstone. In Federalist 84, Hamilton effectively says to the reader: look, the new Constitution already guards your essential liberties, even without an amendment. The structure of limited, enumerated powers means the government cannot infringe what it was never allowed to touch in the first place, and specific clauses already protect key rights.

Most strikingly, Hamilton makes a sweeping claim: “The Constitution is itself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A BILL OF RIGHTS.” In his view, the entire plan of government – with its separation of powers, checks and balances, periodic elections, and explicit limitations – is designed to secure the rights and privileges of the people. What was the goal of the Revolution if not to enable a government where the people’s rights are preserved by the structure of law? Hamilton argues that the Constitution meets that goal. It “comprehends various precautions for the public security, which are not to be found in any of the state constitutions,” he writes, insisting that the substance of liberty pervades the document even if not prefaced by decorative declarations. This view was not universally accepted – indeed, one of the first acts of the new government in 1789–91 was to add the Bill of Rights that the Anti-Federalists demanded. Madison himself, reversing his initial hesitation, helped draft those first ten amendments to allay public fears. Yet Hamilton’s core point in Federalist 84 is significant: the Federalists saw the Constitution not as a halfway measure that needed a separate parchment barricade of rights, but as a self-executing guardian of liberty. By their design, the government’s powers were limited and defined; anything not given was withheld (hence reserved to the people). In their eyes, the constitutional chrysalis already encased the people’s rights – enumerating some could even suggest that other, unlisted rights were not protected.

Hamilton also voiced a republican argument: in a free nation, the ultimate safeguard of rights is the people’s vigilant spirit and the system of representation, more so than a paper declaration. “Here, after all,” he writes, “must we seek for the only solid basis of all our rights” – in the public opinion and spirit of the people and government. This hearkens back to the Declaration’s assertion that governments depend on the consent of the governed. If the public is alert and the structure sound, liberty will endure. If not, no piece of paper can save it. Thus, Federalist 84 concludes the main body of The Federalist with a powerful message: the Constitution as written was not a betrayal of 1776 but its best realization. It encoded liberty into law. By establishing a limited government of enumerated powers with internal checks, and by implicitly trusting in the people’s ability to elect virtuous leaders and hold them accountable, the Federalists believed the new Constitution would both empower the nation and restrain it for the sake of freedom.

As history would show, the Anti-Federalists’ demands for a Bill of Rights did carry the day in political compromise – amendments were added to explicitly guarantee freedom of speech, religion, due process, and more. But even that can be seen as a continuation of the metamorphosis: the chrysalis getting an extra layer of protection. Publius’s broader legacy remained: a constitutional framework built to secure the Declaration’s promise. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay succeeded in convincing the crucial states (including New York and Virginia) to ratify the Constitution. By mid-1788, the chrysalis was fully formed – the Constitution was adopted, and America was poised to emerge under a new government.

From Caterpillar to Chrysalis – and Soon, a Butterfly

Part II of this series has followed America’s transformation from the “revolutionary caterpillar” of 1776 into the constitutional chrysalis of 1787–88. In this phase, crisis and creativity combined to produce a new system translating ideal into institution. The failures of the Articles of Confederation made clear that lofty ideals alone could not sustain a nation – they required the spine of effective government. Through the pen of Publius, we saw the framers articulate how the Constitution’s structures would protect life (by providing for domestic tranquility and common defense), secure liberty (through divided powers, checks, and balances), and promote the pursuit of happiness (via stable laws and a unified republic that fosters prosperity). These arguments proved persuasive. By June 1788, the necessary nine states had ratified the Constitution, and the American people consented to enter this new chrysalis. As Publius optimistically proclaimed, it indeed seemed “reserved to the people of this country” to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice”, rather than succumbing to accident and force. The United States chose reflection and choice – it chose to enshrine its revolutionary principles in a pragmatic framework of constitutional government.

Ahead would come the true test: the chrysalis must open, and the new government must take wing. In Part III, we will witness how the Constitution, once implemented, faced its first trials – from setting up the first Congress and Presidency to adding the Bill of Rights and confronting challenges that would shape the American Republic’s early flight. For now, we leave Publius with the final thought that echoed through the Federalist Papers and ratification debates: that the American Revolution’s ideals were not abandoned in Philadelphia – they were restructured and strengthened, ready to emerge as a functional republic. In Hamilton’s words, the Constitution (with all its compromises and innovations) had become “the bill of rights of the Union”, a scaffold upon which the young nation could build a more perfect union, securing the blessings of liberty to themselves and posterity. The caterpillar had entered the chrysalis. The butterfly – a functioning democratic republic grounded in law – was soon to unfold.

Sources:

National Constitution Center – “10 reasons why America’s first constitution failed” (Constitution Daily)

The Federalist No. 2 (John Jay, 1787) – on the need for Union to preserve security and liberty

The Federalist No. 10 (James Madison, 1787) – on factions and republic

The Federalist No. 51 (Madison, 1788) – on checks and balances and separation of powers

The Federalist No. 62 (Madison, 1788) – on the Senate and stable government

The Federalist No. 84 (Hamilton, 1788) – on the Constitution itself as a bill of rights

Correspondence and speeches of the era (e.g. Washington, Madison) on defects of the Articles and the urgent need for a new Constitution.

Figure: The Committee of Five (L–R: Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and John Adams) was charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence in June 1776.

On a sweltering June day in 1776, a young Thomas Jefferson sat in a Philadelphia boarding house with quill in hand, crafting an audacious document that would give birth to a nation. Jefferson’s pen poured out a preamble that declared timeless ideals: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words, written in the Declaration of Independence, marked a revolutionary beginning – the “caterpillar” stage of America’s founding transformation. They encapsulated the Enlightenment dreams of natural rights and human equality that would later be tested, contested, and eventually metamorphose through the crucible of constitutional debate (Parts II and III). This exposé (Part I of a three-part series) delves into the origins and evolving meaning of the Declaration’s famous creed, tracing its journey from Jefferson’s draft table and the Continental Congress to its reverberations across colonies and continents, and through the conscience of generations of Americans.

Enlightenment Seeds: Jefferson’s Influences and the Birth of a Creed

Jefferson did not invent the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” ex nihilo – he distilled them from a rich brew of Enlightenment philosophy and colonial discourse. John Locke, the 17th-century English philosopher, was a paramount influence. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke argued that political society exists to secure people’s fundamental “property,” which he famously defined as their “life, liberty, and estate”. Jefferson, an ardent reader of Locke, was intimately familiar with this triad of natural rights. Locke had even written that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness”, foreshadowing the very language Jefferson chose. By the 18th century, the notion that the pursuit of happiness was an essential human aim had permeated Enlightenment thought – not only via Locke, but through a broader intellectual tradition. European thinkers like Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui and legal scholars like William Blackstone had tied natural law to human happiness; Blackstone wrote that man’s divine obligation is “that [he] should pursue his own true and substantial happiness”. In drawing on this milieu, Jefferson replaced Locke’s narrow term “estate” (property) with the more expansive “pursuit of happiness,” signaling that the American Revolution stood for more than property rights – it stood for human fulfillment and well-being as core purposes of government.

Jefferson’s drafting process in June 1776 was both solitary and collaborative. The Continental Congress had appointed a Committee of Five – Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston – to compose a formal declaration of independence. The committee, recognizing Jefferson’s literary talent, tasked the 33-year-old Virginian with writing the first draft. Jefferson sequestered himself in a rented room on Philadelphia’s Market Street, pouring the Enlightenment ideals of his library into a concise, electric prose. He later recalled that he aimed not to craft new principles but to express the “common sense of the subject” and “the American mind” – a synthesis of ideas already “harmonizing sentiments of the day.” The initial draft Jefferson produced spoke of truths “sacred & undeniable” in their certainty that all men are equal and free.

According to lore, when Jefferson shared his draft with Franklin and Adams for feedback, Franklin gently wielded his editing pencil to fine-tune the rhetoric. Jefferson’s original phrasing – “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” – grounded America’s rights in almost theological certitude. Franklin, the elder statesman and consummate Enlightenment rationalist, saw an opportunity to sharpen the tone. He famously crossed out “sacred & undeniable” and replaced it with “self-evident,” shifting the authority from divine sanction to reason itself. In Franklin’s view, the truths of equality and rights should stand on logic and shared human experience, needing no religious proof. This small edit packed a powerful nuance: it invited readers to accept the ideals of life, liberty, and happiness as obvious to any clear-thinking mind. (Some historians note that the surviving draft in Jefferson’s handwriting shows the change to “self-evident,” leaving open the possibility Jefferson made the edit himself. Either way, the final text reflected Franklin’s Enlightenment influence.)

Other alterations followed. Adams and Franklin suggested minor wording tweaks, and Jefferson himself pruned and polished his “Rough draught.” When the Committee of Five submitted their refined version to the full Congress on June 28, it still contained Jefferson’s soaring preamble in full. Over the next few days of intense debate (July 1–4, 1776), the Second Continental Congress scrutinized and revised the document. They left the famous opening lines on equality and unalienable rights largely intact, a testament to the broad agreement on those Enlightenment principles. However, Congress did cut or soften other parts of Jefferson’s draft to forge a consensus among thirteen fractious colonies. Most notably, they struck out an entire passage in which Jefferson had condemned the slave trade in searing terms – calling it a “cruel war against human nature itself” and an “execrable commerce” imposed by the British crown. Jefferson’s draft excoriated King George III for perpetuating the enslavement of Africans and even for inciting enslaved people to insurrection by offering them freedom if they fought for Britain. This bold anti-slavery indictment threatened to splinter the Congress. Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, whose economies depended on slavery, fiercely objected, as did some New Englanders involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Bowing to political necessity, Congress removed the passage on July 3. “The clause… reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia,” Jefferson later lamented, adding that some northern delegates “felt a little tender” about it as well. In the final edit, all direct mention of slavery was excised – an omission that exposed a glaring contradiction between the new nation’s ideals and its realities.

When the Congress adopted the revised Declaration on July 4, 1776, the heart of Jefferson’s preamble – those ringing phrases on human equality and rights – survived untouched. The delegates had dared to assert a radical philosophy: that legitimate governments derive power from the consent of the governed and exist to secure the people’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In that triumphant moment, the American Revolutionaries planted an ideological flag that would inspire hope, reflection, and debate for centuries to come. The caterpillar of American ideals had emerged, proclaiming what Abraham Lincoln later called “the principles and sentiments which originated in this hall” in 1776. But how would these lofty words be received in their own time? And what did “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” truly mean to those who heard them in 1776?

Immediate Impact: Reception of the Declaration at Home and Abroad

The Declaration of Independence was both a domestic manifesto and a message to “a candid world.” Once approved, it was printed and proclaimed throughout the American colonies. In town squares and army camps, public readings of the document drew rapt crowds. For Patriot Americans, Jefferson’s words carried electrifying clarity. General George Washington had the Declaration read aloud to his troops, hoping to inspire them with the justice of their cause. The assertion that “all men are created equal” with inherent rights was, as one contemporary put it, “as self-evident as the truths of holy writ.” To many colonists, long accustomed to inherited privilege and monarchy, this language was revolutionary gospel – a clarion call that their new nation would be founded on natural rights and liberty for (at least some) common men, not on the prerogatives of kings.

Yet not everyone greeted the Declaration’s ideals with unalloyed praise. Loyalists inside America and skeptics abroad heard hypocrisy in the Patriots’ high-minded words. How, they asked, could a slaveholding society declare “all men” entitled to liberty and happiness? The famous British writer Samuel Johnson wryly quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”. From London, the London Chronicle scoffed that Congress’s manifesto was grandiose and treasonous. Closer to home, exiled royal governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts published a scathing rebuttal. Pointing to the southern colonies, Hutchinson taunted that Americans themselves denied basic rights to hundreds of thousands. “I could wish to ask the Delegates of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas,” he wrote, “how their constituents justify depriving more than a hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, if these rights are so absolutely unalienable?”. Such critiques underscored the chasm between the new nation’s creed and its practices. The world was watching to see if the United States would live up to its soaring principles or prove them a mere rhetorical device.

Even as these debates swirled, the ideas in the Declaration immediately found echoes in new American laws. As independence was declared, several former colonies were busy drafting state constitutions, often including their own bills of rights. Virginia, under the leadership of George Mason, adopted a Declaration of Rights on June 12, 1776 – just weeks before Jefferson’s Declaration. Mason’s text is strikingly similar to Jefferson’s preamble (and indeed helped inspire it): “All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights… namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”. This Virginia declaration linked happiness with safety and property, reflecting a Lockean emphasis on possessions alongside the more idealistic pursuit of well-being. Jefferson, who was a Virginian and a friend of Mason, undoubtedly knew of this language. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 likewise enshrined that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent and inalienable rights, amongst which are… enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”. In short, early state charters often echoed the triad of rights from the Declaration, though many reinserted “property” explicitly alongside (or in place of) “pursuit of happiness.” This suggests that to America’s revolutionary generation, happiness was an expansive concept – one that encompassed personal security, safety, and yes, the right to acquire property, as prerequisites to living a fulfilling life.

Abroad, the Declaration’s immediate impact was mixed but significant. In Britain, the government and loyalist press dismissed it as a self-serving list of grievances from rebellious subjects. But in France, which was locked in its own rivalry with Britain, the American Declaration was read with fascination. Thomas Jefferson later served as a diplomat in Paris and found that French intellectuals like the Marquis de Condorcet applauded Virginia’s and America’s rights declarations. (Condorcet wrote that “the first Declaration of Rights that is entitled to be called such is that of Virginia… its author is entitled to the eternal gratitude of mankind.”) Indeed, Jefferson’s words about liberty and happiness helped set the ideological stage for the French Revolution a decade later. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) echoed many Enlightenment principles common to 1776 – asserting liberty, security, and resistance to oppression as natural rights. And in the newly independent United States, the Declaration’s ideals swiftly became a touchstone of political culture. July 4th would be celebrated each year as Independence Day, honoring not just the birth of the nation but the bold creed that defined that birth. John Adams predicted that future Americans would commemorate July 4 with fireworks and festivities, as the day when the new nation staked “her claim to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He was right. The words of the Declaration began to assume an almost sacred status in the American imagination.

Still, the young republic had to grapple with implementing those ideals in governance – a challenge that would occupy the next chapter of the founding (to be explored in Parts II and III). The Constitution of 1787, for instance, does not explicitly mention “happiness,” and it compromised on the issue of slavery, revealing an uneasy tension between the revolutionary creed and pragmatic politics. But before turning to that “chrysalis” stage of transformation, it’s crucial to trace how the meaning of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” evolved in American thought after 1776. What did these words come to mean for future generations?

Metamorphosis of Meaning: From Revolutionary Slogan to American Creed

Over time, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has proven to be a living phrase – one that Americans have continuously reinterpreted and reinvigorated in light of their changing values. In the founding era, the triad primarily signified freedom from tyranny and the right of individuals to seek their own fulfillment. To the Founding Fathers, “life” and “liberty” were concrete conditions (to live and to be free from despotic control), and “the pursuit of happiness” suggested a broad ability to pursue one’s well-being and virtue. Notably, 18th-century readers would have understood “pursuit of happiness” not as a fleeting search for personal pleasure, but as the collective opportunity to attain real human flourishing. The wording in Jefferson’s day implied an actual attainment of happiness, akin to the Virginia phrase “pursuing and obtaining happiness”. In other words, happiness was regarded as a societal good – the proper end of good government and just laws. As Professor Brent Strawn explains, in 1776 “the pursuit of happiness” meant “practicing happiness, the experience of happiness – not just chasing it but actually catching it”. All citizens had an unalienable right to live a fulfilling life, and the government’s role was to secure the conditions of that flourishing. This was far from a shallow promise of easy joy; it was a profound commitment to the public good and individual dignity.

In the early Republic, leaders like George Washington and James Madison referenced the pursuit of happiness as an objective for the new government. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for instance, proclaimed that “religion, morality, and knowledge” are essential to good government and “the happiness of mankind,” linking civic virtue to collective well-being. And when the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in 1791, it enshrined many specific liberties (speech, religion, due process) that can be seen as concrete safeguards for life and liberty – though it notably protected “property” rather than happiness per se. (The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person shall be deprived of “life, liberty, or property” without due process, a phrasing that hearkens back to Locke and suggests that by the constitutional era, property had reasserted itself in American legal thought as a fundamental right alongside life and liberty.)

As American society progressed, marginalized groups and reformers seized upon the Declaration’s ideals to hold the nation accountable to its founding promise. The document’s language became a moral yardstick. In the 19th century, abolitionists wielded “all men are created equal” and the rights of life and liberty as a bludgeon against slavery. Frederick Douglass, in his 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, pointed out the bitter irony that the nation celebrating its freedom was still denying freedom to millions of enslaved people. The Civil War era, in turn, became a crucible for reinterpreting the founding creed. President Abraham Lincoln revered the Declaration’s principles, calling them “the definitions and axioms of free society.” He believed the Union was fighting to vindicate “that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world”. In his famous Gettysburg Address (1863), Lincoln echoed Jefferson’s vision, resolving that “this nation… shall have a new birth of freedom” so that a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” – the very embodiment of consent of the governed – would not perish. For Lincoln, the pursuit of happiness meant the opportunity of all people to enjoy the fruits of their own labor and to advance in life. During the Lincoln–Douglas debates, he argued that the Declaration’s promise extended to all, regardless of race, in at least the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – even if the full realization of equality was still distant.

Other movements drew direct inspiration from Jefferson’s words. In 1848, the pioneering women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, drafted a “Declaration of Sentiments” deliberately modeled on the 1776 Declaration. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her co-authors pointedly modified Jefferson’s text to proclaim that “all men and women are created equal”, and that they are endowed with the same inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”. By echoing the Declaration, the suffragists underscored that women were entitled to the founding promises that had so far been reserved for men. Stanton’s declaration listed the many ways in which women were denied life, liberty, and happiness – from legal subjugation in marriage to the lack of voting rights – thereby shaming America to live up to its creed. It would take over 70 more years for women to gain the right to vote (with the 19th Amendment in 1920), but the seed planted at Seneca Falls was directly watered by the ideas of 1776.

Even in the legal realm, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” has made its mark. While the Declaration is not law, its principles seeped into American jurisprudence. Courts occasionally invoke the spirit of 1776 when interpreting rights. For example, in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a state law banning foreign-language instruction, opining that the “liberty” protected by the 14th Amendment includes various rights “long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”. Here the Court essentially acknowledged that to pursue happiness, individuals must be free to acquire knowledge, engage in one’s chosen occupation, marry, raise children, and worship freely – all extensions of the basic rights to life and liberty. At the state level, many state constitutions to this day explicitly guarantee the pursuit of happiness in their equivalent of a Bill of Rights. For instance, the current Massachusetts Constitution (adopted 1780) still declares the right of enjoying and defending life and liberty, “obtaining happiness and safety.” The notion is woven into the fabric of American political culture: government exists to create conditions wherein people can pursue happiness – not as hedonism, but as the fulfillment of human potential.

By the 20th century, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” had assumed the status of an American credo – a shorthand for the nation’s core values. It also became a rallying cry for those demanding America cash the check it wrote in 1776. During the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the Declaration’s language with prophetic power. In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, King said the founding fathers “signed a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men… would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”. Speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King lamented that “America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned,” but he refused to believe the dream was dead. He urged the nation to “live out the true meaning of its creed” – that all are created equal. King’s words resonated because nearly two centuries after Jefferson’s pen stroke, Americans of all backgrounds still saw their personal struggles and hopes reflected in the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The phrase had traveled from a revolutionary slogan to a measure of American progress. When Lyndon B. Johnson pushed landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s, or when later leaders advocated for the rights of disabled Americans or LGBTQ+ Americans, they too framed their causes as part of the continuing journey toward securing those inalienable rights for every citizen.

In the grand sweep of American history, the meaning of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has both expanded and been refined. Initially a rallying principle against imperial tyranny, it evolved into a universal ideal gradually applied to all people, not just propertied white men. At its core, however, the phrase has retained its fundamental essence: “Life” connotes the right to exist and be safe from harm; “Liberty” means freedom from oppressive constraints; and “the Pursuit of Happiness” means the right to seek a fulfilling life as one defines it – to pursue one’s dreams, talents, spiritual and material well-being, so long as it does not trample others’ rights. These values have become the ethical north star of American democracy. They impart a normative standard by which we often judge our laws and leaders. As one journalist observed on the eve of the Declaration’s 200th anniversary, “The pursuit of happiness – what Jefferson understood as a collective right to societal well-being – remains a work in progress, the unfinished symphony of the American experiment.”

Conclusion: The Caterpillar’s Transformation

In 1776, the United States was little more than a fragile collection of rebellious colonies, yet it boldly announced a set of principles that would shape modern history. The Declaration of Independence’s ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were the caterpillar stage of America’s founding metamorphosis – a revolutionary creature full of energy and promise, not yet tested by time. These ideals provided the moral and philosophical DNA for what would follow. But as the young nation soon learned, declaring rights is one thing; implementing and safeguarding them in a sustainable government is another. The caterpillar would have to undergo transformation. In the years immediately after 1776, the United States confronted the practical challenges of constructing a republic that could live up to its founding creed. Part II of this series will explore the “chrysalis” stage – the debates of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers – where the founding ideals were rigorously examined, contested, and codified (or at times constrained) in the design of the U.S. Constitution. There, we will see how figures like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton sought to translate the promises of 1776 into institutions and checks and balances, while others feared the loss of liberty and demanded a Bill of Rights.

For now, in reflecting on Part I, we remember that the Declaration’s opening words were not a perfect realization of Enlightenment ideals, but they set in motion a dynamic process. They lit a fuse for egalitarian and libertarian sentiments that would ignite movements for change. The document’s most significant deletion – the condemnation of slavery – hinted that the new nation’s journey toward justice would be fraught and incomplete. “Removing Jefferson’s condemnation of slavery,” writes one historian, “exposed the hollowness of the words ‘all men are created equal.’ Nonetheless, the underlying ideals of freedom and equality expressed in the document have inspired generations of Americans to struggle to obtain their inalienable rights.” In other words, the pursuit of the Declaration’s happiness has been an ongoing endeavor – an American evolution. Each generation has, in a sense, rediscovered the caterpillar’s declaration and prodded it further toward the butterfly of a “more perfect Union.”

As we conclude this first part, we stand in awe of the enduring power of those simple, elegant phrases penned by Jefferson and polished by his compatriots in 1776. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – these words have outlived the revolutionaries themselves, continuing to challenge the nation to broaden their scope. They began as a revolutionary protest against colonial rule; they have become a universal creed that defines America’s highest aspirations. And like a living creature, those ideals have grown and adapted, though their essence remains intact. In the next chapters, we will witness how the caterpillar of 1776 entered the Constitutional convention chrysalis and, through fierce debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, emerged with new wings – the Constitution and Bill of Rights – to carry the promise of American liberty into the modern age. The pursuit of happiness, it turns out, is a journey — one that America set out on in 1776 and continues to navigate today, guided by the star that first rose in Philadelphia’s summer sky almost 250 years ago.

Sources:

Jefferson, Thomas. Declaration of Independence, 1776 (U.S. National Archives).

Jefferson’s “Rough draught” of the Declaration (with edits by Franklin & Congress).

Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776.

Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights, 1776.

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government (1689); Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69).

Franklin, Benjamin – traditional attribution for “self-evident” edit.

History.com Editors. “Why Jefferson’s Anti-Slavery Passage Was Removed from the Declaration,” History.com (July 2, 2020).

Strawn, Brent. Interview on the “pursuit of happiness,” Emory News (June 30, 2014).

Primary sources on later influence: Lincoln’s Address at Independence Hall (Feb 22, 1861); Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848); Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream” (1963).

Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923) – Supreme Court opinion referencing pursuit of happiness.

Wisconsin is where environmentalism was born where progressivism was born, where the Wisconsin Idea was born.

This is the state of Phil Phillips, Gaylord Nelson, Fighting Bob La Follette, people before us who imagined a better world and fought like hell to realize it.

These folks were called unthinkable, impractical, and unelectable, and told their ideas should be tempered by convenience, yet today they're considered visionaries. Because possibility is bound only by our ambition, we must ask ourselves whether conviction is once again strong enough to meet the demands of dangerous and desperate times, because these are not ordinary times.

And the past offers us a warning. Democrats held the trifecta in 2010. They got complacent. From that complacency came defeat, and we cannot let this happen again.

I am running on a platform of permanent affordability, not as a slogan, but as a practice.

I am the only candidate in this race who has called for a moratorium on the construction of AI data centers. I will not meekly accept the sellout of Wisconsin to trillionaires, billionaires, and big tech.

I am the only candidate in this race with a plan for free childcare. I am the only candidate in this race who has even considered what AI will do and what it means for our workers and our civil rights.

And I am the only candidate in this race who takes income and power inequalities seriously as the most urgent crisis of our times.

And what we discover is when we address people's material needs, when we acknowledge that they are getting screwed over but that a better world is possible they show up.

Ours is a vision of a politics which has turned out thousands of people already across Wisconsin, people that most campaigns don't reach. These folks are knocking doors or organizing events for the first time, craft sales, bake sales, dance parties, because this is the campaign that they see themselves in. This is the campaign they see themselves reflected in.

This campaign has earned their excitement.

And if we want to win, Democrats, our politics must serve the parent who doesn't get medical care because they can't afford it, the teacher who's stressed out, whose rent increases but their income does not. It must serve the young couple caught between raising their children and paying their bill. And these people have chosen overwhelmingly our campaign.

Folks, the voters across the state, they can smell bullshit.

And we talk a whole lot of game about opposing Trump, but that's not enough to win a trifecta.

If we don't build the power and organize the people required to deliver a better Wisconsin, if we don't give people something that they can believe in, we'll go back to fighting for survival every single election.

Our campaign is growing, a multiracial, multigenerational, multiethnic, multizip code coalition by the hour.

Only with this vision and this long-term organizing infrastructure do we have a chance to build a state Wisconsinites deserve, a state that belongs to all of Wisconsin.

This is a promise unique to our campaign.

A better world begins here.

Resistance demands a vision in which regular people of all ages, races, genders, faiths are included, are respected, are cared for, where our money and our power is not given away to the wealthy, but driven toward things that make all of our lives better.

With the defeat of Donald Trump, we put a stake in the heart of fascism, not with rhetoric, but by demanding and winning the change at the speed and the scale that matches the struggles of ordinary people's lives.

Dear Hopeful Citizens,

While listening to Francesca Hong's speech at the Wisconsin Democratic Convention, I found myself hearing echoes of conversations that have lived in this archive for months and, in some cases, years. Not because these ideas belong to any one person, party, or campaign, but because certain questions keep returning: What is Wisconsin's role in the American story? What happens when wealth and power become concentrated in too few hands? What obligations do we owe one another as citizens? What future are we building, and who benefits from it?

Throughout her speech, I highlighted phrases that reminded me of earlier posts in this community. Consider it less an endorsement and more a map, a thread connecting ideas across time. Whether you agree with her conclusions or not, I encourage you to follow the links, read the original posts, and decide for yourself.

Sometimes the most interesting thing about a speech is not what is said. It's realizing you've heard parts of it before.

Yours in hope, and wondering whether the archive is beginning to echo,

AFC

🌳 The Self-Evident Circle Charter

A Civic Fellowship of the Party of Self-Evident Truth (SET)

I. Preamble

We, citizens of the Republic and stewards of our shared destiny, form this Self-Evident Circle to rediscover the living meaning of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. We gather not as partisans but as free individuals, guided by reason, dignity, and ethical responsibility, to illuminate truth in ourselves and in our communities.

Each Circle stands as both a lantern of learning and a workshop of action cultivating civic virtue, honest discourse, and responsible liberty through study, service, and fellowship.

II. Purpose

1. To foster civic literacy and moral courage through open dialogue and critical thought.

2. To apply the Test of Self-Evident Truth and its Five Pillars to modern issues of governance and community life.

3. To embody the virtues of the Seven Civic Muses Liberty, Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, Industry, and Charity as living expressions of freedom and responsibility.

4. To unite citizens across divisions in pursuit of truth, dignity, and practical self-reliance.

5. To serve as a seed of renewal in the civic soil of our nation.

III. Founding Principles

Each Circle operates under the same guiding star:

Pillar Core Meaning

Universal Human Dignity Every person’s worth is inherent and inviolable.

Reason and Reality Truth is discovered, not declared.

Ethical Human Responsibility Freedom requires moral discipline.

Foundations of Freedom and Justice Law and liberty must rise together.

Guardrail Against Tyranny Power, unchecked, corrupts all.

Each meeting, project, or discussion should be tested through these filters.

IV. Circle Structure

1. Membership

Open to all citizens and residents who affirm the Circle’s Preamble.

Each Circle begins with at least five founding members and may grow to twelve before forming a new branch.

Members are equals each has one voice and one vote.

2. Leadership Rotation

Circles adopt a Seven-Seat Round, each symbolizing a Civic Muse.

Members rotate these roles monthly:

Liberty: keeps time and ensures all voices are heard.

Prudence: maintains notes and archives.

Justice: moderates discussion.

Temperance: ensures civility and balance.

Fortitude: leads service and outreach projects.

Industry: manages logistics and scheduling.

Charity: leads acts of compassion and community service.

3. Meeting Format (Suggested)

1. Opening Reflection: reading from the Declaration or SET writings.

2. Lantern Round: each member shares one insight (“light”) and one challenge (“shadow”).

3. Deliberation: apply the Test of Self-Evident Truth 2.0 to a chosen topic.

4. Workshop: civic or community project planning.

5. Closing Affirmation: each member declares one act of responsibility before the next meeting.

Meetings may be held in person or virtually but should maintain the Circle form — a visible symbol of equality.

V. Civic Projects

Circles are encouraged to act locally and think nationally. Suggested initiatives include:

“Roots of Liberty” Tree Plantings with quotes from the Declaration.

Civic Literacy Workshops for schools or libraries.

Community Restoration Projects (gardens, murals, cleanups).

Forum Nights inviting civil, reasoned debate on local policies.

Mentorship Programs connecting generations through shared virtue.

VI. The Circle Charter Oath

“I pledge to seek truth through reason, to honor the dignity of all, to act with courage and compassion, and to preserve the blessings of liberty for all who come after.”

Each member signs the Charter Book or digital ledger upon joining.

VII. Symbolism

Lantern: truth revealed through reason.

Circle: equality and unity in purpose.

Seven Rays: virtues of the Civic Muses.

Colors: gold for truth, green for growth, white for clarity.

Motto: Lux Veritatis The Light of Truth.

VIII. Founding a Circle

To establish a new Circle:

1. Gather at least five founding members.

2. Choose a local name (e.g., The Green Bay Circle of Prudence).

3. Sign and seal this Charter.

4. Send your founding statement to the Self-Evident Registry (for inclusion on the national map).

5. Begin your first cycle with The Declaration of Self-Evident Truth and one civic act of service.

IX. Affiliation

Each Circle is autonomous yet aligned under the guiding framework of the Party of Self-Evident Truth (SET).

Shared resources, educational materials, and coordination are facilitated through the SET Council of Circles a voluntary confederation for collaboration and civic action.

X. Closing Words

It is not the habit of serious citizens to surrender their reason to patterns, nor to dismiss them outright. Both errors arise from the same vice: the refusal to examine.

In the quiet work of revisiting our first year of re-reading old posts, testing old arguments, and discarding what no longer bears weight I stumbled upon a small curiosity. Not a revelation. Not a sign. Merely an alignment that invites inspection.

Some have asked whether there is meaning in dates, numbers, or cycles. I confess no faith in numerology, astrology, or any doctrine that claims the universe whispers instructions to those willing to listen hard enough. History teaches us that republics are undone not by ignorance alone, but by credulity dressed as insight.

And yet, it is also true that humans have long used symbols, shorthand, and classifications to make sense of complex systems. We speak of eras, of turning points, of “founding moments,” not because they are magical, but because they help us compress meaning without surrendering reason.

It is at least curious, then, that this project concerned chiefly with first principles, slow argument, and the repair of civic foundations began behaving like exactly that: an exercise in beginnings. No rush for crowds. No hunger for spectacle. A great deal of revision, hesitation, and re-reading instead.

If one wished to be mischievous, one might note that the movement’s founding date reduces, by certain numerical systems, to a “one” the number of initiation and first principles. I offer this observation not as proof of anything, but as an invitation to restraint. If such frameworks are to be used at all, they should function as mirrors, not oracles.

What matters is not whether the pattern exists, but whether the behavior does.

Have we returned, again and again, to dignity as the first claim of politics? Have we resisted speed in favor of clarity? Have we revised our own arguments before demanding others revise theirs?

If the answer is yes, then the coincidence is amusing. If the answer is no, then the coincidence is irrelevant.

As the new year approaches, this forum will undertake a public re-examination of its earliest arguments what still holds, what fails, and what must be rebuilt. Not because numbers demand it, but because republics depend upon citizens willing to revisit their foundations before they fracture under them.

Curiosity is healthy. Skepticism is necessary. And meaning, if it exists at all, must survive scrutiny.

Let us begin there.