Why the Government Is an Us, not a Them

"The fate of this question and America may depend on this: Have they said, we the States? Have they made a proposal of a compact between States? If they had, this would be a confederation: It is otherwise most clearly a consolidated government. The question turns, Sir, on that poor little thing--the expression, We, the people, instead of the States of America. I need not take much pains to show, that the principles of this system, are extremely pernicious, impolitic, and dangerous."     

                                 --Patrick Henry at the Virginia Ratifying Convention

       The first three words to the Constitution were actually highly controversial. A number of the delegates, and nearly all of the Anti-federalists, thought that they should read "We the States," which would have made the Constitution much more similar to the Articles of Confederation: a compact among sovereign states rather than a popular democracy.
        But Madison wasn't having any of it. The whole point of the Constitutional Convention, from his perspective, had been to transfer the sovereign power of government from the states to the people themselves. If the people adopt the Constitution, he argued in the Virginia convention, “it will be then a government established by the thirteen states of America. . . .The existing system has been derived from the dependent derivative authority of the legislatures of the states; whereas, this is derived from the superior power of the people.”
              If we learn only one lesson from the Founding of America--from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the lives of the Founding Fathers, it is that the government is an “us” not a “them.” Government does not do things to us. We, through the instrument of our government, do things. If we don't like the things that we are doing through our government, we are free to do other things. That's how this whole self-government thing works.
        There is, of course, a catch. "We the people" is a collective entity, not an individual will. Since we don’t always agree with each other, the “us” that is the government will sometimes act in ways we, as individuals, do not support. That’s how participatory democracy works in a large republic. Part of being a grown up, and a citizen, is accepting the fact that the democratic "we" will often not agree with the individual "I." When we insist on speaking of the government as something other than ourselves, we are actually saying that people who disagree with us do not have the right to take part in the democratic process.

       Let’s take the whole health care thing. Here are two facts that are not in dispute: 1) there are a whole lot of people in he United States who don’t like the Affordable Care Act; and 2) there are a whole lot of people in the United States who do like the Affordable Care Act. Public opinion polls vary widely about the percentages in each group, but that doesn’t matter much. The only poll that matters in our political system is called an “election.” And the presidential election of 2008 was won by a guy who told everybody that, if he won the election, his first priority would be to reform the health care system. He won the election with the largest Democratic Congressional majorities in a generation, and he did exactly what he said he would do. That's pretty much how democracy works.
       We miss the point badly when we try to guess what Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton would have thought about the individual mandate. That is looking to the Constitution as a religious text designed to provide us with a list of commandments to run our lives by. But the whole point of self-government is that we, the people, are the government, and we can act through that government to accomplish our goals. The Framers gave us a process that we can use to create the kind of society that we want to live in; they never meant to give us magic words to keep in a box.