The Living Heart of the Constitution

Barbara (Be) Scott

On November 6, 2024, I woke up at 3 a.m. with a post-election-night hangover—and I don’t even drink. Like millions of other Americans, I made it through that day but honestly do not remember how. For the first time in my civic life, I felt there was nothing we could do to stop the destruction of our country.

Then a second thought overtook the first—that we shouldn’t even try, at least not yet. At this juncture, no amount of plotting and strategizing could be effective. The words “wait,” “trust,” and “watch” spoke themselves to me that morning, and I fell back on the teachings of the Tao te Ching, which I tend to do in times of uncertainty, remembering the question Lao Tzu posed roughly 2,500 years ago: “Do you have the patience to wait / till your mud settles and the water is clear? / Can you remain unmoving /till the right action arises by itself?” (Mitchell, 2015).

I had always maintained that Americans were inherently decent. I still believe that; but those who have succumbed to the onslaught of lies and conspiracies are no longer themselves: they have taken on the words, character, and behavior of their propagandists. Hannah Arendt spoke to this idea in reference to dictators who succeeded in “contaminating their subjects with the specifically totalitarian virus” (Arendt, 1951). But in this era of social media, with its instant posts and reposts; 24-hour cable news networks devoted to destroying democracy; and nonstop talking heads on all forms of media regurgitating and amplifying those lies, Donald Trump was able to tap into a messaging zeitgeist that was unfathomable in the time of Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin.

So it came as a sickening revelation that goodness in this country might never again be seen as a shared value, unless it could be passed naturally from one person to another, face to face, through simple trust based on each individual’s authenticity and sincerity. I felt immediately prompted to physically gather with others who would be interested in creating more trusting and truthful relationships. Before engaging in any political action, we needed to heal our hearts from what felt like betrayal by our fellow citizens. I drafted an invitation and posted it on Facebook, the gist of which was this:

Let’s not separate from each other by going too deeply inward at this time. And seriously, let’s break away from the bad news. Connecting one on one with people we both know and don’t know seems like one solution. … The first six people who RSVP via FB Messenger are invited to my house at 7 p.m. next Tuesday night for a heartwarming party.

Five days later, nine people turned up at my house for the inaugural get-together. We did not discuss strategy, politics, or how to win the next round. In fact, we agreed not to speak of the election. We each shared our personal stories, and we all listened carefully. We laughed with each other and felt sorrow at times; we grew closer by revealing something deeply personal about ourselves. We did not bond through common cause but by simple acceptance of one another.

A week or two later, a woman I was just getting to know through the Unitarian Congregation of Taos—another lifeline that lifted me and others from despair—emailed to ask for some information about the heartwarming gatherings. I explained the impetus and invited her and her husband to come. She responded: “Fantastic, Be, every last little bit of it. Sometimes it is the simple act of community witnessing—joy, acts of kindness, happiness. At this point joy feels positively and deliciously subversive.”

By our third meeting, everyone was struggling with the debasement of our nation: They were concerned for all the federal workers who’d lost their jobs in Elon Musk’s cruel rampage against civil servants. Trump was threatening to make a deal with Israel to buy the Gaza Strip and turn it into a luxury resort. And USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) had been gutted, halting billions of dollars in aid to suffering people around the world. These were just three of the many outrages brought up that night. We tried to keep it personal—how does it affect my heart, my mind—without tail-spinning into rants about the recklessness we were all witnessing. I reminded everyone that these get-togethers had not been initiated to discuss politics, but when political actions trickle down to make us viscerally miserable, here was a place to share those feelings in an accepting circle of understanding and compassion.

When the agonized sharing was over, we had a discussion about love, fascism, and sovereignty. One guest read the words of Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine, suggesting we make them our bywords: “When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”¹

Sovereignty: An Inalienable Birthright

That gathering prompted me to think more deeply about our Constitution, starting with the word sovereignty, not just as a political term of self-governance, but as a principle of being individuals who are whole and complete in themselves, free to rule themselves according to their own values as long as they didn’t impinge on others’ rights. Although the entire Constitution is devoted to the idea of sovereignty, the word never appears in the Preamble, the Bill of Rights, or the body of the Constitution itself. But the unspoken idea is present throughout. Our country is sovereign, but so are we, as citizens of a sovereign nation. In the case of the United States, it means entirely in union—sovereign individuals within sovereign states as part of a sovereign nation—choosing to be as one. Benjamin Franklin described it this way: “In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.” This concept, defined as popular sovereignty, refers to government powers that issue from the people to their representatives—in every facet of political life, all the way from a city council to the U.S. presidency. (For a broader discussion on sovereignty, especially as it relates to Native Americans, see Júrgen W. Kremer’s article, “There Always Has Been an Alternate Story,” in this issue.)

In our naïveté, or perhaps complacency, ordinary Americans had considered inevitable and everlasting the simple freedoms of self-determination, such as where to settle, work, go to college, attend church…or not, whom to marry and whether to have children. Thomas Paine, one of the most provocative of the Founding Fathers, stated this tendency to undervalue the precious in his essay “The American Crisis,” which he wrote as a soldier during the American Revolution, in 1776:

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.

We seldom thought to fully appreciate freedom of choice and the rule of law. But now we are faced with Project 2025, which envisions the establishment of a dictator as the Christian nationalist boss, rather than a republic with a “democratically” elected president and an elected body of representatives. (If you don’t count the electoral college and legally permitted gerrymandering, we could use democratically without putting it in quotes.)

While we can all agree that the country has never been perfect and has at times exercised brutality, the promise to change the things that aren’t perfect has always just required a majority of citizens to want them to change badly enough that they would press their representatives in Congress to legislate that change, as they have done so many times. But we must face the reality that not every American is onboard with moving forward. Some would rather go back to simpler, more homogeneous times. Project 2025 is the roadmap for that regression.

Even before the Project 2025 plot to strip Americans of their basic rights, most of us were aware of the dangers to this nation. It’s hard to imagine that average U.S. citizens have ever spent as much time and money in an effort to avert those dangers as they did in the last three elections—on both sides of the political divide. It’s a big responsibility for an individual to feel like the fate of the nation rests on their involvement and their endless donations to particular candidates. But because of Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision granting corporations the right to donate enormous amounts of money to a single candidate or party, the individual’s donations are a cruel joke. To wit, Elon Musk paid nearly $300 million to help Donald Trump and other Republican Party candidates take over this country. No doubt he would have paid more, considering the power those payments have purchased, not to mention access to even more wealth through government contracts that he is now in a position to rewrite entirely in his own favor.

Despite our burden of responsibility not to bury our heads in the sand, many of us have found it too sickening to watch the ongoing sadistic depredations, such as the firing of thousands of civil servants, many of whose lives and the lives of their families will be forever altered. In the main, the quick dismantlement of the federal bureaucracy (including USAID, the largest mitigator of human suffering in the world) seems intended to signal the extent of our powerlessness. The alliance with Vladimir Putin and Russia; the bullying dismissal of a democratic ally, Ukraine; and Trump’s March 4 speech to Congress, in which the leader of the free world taunted his opponents and told lie after lie in a voice meant to mesmerize his followers into even more strident obsequiousness, have all had the effect of throwing the rest of us off balance. When nothing makes sense and there’s no time to adjust to each new travesty, it’s like objects moving in space when you expect them to remain still: the effect is dizziness, with the tendency to sit it out until the nausea passes.

These forces have wasted no time unfurling a hateful agenda, displacing the stars and stripes with a dystopian vision that will strip us of what had always felt like an inalienable birthright. And which, actually, is an inalienable birthright.

A Brief History of a Revolutionary Idea

Personally, I would feel like I was betraying the Founding Fathers if I did not cross my own Delaware to protect the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, documents that have persisted through time for 238 and 234 years respectively, making each of our private and public lives far better than they ever would have been without them. Even though the Constitution has both ruptured and mended in ways, it still bears within its heart the catalyst of progress and revolution.

In the Preamble to the Constitution, its most fundamental words are ones every schoolchild learns: “We the People…” That simple phrase undeniably bestows the benefits of the ensuing words on each and every one of us, no matter our socioeconomic or political status, our race, religion, or sexual orientation. It even promises those rights to those who may not yet have been granted them, because that is the vision—that every single person be left alone to live freely—and sometimes even to be aided in that endeavor.

Beyond the substance, our fervent belief in those words has given them almost infinite power. In fact, most American citizens have not even read the Constitution, but many know by heart at least fragments of its Preamble, the remainder of which is a brief continuation, stating its radical vision in a single sentence:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The phrase “We the People” bestows these blessings, but it also imposes responsibility on those selfsame people. Long have we relied on our government to do a job we ourselves must now undertake. For our role model, we can look to one of the unsung Founding Fathers, Gouverneur Morris, the very man who finalized the language of the Constitution and took the personal liberty of rewriting the Preamble to affirm some of his moral arguments that had been rejected, mostly by slaveholders, on the floor of the Pennsylvania Statehouse in Philadelphia in just under four months in 1787.²

Chosen by the delegates for his admirable thinking and writing skills, Morris was said to have the capacity to hold big ideas. Gouverneur was not a title but his first name, after his mother’s maiden name. Perhaps this is why it seemed natural for him to value the opinions of women, which he rather famously did, because, in a deviation from the patriarchal norm, he was named for his mother, not his father. Gouverneur (most think his name was pronounced “governor”) was a tall, imposing man. At the age of 28, his ankle was crushed beneath the wheel of an open carriage. The injury required amputation of the leg below the knee, which may account at least in part for his great empathy in the face of human suffering.

And while the words he wrote may not have the legal utility required for a court case, they do have the moral authority that supports every kind of legislation that pertains to the values it denotes. Knowing that this brief statement has found its way into the fiber of nearly every citizen’s being reveals that Morris could be considered a radical for his times—not in the “unruly change at any cost” terms but under this definition: “marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional.” Perhaps because of his respect for women and his empathy for those who suffered, he believed in natural rights and envisioned equality and civil rights for all. Outspoken on the floor of what would later be known as Independence Hall, he was well-liked among the other delegates because while he had strong opinions and made them known, he also knew how to bring levity to the serious arguments under debate. More important, he could poke fun at himself. If people can’t help but laugh with you, they are much more inclined to listen to you and tolerate your opinions.

After the Constitution’s details were fully agreed upon, Morris, as a member of the Committee of Style and Arrangement, was selected to give the document its final language. The document already had a sort of introductory paragraph, which briefly discussed the 13 states and how they would govern themselves. It did the job but was uninspired:

We the People of the States of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, and Georgia—do ordain, declare and establish the following Constitution for the Government of Ourselves and our Posterity.³

It must also have seemed to Morris insufficiently visionary. So, taking the kind of liberty he imagined for the rest of the country, he rewrote it—not just as a statement of purpose but as a statement of vision. And it is within this Preamble to the Constitution that a perpetual-motion idea was planted by the man who firmly believed in equal rights for all.

Like all heavenly bodies, in which forces like gravity and electromagnetism both propel and drag on the object in motion, the Constitution was subjected to forces like greed, self-entitlement, racism, sexism, and a hunger for power, each of which acted to slow its momentum; but opposite and equal forces—such as caring, unselfishness, activism, and love for one’s fellow human beings—freed and propelled it.

Morris applied two of his gifts—visionary thinking and the power of the pen—to rewrite the Preamble to also indicate that the Constitution’s purpose was to form a more perfect Union—not a confederation of 13 states, as in the original version. It was almost a spiritual statement, a union meaning “One,” while 13 had exemplified separation. It was as if Morris understood nonduality and the underlying consciousness that unifies us all. And perhaps he did.

Miraculously, it seems, no one insisted on changes to the language he had penned, and it was left alone with its coiled spring of vision intact. Not only did it lay the foundation for a more perfect Union, but it went on to unimaginable lengths to endow U.S. citizens with all the blessings we have come to take for granted—radical, transformative ambitions, like freedom and justice for all. Does that sound like a cliché now? Maybe that’s why it’s under such grave threat, because we grew complacent and relied too much on the government to protect and assert those rights, rather than regard them as the precious life-giving force that we the people bear the responsibility to value and preserve.

Our country—our still imperfect Union: At almost 250 years as a steady democratic republic, we had come to regard America not as perfect but at least as an exemplar of fair and decent governance—of choice and opportunity. We view our forefathers in an almost mythological light. We see that they were human beings with flaws, but we also recognize the dedication with which they articulated their lofty ideals of freedom, justice, and the rule of law (not of man) as something to be treasured and safeguarded, even—and especially—by individual citizens. When those citizens vote, regardless of party affiliation, they are taking that responsibility seriously, and in their minds, they are preserving our way of life and the country’s values.

The problem is only that we citizens don’t agree on the values most worth preserving. The discrepancy is one of scale. Some think the privileges they enjoy can be scaled up and enjoyed by all. Even those who are not citizens, for instance, might expect to receive due process, if not common decency and compassion. Others see the scaling up of rights and privileges for those who differ from them as a fundamental diminishment of their own. We all appreciate roughly the same set of rights. It’s just a matter of who should lay claim to those rights.

Though we have more than enough work to do on ourselves as citizens, the Constitution is still very much in place, despite wishful thinking by the Trump administration and Project 2025 conspirators. A few examples of the progress we can look back on, and feel proud of, include the following:

• Slavery is no longer legal; African Americans have the right to live, work, vote, and own property wherever they wish. These rights ultimately extended to citizens in all ethnic and racial minority groups.
• The U.S. Army and American pioneers in search of land are no longer killing with impunity indigenous populations, who were here long before the Europeans and British arrived.
• Women, once treated as their husband’s property, enjoy the same rights as men: They vote, hold property, borrow money, and have legal rights of personhood in marriage as well as in divorce and custody disputes. For a time, they even possessed the biological right to their own bodies, until the Supreme Court—dominated by six conservative Catholics—transferred those rights to the states, where they were usurped by the privilege of states’ rights. This judicial activism has long-term repercussions for women and girls that hark back to slavery—meaning bondage and performance of services at the will of another without compensation.
• Children, once considered the property of their fathers, have over the years been granted rights of protection, opportunity, and even, in certain cases, emancipation.
• Same-sex and multiracial marriage have both become legal in the last 60 years.
• Disabled people have won—over many, many years—access to equal rights under the law.

All of these vitally beneficial changes in the lives of citizens have issued forth from the Constitution, which provided the legal but also the moral basis for human transformation. But we must admit that it was the will and the vision of “the people” themselves—a free people, unified with the vision and backing of the Constitution—who ignited that engine of change. It has always been the people who carried forth the Constitution’s promissory mission to include every citizen in that vision. As disability-rights activist Lawrence Carter-Long stated: “Race, gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality: People had to claw and scratch and fight and protest and pass legislation in order for those things to get recognized as valid!”

It took a while for us to understand the full implications of where this brilliant document could take us. But its seeds had been planted, and their possibilities had begun to germinate in the minds and spirits of those who were compassionate enough to allow them to take root in their souls. The people who fought for the legislation that brought about these advances in human rights over the next 200-plus years were regular citizens who could not tolerate witnessing the injustices of their day, let alone perpetuate them. People, the people, have acted as the living voice of the Constitution for all of these ensuing years, protesting in the streets, on buses, and in government buildings in order to work through inequity after profound inequity. The goal in most cases could be distilled to a very simple idea: the acceptance and allowance of people as they are.

We are living in the human world. It is not equal, and it is not just. We merely had a virtuous citizenry that took its direction from the vision of its primary guide on self-governance, the Constitution. And legislators, who listened to and represented the people’s interests and will, enacted laws in response to the injustices that remained. Still, we must remind ourselves: their power to do so issued entirely from the people who elected them.

Our ongoing reverence for this founding document can guide us to the full realization that it literally has been and must continue to be “We the People” who constitute America and who continue to manifest its vision. Those who care about the rights of others have tapped into something mystical: a hidden clause within the Preamble itself that continues to spin an invisible mechanism designed to fully realize for everyone what had only been idealized by the founders, and only for white men: true freedom—for all of us. What was that hidden clause? Not hidden, but not yet revealed as the churning force inside the document that would instill its own internal sense of fairness and progress on future citizens. What was it in the Constitution that both generated this ongoing revolution and insisted upon it for almost a quarter of a millennium?

Inarguably, the most important idea was embedded in the first three words of the Preamble, “We the People,” which placed us all on equal footing, without even a suggestion of hierarchy. But equally potent in its visionary capacity was the perpetual motion created by the infinitive of the verb ‘to form.’ “To form a more perfect union” does not specify some end to that ongoing process, but the opposite. The achievement of perfection can never be complete, so inside the document itself lay not imperfection but rather the seeds of perfection, which have continued to bear fruit for all these many years. The contention is between trusting the Constitution and doubting its power. After all, it is a work of man, not of God. Although sometimes it has certainly felt and acted like the work of God.

At some level, knowing that our government is no longer there to ensure just and fair results, it is challenging for all of us at some level to think that the Constitution can endure and continue to work its alchemy. In fact, the current government intends to put as swift an end to it as possible. But they have not reckoned with visionary power, for which raw power is no match. To accept that it is our civic duty to protect this country—to make sure the vision of its constitution survives—might sound impractical at best. But to underestimate the inherent power vested in the people is to underestimate how deeply its promise is rooted within our very psyche—as individuals and as a nation. That promise will not easily relinquish itself, if at all. We need to trust in its seemingly auto-volitional, perhaps mystical, force. If we truly care about what was set out in the Preamble, then we need to promise each other to preserve it by living its values until the time when all Americans are once again prepared to cherish it.

How do we carry forward the values and work of the Constitution without a government to protect and enforce it? The answer is that we must BE the constitution. We the People constitute America. Those of us who studied civics, who have read the Constitution, and who learned to treasure the gifts we were born to think of as God-given entitlements, must take a leadership role in helping other Americans see how essential we all are as we move ahead into what feels like another revolutionary war.

As someone who has studied different versions of the Tao te Ching for many years, I’ve become fairly skilled at letting go. But letting go of the ugly is much easier than letting go of the beautiful. Releasing a stance of protectiveness toward our Constitution and the promise of true democracy would be extremely painful—if that’s what I intended to do. But I do not intend to let it go. Even if it’s wrenched from us, we will reclaim it by whatever means necessary, because the Constitution is not just a parchment document hanging in the National Archives: it is instilled in our very DNA, an epigenetic phenomenon influenced by living every day as a free person, even if we did take it for granted; by stories of our ancestors living as free people every day of their lives, or, for those who still remain outside its blessings, knowing that its promise is not yet fulfilled—but only because of human flaws, not shortcomings of the document itself.

The Constitution was and still is the guiding star to what we consider the full potential of liberty and equality for all. We are all in the field of sovereignty, and we all belong. By being the Constitution, by living its values in public every single day without fail, we can choose to be transformed by living from our hearts and caring for our fellow citizens and for those who wish to be citizens.

I believe that one of the great existential purposes of the United States is to prove to itself and the world that love actually works. Love, in political terms, means just what those who are currently in power have turned their explosive self-entitlement on: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for all people, not just straight white males and not just those born into wealth, power, and privilege. This country has shown for many generations that politics is love. Otherwise, why would Americans—both citizens and their representatives—have worked so steadfastly toward justice and equity?

On the day I was finishing the rough draft of this article, March 13, I hosted the fifth heartwarming gathering at my home. Before we called the evening to a close, we gathered our attention for a rain meditation. The catastrophic lack of snow in our hometown of Taos, New Mexico, meant we were all concerned about the land and water, along with the plants and animals that depend on those systems. We closed our eyes, became quiet, and visualized the clouds coming from the Southwest. Then we listened for the thunder and imagined the clouds darkening and gathering. Opening our eyes a few minutes later, one person said, “Aho.”

Sitting together that night with our hearts open in sincerity, we renewed the core value of the Constitution as We the People acting in unison.

After carrying our cups to the kitchen and pulling on coats and gloves, we walked outside together into the relatively mild night. We were just in time to see the full moon rising—still orange and almost blossoming. As we stood absorbing the beauty, the clouds started to gather, and very soon they almost obscured the moon—except for its light, which illuminated the outlines of the clouds. Before the last person drove away, the moon was entirely concealed behind dark clouds. In the middle of the night, the wind was wild—even scary. But when I awoke in the morning, it was to snow on the ground.

Love, intention, and care all seemed to have played a part in bringing the moisture to Taos. And snow was even better than rain.

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Endnotes

1. For more on Prigogine’s ideas, see Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, coauthored with Isabelle Stengers, published first in French (1978), and later in English (1984).
2. A good portion of the content about Gouverneur Morris was inspired by an interview with three Morris scholars on “We the People,” a podcast. Constitutional law scholar Jeffrey Rosen interviewed the three (Melanie Miller, William Treanor, and Dennis Rasmussen) for an episode titled “The Life and Constitutional Legacy of Gouverneur Morris.” Their books are listed below. https://constitutioncenter.org/news-debate/podcasts/the-life-and-constitutional-legacy-of-gouverneur-morris, accessed Jan. 6, 2025.
   For further reading on Gouverneur Morris, see the books and articles by authors interviewed on the podcast:
   Miller, Melanie Randolph, ed. (2018). The Gouverneur Morris Papers: Diaries Project. University of Virginia Press. She also authored two books on Morris: Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution and An Incautious Man: The Life of Gouverneur Morris.
   Rasmussen, Dennis C. (2023). The Constitution’s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America’s Basic Charter, University of Kansas.
   Treanor, W. (2023). “Gouverneur Morris and the drafting of the federalist constitution,” Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, Winter 2023.
3. Retrieved from the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/resource/bdsdcc.c01a2?st=grid on Jan. 10, 2025.

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References

Arendt, H. (1976). The Origins of Totalitarianism, Mariner Books, p. 306.

Mitchell, S. (1992). Tao te Ching. Harper Perennial, p. 15.

We the People podcast: “The Life and Constitutional Legacy of Gouverneur Morris,” with host Jeffrey Rosen and guests Melanie Miller, William Treanor, and Dennis Rasmussen.