1776 against 1787: constituent power and the forgotten meaning of American democracy

The Constitution necessarily asks how political power should be organized, distributed, and restrained. The Declaration asks a prior question. Where does political power come from? Its answer remains revolutionary. It comes from the people-and it remains with the people. That has consequences extending well beyond the institutions established in 1787.

If constituent power belongs equally to all, democracy cannot consist merely in equal voting rights. Political equality presupposes the material capacity to participate as an equal in shaping the common world. A citizen deprived of those conditions possesses constituent power only in the most abstract sense. Where wealth becomes political power, democracy becomes increasingly formal rather than substantive. Political democracy without economic democracy therefore remains incomplete-not because equality of outcomes is required, but because extreme concentrations of wealth gradually become concentrations of political power.

The American Revolution therefore cannot be regarded as a completed event, safely enclosed within the eighteenth century. It remains an unfinished democratic project. Not because the Constitution failed, nor because the founders were hypocrites – but because constituent power is, by its very nature, inexhaustible. Every constitution is provisional before the sovereign people. Every institutional settlement remains open to revision. Every generation inherits not merely a constitutional order but the responsibility of asking whether that order continues to embody the democratic principle from which it first derived its legitimacy.

Jefferson understood that rights precede constitutions because the people precede constitutions. The Declaration therefore does not merely authorize the republic founded in 1787. It permanently authorizes the people to judge whether that republic continues to embody the democratic equality from which it first derived its legitimacy.

We often imagine that fidelity to the Founding means preserving the constitutional order inherited from 1787. The Declaration suggests something far more demanding. Fidelity to the Founding means remaining faithful to the constituent power from which every constitutional order derives its legitimacy. That fidelity cannot consist in patriotic nostalgia. It requires remaining open to new forms of democratic equality that the founders themselves could scarcely have imagined. The Revolution could never be completed because constituent power can never be exhausted. Every generation inherits not merely a Constitution but the authority-and the responsibility-to ask whether existing institutions continue to embody the democratic principle announced in 1776. The Constitution may organize democracy, but only the Declaration continually renews it.