It was 235 years ago today, on September 17, 1787, that the U.S. Constitution was signed by its authors, and began its challenging journey toward ratification.
The document opens with one of the great run-on sentences in American history:
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.
Fifty-two words, seven commas, and a powerful vision of the complicated aims of republican government.
We fight a lot about the Constitution, and we always have. But it’s not a coincidence that the document begins with the word “we” and puts union at the front of its list of ambitions. Properly understood, and properly put into practice, it has the capacity to bring us together. The Constitution was meant to create common ground in our society, not just to occupy it, and some of its most frustrating and peculiar features are the ones best suited to serving that purpose — a fact that a lot of our system’s loudest critics blithely ignore.
Over on the homepage today, I’ve got an essay on just how that capacity for forging unity manifests itself, and what that might tell us about what we’re doing wrong these days in our practice of constitutionalism.
In our search for greater national cohesion, the Constitution is not the problem but the solution.