The Constitution won’t save us from our own ignorance

Americans argue endlessly over who should govern. We spend less time asking the prior question: What kind of government are we trying to preserve?The answer should be self-government.What are the alternatives? Rule by someone else — by a monarch, an oligarchy, a bureaucracy, a party, an ideological elite, or simply whichever faction has accumulated enough power. Self-government begins with a different premise: Individuals possess equal rights, government exists to secure those rights, and political power is legitimate only when exercised with the consent of the governed. But “consent” is tricky. Fundamental rights are individual. Self-government is collective. Consent is the bridge between the two.And consent cannot be merely a slogan. It requires machinery.The Constitution supplies much of it: limited powers, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and protections for individual rights. But underneath those arrangements lies a continuing process that I call the democratic cycle.Citizens choose representatives. Representatives make laws. Government executes those laws. Citizens experience the results, judge their representatives, and vote again. Elections are therefore not merely periodic ceremonies. They close the loop between governmental power and popular consent.The great virtue of this cycle is not that voters will always be right. They won’t be. Nor will representatives.Its virtue is correction.A self-governing people can make a bad choice, experience its consequences, change its mind, replace its representatives, and choose another course without revolution or violence. Protected by constitutional limits and individual rights, the democratic cycle allows political error without making every error permanent.But there is a vulnerability built into the system.The Constitution can survive for centuries. The citizens who operate it cannot.Every generation disappears and is replaced by another. Each new generation enters the world knowing nothing about individual rights, constitutional limits, representative government, or why the peaceful transfer of political power matters. None of that knowledge is inherited.A competent citizenry must therefore be rebuilt every generation.That requires political education — not indoctrination into a party or ideology, but an understanding of the principles and machinery of self-government. Citizens need to understand why rights limit what majorities may do, why political opponents retain the same rights they claim for themselves, why government officials must remain subject to law, and why honest elections must provide a genuine means of holding those officials accountable.Competence also requires judgment. Politics rarely presents us with perfect choices. Self-government requires citizens capable of comparing imperfect alternatives, distinguishing facts from slogans, recognizing dishonesty even when it comes from their own side, and choosing the available course that moves government closer to the principles they want it to embody.This is why political education is not an ornament of a free society. It is part of its maintenance.Schools have a role. So do parents, historians, journalists, writers, and every institution engaged in serious public debate. A nation that ceases to teach the meaning and mechanics of self-government may retain its constitutional forms for a time. What it cannot retain indefinitely is the substance those forms were designed to protect.JULY FOURTH MADE US INDEPENDENT. SEPT. 17 KEPT US FROM COLLAPSINGThe founders could give us a Constitution. They could not give us competent citizens in perpetuity.That task belongs to every generation.Steve Wolfer is the author of The Democratic Cycle: Why Self-Government Is Failing — How to Repair It