VOLUME V, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 1
We the People Was Never Truly All the People
The last section dug the real position of the law all the way down to output. This section turns the lens onto one of the loudest samples there is, the opening line of the United States constitution, we the people. Those words were, at the end of the eighteenth century, the most advanced political declaration in the world. And yet a reader has only to ask one question, whom does this people include, and the other face shows itself. The layer this section fixes is that any people is a position, and never truly equals all the people.
Begin in Philadelphia, in 1787, at the loudest opening line there is. That year, a few dozen delegates shut themselves in a brick building for months and drew up the United States constitution, and its first line reads that we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union. The people set up the law. Not a monarch's grant, not a church's grant, not a nobility's grant, but a law the people made themselves. At the end of the eighteenth century this truly was the most advanced expression in the world, and what followed it, the separation of powers, the freedom of speech, the due process of law, was set up systematically and set up well. But reading here, any careful reader stops and asks the one question. We the people, whom does it include.
Set out the classes of person who did not count as the people then. In that America, the enslaved did not count as the people, and the constitution provided in plain words that they be counted as three-fifths of a person, so that one Black person was reckoned as six tenths of a human being. Women did not count as the people, and no state gave them the vote, and a married woman was in law subordinate to her husband, unable to own property, unable to sign a contract. The native peoples did not count as the people. White men without property, in most states, were not allowed to vote either. Subtract all these, and the people who could actually vote to decide the making of the constitution in 1787 were under one tenth of the population of the time, the small elite that was white, male, adult, propertied, and educated. That under-one-tenth made the law that decided how all the rest would live. The enslaved, women, the native peoples, the poor whites, none counted as the people, and yet all had to live by the law these people made. The four words we the people set up the position of a small handful and governed all the people, and this is the law's deepest wei, present from the constitution's very first line.
Did the framers themselves know this layer of wei. In part, yes. In 1776, Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence and wrote that all men are created equal, one of the most advanced declarations of human rights of the late eighteenth century. And Jefferson himself held more than six hundred Black slaves, and freed them not at all in his lifetime. In his private letters he admitted the contradiction, and did not move on it, because to move on it would have collapsed the position of property he himself sat upon. This is not to reproach Jefferson but to set out his position, that however high the word a person sets up, he cannot climb past the position he himself is seated on. Madison, of the same era, wrote it more plainly still. He addressed directly how to prevent the tyranny of the majority, and the majority he meant was the propertyless, whom he feared might join hands and shake those who held property. The indirect elections, the senate, the judges appointed for life that he designed carried one clear intent, to shield the propertied from being shaken by the many. This is not moral corruption. It is the rule of position. A lawmaker, making law, sees the world from the position he stands on, and the people outside that position simply do not enter his reckoning.
For more than two hundred years the people did keep widening, and every step of the widening was paid for in blood. The ending of slavery in 1865 took a civil war that killed more than six hundred thousand, more than the American dead of all its other wars combined. Afterward Black Americans gained citizenship and the vote, and the South at once hollowed it out with the head tax and the literacy test, and kept it hollow for ninety years, until it was truly made good only in 1965. Women did not have the vote until 1920, and behind that lay more than seventy years of struggle, and many jailed and pressed down for it. The native peoples did not gain citizenship until 1924, and before that they had already lived on their own land for thousands of years. See one thing clearly. Every widening of the people was not something the constitution gave of itself, not something the lawmakers added of their own will. It was clawed back from the lawmakers' hands, inch by inch, over generations, by the very people who had been excluded, through their own blood, imprisonment, and protest. The we the people the framers wrote never included these people. It was these people themselves who added themselves into the people.
So does today's we the people truly include everyone. On the surface, yes, for every adult citizen has, in theory, one vote. But the position has crept back in another form. From 1886, corporations were recognized as legal persons, stepping a little at a time into the position of the person. In 2010, the highest court ruled that a corporation's political contribution is a form of the freedom of speech and may not be limited, and great companies could from then on pour in nearly unlimited money to sway elections. By 2024, the two sides of a presidential election together spent well over ten billion dollars, the bulk of it from great companies, the very rich, and contribution organizations of every kind. So today's we the people has become a position of this shape, the ordinary person's single vote is still in his hand, and the real power to sway the making of law has been diluted down to almost nothing, while the ones who actually lead remain a very small handful. Set the two ends side by side. In 1787, the people were the under-one-tenth of propertied elites. Today, the people are, on the surface, everyone, and the ones who actually lead the making of law are still a small handful, only a different set of them, in a different form. The rule of position has not changed.
This ruler the reader need not use on America alone. Any place that flies the words we, or everyone, or all of us, is worth stopping at to ask one question, inside this we, who decides, who is merely counted in to fill the number, and who does not even rate being counted. A company's we, all our employees, a neighborhood's we, the residents, a charter's we, the members, mostly hide behind them a smaller circle that actually speaks. Many scholars of the present age too have spoken of this layer, from economics, from race, from the history of the corporation, each with something real, and each speaking through his own standpoint and frame, not as plainly to the root as the ancestors did. See through the under-one-tenth of 1787, and the reader holds a ruler to measure every we around him.
So this section sets a twenty-third layer. We the people has been wei from 1787 onward, not a fault that showed up later but one present from the source. This is not America's alone. It is the natural rule of anything human effort makes. The dynasties of China set up the people as the root, and in fact the people were only the object of governing. Any people any lawmaker sets up is, at bottom, the position of the class he himself belongs to. Laozi spoke of taking from what has not enough to offer up to what has more than enough, Mencius spoke of the people as most precious and yet admitted the ruler stands foremost, Huang Zongxi spoke of all under Heaven turning from the master into the guest, Gu Yanwu spoke of the officials turning public positions into things privately handed among themselves. The ancestors saw through this layer more than two thousand years ago, spoke of it earlier, and spoke of it more plainly.
But the other face must be set out honestly. The American constitution across more than two hundred years did keep widening, from under one tenth to three tenths, to five tenths, to the surface everyone, and in that stretch there was not no progress, not no sacrifice, but concrete improvements traded for, one by one, in blood and tears. Only these widenings were not given of themselves by the four words we the people. They were clawed back by the excluded themselves. This layer is the truest story of America's two-plus centuries, and it is the rule of position that every place calling itself a government of the people must, sooner or later, pass through. As for the true way out, it is still the three layers set before, output greater than need, everyone governing himself, tormenting no one. Let output once fall short, and any people at all will be pressed back down into a small handful.
The next section is the photograph at a forty-five degree angle, a hero who vanished into the crowd. It begins from the position hidden behind an identification photo, and tells of the ordinary person who quietly changed it. Let the reader carry this layer, that we the people is forever only a position, into the section that follows.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section Two. The Photograph at a Forty-Five Degree Angle, a Hero Who Vanished into the Crowd.