Jefferson Wrote Down the Right to Replace a Government, and We Filed It Away

There is a sentence in the founding document of the United States that I think is the most radical thing any government has ever put its name to, and it is almost never read as radical. People assume it is in the Constitution. It is not. It is in the Declaration of Independence, written mostly by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, in the second paragraph:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Read it slowly. It does not say the people may petition. It does not say they may elect different representatives. It says they may abolish the form of government and institute a new one, on whatever principles and in whatever form seems best to them.

What the Sentence Actually Claims

Three things are packed into it, and each is worth separating.

First, government is instrumental. It exists to secure certain ends, and the preceding sentence names them: the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A government is a tool, and a tool is judged by whether it does the job.

Second, the judge is the people. Not the courts, not the legislature, not the government itself assessing its own performance. The people decide whether the ends are being served, and the text gives no other body a vote on the matter.

Third, the remedy is unlimited in form. The people may alter, or abolish, or build afresh, and the new thing need not resemble the old. Jefferson did not write that the people may choose a better king or a better parliament. He wrote that they may lay the foundation on such principles as seem to them most likely to work.

This is a licence to replace representative government itself, should the people conclude it no longer serves the ends it was instituted for. The men who wrote it had just done exactly that to a monarchy, and they wrote the licence in general terms rather than as a one-time exception for themselves.

How It Was Filed Away

Then the Constitution was written, eleven years later, and it contains no such clause. It provides for amendment, by a procedure so demanding that it has been used a couple of dozen times in two centuries and almost never for anything structural. It does not provide for the people to alter the form of government. It provides for the government to alter itself, slowly, when large majorities of its own members agree.

The Declaration's sentence was left where it was, in a document with no legal force, quoted at ceremonies and taught to schoolchildren as a piece of rhetoric about 1776. Its content, that the people may throw out the form of government and try another, became something Americans are proud their ancestors did once and would regard as sedition if proposed today.

I do not think this was a conspiracy. The men who wrote the Constitution had just lived through a revolution and wanted stability. But the effect was to convert a standing right into a historical event, and that conversion is worth noticing, because it is the move every representative system makes about its own origin. The founding act is celebrated; the principle behind the founding act is retired.

Why the Principle Is the Point

Consider what it means to take Jefferson's sentence seriously as a standing principle rather than a memory.

It means the question "is this form of government serving its ends?" is always open, and the people are always the ones entitled to answer it. Not by insurrection, which was the only instrument available in 1776, but by whatever instrument they now have for expressing a collective judgement.

And it means the answer cannot be preempted by the government. A system that says "you may change us only through the procedures we have laid down, and we have laid down procedures that make structural change nearly impossible" has quietly denied the right the Declaration asserts. It has made itself the judge of its own performance, which is exactly the arrangement the sentence was written against.

What I Take From It

I argue on this blog for a form of government in which the people decide the large questions directly rather than through representatives. The usual response is that this is a strange and untried idea. It is untried. But it is not strange to the tradition; it is the tradition, stated in its founding document, before the founders had time to get comfortable.

Jefferson's sentence says the people may institute new government in such form as seems to them most likely to secure their safety and happiness. If that form turns out to be one where the people keep the decisions rather than handing them over, the sentence covers it. Nothing in it says the people must choose a form that resembles the one they are replacing.

The right to replace a government that no longer works is not a right to a revolution once. It is a right to keep asking the question, and the fact that we have stopped asking it says more about how comfortable the current form has made itself than about how well it is doing the job.