The Law Was Written in Your Name
Look at any constitution, any foundational legal document. It usually starts the same way: “We the People.”
Not “We the Politicians.” Not “We the Corporations.” Not “We the Experts.”
We the People.
That means something. It means the law claims to derive its authority from us — from you, from the collective will of ordinary people trying to build a life together. Every legal system that calls itself democratic traces its legitimacy back to this source: the consent and participation of those it governs.
But somewhere between the declaration and the daily reality, that truth got buried. We were taught that “We the People” is ceremonial language — inspiring words on old parchment, but not a living claim we can actually exercise. We learned to think of law as something that happens to us, not something we create and maintain.
That’s the con – an amnesia systems depend on.
If the law was written in our name, then we have the power to rewrite it.
Not by asking permission from those who currently hold power. Not by waiting for someone in office to finally fix what’s broken. Not by hoping the next election cycle delivers the change we desperately need.
We can rewrite it ourselves. Because it’s ours.
Radical? No, foundational. The law belongs to the people it serves. When it stops serving them, they have not just the right but the responsibility to reconstitute it – democracy functioning as designed.
You Have More Tools Than They Told You
Yes, you can vote. Yes, you can protest. Those matter. They’re important expressions of collective will, and they’ve won real victories throughout history.
But they’re not your only tools. They’re not even your strongest ones.
The systems that concentrate power have a vested interest in making you believe that voting and protesting are the ceiling of democratic participation. They frame these as your primary options because both can be managed, channeled, and ultimately absorbed without fundamentally threatening existing power structures. Vote for candidates we’ve pre-selected. Protest in designated zones at designated times. Express your dissent, then go home and wait for the next cycle.
But you have other tools. Constitutional tools. Tools that actually redistribute power rather than just expressing frustration about how it’s distributed.
You can:
Refuse consent to systems that violate dignity — withholding the participation that makes unjust systems function
Build alternatives that work better than what exists — creating proof of concept for governance that actually serves people
Declare new law grounded in principles that serve life — constituting governance from the authority you inherently possess
Reconstitute governance when existing systems fail you — exercising the right to alter or abolish destructive forms and institute new ones
Withdraw participation from structures that harm — refusing to be complicit in your own oppression or the oppression of others
Create communities that operate by different rules — building living examples of how dignity, care, and democracy can function
This is constitutive power — the authority the people have always held, even when systems tried to make them forget it.
Constitutive power is the power to constitute — to bring into being, to establish, to create the foundational rules by which a community governs itself. It’s the power that exists before any government, any institution, any formal system. It’s the power people exercise when they gather and say: “Here’s how we’re going to live together. Here are the principles we commit to. Here’s the governance we’re creating.”
This power doesn’t come from the state. It doesn’t require institutional permission. It precedes and authorizes all legitimate governance. When systems forget this — when they act as though authority flows from the top down rather than from the bottom up — they lose their legitimacy, even if they maintain their power through force or inertia.
You possess this authority. Not because someone granted it to you, but because you’re a person, living in relation with other persons, trying to build a life worth living. That’s the foundation of all legitimate law. Everything else is just architecture we’ve built on top of it — architecture we can rebuild when it no longer serves its purpose.
Sidebar — What I Mean by Systems
When I talk about systems, I’m talking about the rules and structures that shape how we live together. These aren’t abstractions; they’re the rules that decide whether your rent rises, your medicine is affordable, your data is private, your work is safe.
Systems are things like:
Government and law — who gets to make decisions that affect entire communities, who has to follow those decisions, what happens when someone breaks the rules, and how we define justice, crime, and legitimate authority
The economy — how we organize labor and determine what counts as valuable work, how goods and services get exchanged, who controls the resources that make life possible, and how wealth gets concentrated or distributed
Technology platforms — the digital infrastructure that shapes how we communicate and organize, what information we see, how our data gets collected and used, and who profits from the networks we build together
Healthcare, education, housing — the structures that determine who gets access to basic human needs, whether those needs are treated as rights or commodities, and what happens to people who can’t afford to participate
Courts and policing — who enforces society’s rules, who interprets what those rules mean, who bears the cost when those rules are broken, and who has the authority to determine what counts as order versus disorder
These systems weren’t handed down from on high. They’re not natural laws like gravity. People designed them — people with particular interests, biases and visions of how society should work. And what people designed, people can redesign.
The systems we have now were built during specific historical moments, often by people who explicitly didn’t intend for everyone to participate equally. Many were designed to concentrate power, protect existing hierarchies, and make it difficult for ordinary people to challenge how things work. They may have been updated over time, reformed around the edges, but their foundational architecture often remains intact — architecture that was never meant to serve everyone’s dignity.
When a system concentrates power in the hands of the few, when it violates the dignity of persons, when it harms the public trust or the living world, we have not just the right but the duty to build better ones.
It’s not particularly controversial if you think about it. It’s the essence of democracy — the recognition that governance should serve the people, and when it doesn’t, the people have the authority to change it.
The radical thing, actually, is the insistence that we can’t change these systems. That they’re too big, too complex, too entrenched. That we have to accept them as unchangeable givens and content ourselves with small adjustments around the margins.
That’s learned helplessness dressed up as pragmatism.
Why We Forget
Systems that centralize authority depend on our amnesia.
They need us to forget that we have constitutive power. They need us to forget that law derives its authority from the consent of the governed, not from the institutions doing the governing. They need us to forget that when systems fail to serve life, we have the authority to build new ones.
So they teach us that change only comes through official channels — channels a few in positions of archaic power control. They tell us to vote for candidates they’ve selected, write to representatives who rarely respond, petition for reforms that take decades to materialize, work within systems designed to resist the very changes we’re seeking.
They call dissent disorder. They call imagination naïve. They call self-governance unrealistic. They professionalize democracy until it becomes something done by experts rather than practiced by communities.
And when those official channels fail — when we vote and nothing changes, when we protest and get ignored, when we petition and get denied — they sigh with practiced patience: “Well, democracy is hard. This is the best we can do. Maybe try again next election.”
What a lie. Democracy isn’t hard. It’s suppressed.
We are trained to mistake dependence for participation. We’re taught that democracy means choosing between options someone else selected, rather than creating the options ourselves. We’re told that governance is too complex for ordinary people, that we need experts and professionals to make decisions for us, that our role is to consent (or withhold consent) from choices already made.
This is how systems perpetuate themselves even when they’ve stopped serving the people they claim to represent. They convince us that we’re powerless except in the narrow ways they’ve defined. They make us forget that institutions don’t grant our authority — they’re supposed to exercise authority we’ve delegated to them, authority we can withdraw when they fail to use it properly.
The Founders of the United States knew this. They wrote it directly into the Declaration of Independence:
“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.”
Not “petition the government to reform itself.” Not “vote harder and hope for the best.” Not “wait patiently for systems to fix themselves.”
Alter or abolish. Institute new government.
They didn’t wait for permission from the British Crown. They understood that when systems of governance become destructive to the fundamental rights they’re supposed to protect, the people have the inherent authority to reconstitute governance on better foundations.
They understood that the right to rebuild is inherent — the first law behind all others, the foundational principle that makes all legitimate governance possible.
I speak of the right found in the document that founded the United States. The right to reconstitute governance when it fails us isn’t granted by governments — it precedes the state, authorizes the state, and continues to exist as a check on the state’s tendency to serve itself rather than the people.
We’ve just been trained to forget it.
When Leadership Falters
Every era tells the same story in new language: promises made, power consolidated, and the people left wondering why the same injustices persist despite changing faces in office.
This isn’t just our moment — it’s a recurring pattern woven through history.
Leaders pledge progress during campaigns, then compromise the very people they swore to protect once in office. They speak of courage while running for election, then govern by caution once they face the institutional pressures of maintaining power. They repair the surface — passing incremental reforms, making symbolic gestures — without ever touching the foundation that keeps producing the same problems.
Not all of them act in bad faith. Many truly mean well when they make their promises. They genuinely believe they’ll be different, that they’ll resist the corrupting pressures of power, that they’ll keep fighting for the people who elected them.
But the structure rewards obedience, not integrity.
The system they inherit is designed to preserve itself. It punishes those who challenge its fundamental premises and rewards those who work within its constraints. It teaches even the well-intentioned to measure success by survival — by keeping their position, maintaining their influence, not rocking the boat too hard — rather than by service to the principles they claimed to represent.
Campaign finance requires them to court donors whose interests conflict with their constituents. Party loyalty demands they support legislation they might privately oppose. Institutional norms pressure them to compromise away the bold vision they ran on. Media narratives frame anyone who refuses these compromises as unrealistic, extreme, unable to govern effectively.
Slowly, incrementally, the leaders who arrived promising transformation become administrators of the status quo. Not because they’re evil, but because the incentive structures they operate within make transformation nearly impossible without paying costs most aren’t willing to pay.
Democratic and Republican, Labour and Conservative, Liberal and Progressive — the names and platforms change, but the pattern repeats. Each new party arrives promising to be different, to finally deliver the change previous parties failed to achieve. And each, in turn, finds itself constrained by the same structural forces, making the same compromises, disappointing the same people who believed this time would be different.
Individual leaders may have more or less courage, more or less integrity, more or less commitment to their principles. But they’re all operating within structures designed to resist fundamental change, to channel dissent into manageable forms, to make anything beyond incremental adjustment seem impossible.
And structures rarely reform themselves from the top down.
Why would they? Those who benefit from current arrangements have every incentive to maintain them. Those with power to change systems have gained that power by succeeding within those systems as they currently exist. Asking them to fundamentally restructure the very systems that elevated them requires them to act against their own immediate interests — possible, certainly, but rare enough that we can’t base our strategy on hoping for it.
That’s why every generation must reclaim the creative work of lawmaking — the right to imagine and construct what comes next, not by petitioning existing powers but by exercising the constitutive authority that precedes and authorizes all legitimate governance.
If we leave that work to the same hierarchy that keeps breaking faith with us, we’ll keep inheriting the same cycle:
Elections as adrenaline — the brief burst of hope and energy that comes with believing this time will be different, this candidate will finally deliver.
Governance as exhaustion — the slow grind of watching promises dissolve into compromises, watching bold visions get whittled down to incremental adjustments that never quite address root causes.
Democracy as theater — the performance of participation without the substance of power, the ritual of voting without the reality of self-governance.
We can do better than this performance. We can write a new act.
Not by abandoning electoral politics entirely — votes still matter, representatives still have power to help or harm — but by refusing to limit our democratic participation to the narrow channels institutions have defined for us.
We can build systems of governance at the community level that embody the principles we keep hoping national leaders will implement. We can create living examples of how dignity, care, and democratic participation actually function. We can develop the competence and confidence to govern ourselves, so we’re not dependent on institutions that have repeatedly proven they’ll prioritize their own preservation over our protection.
And when we do this — when communities demonstrate that they can protect dignity, make decisions democratically, and thrive outside extractive systems — we change what’s politically possible at every level. We create models that can scale. We shift what people believe is achievable. We build power that doesn’t depend on institutional approval.
The next midterm and every one after it will matter — not because they’ll save us, but because they’ll test how well we’ve learned to govern ourselves between them.
Just remember, when leaders lose their nerve, we must remember our spine.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Start where you are.
Your neighborhood. Your workplace. Your community.
You don’t have to rebuild the entire nation overnight. You don’t need to solve every systemic problem before you begin. You don’t have to wait until conditions are perfect or until you have all the answers.
You start with the people around you, in the place where you actually have relationships and knowledge and standing. You start small and local and concrete, building systems that work at human scale before trying to scale them up.
Build systems that:
Make decisions democratically — everyone affected by a decision gets meaningful input into making it, not just symbolic consultation but real power to shape outcomes. This means moving beyond representative democracy’s “vote every few years” model toward participatory democracy’s “ongoing engagement in governance” model.
Protect dignity without exception — no one gets cast out, no one gets abandoned, no one’s worth is contingent on their productivity or compliance or ability to fit into existing categories. Dignity is inherent and unconditional, which means systems must be designed to protect it for everyone, especially those most vulnerable to being excluded.
Prioritize care over profit — people and planet come before extraction and accumulation, which means economic arrangements must serve life rather than treating life as a resource to be exploited. It’s not about abolishing exchange or markets, but about subordinating them to the fundamental goal of enabling flourishing rather than maximizing profit.
Plan for future generations — decisions are made with seven generations forward in mind, not just the next quarterly report or election cycle. Essentialy, building in accountability to people who can’t yet speak for themselves but will inherit the consequences of what we do today.
Connect communities through shared principles — creating networks of mutual aid and solidarity based on common commitments to dignity, democracy, and care, rather than isolated communities competing for limited resources.
When existing law no longer serves life, when it protects exploitation over dignity, when it enables harm rather than preventing it — write better law.
Not by waiting for legislators to do it for you. Not by hoping courts will interpret existing law more favorably. Not by petitioning those in power to please reform the systems they benefit from.
By gathering with others in your community and declaring, and committing:
“Here’s how we will live together. Here are the principles we agree to uphold. Here’s how we’ll make decisions that affect us. Here’s how we’ll handle conflicts and ensure accountability. Here’s the governance we’re creating.”
Legitimate law derives its authority from its alignment with dignity and care, not from institutional approval. Communities don’t need the state’s permission to govern themselves according to principles that protect life.
They just need to do it.
What You Can Do Right Now
You’ve watched cycles repeat. Promises made and broken. Leaders who campaigned on transformation governing by caution. Systems that keep producing the same injustices despite superficial changes.
You’ve done your part — you’ve voted, you’ve organized, you’ve shown up. And still the ground shifts beneath you. Still the fundamental problems persist. Still you’re told to be patient, to wait for the next election, to work within channels that keep absorbing your energy without producing real change.
So act before the next disillusionment arrives.
Act while hope is still warm, while the energy from recent victories hasn’t yet faded into exhaustion.
You don’t need permission to act lawfully in the name of life and dignity.
Legitimacy flows from right action, not from institutional approval. When you organize your community to protect dignity, when you create systems of governance that serve life, when you build alternatives to extractive systems — that’s legitimate. It’s legitimate because it aligns with the fundamental purposes that make any law legitimate: protecting people, enabling flourishing, stewarding the living world.
You don’t need the state’s permission to do this any more than you need its permission to help a neighbor or organize a potluck or teach someone a skill. These are basic expressions of human sociality and mutual care. Governance is just the formalization and coordination of those impulses at larger scale.
If you see a system violating dignity, you can stop participating in it. Withdraw your cooperation. Refuse to be complicit in your own oppression or the oppression of others. Not as mere protest — but as an exercise of the power every person has to withhold the consent that makes unjust systems function.
If you see a need unmet in your community, you can build what meets it. You don’t have to wait for institutions to finally provide what they should have been providing all along. You can organize mutual aid networks, cooperative structures, community resources that ensure everyone has what they need to survive and thrive.
If existing law fails to protect people and planet, you can constitute better law. Gather with others. Identify the principles you share. Draft governance documents that embody those principles. Establish processes for making decisions, handling conflicts, ensuring accountability. Create the structures you need, then live according to them.
Start small. Start local. Start now.
Don’t wait until you have perfect clarity or complete consensus or ideal conditions. Don’t wait until you’ve solved every theoretical problem or anticipated every possible challenge. Start where you are, with the people around you, building something modest that works.
Gather people who share your values — your neighbors, your colleagues, your friends, members of groups you’re already part of. You don’t need a huge number. Ten people who trust each other can do remarkable things. Twenty can build systems that serve hundreds.
Write your principles — not a massive legal document, not comprehensive policy covering every contingency, but a clear statement of what you stand for and what you’re committed to upholding together. What does dignity mean to you? How will you make decisions? What boundaries will you maintain? What are you accountable to each other for?
Practice self-governance — actually doing the work of making collective decisions, handling disagreements, ensuring accountability, adapting as you learn. This is a skill set that atrophies when we only exercise it during elections. It needs regular practice to develop competence and confidence.
Show what’s possible — create a living example that others can see and learn from. When your community successfully governs itself democratically, when it protects dignity better than surrounding systems do, when people thrive within structures of mutual care — that becomes proof. Proof that different arrangements work. Proof that we don’t have to accept systems that keep failing us.
Every community that does this becomes proof.
Proof that we don’t need systems that concentrate power in distant institutions we can’t hold accountable.
Proof that democracy can function at human scale, with ongoing participation rather than just periodic elections.
Proof that we can protect dignity without authoritarian enforcement, through community accountability and mutual commitment.
Proof that we can build the world we want to inhabit — not someday, not after the revolution, not once we’ve convinced those in power to change, but now, in the communities where we actually live.
The Law Is Ours
The law was written in our name.
Not as a metaphor nor as inspiring rhetoric to be forgotten once elections end. As a literal claim about where legitimate authority comes from.
That means we are its stewards — responsible for ensuring it serves life, protects dignity, enables flourishing. We’re not passive subjects who receive law from on high. We’re active participants who create and maintain the governance structures we need.
We can renew it when it grows stale, refine it when we discover better approaches, and reimagine it entirely when we recognize that current systems can’t serve their stated purposes.
We can build ones that actually serve life instead of extracting from it. Systems that protect dignity instead of violating it. Those that enable participation instead of concentrating power.
We don’t have to wait for the next election, or the election after that, or the supposedly transformative leader who’ll finally fix everything.
We don’t have to hope that politicians will somehow overcome the structural pressures that have corrupted every previous generation of leaders.
We don’t have to content ourselves with incremental adjustments to systems whose fundamental architecture keeps producing harm.
We have the authority already.
Not because someone granted it to us, but because we’re the people in whose name every legitimate law is written. We possess constitutive power — the power to create governance that serves us, the power that precedes and authorizes all institutions.
I don’t mean a new power we need to seize. It’s an existing power we need to remember and exercise. It’s been there all along, waiting for us to stop asking permission and start building.
Build the world you want to live in. Start where you are. Gather your people. Create your governance.
And when they ask — when institutions demand to know: “Who gave you permission to do this? What authority do you have to create your own governance? How dare you act without approval from the proper channels?” —
You can answer, steady and lawful, grounded in the foundational principle that makes all legitimate governance possible:
“We the People. That’s who.”
The power to reconstitute is responsibility.
It is not granted by states — it flows from life itself and begins wherever dignity is upheld.
Need a place to begin?
Explore the Covenant — a boilerplate constitution for communities everywhere, a framework you can adapt to local needs.
It’s bedrock you can count on — constitutional language and structures that embody the principles of dignity, democracy, and care.
It’s civic source code you can build with — an open framework you can implement, modify, and share rather than reinventing governance from scratch.
It’s law you can finally call your own — not imposed from distant institutions but adopted by communities that recognize themselves in its principles.
The Covenant provides the architecture. Your community provides the life.