The founders didn't create a nation with one all-powerful center. They built a system of layered authority on purpose — because they had just escaped one tyrant, and they weren't about to create another. Federalism is perhaps the most misunderstood feature of the American constitutional design. Critics on one side call it a relic, a legal dodge used historically to protect injustice. Critics on the other invoke it selectively — cheering when it limits federal power they disli

The republic doesn't run on laws alone. It runs on citizens who show up, pay attention, and care about something beyond themselves. That is the ask. That has always been the ask. The founders had a word for it: civic virtue. It was the animating concept behind their entire political experiment, and they were under no illusions about its difficulty. They knew that the machinery of republican government — separation of powers, checks and balances, free elections — could be oper

We fought a revolution over taxation without representation. But the twenty-first century has given us a paradox the founders didn't anticipate: taxation with representation — plenty of it — but precious little accountability for where the money goes. The annual federal budget of the United States now exceeds four trillion dollars. It funds everything from aircraft carriers to agricultural subsidies to the administrative apparatus of a government that touches nearly every cor

The moment the law bends for the powerful, it breaks for everyone else. This is not a partisan observation. It is the bedrock finding of every serious student of republican government in history. The rule of law is the most foundational concept in the American constitutional tradition. It is the principle that no person — regardless of wealth, office, or political connection — stands above the legal framework that governs the society. The law applies equally. It is enforced c

A democracy can only be as wise as its citizens. This is not an inspirational sentiment — it is a structural constraint. Self-governance requires a self that is capable of governing. And that capability does not arise spontaneously. It has to be cultivated, and the institution most responsible for cultivating it is the school. The founders understood this. Thomas Jefferson's most enduring domestic policy obsession was not the Louisiana Purchase or his own elections — it was t

A free press is not the enemy of the people. It is the institution that stands between the people and unchecked power. But freedom is not sufficient. With that freedom comes a weight — a set of obligations that free institutions must impose on themselves, because no one else can. The founders placed the protection of the press in the First Amendment — not as an afterthought but as a foundational guarantee. They had lived in a world where the Crown controlled the printing pres

You don't have to run for office to serve this republic. You don't have to march, donate, organize, or sacrifice in any dramatic way. The foundational ask of republican citizenship is simpler and more demanding than any of those things: you have to pay attention. Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton — the architects of the republic — wrote and argued with an almost obsessive concern for one question: whether citizens would remain engaged enough to hold their government accountable. T

Small government is not the same as no government. Limited government is not helpless government. These distinctions, which should be obvious, are routinely obscured in American political debate — and the obscuring serves no one well. The founders who crafted the Constitution were not anarchists. They were not ideologues who believed that government was inherently evil or that all public functions should be discharged by private markets. What they believed — and what they bui

From many, one. It was the motto stamped on the very seal of the United States at the moment of its founding — and somewhere along the way, we stopped meaning it. E Pluribus Unum was not a slogan chosen carelessly. The founders understood that the great experiment they were undertaking required something that had never been successfully built before: a nation composed of many distinct peoples, regions, faiths, and interests, unified not by blood or crown but by shared princip