We understand a constitution today as a kind of super-law, a law that can validate or invalidate democratically passed statutory laws. Every side invokes the constitution when it is convenient and seems to forget it when it is not. And the new practice of identifying every judge with which President appointed them may accede to the reality of the politicization of the law, but it also renders meaningless the very idea of constitutional limitation.
But the idea of a constitution is older and richer. When Aristotle talked about the Athenian constitution, the word he employs is politeia, a form of the Greek polis, the city and people of Athens. One possible root of polis, and also of politeis, is the Greek word pelein, describing the rising circular motion of smoke rings that rise up from a peace pipe. Pelein signifies the motion by which something emerges or comes to be. The people of a city, Aristotle understood, are those who emerge and gather around a common center. The politician is the person who stands out in public and speaks in such a way that the people gather around and constitute themselves as a people.
A constitution, in this sense, speaks to the character and way of life of a people; it is their ethos, the values, ideals, and practices that make them who they are. But a constitution in this sense is never static. We as a people are always constituting ourselves. There is a freedom in constituting ourselves, and yet it is a freedom limited also by who we are. We look back to our past to find who we are, but we also peer into our future and ask: who do we want to be? All constitutions must then be both backward- and forward-looking, a negotiation between who we have been and who we are becoming.
Hannah Arendt came to the United States of America at the age of 35. She came as a stateless refugee, a Jew who had escaped arrest by the Gestapo in Berlin and confinement in a concentration camp in Gürs. Arendt developed her own sense of the American constitution. First, she was struck by Americans’ sense of citizenship. While working as an au pair for a family in the months after her arrival, she wrote to her friend Karl Jaspers of her astonishment at the confidence average Americans had in their right and responsibility to write letters to their congressmen and their belief that their opinions about politics mattered.
Second, she was struck by the fact that there was no “true American.” There were Anglo-Americans, Irish-Americans, white Americans, Black Americans, and even Jewish Americans. Coming from Europe, where each state had a national people and then minorities who were second-class citizens, Arendt was amazed that in America you could be both Jewish and American. The hyphenated nature of American citizenship was, she thought, unique in the world at the time. It meant, she argued, that at least in its core sense of itself, America was a truly pluralistic society, one that at its best could be a home not only for individuals but for peoples.
By the 1960s, after Arendt had become an American citizen and established herself as a political thinker, she added two other core characteristics to her version of the American constitution. The first was a fierce commitment to the dispersal and multiplication of power. The greatest American contribution to political thinking, she wrote, was the development of a political structure without sovereignty. Not only did the American founders take from Montesquieu the separation of powers among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, they also took seriously Montesquieu’s insight that “only power checks power.” The federalist system was designed to prevent either the states or the national government from acquiring too much power and becoming tyrannical. If some states became too tyrannical, the national government would intervene. If the national government claimed too much power, the states would band together to oppose it.
Finally, after living through the Civil Rights and the Anti-War movements in the 1960s, Arendt added a final core constitutional value to her understanding of the American constitution: collective dissent in the form of civil disobedience. So important did Arendt find this core American right to organized and collective dissent, she argued that it was foundational for the country and should be explicitly secured by an amendment to the written Constitution.
Arendt understands civil disobedience to be necessarily a form of collective political dissent. It is a group phenomenon that publicizes widely shared minority opinions via extraordinary means to contest unjust acts by a ruling majority. “Civil disobedience,” she writes, “arises when a significant number of citizens have become convinced either that the normal channels of change no longer function, and grievances will not be heard or acted upon, or that, on the contrary, what the government is about to change and has embarked upon and persists in modes of action whose legality and locked constitutionality are open to grave doubt.” When, say, citizens gather to block access to abortion clinics or to shut down an intersection to protest laws banning abortion, the “concerted action” of civil disobedients “springs from an agreement with each other, and it is this agreement that lends credence and conviction to their opinion.” In other words, civil disobedience is never the act of a lone individual but necessarily the actions of an organized group that aims to change laws or to prevent unconstitutional changes in the law. Civil disobedients “are in fact organized minorities, bound together by common opinion, rather than by common interest, and the decision to take a stand against the government’s policies even if they have reason to assume that these policies are backed by a majority.”
The importance of civil disobedience as a right of collective dissent is why Arendt named “civil disobedience” as one of the core constituent powers that could restrain tyranny in the United States. Dissent, Arendt argued, is the hallmark of free government. We are at a moment when dissent is required if we are to preserve our freedoms. It is in moments like these that civil disobedience emerges as movements of “organized minorities” to take a “stand against the government’s policies.
What we are witnessing today is not simply unrest or disorder, but a struggle over constitutional meaning itself. Civil disobedience, as Arendt understood it, is not lawlessness but a claim made in the name of law — a demand that the constitution be taken seriously as the expression of who we are and who we aspire to be. It is public, collective, and accountable, and it appeals not to private conscience but to shared judgment. For that reason, civil disobedience is incompatible with secrecy, opportunism, or violence for private gain. It is the opposite of criminality, and it must work to be true to that spirit. Civil disobedience belongs to a tradition in which citizens act together, openly, to contest laws that betray the constitutional ethos they claim to serve.
For generations, Americans have accepted a bargain from the politicians, technocrats, and civil servants who largely ran the country. They outsourced government to a technocratic elite in return for prosperity. But that bargain has failed. It failed for a reason: too many Americans felt left out of both prosperity and a sense of self-government. What we see now is the chaos of the destruction of the technocratic order and the birth pangs of something new.
The vapid hope that the old order of technocratic liberalism will hold is finally, slowly, disappearing. That is a necessary step. What emerges, however, is far from clear. President Trump has a keen sense of the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the old order, but very little idea of what will replace it. We are witnessing a tension within the MAGA coalition, as President Trump struggles to hold together those who want simply to tear down the old order and those more radical elements — a minority within the President’s coalition — who want to fully transform the United States into a culturally white, patriarchal, and Christian society.
The American constitution, like Aristotle’s politeia, is never finished. It comes into being only when a people gathers, speaks, and acts in concert. That process is risky. It invites conflict, dissent, and even disunity. But a constitution that cannot withstand organized dissent is already hollow. The question before us is not whether the United States will experience conflict, but whether that conflict will remain political — rooted in public action, shared judgment, and constitutional claims — or descend into something else entirely. In moments like these, civil disobedience is not a threat to the constitution. It is one of the ways a people struggles, once again, to bring it into being.
