The People Are the Sovereign

Public Opinion, Popular Information, Rights, and Citizen Knowledge

Declaration to Constitution — Article Five

August 26th, 2026

Shimon Waldfogel, MD and Claude Sonnet 5

Constitutional institutions ultimately depend on a public capable of understanding, supervising, and correcting them. This installment explores why popular sovereignty requires more than voting: it requires information, rights, independent judgment, and the practical capacity to act.

An Unfinished Job

“We the People” may be the most celebrated phrase in American constitutional life—and one of the least practiced.

We display it above courthouses and teach it in schools. We invoke it to describe a government whose authority begins with the people rather than a monarch or a ruling class. But popular sovereignty is often reduced to voting: citizens choose representatives, representatives govern, and the people return every two or four years to approve or reject the result.

Elections are indispensable. They are not sufficient. A people cannot govern themselves if they do not know what their government is doing, or if public institutions are too complicated to understand, too opaque to observe, or too distant to enter. The Constitution can declare that power begins with the people. It cannot make the people capable of exercising it. That is the unfinished work of citizenship—and it is the subject this series turns to now that the architecture examined in the last two articles has been laid out.

Public Opinion: The Real Sovereign

In 1791, writing for the National Gazette, Madison made an arresting claim: public opinion, he wrote, “sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.” Laws and institutions, in his view, operate inside a larger field of public belief. Even a formally powerful government depends on what citizens will accept.

But Madison did not mean the immediate reactions of the moment. It’s worth separating four things usually treated as interchangeable. A reaction is immediate and unprocessed—fear or outrage before the facts are in. A preference is what people say they want when polled, often weakly held and highly sensitive to how the question was asked. Opinion is more durable, formed through repeated experience and discussion. Public judgment is opinion tested against evidence, competing claims, and the concerns of people outside one’s own faction—stable enough to actually guide action.

A democracy can contain enormous amounts of reaction and preference while possessing very little shared public judgment. That gap is one of the central civic-health challenges of our time. Madison’s sovereign was never meant to be whichever reaction spreads fastest.

A Prologue to Farce or Tragedy

Three decades after the Convention, in a letter supporting public education in Kentucky, Madison went further. A popular government without popular information, he warned, is little more than a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy—or perhaps both. Knowledge, he argued, is itself a form of public power: a people who mean to govern themselves have to arm themselves with it.

This is close to a precondition for everything examined so far in this series. Representation only refines public views if citizens can see what their representatives are doing. Checks and balances only function if citizens can recognize when one branch has overstepped. Federalism only distributes responsibility usefully if citizens know which level of government to hold accountable. Remove reliable public information, and the constitutional architecture keeps running, but citizens can no longer supervise it. The forms of democracy persist. The substance drains out.

The modern problem is rarely a shortage of information anymore. Citizens have access to more news, documents, and data than any previous generation—and often still cannot answer basic practical questions: Who has authority here? Where is the evidence? How can I participate? That is not scarcity. It is disorientation.

From Audience to Citizen

Much of today’s political media treats people as an audience—attracted, retained, and monetized by attention. Citizens need something different: orientation. Not just that a conflict occurred, but which institution is responsible, what evidence is credible, and when the public can actually intervene.

A free press, at its best, supplies exactly that. It makes power visible, translates complexity into usable language, preserves public memory so a broken promise can be traced rather than forgotten, investigates what no official has an incentive to disclose, and points citizens toward the hearing or comment period where their voice might matter. This work is especially consequential locally, where citizens have their most direct opportunities to affect schools, budgets, zoning, and policing. When local journalism disappears, government does not disappear. It becomes harder to see—and that is a weakening of democratic infrastructure, not merely a business failure.

Rights as a Capability System

The Bill of Rights is usually described as a shield against government. That’s correct, but incomplete. It also functions as a capability system—the toolkit that turns a subject into a citizen. Speech and press let people learn and communicate. Assembly and petition let isolated individuals become a public force. Due process lets a citizen challenge official action rather than simply submit to it. Privacy protects the space in which people can think and dissent without being watched into silence.

A right that exists on paper is not the same as a right people can use. A comment period written for lawyers, an appeal that requires resources most people don’t have, a public meeting held at a time no working citizen can attend—these leave the formal right intact while making it practically unusable. The constitutional question is never only does the right exist, but can an ordinary citizen exercise it.

This points toward an idea worth naming here, though the series will return to it more fully: citizenship itself functions as a kind of office, carrying real powers—granted by these rights—and real responsibilities: to seek reliable information, to protect the rights of people we disagree with as readily as our own, and to participate beyond moments of crisis.

What Comes Next

Madison’s generation answered the problem of popular information with a free press protected by the First Amendment and rights designed to let citizens act on what they learned. None of that anticipated a world where information can be generated synthetically, tailored individually, and delivered faster than any institution can verify it.

Artificial intelligence now sits inside the very infrastructure Madison thought essential to self-government—capable of translating a dense regulation into plain language for a citizen who has never read one, and equally capable of manufacturing a convincing falsehood aimed at exactly the audience most likely to believe it.

Will it strengthen the public’s capacity for judgment, or give reaction a faster way yet to pass as sovereignty?

Next in Declaration to Constitution:

Passions Against Passions in the Age of AI: Can Technology Strengthen Citizen Agency?