We the People and America’s Constitutional Crisis: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract A majority of Americans agree that our democracy is at risk, but they disagree about the location of these threats. This article examines how debates about who constitutes the “we the people” seeded a politics of resentment that raised the saliency of the many antidemocratic tendencies and institutional features of the American political system. As the American electorate becomes more diverse, questions about whose voices, histories and votes should count have become increasingly fraught, and Donald Trump’s presidency exacerbated these tensions. The growing political divide and the public’s increased awareness of and attention to the anti-democratic features of our political system are pushing us closer to a political precipice as a minority of Americans seek to maximize their power at the expense of an increasingly frustrated majority. This is problematic in a democracy where confidence in the system requires individuals to believe that their participation matters and counts.