“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The Constitution’s preamble gives us a way to judge the quality of our government, explicitly listing seven goals that it must fulfill. These goals are not empty promises, they are sacred duties our government is tasked with meeting. And right now, it is failing on all criteria.

“In order to establish a more perfect Union”

Our Union is breaking. Trust in our political institutions has plummeted to single digits. Geographic disparities, online echo chambers, and cultural disputes work together to create a reality where disagreement leads to outrage. We cannot agree on basic facts for essential topics like elections or public health. A Union requires some sense of shared identity and common purpose and ours is dissolving a bit more every day. Think about it: would you describe our present Union as anything remotely close to perfect?

“establish Justice”

Justice is not established when laws apply differently based on wealth and power.

A president is now effectively immune to prosecution, especially considering the standing Justice Department tradition of not inditing a sitting President. A sitting president literally incited a mob to storm the Capitol and faced no meaningful consequences for doing so, even going so far as to pardon those guilty of seditious conspiracy. And beyond our most powerful office, financial recklessness, Ecocide, coordinated disinformation campaigns, data theft, and other white-collar crimes are often beyond the reach of our government’s justice, as have seen time and time again. Major crimes, ones with grave national security implications, now result in settlements without admission of guilt and no individual accountability.

Meanwhile, millions cannot afford legal representation. Public defenders are overwhelmed and cash bail imprisons the poor before trial while the wealthy walk free. The cost of legal representation is such that wealthy entities can simply outspend and outlawyer those wronged, bleeding them dry as they try to make their case and find justice. The promise of equal justice under law has become a bitter joke to those who encounter the system from below rather than above.

Our system does not create justice, it creates injustice systematically.

“insure domestic Tranquility”

Domestic tranquility is not ensured when Americans report record levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. It is not ensured when mass shootings occur with numbing regularity. It is not ensured when deaths of despair continue decimating enormous numbers of Americans.

Our domestic life is in no way, shape, or form tranquil. Our domestic life is marked by fear, division, rage, and despair. Algorithmic outrage, endless doomscrolling, and polarizing media have led us into a state of constant stress for civically engaged Americans. The only response available to us is to ignore reality completely, to pretend the big picture is not as dark as it really is. Forced ignorance is not tranquility.

“provide for the common defence”

We spend more on military defense than the next ten nations combined. But money does not fight. Defense in the 21st century requires more than air superiority. It requires cybersecurity, information integrity, and entrenched, reinforced civilizational resilience. Foreign adversaries manipulate our public discourse with impunity, and our supply chains and power grids have proven to be remarkably fragile, unfit for a superpower. Climate change will displace millions, destabilize agriculture, and stress every system we depend on; pandemics have already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans; and artificial intelligence, the most powerful technology ever created, is being developed with no democratic oversight. (Can you imagine the insanity of allowing companies to develop nukes? Well, consider that AI is more powerful than a nuclear bomb, and you can begin to understand how insane it is to let for-profit companies recklessly race to get to that technology first.)

Our existing military, intelligence, and political institutions have proven inadequate in countering these new threats. We are spending trillions defending against 20th-century threats while 21st-century threats go unaddressed. It does not matter how many aircraft carriers we have if our digital and electrical infrastructure is exposed and vulnerable.

"promote the general Welfare"

The general welfare is not promoted when most Americans live paycheck to paycheck in the wealthiest nation in history, nor is it promoted when healthcare costs bankrupt families while insurers report record profits. It is not promoted when housing costs consume half of income in major cities, nor when owning a home is not achievable for millions of us. It is not promoted when a college degree, once the path to the middle class, now is only accessible through crushing, unforgivable debt. Nor is it promoted when AI and robotics threaten to eliminate tens of millions of jobs. The more essential a good or service is, the more it costs; because, after all, our suffering is profitable and our society is structured to maximize profit at all costs.

The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 90%. CEO pay has risen from 20 times worker pay to over 285 times. Productivity has increased for decades but wages have stagnated, proving trickle-down economics to be a blatant lie. The welfare promoted is not general, and like justice, it is only delivered to those who can purchase it.

"Secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"

Liberty requires the conditions in which freedom can be exercised: economic security, access to information, protection from manipulation, and a habitable planet. Liberty can only be maximized when all other requirements are fulfilled. Our economic system traps millions in debt and wage-slavery; our information environment is designed to capture attention and exploit psychological vulnerabilities; our data is harvested and our privacy is virtually non-existent; and our healthcare is tied to our employment, so that without trading away most of our time and energy, we cannot survive. These are not the conditions of liberty, they are invisible, abstract chains.

And our posterity? They will inherit a destabilized climate, depleted aquifers, degraded soil, collapsing biodiversity, and an incomprehensibly large national debt. Those are the blessings of liberty that we are securing for our descendants.

The Promise Unkept

The Preamble sets the standard by which to judge our government, and by that very standard, our government has failed us.

It has not formed a perfect Union, it has overseen over our cultural fragmentation. It has not established justice, it has created a two-tiered system where the wealthy always win. It has not insured domestic tranquility, it has inflamed division and despair. It has not provided for the common defense, it has ignored the threats that matter most. It has not promoted the general welfare, it has enriched the few. It has not secured liberty for posterity, it has mortgaged their future.

While this text focuses on the failure of our government to fulfil the goals set in the preamble of our Constitution, our problems range far beyond the areas of politics and economics. We face existential risks from reckless technological development and runaway climate change, risks that threaten the nation as a whole. Never before have the foundational systems of our nation faced such sustained, simultaneous, and interconnected failures across governance, economy, information, and environment. The failure to address these systemic crises spans administrations of both parties, congresses of both majorities, and courts of varying composition. The failure is structural, it is not the fault of any one individual or political party.

However brilliant for its time, the system itself is no longer capable of achieving its own stated purposes. Our lives depend on recognizing this stark, ugly reality. When a system can no longer repair itself, the people must reclaim their original authority. This is not a rejection of the founders and their wisdom, but an affirmation of their core insight: government must serve its people. The founders gave us a framework and a promise. The framework has failed, but the ideals remain. We must begin anew with a fresh canvas and the most skilled artisans of our time.