"Us" Not "Them"

I love this. I've said many times I never expect my government to completely represent my views because I know I'm too far left of center and what gets implemented must be a compromise somewhere in the middle. My unadulterated views shouldn't be the ones implemented, because that would mean too many others would get excluded and have no representation instead of a compromised representation. The government is not some alien entity imposed on us, it is what we have negotiated to best represent all of us.

Why the Government Is an Us, not a Them

  . . . If we learn only one lesson from the Founding of America--from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the lives of the Founding Fathers, it is that the government is an “us” not a “them.” Government does not do things to us. We, through the instrument of our government, do things. If we don't like the things that we are doing through our government, we are free to do other things. That's how this whole self-government thing works.

There is, of course, a catch. "We the people" is a collective entity, not an individual will. Since we don’t always agree with each other, the “us” that is the government will sometimes act in ways we, as individuals, do not support. That’s how participatory democracy works in a large republic. Part of being a grown up, and a citizen, is accepting the fact that the democratic "we" will often not agree with the individual "I." When we insist on speaking of the government as something other than ourselves, we are actually saying that people who disagree with us do not have the right to take part in the democratic process. . . .