The Republic Doesn’t Ratify Itself

When the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) asked 3,009 undergraduates where the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people” come from, only 26 percent could place them in the Gettysburg Address. Set aside, for a moment, the embarrassment of a college senior failing to identify Lincoln. The deeper problem is what the sentence says. It is not a quotable flourish—it is the definition of self-government, the claim that legitimate authority flows up from the governed rather than down from a sovereign. Three-quarters of our students cannot locate the line that describes the regime they live under and are, in theory, being educated to sustain.

The rest of ACTA’s findings sharpen the point. Only 37 percent know that Congress, not the president, holds the power to declare war. Just 39 percent know that senators serve six years and representatives two. Fewer than half—44 percent—know that the Federalist Papers were written to win ratification of the Constitution. Read together, these are not four unrelated trivia failures. Each maps onto a distinct pillar of how a free people governs itself: who may commit the nation to war, how officeholders are held accountable to the governed, and how the Constitution itself was argued into existence rather than handed down. Strip away any one of them and the machinery of consent stops working.

That last item is crucial. The Federalist Papers exist because ratification was not automatic. The Constitution was a proposal that had to be defended against able opponents and before skeptical conventions. Publius wrote eighty-five essays because the founding generation understood that a frame of government secures nothing until a people is persuaded to consent to it. Consent was the hinge—and, by its nature, it cannot be inherited. It has to be won again.

This is the part our institutions have forgotten. We speak of the Constitution as a possession, something handed across generations like a deed. But a republic is not self-ratifying. Each generation arrives knowing nothing, and each must be brought—through argument, memory, and example—to affirm the inheritance for itself. Edmund Burke called society a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Tocqueville saw that this partnership held where Americans were actively instructed in the habits and ideas of self-rule: in townships, churches, associations, and schools. The knowledge was never assumed to transmit on its own; it was the regular work of mediating institutions to transmit it.

College was once the most ambitious of those institutions—the place where a young citizen encountered the documents, debates, and arguments that turn a passive heir into a consenting member of the republic. ACTA’s data show how thoroughly that mission has been abandoned. The foundational course in American history and government, once a near-universal requirement, has become an elective most students never take. We did not decide that the republic no longer needs ratifying. We simply stopped making the case and then expressed surprise that the verdict came back ambivalent.

It is no coincidence that the same survey found a majority of students unwilling to remain and defend the country if it were attacked. Attachment is not a sentiment that arises on its own; it follows from understanding. You do not risk anything for a regime you cannot describe. The student who cannot say what self-government is, who holds war powers, or why the Constitution had to be argued for has not been given the materials from which loyalty is built. Ignorance and ambivalence are the same finding viewed from two angles.

The remedy ACTA proposes in its Broadside for the Nation—a required, well-designed course in American history and government at every institution—is sometimes dismissed as nostalgic or as a demand that students memorize names and dates. That misreads it. The requirement is not about retention of facts; it is about re-ratification. This solution insists that each generation be deliberately walked through the argument for self-government, so that consent is offered with open eyes rather than withheld by default. A citizen who has never been shown the case has not rejected it; he has simply never been asked to weigh it.

Our nation is turning 250. The anniversary will summon the usual rhetoric about an inheritance handed down. But inheritance is precisely the wrong metaphor. The founders did not inherit the republic; they argued it into being and asked their fellow citizens to say yes. Every generation since has faced the same question, whether or not anyone bothered to put it to them. The scandal in ACTA’s numbers is not that our students answered the questions wrong. It is that, for a generation, we stopped asking.

This piece was originally published by AEIdeas on June 29, 2026.