Talk:We the People (disambiguation)

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Could someone please create a page for the Center for Civic Education constitutional law competition, "We the People, The Citizen and the Constitution."

General rhetorical use, and possibly an association of uninflected use with conspiracy theories

I think that there ought to be some mention of how this is used as a set phrase in modern American political rhetoric, as a way of conflating the demands of a particular subset of Americans (who may or may not actually have majority support, and invariably do not have anything close to universal support) with some sort Rousseauian (or Romantic nationalist) volonté générale. (Such conflation isn't uniquely associated with this phrase, of course.)

While such rhetorical use is common across a wide variety of mainstream and non-mainstream political positions, I've also noticed that use of "We the People" as a set, uninflected phrase (e.g., "the government is stealing We the People's money," "the government is supposed to represent We the People," or "this country belongs to We the People") seems to be associated with QAnon and related conspiracy theories. If this is actually the case, it seems worth mentioning.

I don't have reliable sources on hand for these observations (and I'm not 100% sure the second is actually correct, as opposed to being a function of what uses I'm most likely to see and/or notice – I live in less of a media filter bubble than a lot of people, but I'm still far from consuming a statistically representative sample of all American political discourse), and I don't have time to hunt for some right now, but I thought I'd throw this out there in case someone else has sources already handy, more time, or both.2603:7081:7E3E:DB14:F848:7E9A:517E:CA28 (talk) 08:22, 11 July 2023 (UTC)