As the United States marks 250 years, the arguments that shaped the nation — over liberty, power, representation and responsibility — remain strikingly familiar.

By Ryan Heimer

WASHINGTON — Two hundred and fifty years after Americans declared that the government should rest on revolutionary ideas about liberty and equality, the country is still wrestling with a question the founding generation never fully answered: How can people who profoundly disagree continue to govern themselves together?

The question can get lost amid the familiar imagery of the American founding.

There is George Washington, the commanding general turned president. Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, the elder statesman. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton debating the structure and power of the new government. John Adams championed independence.

But the American founding was never as orderly as the portraits suggest.

The men who built the early republic argued intensely about executive power, representation, economics, federalism, slavery, political parties and the meaning of liberty itself. The Constitution did not end those arguments. It created a system in which Americans could continue having them.

That complicated legacy has become particularly relevant as the country commemorates its semiquincentennial in 2026 — not simply as a celebration of what happened in 1776, but as an opportunity to consider what Americans inherited and what they will pass on.

Recent discussions organized by the Aspen Institute, Colorado Mountain College and the National Constitution Center have returned to that question by examining both the famous and largely forgotten figures of the founding.

The Aspen gathering began with an idea that sounds simple but carries considerable weight 250 years after independence: Strong communities and democracies require an informed and engaged public, along with the ability to engage in dialogue across differences.

The founding generation certainly understood differences.

One National Constitution Center discussion playfully imagined the founders as members of an unusually argumentative band.

Washington was the frontman trying to keep the group together. Hamilton and Jefferson battled over its direction. Madison and Hamilton collaborated on the Federalist Papers before becoming political opponents. Adams and Jefferson went from revolutionary collaborators to bitter rivals and, eventually, back to friends through their correspondence.

Behind the personalities were serious disagreements about what the new country should become.

The founders knew previous republics had failed. James Madison worried particularly about faction — groups of citizens driven by interests or passions that could threaten the rights of others or the broader public good.

Eliminating faction entirely would require eliminating liberty. The alternative was to control its effects.

The constitutional system that emerged divided authority among institutions and between the national government and the states. Legislative, executive and judicial powers were separated so that political authority would encounter competing political authority.

The Constitution, in other words, did not assume Americans would eventually stop disagreeing.

It assumed they wouldn’t.

The indispensable president

Washington became crucial because someone had to transform the Constitution’s description of a presidency into an actual institution.

He surrounded himself with people holding competing visions of the country.

Hamilton envisioned a commercial republic supported by stronger national institutions. Jefferson favored a more decentralized and agrarian future. Washington increasingly sided with Hamilton, whom he deeply trusted after their experience together during the Revolution.

Yet one of Washington’s most important contributions came not from exercising power but relinquishing it.

That helped establish an American principle that extends far beyond the presidency: The institution must be larger than the person temporarily occupying it.

It is a principle at the heart of public administration.

Presidents leave. Governors leave. Mayors and agency leaders leave. So do the inspectors, analysts, contracting officers, teachers, engineers, emergency managers and other public employees who perform the daily work of Government.

The institution continues.

But focusing exclusively on Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison also obscures how many people participated in building those institutions.

Fifty-five delegates took part in the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1787. They arrived in Philadelphia with different backgrounds, interests and visions for the country.

Among them were James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, John Dickinson and Roger Sherman.

Their names may be less familiar. Their contributions were not.

The people behind ‘We the People’

Wilson, a Scottish immigrant, became one of the founding era’s strongest advocates of popular sovereignty.

He argued that political authority ultimately belonged to the people and supported direct election of the president and legislators. He also served on the Committee of Detail and prepared an early draft of the Constitution.

Within that drafting process appeared three words that would come to define the document: “We the People.”

For Wilson, the idea carried profound implications. Political authority did not ultimately belong to a king, state, legislature or president. It originated with the people.

But Wilson’s record also captures one of the central contradictions of the founding.

The advocate of political equality participated in compromises surrounding slavery and proposed the ratio that became associated with the Three-Fifths Clause.

Gouverneur Morris presented a different combination of principle and contradiction.

Morris spoke more frequently at the Constitutional Convention than any other delegate, offered more motions and had more motions adopted. He was also the convention’s most outspoken opponent of slavery.

When the final draft of the Constitution came into his hands, Morris helped transform its Preamble into a statement of national purpose.

“We the People of the United States” would establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure liberty for future generations.

Those words remain more than ceremonial.

They explain why the government exists before describing how it operates.

John Dickinson approached the American experiment from yet another direction.

The author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania spent decades in public affairs and developed a reputation for defending causes even when doing so carried political or personal consequences.

His Liberty Song offered an early expression of an idea that would become deeply embedded in American political culture: “By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.”

Dickinson nevertheless opposed declaring independence before he believed the colonies were prepared for it. When the decision moved forward, he abstained rather than preventing unanimity — and then served with his military unit.

His story raises a question that remains relevant: Can citizens disagree with a decision and still accept responsibility for the community that made it?

Roger Sherman represents a quieter side of the founding.

He served in the Continental Congresses, helped draft the Declaration and Articles of Confederation, attended the Constitutional Convention and later served in both the House and Senate.

When the convention threatened to fracture over representation, Sherman helped advance the arrangement that produced a House based on population and a Senate providing equal representation to the states.

It was not a perfect theoretical solution.

It was a workable political settlement.

Much of government still operates in that space between the ideal and the possible.

A promise the founders did not fulfill

Any account of the founding also confronts a contradiction that cannot be separated from the
country’s history.

The nation proclaimed human equality while allowing human bondage.

Jefferson understood slavery’s incompatibility with the principles he helped articulate but remained a slaveholder. Washington provided for the emancipation of enslaved people he owned through his will, but slavery remained deeply embedded in the nation’s economy and politics.

The less famous founders were complicated, too.

Dickinson became an abolitionist and freed the people he enslaved. Morris argued forcefully against slavery at the Constitutional Convention. Wilson, despite his arguments for popular sovereignty, participated in compromises with slaveholding states.

The contradiction would follow the country long after the founders were gone.

But the language of equality also created a standard later generations could use to challenge the country.

Frederick Douglass returned to it. Abraham Lincoln returned to it. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the nation’s founding promises as a promissory note that America had yet to fully honor.

The American story therefore became not only an effort to preserve the founding, but a continuing argument over how to fulfill its promises.

Where constitutional promises become real

That argument does not occur only in presidential elections, congressional debates or Supreme Court decisions.

It also takes place in the ordinary machinery of government.

A legislature can establish a workplace-safety standard, but someone must inspect and enforce it.

Congress can appropriate money for infrastructure, but someone must design, contract, construct and maintain it.

Governments can establish benefits, but someone must administer them. Emergency plans require people to execute them. Public money requires employees who safeguard it. Contracts require professionals who protect competition, accountability and value for taxpayers.

A Constitution establishes authority.

Public administration turns that authority into action.

For most Americans, that is where government becomes real — at a school, permit counter, inspection site, benefits office, public meeting, emergency operations center or city street.

The distance from Independence Hall may be hundreds or thousands of miles.

Constitutionally, it is much shorter.

Liberty’s counterpart

Near the end of the Aspen discussion, Princeton scholar Robert P. George recalled an observation from psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.

Frankl admired America’s commitment to liberty but worried that freedom without sufficient attention to responsibility could become unbalanced. He suggested that the Statue of Liberty in the East might someday be complemented by a “statue of responsibility” in the West.

It is an especially useful image at 250.

Liberty protects the ability to speak, worship, disagree, associate and pursue one’s own life.

Responsibility asks what citizens do with that freedom.

For public servants, the question carries another dimension. Government authority is never truly theirs. Budgets, data, enforcement powers, procurement authority and institutional knowledge are temporarily entrusted to them on behalf of the public.

That is stewardship.

And the challenge is becoming more complicated.

An old argument in an age of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can process information on a scale the founders could never have imagined. Governments are exploring automation, predictive tools, digital services and AI-supported decision-making.

Yet the technology does not eliminate the questions of 1787.

Who possesses authority?

Who is accountable when government makes a mistake?

How transparent should a public decision be?

How should efficiency be balanced against due process?

What decisions can technology assist, and which should remain fundamentally human?

Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Wilson, Morris, Dickinson and Sherman would have understood none of the technology.

They would have recognized the argument over power.

That is one reason the National Constitution Center has framed 2026 not as the conclusion of the country’s anniversary celebration but as the beginning of a broader “civic decade” leading toward the Constitution’s 250th anniversary in 2037 and the Bill of Rights’ in 2041.

The framing shifts the anniversary question from “What happened 250 years ago?” toward something more demanding: What will Americans do with what they inherited?

The view from 2076

By 2076, the United States will celebrate its 300th birthday.

Its technology, economy, workforce and communities will almost certainly look different from today’s.

But the central question of self-government may remain familiar: Can a diverse people with competing interests continue governing themselves through institutions they recognize as legitimate?

None of the founders had a complete answer.

Washington demonstrated that power could be relinquished. Madison confronted factions. Hamilton emphasized national capacity. Jefferson articulated expansive ideals while embodying some of the founding’s deepest contradictions.

Wilson emphasized popular sovereignty. Morris helped give the Constitution its national voice. Dickinson connected liberty with responsibility. Sherman demonstrated the practical necessity of
compromise.

Their disagreements helped construct a system in which later generations could continue the argument.

Near the end of the Aspen conversation, historian Walter Isaacson recalled Albert Einstein comparing the American constitutional system to a gyroscope — capable of correcting itself when it appeared to be tipping dangerously.

Isaacson added an important qualification.

The system does not necessarily right itself.

People have to right it.

Constitutions cannot administer themselves. Institutions cannot maintain themselves. Democratic norms cannot guarantee their own survival.

Each generation receives them temporarily.

The generation of 1776 articulated an extraordinary promise. The generation of 1787 tried to construct institutions capable of sustaining it. Later generations fought over who would be included within those promises.

Now the institutions are temporarily in the hands of the generation of 2026.

By 2076, they will belong to someone else.

The Constitution begins with three words that are so familiar their radical implication can be
easy to overlook:

“We the People.”

They never described a people who agreed about everything.

They proposed that people who disagreed could nevertheless govern together.

Two hundred and fifty years later, the experiment remains unfinished.

And the work of “We the People” continues.