This Constitutional Moment
Why legitimate authority feels impossible and what this moment requires
The Question Every Citizen Must Answer
Something is breaking down in how we organize ourselves, and everyone can feel it.
The symptoms are everywhere: truth fractures into competing narratives, power begets performance, law is cudgel. We find ourselves asking not just “what should we do?” but “who gets to decide what we should do?” — and discovering we have no satisfying answer.
This isn’t just institutional failure. It’s something deeper: the collapse of the shared frameworks that make institutional success even possible. We can identify wrongdoing everywhere, but we lack the moral consensus to make our judgments stick. It’s a crisis of legitimacy.
The Illusion of Speaking Truth to Power
The traditional response to illegitimate power is to speak truth it — assuming that truth, clearly articulated, can shame authority into better behavior. But what if this entire framework rests on a false premise?
Power that doesn’t listen because it doesn’t have to reveals something crucial: the entire system that created that power makes listening structurally impossible. When authority flows from the top down rather than emerging from authentic consent, truth-telling becomes performance rather than accountability.
This recognition leads to a different approach: speak truth to everyone. Let new power rise from that truth-telling. Because legitimate authority has always flowed from the consent and beliefs of the people, not from the commands of institutions.
We need to understand where legitimate authority actually comes from. To identify this gets at the heart of our crisis: most of what we call “consent” is actually something else entirely.
Why Consent Isn’t What We Think It Is
Some recent discourse in political philosophy we happened upon identifies the dynamic relationship between consent, compliance, and dissent that determines whether governance actually works.
Consent emerges through genuine deliberation and authentic agreement. This is the most stable form of legitimate authority because people are genuinely invested in the outcomes.
Compliance happens when people go along without really understanding or agreeing — often due to habit, social pressure, or deliberately opaque processes. This appears stable but is actually fragile, because when people wake up to what’s happening, compliance can suddenly collapse.
Dissent occurs when communities organize around different moral visions than those imposed by dominant groups. Crucially, this isn’t the opposite of consent — it’s the same process of moral organization pointed in a different direction.
Most of what we call “consent” is actually compliance with systems people don’t understand and haven’t genuinely agreed to. People vote, but do they consent to what follows? They follow laws, but do they understand the moral framework those laws represent?
Consider that this may be why our institutions feel simultaneously powerful and illegitimate. They can compel behavior, but they can’t generate the moral authority that makes governance sustainable. And this brings us to the deeper question that compliance obscures.
Law as Written Moral Conviction
What is law, really? It’s not supposed to be just rules on paper, but our deepest moral convictions made manifest. When law works — when it carries genuine authority rather than mere force — it breathes with the rhythm of human dignity.
But when law becomes weaponized against people, when it serves power rather than principle, we’ve forgotten its essential nature. Good law doesn’t impose ethics; it reflects them. It doesn’t create dignity; it protects what already exists in every human heart.
Dignitarian governance, then, is the art of making moral conviction durable across time and difference. It’s the challenge of translating shared values into institutional forms that can evolve without losing their essential character — with dignity as the supreme organizing principle.
This reveals the core challenge anyone concerned about legitimate authority faces: How do you scale moral authority without corrupting it? How do you build “federations of local moral consensus rather than empires of compliance”?
The answer requires understanding something most governance frameworks ignore: the difference between scaling control and scaling moral narration.
Architecture of Authentic Consent
Governance innovation means designing systems where authentic consent becomes structurally necessary rather than merely hoped for. This requires more than good intentions — it demands institutional architecture that makes compliance impossible and authentic participation unavoidable.
But here we encounter a fundamental limitation that most political theory ignores: authentic consent cannot be centralized because empathy is local.
This insight, emerging from recent political philosophy discourse, reveals why so many governance systems fail despite good intentions. Empathy — the capacity to understand and share the feelings of another — operates most powerfully in direct, immediate relationships. It degrades rapidly as it moves through hierarchies and administrative layers.
Static moral codes, no matter how carefully crafted, cannot transmit the dynamic empathetic data that authentic moral decision-making requires. When authority becomes distant from the lived experience of those it governs, even well-intentioned leaders lose the empathetic connection that enables genuine consent.
This explains why elites consistently avoid seeking authentic consent and instead design systems for managing compliance. Genuine consent would require them to remain in empathetic relationship with those they govern — a relationship that becomes structurally impossible at scale without radical decentralization.
What would authentic consent architecture look like? Not just transparency and accountability, but empathy preservation as a design principle. Governance structures that maintain the relational context in which moral authority emerges. Authority that remains connected to the lived experience of those it affects.
This suggests subsidiarity not just as administrative efficiency, but as moral necessity: keeping power at the level where empathetic connection remains possible, with higher-level coordination remaining always revocable and mandate-specific.
But here’s where the crisis of our moment becomes apparent: such frameworks become impossible when shared moral foundations themselves are under attack.
When Shared Frameworks Collapse
Evil becomes purely subjective without shared frameworks for recognizing good. This is why dignitarian principles matter — they establish moral common ground that makes justice possible and accountability meaningful.
The fracturing of truth we’re experiencing isn’t just epistemological — it’s fundamentally about legitimate authority. When we lose shared frameworks for distinguishing truth from falsehood, justice from injustice, we lose the foundation that makes dignitarian governance possible.
But the collapse goes deeper than competing ideologies. It stems from the structural impossibility of maintaining moral consensus through centralized systems that break the empathetic connections on which genuine moral authority depends.
When governance operates through abstract rules rather than empathetic relationship, it inevitably produces the fragmentation we’re experiencing. People lose faith not because they’re irrational, but because they can sense the absence of genuine moral connection in the systems claiming authority over them.
Perhaps strikingly, the foundation was never there to begin with and we are only now coming face to face with a reality bent towards the subjective morals of a few, rather than the ones the majority of people hold.
This explains why our moment feels simultaneously urgent and impossible. We can see the need for governance innovation, but we lack the shared moral vocabulary that would make such innovation possible. We’re trying to rebuild the foundation while standing on it — and the foundation itself was built on the false premise that moral authority could be transmitted through hierarchy rather than relationship.
Dignitarian frameworks can’t simply be imposed from above — they must emerge from the moral convictions of the communities they serve.
Memory, Evolution, and Governance Time
Legitimate institutions aren’t just founding documents — they’re living expressions of a community’s ongoing commitment to certain principles and relationships. Maintaining legitimate authority requires both preserving core principles and enabling adaptation as conditions change.
This creates a fundamental tension between stability and evolution. Too much rigidity and governance becomes irrelevant to current conditions. Too much flexibility and it loses its constraining power over temporary majorities or emergency circumstances.
The solution lies in dignitarian design that protects certain principles as absolutely inviolable while creating clear, participatory processes for everything else. The core question becomes: What aspects of human dignity and coordination must never be compromised, regardless of circumstances?
But this temporal challenge reveals something deeper about the nature of governance work itself.
The Sacred Dimension of Governance Innovation
Dignitarian thinking requires holding both pragmatic realism about power and visionary commitment to human dignity. It’s technical work that’s also deeply spiritual work: the ancient human project of learning to live together in ways that honor both our individuality and our interdependence.
This work becomes more urgent as technological change accelerates and global challenges require coordination at unprecedented scales. The choice isn’t between local autonomy and global coordination — it’s between designing systems that preserve human agency and dignity while enabling necessary collective action.
Understanding that empathy is local doesn’t mean abandoning coordination at larger scales. It means designing coordination that preserves rather than destroys the empathetic relationships on which legitimate authority depends. It means building what we might call “fractal governance” — patterns of legitimate authority that maintain their essential character across scales while adapting to local conditions.
What this Moment Requires
Every generation faces fundamental questions about how to organize society, whether it recognizes them or not. Ours faces them with particular urgency because the systems we’ve inherited are proving inadequate to current conditions, while the pace of change makes traditional reform processes seem impossibly slow.
This isn’t cause for despair. It’s invitation to conscious participation in the evolution of legitimate authority. The principles of human dignity, participatory governance, and ecological sustainability that must guide this work aren’t new. But their application to our current circumstances requires both rigorous thinking and visionary imagination.
The recognition that authentic consent cannot be centralized doesn’t paralyze governance innovation — it clarifies it. It points toward governance architectures based on empathy preservation, relational authority, and federated rather than hierarchical coordination.
The work of governance innovation isn’t just political. It’s the deepest form of practical love: the commitment to create frameworks within which current and future generations can discover their own forms of flourishing through coordination and dignitarian principles.
That work continues. The question everyone must now answer is whether we’ll do it consciously, with wisdom and care for the empathetic relationships that make legitimate authority possible, or let it happen to us through crisis and reaction.
The choice remains ours. For now.
What questions about legitimate authority are you wrestling with? What frameworks do you think could help bridge the gap between the governance we have and that which we need?
—Novus Publius