The Constitution's Preamble, Plain and Powerful

The most famous three words in American politics aren’t the whole story. We take “We the People” and follow it through the full Preamble to see how six clear aims—union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and the blessings of liberty—turn revolutionary ideals into a working constitutional order. Along the way, we revisit the turmoil of the Articles of Confederation, the shock of Shays’ Rebellion, and the founders’ wager that a real federal government could do what a loose league never could: secure rights by giving consent a capable home.

With Dr. Paul Carrese, we connect the Declaration’s language of rights and consent to the Constitution’s design, showing why “we the states” gave way to “We the People of the United States.” That shift creates dual citizenship—state and national—and asks more of us than slogans. It requires institutions that can act, courts that can judge, a Congress that can legislate for truly national concerns, and citizens who understand the rhythm of federalism. We also unpack “promote the general welfare” without turning it into a blank check, and we sit with the solemn weight of “do ordain and establish,” a phrase that makes the people authors of their own basic law.

There’s a cultural note here too: freedom with structure. Think of the Constitution as a rhythm section and civic life as improvisation—a balance captured, unexpectedly, by the jazzy pulse of Schoolhouse Rock. If you’ve ever sung the Preamble, this conversation will give that tune new meaning and sharper edges. If you’ve never read beyond the first three words, you’ll leave with a practical checklist for civic health: are we better at union, fairer in justice, steadier in peace, stronger in defense, wiser in welfare, and more faithful to liberty for those yet to come?

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves history and civics, and leave a review with the one line from the Preamble you think we should debate next.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting the Stage: The Preamble
• 2:49 The Six Purposes Unpacked
• 6:16 Union and Justice After the Articles
• 9:01 Domestic Tranquility and Shays’ Rebellion
• 11:26 Common Defense and Federal Logic
• 14:01 General Welfare and State Police Powers
• 16:26 Blessings of Liberty for Posterity
• 18:46 Linking Declaration and Constitution

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:46

Welcome back, everyone. I am very excited. We are getting started on the Constitution. And today we have Dr. Paul Careese back with us, and we are going to be talking about the preamble. So, Dr. Carece, what is the purpose of the preamble of the Constitution?

SPEAKER_01: 1:02

Thank you, Liz. Another great, very important question. Everyone listening should get out your text as usual, a pocket constitution or some other version of the text. The purpose of the preamble is to spell out the purposes of the Constitution. That's the short answer. So probably many people would recognize the opening phrase of the preamble, we the people. That's still widely cited and widely known. Of course, we want to note it's we the people of the United States. That's important. And then the remainder of the preamble has six particular purposes that the Constitution has, beginning in the phrase, we the people of the United States, in order to. So Liz, actually at that point, would you pick up in order to do what? If you would read from there.

SPEAKER_00: 2:03

In order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

SPEAKER_01: 2:24

Great. So in a basic way of understanding what's going on, there are six particular purposes. We, the people of the United States, and I'll talk a little bit more about why that phrasing is important, have these particular goals in mind, six of them. That's why we're establishing this constitution. So let's talk about those. The first one is the Union. This makes sense given the history of the United States since the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and the Articles of Confederation had been ratified in 1781. And it was not all happy, not all successful from 1781, even 1783 onward. We had won the Revolutionary War. Treaty of Paris is an extraordinary achievement, but the self-governing of these 13 states in this union under the Articles was messy, it was complicated, and there were signs it was failing. Thus, the problem is we don't have a strong enough government for the union. We don't have a strong enough union. So that's what we've been talking about in earlier episodes with the reason to have the Constitutional Convention, the ratification debate, Federalist and Anti-Federalist view. So union is obvious, and first, a more perfect union. We have a union. We're not making it here in this document. We're replacing, but in a sense, extending the Articles of Confederation. So to have a more perfect union, to form a more perfect union. The Constitution does that. Second, to establish justice. You could say that's a criticism of the Articles. We didn't have justice under the Articles. There was no, you know, the Federalist point of view, to be a little blunt, is there was no there there. There was no government to the Articles. It had aims to achieve justice among the 13 member states of the Articles, but being more like a league or a treaty among kind of foreign states to each other, there wasn't a government to establish justice. So justice is an, you know, what's the whole point of politics? To have, in the American view, right, to have justice, laws that are achieving justice for individuals and for communities and other dimensions of life. Third, to ensure domestic tranquility. Well, this also is pointing back to problems under the articles. One of the main motivating moments leading to calling the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787 was Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts. Farmers, some of whom who were veterans of the American Revolutionary War, were in such a lousy economic circumstance because of economic disorder, because the Articles government was very weak. They couldn't pay their debts. The money was the paper currency was worthless, losing their farms, et cetera, et cetera. So an uprising, an armed uprising out in western Massachusetts. So here are three pretty basic aims of the American conception of government. We're forming a union. We want justice. Why are we forming a union to have justice? And part of justice is domestic order and peace and tranquility. So here are three very basic aims of the American conception of politics since 1776. Then the fourth one, common defense. We're going to ensure domestic tranquility with this Constitution. We're also going to provide for the common defense of all the member republics, and they're thinking there will be more states added. So this goes back to Montesquieu, and the major reason to have a federal government, to form a federal union, is for republics, which tend to be smaller than monarchies or obviously empires, they band together to form a federal government, a union, to provide collective defense in a way. That was the reason why the Articles of Confederation used that phrase, which is the term we think of today, related to treaties. Right? The Articles of a Treaty, one independent foreign government with another, right? So this was a major reason for the Articles of Confederation, except it was just too loose. It was not a real government. Okay. Next, to promote the general welfare. This is a really interesting phrase signaling in relation to union that this is a real government. This is not like the Articles, a league, a treaty between very sovereign, independent, separate governments. There is a general welfare of the United States, of the Union as a whole, and general welfare is kind of the thing that state governments do and did. The technical phrase we use in political science and constitutional law is the police power of the states. The states have plenary powers as sovereign governments to address health, safety, welfare morals of right? So general welfare, that's a really interesting one to promote the general welfare. And then the last big long one: secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. So this is a ringing phrase, very typical of sort of rhetoric of the 18th century and earlier, to have a ringing conclusion. The blessings of liberty, not just to secure liberty, but to secure the blessings of liberty. And it's for ourselves, and we want this to last. We do this, we form this partly for ourselves and for generations after us. So those are those are three, I'm sorry, those are six really, you know, pretty big, pretty fundamental aims about uh about a new American political order that that are the objectives, fundamental aims of of American politics.

SPEAKER_00: 8:44

So Darth Priest, you and I did some episodes on the Declaration of Independence, and this conversation feels familiar because these ideas sound similar to the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01: 8:58

Yes, indeed. And in a way, you could say the function of the preamble as a whole is to connect the Declaration to the Constitution. This is a major point of contention in the ratification debate coming from the Anti-Federalists. Are we betraying the principles of the Declaration by setting up this very powerful government, say the Anti-Federalists, right? What about consent to the governed? What about rights and especially liberty of individuals, right? So then the Federalists have their argument. No, we're actually securing the rights and liberty invoked in the Declaration, because we're providing an adequate government, an adequate layer and complexity of government to achieve those ends. So the Declaration is central here, and I think that's the reason why you get this ringing phrase at the end, the blessings of liberty, which invokes the grandeur of the opening two paragraphs of the Declaration, and then the final paragraph with its ringing conclusion, right? We mutually pledge to stand for these principles and to stand for our liberty. We mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor. So there is a there is a connection, but there there is also something different happening here. We tried it once with the articles, didn't quite work. So the the a big change with the preamble is to start with we the people. And who is this people? So I would read the declaration as saying, well, it's the same people because the declaration is from the representatives of the 13 now states. They're not colonies. It's the representatives of the states. Who are they representing? They're representing the people of the states, but the word people in the declaration is used at least in plural senses, but very definitely in the sense of one American people. So there's an implicit federalism in the Declaration, and that's being translated into this first phrase of the Constitution, we the people of the United States. So crucial change from the Articles. This is not we the states, as the Articles. The title of the Articles of Confederation is the Articles of Confederation between, and then it lists the names of all the 13 states, right? No, this is we the people of the United States. And you and it's got this plural meaning. Which which people do you mean the peoples of the independent states? Yes, it means that. But we, the peoples of these independent states, have given up crucial sovereign powers to this new government, and we form a people, an American people, in a deeper sense than we did under the articles. And maybe the declaration calls for that, but now we are we are definitely doing it. We're establishing it in very concrete terms.

SPEAKER_00: 12:02

And you brought up that last line, you know, of the declaration, which is you know, plunging our sacred honor. Can you tell us a little bit more about the last line, too, of this preamble? Because, you know, it says, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America. Why is that so significant?

SPEAKER_01: 12:24

Great idea. So one challenge for thinking seriously about the preamble is we tend to only use the first three words. We the people. We kind of forget the rest of it. We forget we the people of the United States. That it's a it's it's not just we the people as kind of democracy in some you know vague sense. It's it's more formal than that. It's we the people of the United States. And then if we go a little further, okay, we do occasionally invoke some of these six aims or purposes, but we almost never talk about the final clause here. We the people of the United States, dot dot dot, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. And then in the middle, why? You know, at least summary of why, these six aims. We the people of the United States do ordain and establish this constitution. That's very formal language. So this is again a big change from the articles. And this captures something that's in the declaration. We've talked about this before, that the bulk of the declaration is invoking the English common law. And in the middle of that bill of indictment, if you think about a court of law, right? The common law and a court of law, the bill of indictment against the king and then the king in parliament, in the middle of it is the claim, the charge that the king has joined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution. So there's a constitutionalism in the declaration, and here you've got the preamble of the constitution saying we are a constitutional people. We didn't quite get it right with the articles. We've got we are constitutional people because there's state constitutions, and the state constitutions pre-exist the Declaration of Independence. So Americans have been a constitutional people since late 1775, and then this idea of our constitution is invoked in the Declaration. But now we're saying we got to up our game. We need to have two layers of constitutional government: the states, sovereign, and then the states give up some of their sovereignty to make a real sovereign government, real union, in the national federal government. And we are now declaring ourselves, we the people of the United States, are a constitutionalized people. We're gonna have to learn to be citizens of two governments. We are constitutional citizens of a particular state. You and I, Liz, are in the state of Arizona. We are citizens of the state of Arizona, and we are citizens of the United States of America. And we're gonna have to get used to this. So if you think about it, this sounds a little heavy-handed. We do ordain and establish. And the ordain, by the way, is like that final clause of the declaration. This this is a religious term, we think, right? There's something higher here. So there's no reference to divinity in the in the Constitution the way there's in the Declaration, except there's language in Article I about the, or is it Article II about the veto power that the executive has and numbers of days, excluding Sundays. And there is another reference to Sundays, right? And then there's the you know the final clause of the Constitution refers to the year of our Lord. So there, but there's a very minimal presence of religion here compared to the Declaration, which has the laws of nature, nature's God, and then three other references to a divinity and a very active divinity. So but this is an important kind of religious, metaphysical, higher element ordain and establish. But again, constitutional, it's a big deal to be constitutionalized people. And if we think it's heavy-handed, well, you know, the Union wasn't doing so well heading into the war of 1812, and and you know, talk of secession or separation or you know, states not wanting to support the federal government in in the war of 1812. And the Civil War did happen 70 years ahead of this language, but it's a constant concern of many leading founders, George Washington included, can this union hold together even under this new constitution? Right? So to be, we for I think we forget this dimension about the preamble and about our founding. The the ambition to be constitutional at two levels, a really constitutional people of the United States means we are a real government as a federal government. And we're gonna have, and this is what you're doing with with the civics in a year, Liz, right? We need a citizenship education, civic education to form us as citizens of the union, of the federal government, as constitutional people. This is more than just the word democracy. And then we're also citizens of our of our states. So that's why the whole package of the preamble really matters. Every single word.

SPEAKER_00: 17:41

Dr. Freeze, I grew up hearing the schoolhouse rock preamble song. And this now, I feel like I mean, I loved the song before because it's catchy, it's fun, but now it just holds, you know, some new meaning to it. So I really look forward to digging more into the Constitution with you and with other experts that we are going to have on. Dr. Craig's thinks it's great.

SPEAKER_01: 18:04

Can I can I just add something, Liz, about about schoolhouse rock? So I'm a little bit old, I'm a little bit older than you, but you know, I I I remember watching those. And there's something great about schoolhouse rock that I just have to mention, which is this preamble itself is capturing this. Some balance between order and liberty. And schoolhouse rock was produced by very, very talented musicians who came out of you know, Broadway and jazz, and it's this you know, combination. The music is often very sort of jazzy. You know, it's got a bit of a pop and rock flavor to it, but very jazzy. That's American to have this blend and balance of uh the sort of spontaneity and freshness and liveliness of that music. And of course, they're doing something completely new, and they're doing something that seems very informal and democratic. They're making sort of pop music about this very formal thing, the Constitution and civics, right? But it's it's freedom with order and and to serve order. So I, you know, I think of jazz as the quintessential. I don't mean to offend people who are fans of rock music or god forbid bluegrass or you know, something like that. Anyway, uh country music, goodness gracious. But you know, like jazz. Jazz is this is quintessential American music because it's this blend of order and liberty. So school, I I love schoolhouse rock.

SPEAKER_00: 19:33

Well, now I'm gonna go listen to more songs. Thank you so much, Dr. Grace.

SPEAKER_01: 19:38

Thank you.