We The People

We the people begins as action by the people, i. e. as a process of collective construction, the consequent product of which is contingent.  For example, Hobbesian Democracy is based on a contract, the content of which is, nevertheless, essentially monarchic.  Now, one fundamental challenge to such a Democratic impulse is the historical ephemerality of the We, which does not preclude a relapse into dynastics, the corrective to which is the incorporation of a dynamic mechanism into the original contract, i. e. by which a perpetual renewal of We is possible. So, one of the central political tensions in contemporary America is that between the fetishization of the Constitution, and its amendability.