Justice Breyer: It's up to us whether the American experiment succeeds

The following is a foreword from the forthcoming book "The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals."

Commentators sometimes note that there are two types of countries. One type remains the same as it was a thousand years ago. The same groups of people argue against the same groups of people. Those arguments sow divisions within society. Those groups often fight wars against one another, and the nation itself makes little progress. 

The other type of country is one based on core documents. Those documents lay out important values, including democracy, human rights, equality, and the rule of law. Those values endure and serve as guideposts for the nation over time. And even when that nation proves itself imperfect, its people draw on their shared values to call on the nation – and its government – to live up to its creed. 

The second story is the story of America. We are a Nation, not of a single racially similar people; we are a Nation where very different kinds of people live together under legal and ethical documents. Our Nation’s canonical documents – the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – lay out America’s founding principles: liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness, government by consent, the separation of powers, and basic human rights. The American people have over time called upon their government to live up to those principles. 

Thomas Jefferson well expressed our basic ideals in two sentences he wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

There is our aspiration. It is “self-evident” that at birth, “all men are created equal”; and that certain rights are “inalienable,” that is to say, they cannot be taken from us. Which rights? “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” How do we “preserve” these rights? By creating “governments” that “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That is to say, our government is rooted in the consent of “We the People.” 

Have we always lived up to these values? Certainly not. There was slavery. There was a bloody civil war. There was Jim Crow. The list goes on and on. But when faced with these, and other, challenges, generations of Americans – for example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the suffragists, Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, and countless others – have acted. They have called upon the Nation to live up to the promises and the ideals of our Nation’s founding creed.

There we have the Declaration of Independence; but what about the Constitution? When writing the Constitution, its Framers took the Declaration of Independence and its basic promises as a given. They then asked a series of difficult questions: How do we take the Declaration’s basic values and, as a practical matter, make sure that they become part of the United States of America, now and in the future? How do we create institutions, a system of institutions, that will allow the American people to govern themselves?

We want a system that is not driven by passions, immediate preferences not thought through, or by the self-interest of individual factions. We want a system that will promote deliberation and debate, that will slow down pure politics, that will allow for compromise that promotes the common good. How do we ensure that the new government does not seize too much power and abuse the American people’s cherished liberties? 

The Founders settled for a constitution that created a new national government of limited powers. It would be rooted in certain core principles: separation of powers, federalism, and a Bill of Rights. No government, no part of a government, would become too powerful. There we have the American Experiment. 

How do we now make certain that this experiment succeeds? It is up to us – up to all of us.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer is a retired Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and serves as an Honorary Co-Chair of the National Constitution Center's Board of Trustees.

Copyright © 2026 by The National Constitution Center. From the forthcoming book "The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Enduring Ideals" by The National Constitution Center to be published by Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.