What Happens When We the People Change?

We began this book with approximately 115,000 voters. Change roughly that many switched votes in three states in the 2024 presidential election, and the presidency changes hands.

That fact led us to a question much larger than who won: why should the Liberty of more than 330 million Americans appear to depend so heavily upon which candidate occupies one office?

Our answer has taken fifteen chapters to develop. Liberty requires government, but government requires power. Power attracts factions. Concentrated private power can threaten Liberty, but concentrated governmental power created to restrain it can threaten Liberty too.

Governmental responsibilities accumulate. Temporary solutions become permanent institutions. Each generation inherits the previous generation’s starting point.

As the machinery becomes more powerful, factions fight harder to control it, elections become more consequential, and WTP become increasingly convinced that everything depends upon our side winning.

A new birth of freedom begins when WTP stop asking who will save our Liberty and resume responsibility for preserving it ourselves.

Lincoln looked back to 1776, asking whether a nation conceived in Liberty could endure. A new birth of freedom does not require pretending that 1776, 1787, 1863, 1913, or 1933 can be recreated.

History does not move backward. Circumstances, technologies, institutions, and problems change. But the Laws of Nature did not expire.

Human beings still respond to incentives. Scarcity still requires choices. Competition still disciplines power. Concentrated power still creates concentrated consequences. Good intentions still produce unintended consequences.

Our task is restoration by principle, not nostalgia. WTP are not merely customers of political campaigns. WTP are the principals of American government.

Our responsibility exists before, during, and after the election. We determine principles before candidates arrive, measure candidates against them, verify the election, compare governing with promises, measure results, and reconsider our own judgments in light of evidence.

The bifurcation of WePEG1787 changes where the process begins. Candidates do not score first. WTP do. A citizen who has already considered governing principles enters political life differently. The questions already exist, and the candidate walks into our examination.

The candidate no longer brings WTP the Measuring Stick. WTP bring the Measuring Stick to the candidate.

New Candidates Can Enter

A healthy system of self-government should continually attract capable citizens willing to serve for a time and then return to private life. There are qualified people throughout the country who understand families, businesses, classrooms, farms, medicine, engineering, law, economics, public safety, ministry, technology, the military, and their communities.

Many will never build political organizations or donor networks large enough to compete with established candidates.

A first-time candidate can present a résumé and score the same principles as an incumbent. WTP can immediately compare that judgment with our own.

The incumbent retains an appropriate advantage through an actual governing record, but the challenger is not merely politically empty because the challenger has never held office.

The price of admission to representative government should not be the ability to finance a personality contest.

Political Money Meets Something It Cannot Buy

Money can buy political communication, advertising, consultants, polling, opposition research, digital targeting, signs, events, and organization. Liberty Civics™ does not need the government to silence that speech. It can attack the value of the money from the opposite direction by giving WTP better information.

If WTP have already scored the principles and candidates have publicly scored the same principles, money cannot rewrite those scores. Organizations remain free to argue, praise, criticize, and persuade.

But WTP still possess the Measuring Stick. The same applies to personal attacks. Character matters, but destroying a personality does not answer a governing principle.

Don’t silence the money. Make the money less powerful by making WTP better informed.

Political Parties Return to Their Proper Place

Political parties need not disappear. They can recruit candidates, organize coalitions, articulate philosophies, mobilize voters, and help representatives work together.

The problem begins when the party becomes the citizen’s North Star. WePEG1787 reverses that relationship. A Republican, Democrat, or Independent can score principles before seeing candidate scores.

Nothing requires changing party membership; something more important happens—the party becomes information instead of identity.

Representatives Gain Something Too

Representatives may benefit enormously from this system. Election results provide a compressed choice. Polls depend upon wording and sampling. Party registration is a crude proxy. Calls and emails may overrepresent highly motivated groups.

Principle scoring can provide another source of information: direct, issue-by-issue civic judgment from participating constituents. That does not turn representatives into polling machines. Representative government requires judgment, but the conversation becomes visible.

The Ratchet Gets a Release Lever

Every inherited governmental power can be examined against principles. Every program can be measured against purpose and results. Every candidate can be asked whether an authority should continue, be reformed, be returned to another level, or be terminated.

Some institutions solve real problems and should remain. But inheritance is not justification. The fact that the government possessed power yesterday does not, by itself, establish that it should possess it tomorrow.

Keep what works and remains legitimate. Reform what can work better. Return what belongs elsewhere. End what no longer justifies the power it consumes.

WTP Can Start Without Permission

We do not need Congress to create WePEG1787, a president to authorize it, a political party to endorse it, or every American to agree.

A citizen scores. A family discusses principles. Neighbors compare. A civic organization uses the Measuring Stick. A worship center teaches Civics without becoming a faction. A candidate scores.

A candidate forum compares. A community asks representatives to explain their records. Someone qualified who never imagined running for office looks at the process and says, I can do that. Self-government scales from participation, not permission.

You don’t join Liberty Civics™. You practice it.

No One Is Exempt. No One Is Omitted.

The discipline must remain absolute. If Liberty Civics™ becomes a tool for defeating Democrats, it has failed. If it becomes a tool for defeating Republicans, it has failed.

If believers exempt candidates they favor, it has failed. If nonbelievers dismiss believers rather than examine governing principles, it has failed. If WTP demand candidate scores but refuse to examine our own, it has failed.

If we measure results only when the opposing faction is in power, it has failed. If evidence demonstrates one of our own formulations is wrong and we refuse to reconsider it, we have become another faction protecting an ideology.

The standard is harder: No one is exempt. No one is omitted. Including us. Liberty Civics™ gains no authority from an institution declaring itself correct. Its credibility must come from principles, evidence, consistent application, and results.

The New Political Question

Imagine what would change if this became normal. Instead of asking first whom someone is voting for, WTP asks how the principle was scored.

Candidates publish scores. Parties no longer define the entire debate. First-time candidates begin with governing information rather than invisibility. Political spending can still speak but cannot alter the scores.

Election Day sets a benchmark rather than ending civic participation. Programs are measured by purpose and results rather than inherited automatically.

That is not a new political party. It is a different civic culture. And culture changes government long before government recognizes that culture has changed.

The Measuring Stick Comes Home

The final Measuring Stick points at ourselves. Do I know what Liberty means? Do I recognize that good intentions do not suspend the Laws of Nature? Do I apply constitutional limits when my faction holds power?

Do I distinguish solving a problem from permanently transferring responsibility to the government? Do I demand evidence rather than labels? Do I accept a verified election result when my candidate loses? Do I know my governing principles before asking a candidate for theirs?

Do I measure what representatives actually do and what results follow? Am I willing to change my judgment when the evidence proves me wrong?

The answer is not complicated. Learn the principles. Examine them. Score them. Teach them. Ask candidates to score them. Compare. Vote. Verify the result. Measure the governing. Measure the results. Correct what fails. Preserve what works. Recruit good people. Run for office when necessary. Then teach the next generation to do the same. Repeat. That is self-government.

For Posterity

The Founders could not finish the American experiment for us. They gave posterity extraordinary discoveries about Liberty, natural rights, consent, divided power, representation, federalism, checks and balances, and the dangers of faction.

They also left unresolved contradictions and decisions for later generations to confront. Every generation since has done the same. So will ours.

Will posterity inherit a government so powerful that every election determines which half of the country fears the next four years? Will they inherit factions that teach them to measure people by labels rather than govern by principles?

Will they inherit debts without understanding who incurred them, institutions without remembering why they were created, and powers nobody can explain how to return?

Or will they inherit a people who understand Liberty, a government whose power must continually justify itself, candidates who reveal principles before receiving authority?

And representatives whose records can be compared with promises, citizens who measure themselves before measuring others, elections whose results can be verified, programs measured by results rather than intentions?

And new candidates able to stand before WTP without first becoming creatures of the political machinery, and a common Measuring Stick no faction owns?

Liberty, inherited but not understood, will eventually be lost. Liberty understood, practiced, measured, and taught can be handed to posterity.

The world changed in 1776 because ordinary people asserted something extraordinary: legitimate government exists to secure their rights and derives its just powers from their consent.

Two hundred and fifty years later, the question is whether WTP still possesses the understanding, discipline, and courage required to live under that proposition.

The government cannot answer that question for us. Political parties cannot answer it for us. Candidates cannot answer it for us. WTP will answer it by what we do next.

The Founders gave us their discoveries. We owe posterity ours.