The core tenet of American democracy is the people.

It’s what the Declaration of Independence is rooted in: “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”

It’s what the Constitution opens with: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, 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.”

And it’s what Abraham Lincoln concluded his Gettysburg Address with: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

So then why do we, the American people, abhor our government so much?

In nearly every aspect of our day-to-day life, we find some reason to blame or disparage the government. Whether it’s bumpy roads and perennial construction or the skyrocketing gas and grocery prices, there’s always something the government is doing wrong and how it always makes our lives harder.

I feel like the most glaring example of this contradictory attitude is in political rhetoric, specifically conservative rhetoric. 

A lot of right-leaning dialogue centers on the government taking citizens’ hard-earned money and imposing tons of undue laws and regulations. But it goes past just highlighting the dangers of a big, unlimited government – which is indeed a very real and very significant point of concern – and crosses over into characterizing the government as some sort of enemy we should fear.

So much so that one of our former presidents, Ronald Reagan, claimed that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”

And I feel like that undermines and ignores the entire point of our democracy.

Our democracy is something we made. It’s something we created and preserved over nearly 250 years to protect us and benefit us and serve us and allow us, as the Constitution stated, to “promote the general Welfare”.

I am not here to undermine conservative political views. And I am certainly not here to say that we should be obsequiously grateful to the government and blind to its missteps.

But what I do think we need to remember is that we the people were the ones who chose the representatives who are currently writing laws and the governors and presidents in office who are executing them. We the people are the ones who are voting on different referendums and propositions. We the people are the ones who crafted this system.

So maybe it’s time we consider that there’s More to the Story and acknowledge that it’s not the fault of the institutions we built to serve us that we are experiencing certain issues. It’s our demonization of the government that we actively perpetuate and the reluctance to actually push for meaningful change that stems out of that one-sided perspective.

To come back to Lincoln’s words, our government is one “of the people, by the people, for the people” and it’s up to us to ensure that it meets our needs.