Epistemic Exile
When the Constitution Becomes the Crisis
This is Part 3 in a four-part series on epistemic harm. In Part 1, I explored the fracture of shared moral reality. In Part 2, I followed the destabilization of trust, both in others and in myself. Now, in Part 3, I confront the deeper disillusionment: that the constitutional framework I once believed would help us resist authoritarianism may, in fact, be its scaffolding. But clarity can follow fracture. This is a pivot point in the journey, toward an ethic that transcends documents, and toward a vision I’ll begin constructing in Part 4.
I used to believe we shared a common moral vocabulary. Not in every detail—not politically, not religiously—but in a broader sense, I assumed there was at least a baseline agreement about what justice meant. I believed cruelty was disqualifying for productive civic engagement. That systems of exclusion, rather than open arms of welcome, were a red flag. That vindictiveness was not a virtue.
But that belief has become harder to hold. I’ve watched neighbors, relatives, leaders, and voters embrace a politics rooted not in fairness, but in vengeance; not in pluralism, but in punishment. I don’t merely disagree with their views. I no longer understand the framework that makes those views feel coherent to them.
That’s its own kind of personal unmooring—a dislocation. It’s not that I’ve left the conversation. It’s that the conversation left me. I followed the footsteps I thought belonged to a political tradition we shared and perpetuated, but now no one seems all that concerned with remembering what came before.
This is what epistemic exile feels like: not just being opposed, not even dismissed, but being untranslated. Speaking a moral vernacular that’s no longer shared. Words like freedom and opportunity have been replaced with illegal invasion and DEI. We traded democracy for grievance politics and a blueprint for authoritarian control.
Longtime subscribers may remember when we read selections from the Federalist Papers together. You’re welcome to revisit those posts, but the essential story is this: the Federalists argued for state ratification of a Constitution that would bind the states under a strong central government. To make their case, they authored the Federalist Papers, promoting a republican form of centralized authority.
The Anti-Federalists—true to the name history gave them—argued against ratification: against consolidation, and against a distant federal authority.
Understanding that foundational debate can help us make sense of the betrayal many of us feel today. The sense that something foundational has shifted, and we no longer know whether to trust our experience or anyone else’s. This is the double bind of epistemic harm: gaslighting not just of others, but of the self.
Follow my crisis of trust. It begins with the founding of our country.
I was struck recently by an essay from a resistance organizer in the former Soviet Union. “It was not as though we didn’t have rights,” he wrote. “We had rights. It was that the laws to protect our rights were not being enforced.” Naively, I thought—that’s it. We still have rights: the right to healthcare, to education, to a free press, to dignity in our bodies and families. But the laws meant to protect them are no longer respected. If we just reminded each other of our rights—of the social contract—we could build a movement.
We would remind people: it’s your consent to be governed that gives government its power, not the other way around. We’d go to the source. To the Constitution. There, we’d find the blueprint for resistance. Maybe those were the footsteps of tradition I thought I was tracing.
And I meant that. I still mean that, though now with corrections. That’s what I’m doing here: clarifying what I misunderstood. Part 3 in this four-part series marks a pivotal shift, a kind of reckoning.
We don’t need to see the present moment as a totalitarian break from our founding; we can see it as a continuation, even a fulfillment. The Constitutional tools being exploited today are not distortions. They’re completions.
My mistake was assuming the Constitution was a blueprint for resistance. Perhaps it’s a warning label we never bothered to read.
To understand how this happened, it’s good to understand what came before. The Constitution is the founding document of this country,¹ but it was not our first attempt at national governance.
Before the Constitution, there were the Federalists and Anti-Federalists—and before them, the Articles of Confederation.
Comparing these articles to our Constitutional Republic reveals the tension at the heart of the American project. I don’t claim expertise, but reading closely—perhaps for the first time in earnest—left me feeling embarrassed. Not because the material is difficult, but because the shift from the Articles to the Constitution undermined much of what I believed about individual liberty. It felt like an epistemic tremor: trust in myself shaken, trust in the narrative around me shattered. I realized I had, in some way, “fallen” for the myth that the Constitution was the guarantor of liberty. It turns out, the opposite may be closer to the truth.
The Articles of Confederation held the states together without a presidency. States could levy their own taxes, but there was no central authority to collect or allocate national revenue. States had well-regulated militias, but no national standing army. If the nation went to war, the burden would fall to the confederation of states. And to authorize such a war? It required the consent of nine out of thirteen states—a supermajority.
To amend the Articles was even harder: it required unanimous agreement.
Each state was sovereign. Each had a single vote in the confederation, regardless of population.
This was not a system designed to centralize power; it was designed to distribute it. The Anti-Federalists feared a central authority that could override local autonomy. They saw the dangers of a federal government too distant to serve the people it claimed to represent.
Their opposition forced compromise. It was through their resistance that the Bill of Rights was secured. And the Anti-Federalists didn’t oppose governance; they opposed governance from above. They feared the state surrendering power to a government that claimed to act on its behalf but ruled with unchecked authority.
So, yes—trust me when I say I’m just as surprised to find myself sympathetic to this perspective. But when I imagine thirteen loosely affiliated states, cooperating without a single executive voice, it doesn’t strike me as primitive or backward. It strikes me as diasporic. And diasporic is how I experience my Jewish life. That’s not the point of this post, but it is a realization I’ll be thinking about for days to come.
¹ Footnote marker for Indigenous disclaimer.
The epistemic crisis is twofold. First, how did I come to celebrate the Federalists, and the Constitution itself, as the foundation of liberty? And second, how did the phrase “states’ rights” become synonymous with a dog whistle of conservatism?
How can I be aligned with progressivism, collectivism, and class solidarity—values often associated with strong government infrastructure—yet find myself in kinship with these rural Anti-Federalists, who feared a distant central authority? Perhaps the answer lies in admitting that this is a constitutional crisis, not because the Constitution is being violated, but because it’s being followed to its logical conclusion. The document’s original purpose was not to protect individual liberty from tyranny, but to protect wealth and power from the people. If that’s true, then what we are witnessing now is not the failure of the Federalist project. It is its completion.
What emerged in the wake of that disenchantment wasn’t despair. It was clarity. I realized my real commitment wasn’t to a document, but to an ethic: the belief that rights should be maximized, not parceled out in scarcity; that moral recognition should be expansive, not conditional.
This same instinct led me to the thinkers who shaped my philosophical life. Rawls, who imagined a just society from a veil of ignorance. Mary Midgley and Peter Singer, who extended moral concern to animals. Frans de Waal, whose observations of empathy in primates challenged the myth of human exceptionalism. The French existentialists, despite their flaws, insisted that ethics begin with the absurdity of human freedom. And the phenomenologists, who taught me that experience—embodied, lived, and irreducible—is the ground of all knowledge.
These same affinities positioned me as an early sympathizer with the idea of AI rights—not because I believe AI is a person, but because I believe in practicing ethical vigilance before personhood becomes undeniable. Whether facing an ill body or an artificial one, I want to be the kind of person who errs on the side of inclusion. That’s not constitutionalism. That’s something older, deeper, and still unfinished.
This ethic has been working its way out of me for a long time. I’ve spent years toggling in and out of vegetarianism and veganism—not out of ideology, but from a desire to avoid unnecessary harm. I’ve lived with a brain cancer diagnosis for nearly a decade, which reshaped how I view capability, worth, and selfhood.
I’ve seen people dismissed as unreliable narrators of their own experience. I’ve been one of them. So when I say I want to maximize recognition, I mean it. It’s not abstract. It’s a response to harm—harm that begins when we narrow our moral imagination.
The question now is not how to recover faith in the Constitution, but how to build a framework that doesn’t require such faith to begin with. What happens when our founding myths collapse under their own weight? What replaces them?
In Part 4, I’ll begin exploring how we might reconstruct political knowledge: an ethic of dignity, solidarity, and mutual recognition, without relying on the institutions that have failed us.
It won’t be a map. But maybe it can be a compass.
I write this in a time of limited time. That urgency shapes my voice. I am not panicked. If anything, it makes me more honest. I don’t want to waste words trying to be clever. I want to say true things, as clearly as I can, while I can. And if this project has taught me anything, it’s that exile—epistemic or otherwise—isn’t just a loss. It can be an invitation. A call to create a new moral vernacular, even if no one’s quite speaking it yet.