This essay orignally appeared in the chapbook Epistemic Harm: A Politics of Rupture and Trust. Conceived in a series of Substack essays, we lightly edited for coherence and consisency. The PDF is available for download here.
Special thanks to public historian Tad Stoermer, whose framing didn’t just refine my argument, it returned me to the questions that matter most.
Epistemic harm occurs within a relational triad:
— those who construct systems;
— those who adopt beliefs shaped by those systems; and
— the mutual interaction of individuals navigating and interpreting these systems in relation to one another.
The harm that we are naming happens within a relational dynamic between these three epistemic nodes: the people who construct systems, those who believe things about those systems, and the interaction among people negotiating meaning within those frameworks. It is construction, boundary, and integration. We build frameworks. We operate within them. And we live in the human friction of matching and mismatching our beliefs against one another.
This isn’t just theory. When relationships fracture over divergent commitments to institutional structures, we often reach for foundational reassurance. In the American context, that foundation is often the Constitution.
In February 2025, I invited readers of my Substack to join me in a group reading of the U.S. Constitution. We would read a few articles each week and reflect in the Notes section, lightly moderated.
I expected spirited debates over constitutional interpretation or historical parallels. Secretly, I hoped we’d find comfort in the Constitution’s resilience against authoritarianism.
That is not what happened.
Alongside the text, we read selections from the Federalist Papers. But what stood out was not liberty or justice—it was the repeated emphasis on protecting wealth and restraining populism. And to my surprise, it was the Anti-Federalists—the side more skeptical of centralized power—that sounded closest to the values I thought I’d find in the Constitution itself.
I made a personal commitment not to let the Framers off the hook. These were wealthy, landholding white men—many enslavers—who held disproportionate power. The more I read their words with this in mind, the more I saw that the great fear animating their prose wasn’t monarchy—it was the people themselves. “Insurrection,” “faction,” “passion”—these were not democratic energies to be harnessed, but dangers to be subdued.
As Indigenous speaker and writer Mark Charles has said, “Since when did ‘We the People’ mean ‘all the people’?!” (17 minutes)
If I had cracked the door of skepticism, historian Tad Stoermer kicked it wide open. I was no longer reading the Constitution as a backstop to multicultural democracy—I was reading it to understand what kind of reality it was designed to stabilize, and for whom.
What does a foundational document do?
It enshrines the values a society wants to protect.
It structures power in ways that reflect who society trusts to wield it.
It constructs a reality that makes some lives legible and others marginal.
The Constitution wasn’t written to expand democracy but to contain it. Its aim was to cool the passions of the people, not channel them. To suppress uprising, not cultivate consent.
This creates a form of epistemic rupture—when the very document meant to bind citizens to one another reveals itself as an instrument of selective exclusion.
I once read a reflection from a Soviet-era dissident: “It wasn’t that we didn’t have rights; it was that the rights we had weren’t enforced.” That insight led me back to the Constitution.
We have rights, too. But increasingly, they’re not being honored. The Constitution remains binding—it’s the law of the land. But that’s not the same as justice.
Our argument here is not to reject the Constitution in total. We’re not calling for structural revolution. We’re calling for exposure. A holding-up to the light.
The Constitution has been praised as a sacred text. But it has also been used—through selective interpretation, through omission—to protect the powerful. So we ask, sincerely:
How did the supposed hallmark of American democracy help enable authoritarian tendencies?
The rise of figures like Donald Trump, and legislation like the Big Beautiful Bill Act, force us to confront a hard truth. The very tendencies we decry in the current administration are not aberrations from America’s foundational text, but rather, its logical extension.
Our critique is twofold: First, to offer a provisional answer to that paradox. And second, to name the Constitution as a real-world example of how foundational structures can produce epistemic harm.
We don’t burn it in effigy. But we do name it as a site of rupture. Like the Soviet dissident, we remind the state what it is supposed to be accountable to.
The Federalists created a centralized federal system, one that can override state law and individual liberties alike. The logical ends of this framework—when misused or left unchecked—are authoritarian. A system built to protect property and power is not broken when it silences dissent. It is functioning as designed.
Legal precedent replaces humanity. That’s how epistemic harm becomes systemic. That’s how shared trust breaks. Many of us are experiencing this same rupture.
If these foundational frameworks can fracture, we now ask: How are they mended? What’s beyond them? Can they be repaired or even replaced?
In [the previous section], we reached a breaking point—a recognition that the Constitution itself may no longer be a site of shared meaning. But if the frame is broken, if the social contract is threadbare or weaponized, what remains? What can be built in its absence?
This essay begins the pivot from critique to construction. And the path forward is not through replacement but through relationship. Not through a new grand narrative but through a return to dialogic trust.
That requires risk. Not the risk of being wrong, but the deeper risk of being vulnerable. Writers know, and this pamphlet is a case in point, that you don't know precisely what you think, feel, and believe until you attempt to commit to speech, either written, spoken, acted, or lived--the risk of active participation in dialogue is demanded.
To be in relationship across epistemic rupture means holding space for meaning-making without precondition. It means staying with the disorientation. It means recognizing that trust can’t be compelled—but it can be offered.
In this piece, I explore what it means to live ethically in a post-constitutional world—not lawless, but grounded in a different ethic. One that honors difference without dissolving into relativism. One that sees disagreement not as danger but as invitation.
We talk about “breaking the frame,” but there’s a softer metaphor too: stepping outside of it. Looking around. Asking what else we might build if the materials were conversation, care, and co-constructed truth.
This isn’t a utopian gesture. It’s a sober one. If our shared frameworks no longer hold, we need new forms of holding—ones not imposed from above but grown between us.
Let’s begin again. Our prescription is as plain as the text of our project: Toward a politics of rupture and trust. Acknowledge that our shared worldview is slipping and repair begins in relationship.
On this fourth of July 2025, against the backdrop of an ever-strengthening Executive, complicit Congress, and partisan Judiciary, may we rediscover the bonds between us—to move toward trust, and to define ‘We the People’ on our terms.