In 2023, a California school board became a national story when a conservative majority twice rejected state-approved curriculum over a lesson mentioning Harvey Milk. Governor Newsom threatened a $1.5 million fine. Parents packed the meetings. Everyone invoked constitutional rights. Very few on any side could have told you what the First Amendment actually says. Not the general idea. The text.
That same year, senators spent hours grilling social media executives about censorship. Questions about platform liability were First Amendment questions. Questions about user tracking were Fourth Amendment questions about the third-party doctrine. Neither term appeared in the hearings. The 2023 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey found that only one in 20 Americans can name all five First Amendment rights. Constitutional illiteracy isn't ignorance of trivia. It's the inability to connect your argument to the document you're invoking.
A California coastal property owner once sat through a zoning hearing that ended his investment. He hadn't violated any law. Environmental review requirements were individually defensible and collectively prohibitive. His land was regulated into near worthlessness without being acquired. He didn't know the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation," was written in part for exactly this situation. Whether it applied is a question the Court has been debating since Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon in 1922. The protection existed. He'd never heard of it. California property owners run into this problem constantly. Most have no idea there's a constitutional argument available to them.
This is the pattern. The constitutional provision most directly relevant to a citizen's situation is, in most cases, the one that citizens know least about. The 17th Amendment's replacement of state legislative appointment with popular Senate elections explains structurally why federal power has expanded so relentlessly since 1913. The Tenth Amendment's reservation of powers to states and the people is the constitutional basis for every federalism argument the right makes about Washington overreach. The Fourth Amendment's third-party doctrine governs what federal agencies can demand from your financial institution without a warrant. Citizens have strong opinions about all of these outcomes. Most have never read the provisions producing them.
The Supreme Court has been more constitutionally active in the past decade than at any point since the Warren Court. Dobbs overruled fifty years of abortion precedent. Bruen rewrote the Second Amendment doctrine using a historical-tradition test rooted in original meaning. Students for Fair Admissions ended race-conscious admissions on equal protection grounds. West Virginia v. EPA constrained the administrative state's authority to make major policy by regulatory fiat. These are decisions the conservative constitutional movement has been pursuing for decades. They deserve a public that understands why they were reached and what they actually say. Right now, mostly, that public doesn't exist.
I've spent thirty years in institutional investment management advising ultra-high-net-worth families on decisions shaped by the 16th Amendment's income tax provisions, the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause, and the Fourth Amendment's limits on what the government can demand from financial records. None of my clients is a constitutional scholar. All of them live under this doctrine daily. The costs of not understanding it fall on them, not on professors.
The conservative constitutional argument doesn't end with winning cases. It requires citizens who understand what was won and why it holds. Bruen is being litigated into effective nullity in jurisdictions whose officials disagree with it. Students for Fair Admissions is being resisted by institutions determined to accomplish through "holistic review" what the Court said equal protection forbids. Dobbs returned abortion to democratic deliberation — and that deliberation will be shaped by citizens who either understand the constitutional argument or don't. A Supreme Court majority can establish a doctrine. It can't enforce it against a culture that doesn't understand the underlying argument well enough to hold its institutions accountable. That work belongs to citizens.
The Federalist Papers were newspaper op-eds. The Constitution was a citizen's document. Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France that to love the "little platoon we belong to in society" is the first principle of public affections and the first step toward love of country. His point was that the family, the church, the local community, and the voluntary association are the foundation of civil society itself. The Constitution the Founders wrote was not creating that foundation. It was protecting it. The amendments in that document are where the protection becomes specific and enforceable. They deserve citizens who have actually read them.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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