imthepeople.com

I’m The People

“We the People” was never meant to be a crowd. It’s a person. It’s you.

It is the first line of the country’s founding document, and somewhere along the way it stopped meaning anyone in particular. It became a phrase on a wall. Something invoked most often by the people who already hold the power, about the people who don’t.

What happened to the phrase

Listen to how it gets used now. The people want this. The people have spoken. The people are fed up with that. Always plural. Always secondhand. Always in somebody else’s mouth, describing you to a room you are not in.

A crowd is easy to speak for, because a crowd cannot answer back. It has no address and no opinion of its own, so anyone can borrow it. Both sides do, constantly, and they cannot both be right about what it wants.

Every time that phrase gets used, somebody is being represented and somebody is doing the representing. It is worth knowing which one you are.

The idea

This project starts from the other end. Not what the people want, which nobody can honestly report, but what one person is actually willing to do. Change the word from plural to singular and the whole sentence changes with it.

I’m the people is not a slogan about a movement. It is a claim about responsibility, and it only works in the first person. Nobody can say it on your behalf. That is the entire point of it.

Where this actually is

What that becomes in practice is genuinely undecided. There is no plan here yet, no program, no ten-point anything, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

Publishing before there is an answer is deliberate. A project about people being spoken for should not open by announcing what they think.

What this is not

• Not a party, not a candidate, not a side. No endorsements are coming.
• Not a movement looking for members. The unit is one person, which is the whole argument.
• Nothing to sign up for, buy, or donate to. There is no list, and there is no ask.
• National in scope, because the problems are.

In development, and genuinely early. When there is something real to say, this page is where it will say it first. Nothing else will arrive uninvited.

If you want to say something: contact@imthepeople.com