While the President and his surrogates attempt to portray "We, the People" as some sort of collective who are helpless without the guiding and controlling hand of a large and powerful government master, America's Founders saw "We, the People" as masters of their government, who retain sovereignty over that government by the provisions and limitations of their own Constitution for controlling elected representatives in that government.
There is a huge difference in outcomes between the two concepts. America's Founders were clear in their understanding that economic progress, for instance, relied on the degree of individual freedom which existed, and they stated it clearly:
"Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise." - Thomas Jefferson
"The enviable condition of the people of the United States is often too much ascribed to the physical advantages of their soil & climate .... But a just estimate of the happiness of our country will never overlook what belongs to the fertile activity of a free people and the benign influence of a responsible government." - James Madison
". . . the fertile activity of a free people and the benign influence of a responsible government." The word "benign" takes on special meaning today, when almost every person understands the implications of the word "malignant"--a word which might be used today to describe the kind of debilitating and destroying government "influence" we encounter at every turn.
No wonder so-called "progresssive" leaders like the Democrats who represent the current Administration must use misleading semantic maneuvers in order to sell their misleading and counterfeit ideas.
1801 Inaugural Address of Thomas Jefferson
(Excerpt) "Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. . . possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?
"Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities." (end of excerpt)
Some reader in Townhall.com had made a comment several month ago to one of the columns about the progressives and said they should not be called progressives as they aren’t. I wished I could remember the word the reader used, because it fit perfect