Today's overheated but sterile partisan arguments—what columnist Molly Ivins described as the World Wrestling Federation in political drag—have lost touch with the fundamentals on which America was built. Our institutions, our Declaration of Independence, and our Constitution took shape in a vanished world using assumptions and ideas now gathering dust in our civic attic. As we grapple for an agreement on proper policy, and communicate (or not) in slogans and sound bites, it may well be that the only way forward is back. We revere the founding fathers; perhaps we should also listen to them. Only when we understand what they built can we adapt it for our time.

In early November 1620, a wooden vessel bobbed queasily in the ocean swell off the coast of Cape Cod. The Mayflower's 102 passengers had spent sixty-six days crossing the North Atlantic in a boat whose cluttered deck was no bigger than a singles tennis court. They came to build a new community in a wilderness far beyond the reach of established authority. Solemnly, they all affixed their signatures or marks to a document committing them to combine themselves "together into a civil body politic." This document, the famed Mayflower Compact, was a concrete example of a theoretical idea called a "social contract," by which people living in an Eden-like state of nature created a government by common agreement.

The general idea that government and society are created by a social contract is as old as Socrates, but when the North American British colonies were founded, government's existence relied on the "divine right of kings." God established government and set kings to rule over us. Obedience to the monarch is a duty to God, and the monarch's rule is pretty much absolute.

In the century and a half after the Mayflower's passengers disembarked, however, many Europeans abandoned the God-made-us-do-it concept. They found the roots of government in rational beings creating social contracts. Generally, political thinkers began by imagining a "state of nature," a time before society and government existed. Then they asked, How did government emerge from that?

Of the many who tackled that question was Englishman John Locke, writing at the end of the 1600s, who best laid down the basics of what became the American view of government. In the state of nature, he reasoned, man has a right to life (because God gave it to him), and therefore to liberty (because life without liberty is useless) and to property (because in exercising liberty and supporting life man creates and needs essential property). But these rights were threatened by human imperfection, so mankind agreed to give up specific portions of life, liberty, and property to a common government for the protection of natural rights—a "social contract," not literally written down as the Mayflower Compact was, but something we all understand and agree to.

This was revolutionary stuff. Our rights are inherently ours, Locke said; God, not the government, gave them to us. Government, on the other hand, came from us, not God. The true sovereign is the people, who created government for their own purposes. If government misbehaves and trashes our liberties instead of protecting them, we can rightfully turn the rascals out.

What took Locke and many other theorists volumes to explain, Thomas Jefferson distilled into one of the most brilliant and enduring statements of political principle ever penned—the second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," it begins. Only an American would have put it that way. We are all rational people and do not need a special class of experts and philosophers to explain things to us. "... that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Here is the doctrine of God-given natural rights.

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, ... ." The essential notion of social contract is here reduced to a single sentence. Next, "... that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."

After their successful revolution, this remarkable generation of Americans put the Declaration's principles into the Constitution. The people's representatives wrote it in a sweltering room in Philadelphia with curtains drawn and guards at the door. They began in late May 1787, and finished it by September. Accustomed as we are to having deliberative bodies spend four months just arguing about agenda, it is startling to remember that the most creative and longest-lasting written constitution ever penned was assembled in short order.

Once the delegates conceived the Constitution, they sent it back to the people for ratification. The principle was made flesh; the people were the sovereign. We had made a fully articulated social contract, with the clear and express purpose "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

Seemed simple enough. But the genius of the Constitution and the key to its longevity is that it sets a general framework and lets each generation fill in the specifics as conditions change.

The arguments began immediately. Alexander Hamilton, President Washington's Secretary of the Treasury, whom Vice President John Adams derided as a "bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar," wanted a loose interpretation of the Constitution so the government could act forcefully. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson led the faction that wanted a strict reading of the document so that governmental power would be safely hobbled. Jefferson, a slave-owning, aristocratic democrat, contemplated a nation of small farmers where the only possible threat to liberty was government itself.

History overwhelmed Jefferson's vision. The world grew complex. Private power pooled into great corporations, the economy became national, then global. Our government necessarily claimed greater and greater powers in its pursuit of "the general welfare." From protective tariffs, post-slavery Constitutional amendments and antitrust laws in the nineteenth century, to the New Deal, the Council of Economic Advisors, and aggressive civil rights protection in the twentieth century, we have steadily expanded what our government does for us. The rhetoric in our mouths may still be Jefferson's, but the world of affairs we actually inhabit belongs to Hamilton.

And that world has changed drastically since we adopted the Constitution. The Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area in 2004 contained more than twice as many people as the entire United States did in 1787. The simplicity that made self-sufficiency easy and normal is long gone. We are the most dynamic and powerful nation on a troubled earth, but we're finding it devilishly hard to export our ideas of freedom and government. We are farther than ever from a state of nature, and accelerating.

We may actually be at a crossroads. Though there is no shortage of positions loudly proclaimed, our debates are rarely focused and seldom productive. We talk past each other and retreat into positions we won't compromise. So is the very basis of our government—a social contract among rational individuals based on essential goals—still relevant, or even coherent any more? Are there other ways to think about government? Are our political fundamentals from the 1700s failing us?

One source of confusion is that the old, familiar liberal versus conservative argument about whether to employ government to pursue social ends has become moot. Today's conservatives embrace the use of federal power and spend freely. What separates conservatives from liberals now is only the objects they want government to pursue. That shift in the terms of debate has disoriented us a bit.

But, indeed, within the last thirty years some political thinkers have challenged the basic social-contract concept. "Communitarians" argue that Locke and his heirs are wrong to focus exclusively on the selfish individual and to think of society merely as a means of optimizing individual rights. Instead, communitarians emphasize that we are social creatures who live in communities and groups, that we have responsibilities as well as rights, and that our rights include not just "freedom" but also "positive rights" such as a good education and access to health care. They argue that "the exclusive pursuit of private interest erodes the network of social environments on which we all depend, and is destructive to our shared experiment in democratic self-government." Loneliness, social isolation, greed, political alienation, and family breakdown are all exacerbated by classic social-contract thinking with its emphasis on the individual. This is not a socialist position; rather, it simply says that the communities we inhabit deserve as much political weight as the individual and his or her rights.

Aside from the communitarian challenge, we have learned that not everyone around the globe believes our individualistic social contract model is universally valid. Singapore's former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew (1959-1990), for example, says bluntly that for Asians a government "where the interests of society take precedence over that of the individual suits them better than the individualism of America."

But the vast majority of us still adhere to the ideals of the founders, even if we'd be hard put to recall where they come from. The main resistance to communitarian thought comes from people's discomfort with abandoning the central emphasis on individual rights that has been our cornerstone.

The problems furrowing our brow today may not lie in the fundamentals but in the administrative details. Our huge and complex nation now has a social subcontract, run by middlemen.

In their 2002 book, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public, this month's Urbanite Guest Editor Matthew Crenson and co-author Benjamin Ginsberg reveal the extent to which individuals and interest groups now access government directly through lawsuits, lobbying specialists, and administrative rulings. Mobilizing citizens, they argue, is now just a pointless nuisance. Americans have become customers of government services in a process eerily reminiscent of a commercial marketplace rather than a public forum. Add to this the niche markets of passionate single-issue groups, and the result is a great deal of noisy talk camouflaging the breakdown of sincere public debate about big issues. Politicians play to their base. The base hires a professional lobbyist and files lawsuits. The real political action lies in confirming judges and administrators, because they now have the power that used to belong to Congress.

The outcome is that no matter how exasperated we are, we can't seem to affect things. The latest CNN poll numbers as this is being written, for example, indicate that more than sixty percent of Americans disapprove of the war in Iraq, a number that one would never guess from the lack of political activity against it. We've turned the matter over to the government, and without a citizen draft or an immediate tax bill for the war, we seem divorced from the issue even if most of us have an opinion. We just trade barbs in the blogosphere and give negative performance ratings to both Congress and the president. We ("the people") no longer remember the ideal of a social contract, no longer quicken to the idea that the government actually belongs to us.

For Jefferson's idealism and Hamilton's realism to work for us now, we first have to remember what they were. Then recall that we overwhelmingly do agree on the basics of the social contract. All our noisy arguments are tempests in Locke's teapot. Let's consciously re-enact the social contract, awakening to the principle that government is nothing more than us, using powers we confer and that we can direct, modify, increase, or take back. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a president who wielded government action with great gusto, said, "Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country."

The back-to-political-basics debate boils down to two questions. First, what is it we want our government to do for us? Specifically, are there things it must do other than just protect life, liberty, and property? Second, what parts of our life, liberty, and property are we willing to give up to support such a government? Take a few moments to make simple lists of things you think government should do and what sacrifices you would be willing to make in return. Compare your list with someone else's. See if the two of you can come to consensus about these fundamentals. Do it in a group, over coffee. Spread across three hundred million Americans, the debate on this would be acrimonious and heated, but it would engage the real issues and perhaps get us somewhere.

What we cannot do safely is let things drift as the gulf between the government and the governed continues growing. Though it's funny to recall the old punch line, "I don't vote because it only encourages them," in truth, frustrated detachment is a losing strategy.

Things hang in the balance. Educator Robert M. Hutchins warned, "The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." And, he might have added, ignorance of its principles. But Common Cause's John Gardner offers an alternative vision: "The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest." Then he reminds us, "No one else can."