Can the Constitution Save Us? Beau Breslin’s Jeffersonian Turn
For more than two centuries, Americans have largely followed the vision of James Madison, revering the United States Constitution as a durable, stabilizing force designed to outlast the generations.
Thomas Jefferson
But what if the nation had taken a different path—one advocated by Thomas Jefferson, who believed that each generation should rewrite its fundamental law?
That provocative question lies at the heart of the work of Beau Breslin, a constitutional scholar and the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair in Government at Skidmore College. His intellectual journey—from a self-described Madisonian to a proponent of generational renewal—culminates in a bold call for a constitutional convention in 2037, a vision that began not in the halls of power but in a first-year seminar classroom at Skidmore.
From Seminar Room to National Conversation
Breslin’s fascination with Jefferson’s radical idea—that “the earth belongs to the living,” and that being governed by the dead is a form of tyranny—took concrete form in 2010, during a Scribner Seminar he was teaching at Skidmore. These interdisciplinary courses encourage first-year students to wrestle with big questions.
Beau Breslin is leading a series of “Democracy Check-Ins” at the Saratoga Springs Public Library. His next will be Thursday, June 26. Registration is required.
The spark came when Kate Cavanaugh, a student and peer mentor in the course, lingered after class to ask:
“What if we rewrote the Constitution every generation?”
It was a Jeffersonian question—and a turning point. Along with first-year student Ben Polsky, Breslin, Cavanaugh, and their collaborators began to imagine a series of periodic constitutional conventions—not every 19 years, as Jefferson suggested, but paced to match human life expectancy. Using that logic, they chose 1825, 1863, 1903, 1953, and 2022 as the critical flashpoints.
A 2011 summer research grant supported Cavanaugh and Polsky in drafting the book’s early chapters. Breslin credits them not just as assistants, but as collaborators who transformed his worldview.
“They fundamentally changed the way I see the world,” he writes. “Exceptional students who taught me more than I taught them.”
A Constitution for the Living: Reimagining American History
Published in 2021, Breslin’s thought experiment originated in a first-year seminar he taught in 2010.
Published by Stanford University Press, A Constitution for the Living is a bold experiment in counterfactual civic history. It imagines what might have happened if Americans had in fact adopted Jefferson’s model of generational renewal. Each of the five imagined conventions addresses the pressing concerns of its time, from slavery and civil rights to worker protections, foreign policy, environmental rights, and technological change.
The 1903 convention, for instance, features the first participation of people of color, with figures like Booker T. Washington and Quanah Parker shaping the debate on Reconstruction, industrialization, and imperialism. The imagined 2022 convention uses a hybrid system of crowdsourcing and direct election to select delegates and considers proposals such as:
Reforming the Senate and presidency
Creating a third branch of Congress
Instituting term limits for justices
Adding positive rights such as environmental protections
Rethinking the Second Amendment
Debating privacy rights in the digital age
Breslin acknowledges the speculative nature of the project but hopes the scenarios act as “credible provocations”—thought experiments that illuminate our current challenges by imagining roads not taken.
Rethinking Endurance: From Madison to Jefferson
As he developed the book, Breslin found himself increasingly aligned with Jefferson’s challenge to permanence. While Madison’s argument for stability carried the day in 1787, Breslin now believes that without mechanisms for renewal, endurance becomes stagnation.
“The Constitution has become an anachronistic instrument,” he argues—designed for an 18th-century agrarian republic, yet forced to govern a 21st-century networked society.
This rigidity, he says, has led to institutional gridlock, rising authoritarianism, and the overreach of the judiciary, which is left to interpret ambiguous constitutional silences on everything from cyberporn to assault weapons.
“We’re working with a system that cannot evolve,” Breslin says. “So we either rely on the courts to stretch meaning or we freeze entirely.”
A Civic Duty
Rather than upheaval, Breslin frames periodic constitutional renewal as a democratic necessity.
“Jefferson was right,” he says. “If we’re governed by a document written by the dead, we’re not really self-governing.”
He suggests holding conventions every 50 years, allowing each generation a structured opportunity to modernize and reaffirm the nation’s foundational law.
To that end, Breslin is now calling for a modern constitutional convention in 2037—the 250th anniversary of the original 1787 gathering in Philadelphia. He believes this symbolic milestone could offer the public trust and momentum needed to undertake the task.
A Blueprint for 2037
Breslin’s vision for the 2037 convention emphasizes radical democracy and equity. He proposes:
Delegates selected by lottery, like jury duty, to ensure geographic and demographic representation
Supplemental seats for scholars and civic leaders, chosen by state legislatures
Paid participation, to ensure inclusivity across class lines
Transparent deliberations, with some closed sessions to foster honest dialogue
Ratification by supermajority popular vote, as a guardrail against extremism
The goal, he says, is not to tinker at the edges, but to reopen core questions:
What kind of democracy do we want? What institutions are no longer serving us? What rights must now be named and protected?
Civic Rehearsal and AI
Breslin is under no illusions about the challenges.
“Frankly, I’d be petrified to hold a convention today,” he admits. “The political climate is too toxic.”
That’s why he advocates a period of “civic rehearsal”—mock conventions in classrooms, town halls, and public forums that begin to build the capacity and imagination required for real constitutional deliberation.
In partnership with Skidmore student Prairie Gunnels, he has already begun experimenting with AI tools like ChatGPT to draft generational constitutions for the Greatest, Silent, Boomer, Gen X, Millennial, Gen Z, and Alpha cohorts. Their collaboration, recently featured in The Fulcrum, is a five-part series, “Following Jefferson: Promoting Intergenerational Understanding Through Constitution-Making.”
The Living Constitution
Breslin’s call to action is rooted not in rebellion but in faith in the idea that the Constitution should grow with the people it governs.
“I still believe in the Constitution—but only if it belongs to the living. We shouldn’t confuse reverence with relevance,” he says.
And so Breslin leaves us with a question that each generation must answer for itself:
Does this Constitution still work for us?
If the answer is no—or even maybe—then the task is not to discard the past, but to carry forward its deepest ideals. Not to wear the old jacket out of habit, but to stitch a new one together—with care, imagination, and purpose.
Because a Constitution worthy of the living must do more than endure. It must evolve.
Dan Forbush generated this story from interviews tramscribed and processed with Otter, NotebookLM, and ChatGPT. We describe our AI-augmented process here.
