Within minutes following the January 7, 2026 ICE shooting tragedy in Minnesota, where an immigration enforcement operation ended in gunfire, casualties, and competing narratives, social networks fractured along predictable partisan lines. Before investigations could establish basic facts, the horrible death of Renee Nicole Good became a Rorschach test: proof of either tyrannical federal overreach or necessary enforcement against violent resistance, depending on which media ecosystem you inhabited. Conservative outlets emphasized officer safety and the dangers of sanctuary policies. Progressive media focused on aggressive enforcement tactics and community trauma. Each side had witnesses, selectively edited video footage, expert commentary confirming priors. It was almost impossible to find shared agreement on what actually happened because we no longer have shared institutions capable of establishing common facts, let alone common ground for negotiating what those facts mean for policy.
This tragic incident is no longer just about Renee Good, Minnesota or immigration enforcement. Like so many other issues that divide us daily, this tragic incident exposes the ongoing collapse of a negotiating framework that makes American democracy possible. We once made reasonable assumptions that parties in profound disagreement can nevertheless establish mechanisms for continuing conversation. Today, facts themselves become contested based on tribal affiliation. Every institution, courts, universities, media, even science, is suspected of partisan capture. Negotiations are now almost impossible because there’s no neutral ground on which to stand.
In Philadelphia, where I live, we are preparing to mark 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. Over a million tourists are expected to visit Philadelphia this year to celebrate the Semiquincentennial. Perhaps the most relevant commemoration wouldn’t be another parade or fireworks display, but rather a serious reckoning with Philadelphia’s actual origin story. Not a tale of easy consensus but of how people with radically different worldviews, who spoke different languages, held incompatible cosmologies, served different peoples, established frameworks for continuing negotiation across seemingly unbridgeable divides.
If they could negotiate then, can we learn to negotiate now?
Under the elm: The original compact
What if we could time transport ourselves under the Treaty Elm, that massive tree under which William Penn and Lenape Chief Tamanend negotiated the 1682 compact that would make Philadelphia possible. The gulf separating these two men was larger than a canyon. Penn represented European colonial expansion, Christian theology, written law, and proprietary land ownership. Tamanend represented indigenous sovereignty, animist spirituality, oral tradition, and communal relationship to land. They had every reason to view each other as existential threats. But they negotiated.
The story actually begins earlier. In 1638, Swedish settlers established New Sweden along the Delaware River. When Dutch forces conquered them in 1655, the Dutch didn’t expel the Swedes but incorporated them, recognizing existing property claims and allowing Swedish legal customs to persist.
This established a crucial precedent: governance in this territory would layer rather than replace, would negotiate rather than erase. Multiple peoples with incompatible visions could coexist through negotiated frameworks rather than through domination.
William Penn’s arrival in 1682 represented a third iteration. Having received Pennsylvania as payment for debts the Crown owed his father, Penn needed to establish legitimacy with three distinct groups: the English Crown (which granted his charter), the existing European settlers (Swedish and Dutch), and the indigenous Lenape who actually controlled the land. Any one of these groups could have denied Penn his ambitions. Instead, he negotiated with all three.
The Treaty of Shackamaxon, conducted in the Lenape language with Tamanend, wasn’t Penn’s recognition of indigenous humanity, though that mattered, but his recognition of indigenous sovereignty. The treaty’s actual text has been lost, perhaps deliberately, since oral traditions held more authority in Lenape culture than written documents. But contemporary accounts describe specific provisions: fair payment for land, mutual defense against outside threats, equal access to justice with Lenape and Europeans tried before mixed juries, and crucially, mechanisms for ongoing negotiation.
This treaty wasn’t meant to be permanent. It established a framework for continuing conversation. When circumstances changed (population growth, new settlements, resource pressures), the parties agreed to reconvene. The treaty worked because it anticipated its own insufficiency.
Voltaire later called this “the only treaty between Indians and Christians that was never sworn to and never broken.” The claim is only partially accurate; the treaty eventually failed to prevent indigenous dispossession as European population overwhelmed negotiated frameworks. But it held for over seventy years, far longer than virtually any other colonial-indigenous compact, not because of European virtue but because its structure assumed renegotiation rather than permanence.
Lesson one: Sovereignty
Penn and Tamanend’s first act wasn’t to solve their differences but to recognize each other’s standing. Penn didn’t say, “I have a charter from the King, therefore I own this land.” He said, “You control this territory; I seek permission to share it; what terms would make that possible?” Tamanend didn’t say, “You’re invaders; leave.” He said, “You’re here; we’re here; how do we avoid war?”
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Contemporary American discourse has abandoned this foundational step. We don’t recognize each other’s sovereignty, our legitimate standing to hold different views and advocate for them through legal channels. Instead, we treat opponents as illegitimate: not just wrong but dangerous, not just misguided but evil, not just political adversaries but existential threats.
After Minnesota, what would recognizing sovereignty look like? It would mean acknowledging that communities have legitimate concerns about immigration enforcement tactics that separate families and create surveillance states. It would also mean acknowledging that federal authorities have legitimate obligations to enforce laws and protect officers conducting dangerous operations. Both concerns are real. Both deserve respect. Neither can simply override the other through assertion of superior righteousness.
This doesn’t mean accepting the other side’s policy preferences. Penn didn’t adopt Lenape theology; Tamanend didn’t embrace Quaker practices. But both accepted that the other party had legitimate interests that couldn’t be dismissed or crushed, only negotiated.
The frame
The Treaty of Shackamaxon established negotiation principles with indigenous peoples, but Penn understood he also needed constitutional frameworks for governing European settlers. He produced a remarkable series of documents, each building on lessons from the last, each demonstrating that negotiated governance could work in practice, not just theory.
Penn’s 1682 Frame of Government, issued simultaneously with the Lenape treaty, established the basic structure: an elected Assembly with genuine legislative authority, a Provincial Council drawn from landowners, trial by jury, religious freedom for all Christians, and sharp limits on capital punishment (Penn had spent time in the Tower of London and understood state power’s dangers).
Most radically, the Frame explicitly provided for its own amendment. Penn didn’t claim to have discovered perfect governance structures. He established a starting point that would need adjustment as circumstances changed.
Colonists immediately tested this provision. They amended the Frame in 1683, barely a year after its adoption. They amended it again in 1696. These weren’t revolutionary upheavals but peaceful constitutional adjustments, demonstrating that fundamental governance structures could change without violence when proper mechanisms existed.
The 1701 Charter of Privileges represented Penn’s mature constitutional thinking, refined through nearly two decades of practical experience. It went further than the Frame: granting the Assembly sole power to initiate legislation, establishing annual elections, and guaranteeing religious liberty without qualifier, expanded to include Jews and eventually all faiths.
Pennsylvania became the only colony where settlers had actual control over their governance rather than advisory roles to appointed officials. The Charter of Privileges remained Pennsylvania’s constitution until 1776, a remarkable 75-year lifespan that testified to its flexibility and legitimacy.
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Even the mundane Philadelphia City Charter, dealing with night watchmen, market regulations, and street maintenance, mattered. It demonstrated that constitutional principles scaled down to municipal administration, that the boring infrastructure of daily governance operated on the same negotiated-consent principles as grand political theory.
The progression—Treaty (1682) → Frame of Government (1682) → amendments (1683, 1696) → Charter of Privileges (1701) → City Charter—shows iteration in practice, not just theory. Penn kept adjusting based on what worked and what didn’t. This wasn’t failure; it was the system working as designed, anticipating its own insufficiency and building in mechanisms for peaceful change.
Lesson two: Iteration, not permanence
Today, we have lost some of the wisdom of the Frame. Tragic events like Minnesota reveal something about how we think versus how Penn thought. The Frame assumes that no document, no policy, no arrangement can be final. Penn understood that circumstances change, that populations grow, that needs evolve, that what works in one decade may fail in the next. Wisdom lies not in achieving permanence but in establishing processes for peaceful change when circumstances demand it.
The contemporary impulse, visible in partisan battles over immigration, abortion, guns, religious liberty, is to achieve final victory: a Supreme Court decision, a constitutional amendment, a permanent legislative majority that settles the question forever.
Penn’s insight, validated by Philadelphia’s constitutional experience and eventually embedded in the U.S. Constitution’s Article V, is that democratic governance requires ongoing adjustment. Not because initial framers were foolish but because circumstances change in ways no one can anticipate. The Frame worked not because Penn was wise but because it anticipated Penn’s limitations.
What would this look like for immigration policy after Minnesota? It would mean abandoning the fantasy that we’ll achieve a permanent settlement, either open borders or perfect enforcement, that ends the debate. Instead, it would mean establishing review mechanisms, sunset provisions, required reassessments that force periodic renegotiation as demographics shift, economic conditions change, and enforcement technologies evolve.
This is exhausting work. Not easy. Penn’s treaty required ongoing meetings, patient listening, willingness to adjust positions. Democratic negotiations have always been exhausting; we’ve just convinced ourselves it should be easy.
The grid
Penn’s city plan embodied his political principles in physical form. Working with surveyor Thomas Holme, Penn designed a grid stretching from the Delaware to the Schuylkill River, with uniform blocks and five public squares. No central palace. No radiating boulevards emphasizing authority flowing from a sovereign. No medieval warren of alleys encoding class distinction. Just a grid, implying equality of access, predictability of law, transparency of intention.
When you stood at any corner in Penn’s Philadelphia, you could see to the next intersection in four directions. Nothing was hidden. Authority, if it existed, operated in view.
This physical transparency reinforced political transparency. Pennsylvania Assembly debates were public from the start, published in full, with votes recorded and financial accounts available for inspection. This wasn’t because colonists demanded it but because Penn’s Quaker practice made secrecy suspect. In Meeting, anyone might speak if moved by the Inner Light; silence held equal weight with speech; you spoke your truth before the community. In governance, the same principle applied.
Lesson three: Transparency
The Minnesota shooting video clips circulated on social media illustrate what happens when transparency is absent. A thirty-second clip showing officers approaching with weapons drawn becomes “proof” of aggressive tactics. A different angle showing individuals fleeing becomes “proof” of resistance. Each clip generates thousands of shares within communities already convinced of their interpretation, while cross-posting to opposing communities generates not dialogue but contempt.
Current social media architecture, optimizing for engagement, which means outrage, which means polarization, is the opposite of Penn’s grid. It hides more than it reveals. Algorithms determine what you see based on what will keep you scrolling. Echo chambers form naturally. Cross-cutting conversation becomes nearly impossible.
Penn’s physical grid embodied political principles; contemporary equivalents must include digital infrastructure. What if we built digital deliberation spaces using principles from Penn’s grid and Quaker Meeting practice: transparency of information, equality of access, structured listening before speaking, qualified assertion rather than absolute certainty?
Taiwan’s vTaiwan platform offers one model. Using Polis software, vTaiwan maps opinion distributions, identifying not just divisions but unexpected areas of agreement. In deliberations over Uber regulation, Airbnb rules, and online alcohol sales, vTaiwan brought thousands of citizens into iterative conversation, finding workable compromises that are neither pure majority rule nor interest-group negotiation achieved.
The key insight: most political debates aren’t actually binary. On immigration enforcement, significant majorities support both border security AND humane treatment of migrants AND due process protections AND efficient deportation of dangerous criminals. These preferences seem contradictory in binary framing but become complementary once the full opinion space is visible and participants are required to acknowledge rather than demonize competing legitimate concerns.
Structured disagreements
The Quaker Meeting, silent worship where any participant might speak if moved by the Inner Light, provided the template for Philadelphia’s civic culture. Benjamin Franklin’s Junto, founded in 1727, epitomized this approach: twelve men meeting weekly to debate questions of morals, politics, and natural philosophy, with formal rules requiring that members approach disagreement constructively, that assertions be qualified (“I imagine” rather than “certainly”), that consensus be sought even when impossible.
The Junto’s structure, rotating discussion leadership, mandatory preparation of written questions, commitment to mutual improvement rather than winning debates, directly reflected Quaker Meeting practice translated to secular purposes. From the Junto came Philadelphia’s Library Company, Union Fire Company, American Philosophical Society, and hospital, each founded through voluntary subscription, each governed through participatory mechanisms.
By 1776, Philadelphia had developed a civic culture where ordinary people expected to participate in collective decision-making, not just voting but organizing, petitioning, debating. This expectation, grounded in ninety years of practice, shaped the documents that would define American democracy.
Lesson four: Productive disagreement
After the Minnesota shooting, what struck me most wasn’t the disagreement over what happened or what it meant, but the complete absence of any shared framework for investigating contested events together. We don’t just disagree about immigration policy; we can’t even agree on basic facts because we’ve abandoned the assumption that such agreement is possible or even desirable.
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Penn and Tamanend spoke different languages, held incompatible cosmologies, served different peoples, yet they established mechanisms for determining facts and negotiating their implications. We speak the same language, live in the same country, yet treat each other as epistemological enemies.
The solution isn’t to eliminate disagreement, that’s impossible and undesirable, but to create structured spaces where disagreement can be productive rather than destructive. This requires rules. We must listen before speaking. We must acknowledge legitimate concerns in opposing positions. We must qualify assertions rather than claiming absolute certainty. We must distinguish between facts and interpretations. We must commit to continuing conversation even when consensus proves impossible. These rules are not easy to follow in practice. This is exhausting work.
The legitimacy crisis facing American democracy, with recent polling showing only 28 percent of Americans satisfied with the nation’s direction and trust in major institutions near historic lows, stems substantially from citizens feeling excluded from consequential decisions. Voting every two or four years doesn’t satisfy the participatory impulse that Philadelphia’s founding embodied. People want voice in ongoing governance, not just periodic authorization.
From Philadelphia to the Constitution
When delegates convened in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a new constitution, they didn’t arrive as blank slates ready to absorb Quaker philosophy through some mystical “halo effect.” They came from diverse colonial traditions: Virginia’s plantation aristocracy, Massachusetts’ town meetings, New York’s patronships, South Carolina’s slave economy. They brought their own precedents and prejudices.
But Philadelphia offered something no other American city could: a century of documented constitutional experimentation at multiple scales, operating successfully under transparent public scrutiny.
The physical infrastructure mattered for practical deliberation. Delegates lived, ate, and argued in Philadelphia for months. They walked streets designed on egalitarian grid principles. They witnessed a functioning city where multiple religious groups coexisted without sectarian governance. They saw voluntary associations—library companies, fire companies, mutual aid societies—operating successfully without state direction. The city demonstrated that transparent governance and distributed authority could work at scale, not as theory but as daily reality.
Pennsylvania’s documented constitutional experience provided testable models. When debating census requirements and reapportionment, delegates could examine Pennsylvania’s actual practice of periodic reassessment, written into the Frame of Government and refined through the Charter of Privileges. When discussing executive power, they had Pennsylvania’s Provincial Council as a case study, not hypothetical but a system that had operated for a century. When structuring the judiciary, Pennsylvania’s Court of Common Pleas offered a working example. When debating amendment procedures, they could study Pennsylvania’s experience: three major constitutional revisions (1683, 1696, 1701) accomplished peacefully through prescribed mechanisms.
This wasn’t philosophical influence but empirical evidence. Pennsylvania had tested what worked and what didn’t, documented the results, and made the records publicly available. The delegates could read Assembly debates, examine financial accounts, study court proceedings, and interview citizens who had lived under these systems. No other colony offered comparable documentation of constitutional evolution.
The location itself signaled compromise. Philadelphia was chosen precisely because it wasn’t anyone’s capital, not Virginia’s, not Massachusetts’, not New York’s. Meeting there meant no state hosted on home ground. The neutral setting encoded the federal principle they were trying to establish: that the Constitution would emerge from negotiation among equals, not imposition by a dominant power.
The Constitution they produced bears specific Pennsylvania imprints. The census requirement (Article I, Section 2) mandating reapportionment every ten years echoes Penn’s Frame, which required periodic reassessment of representation as population changed. The federal structure, dividing power between national and state governments, reflects Pennsylvania’s century of negotiating between proprietary interests, colonial administration, and local governance. Most fundamentally, the amendment process (Article V) institutionalizes what Pennsylvania had practiced since 1682: the assumption that no document can be final, that wisdom lies in establishing processes for peaceful change.
The Constitution creates a framework for ongoing negotiation, not just between branches through checks and balances but across time through amendments. It assumes diversity, different states, different interests, different visions of the good life, and doesn’t attempt to resolve these differences finally but rather establishes rules for managing them perpetually.
Lesson five: Negotiating forever
The Minnesota shooting will generate investigations, reports, possible prosecutions, civil suits, legislative proposals. Each will be contested. Conservative legislatures will pass laws strengthening immigration enforcement. Progressive jurisdictions will pass laws constraining it. Federal courts will review both. None of this will resolve underlying disagreements about national identity, sovereignty, obligation to migrants, or legitimate use of force.
Is that failure? No. That’s the nature of democratic governance over fundamental disagreements.
The Constitution’s amendment process institutionalizes the principle of perpetual negotiations. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments didn’t betray the founders’ vision; they fulfilled it by providing mechanisms for correcting catastrophic errors embedded in the original document.
Americans will negotiate forever. Deep disagreements on immigration, guns, abortion, religious liberty won’t vanish. They might become negotiable rather than existential, but they won’t disappear. Our goal should not be to win permanently, but to establish rules for managing disagreement that all parties accept as legitimate even when outcomes disappoint them.
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This requires accepting that the other side isn’t going away. That they have different values, different priorities, different visions of the good life, and the Constitution protects their right to advocate for those visions through legal channels. We can think they’re wrong. Penn thought Tamanend’s theology was wrong; Tamanend thought Penn’s was wrong, but we can’t deny their standing to participate in the negotiation.
Once we declare opponents illegitimate, outside the circle of those with whom negotiation is possible, democracy ends and force begins.
The incomplete inheritance
Penn’s Frame wasn’t perfect. It excluded women from formal politics, initially limited religious freedom to Christians, said nothing about slavery. The Lenape treaty, however principled, couldn’t prevent eventual dispossession as European population growth overwhelmed negotiated frameworks. The Constitution of 1787 embedded slavery through the three-fifths clause and fugitive slave provisions, requiring civil war and three amendments to partially correct.
These failures don’t invalidate founding principles; they illustrate why the principles matter. Penn’s assumption that no document can be final, that wisdom lies in processes for peaceful change, becomes more urgent given historical injustices embedded in founding documents. The Constitution works not despite amendments but through them.
Philadelphia’s Semiquincentennial offers opportunity for dual recognition. Celebrations need not be uncritical. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves; Penn himself owned slaves briefly before Quaker conscience caught up. But cynicism shouldn’t prevent appreciation of genuine innovation. Philadelphia’s founding documents created space for peaceful change, including change that contradicted founders’ own practices. That provision for self-correction matters immensely, especially now when our capacity for self-correction appears broken.
Last word
Penn and Tamanend didn’t create perfection under that elm. They created a commitment to continuing conversation. Two hundred fifty years later, that commitment requires renewal, not preservation but practice, not memory but engagement, not celebration but continuation of the negotiation they began.
After Minnesota, after everything dividing us now, the question isn’t whether we’ll continue disagreeing, we will, but whether we’ll maintain the commitment to negotiation that Penn and Tamanend established. Can we recover these five lessons their example teaches?
These lessons don’t make negotiation easy. But the alternative isn’t easier. The alternative to endless negotiation isn’t stability but force. Penn and Tamanend understood this: they negotiated not because they agreed but because they recognized that the alternative to negotiation was violence.
The same recognition faces us now. The treaty holds because we renew it. The Constitution works because we amend it. Democracy survives because we practice it, imperfectly but persistently, aware that the alternative to conversation is conquest.
The documents matter, the treaty, the Frame, the Charter, the Declaration, the Constitution, but they matter because they created space for continuing conversation, not because they settled questions permanently. Penn’s grid endures not because it was perfect but because it was adaptable. His treaty endured because it assumed renegotiation. His Frame worked because it anticipated amendment.
We now must build contemporary institutions, digital and physical, local and national, that embody these principles for 2026 and beyond.
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