I recently addressed an enthusiastic crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference on a concern that has been growing in my mind. I call it the “crisis of legitimacy,” and by that, I mean the growing distrust of people in our legacy institutions. Institutions such as the media, academia, medicine, and even the government itself. 

At our country’s founding, our forefathers’ understood that political power comes from the consent of the governed and that sovereignty doesn’t belong to any official or institution — it lies in the people itself. Today, this notion often seems to have been entirely abandoned.