Increasingly thinking the founding fathers were exceptionally mediocre people who did some exceptionally mediocre thinking and even recognized it. Mixed in with some outright bad thinking,
Unfortunately generations of fragile nerds, who approach it the way comicbook fans approach the Batman canon, have elevated that mediocre work to a kind of divine status where it is subject to stresses of overextended use it can’t handle.
And between being very hard to amend, and the courts serving as a sort of retcon-cope nerd fandom, the fragility just builds and builds. It’s a very short constitution (among the better features) with astounding amounts of legal exegesis on top. Kinda like windows on dos.
I genuinely don’t get the religious fervor the cult of originalism brings to the party. It’s a hard practical problem of structural/procedural reform exacerbated by a group that sincerely treats a core document like it’s divine revelation with unquestionable authority.
So basically the constitution has a meltdown/spectre type basic bug due to bad original design that is now being claimed as a feature twitter.com/Thom_Hartmann/…
No, 235 years of field use doesn’t make the case you might think it does. It’s a version of appeal to nature fallacy. Mere survival of a thing makes no case one way or the other about its moral value. Especially when propped up by violence.
The “proof by real world demonstration” doesn’t show what origins lists claim. Slavery was ignored and took a century to blow up in a bloody civil war and still isn’t sorted out. The demonstration is that bad thinking can be propped up by violence for centuries
Hmm. Arguably Hamilton did foresee and in fact seed the Industrial Revolution in his 1791 report on manufactures that set up the American System. It was just kinda against the spirit of the Jeffersonian constitutional grain. Michael Lind’s land of promise covers it decently
I think their main failure was the failure to imagine the Industrial Revolution... and what would happen to representation when states or territories are added to the Union.