The greatest flaw in the founder’s reasoning was that they trusted public servants to fight for what’s best for the country. They expected public figures to always attempt to do what’s best for the country and their constituents and built our systems based on a lot of trust.
They never expected there to be half the country that doesn’t care about the rules and only works for their own benefit.
They didn’t really… there are a LOT of check and balances in the US constitution.
There were a few holes though. FPTP is possibly the biggest one, yet the easiest to forgive them for because they literally didn’t know any better, but FPTP causes bipartism which leads to line-toeing which necessarily weakens the “balance” part of check and balances.
Then there’s the almost complete immovability of the US constitution which gives enormous power to the SCOTUS and led to a whole lot of gaps being filled with fragile “tradition” or nefariously repurposed (2nd amendment, citizens united, executive orders, yada yada). This isn’t just on the founders for trusting states too much to continuously reform the constitution, but also lies squarely on this frankly insane cult around the revolutionary mythos which made it entirely taboo to reform anything the founding fathers ever did to the point that no meaningful amendment was passed in over a century.
Complain all you want about the founding fathers, but they aren’t to blame if a vast majority of Americans would almost certainly, in a hypothetical referundum, vote against even the smallest constitutional reform on the grounds that “it ain’t what the Almighty Fathers intended”. The very fact that you’re talking about the Founding Fathers’ intent as is if it has ANY BEARING on today’s politics shows just how deeply ingrained this personality cult is.
The greatest flaw in the founder’s reasoning was that they trusted public servants to fight for what’s best for the country. They expected public figures to always attempt to do what’s best for the country and their constituents and built our systems based on a lot of trust.
They never expected there to be half the country that doesn’t care about the rules and only works for their own benefit.
They didn’t really… there are a LOT of check and balances in the US constitution.
There were a few holes though. FPTP is possibly the biggest one, yet the easiest to forgive them for because they literally didn’t know any better, but FPTP causes bipartism which leads to line-toeing which necessarily weakens the “balance” part of check and balances.
Then there’s the almost complete immovability of the US constitution which gives enormous power to the SCOTUS and led to a whole lot of gaps being filled with fragile “tradition” or nefariously repurposed (2nd amendment, citizens united, executive orders, yada yada). This isn’t just on the founders for trusting states too much to continuously reform the constitution, but also lies squarely on this frankly insane cult around the revolutionary mythos which made it entirely taboo to reform anything the founding fathers ever did to the point that no meaningful amendment was passed in over a century.
Complain all you want about the founding fathers, but they aren’t to blame if a vast majority of Americans would almost certainly, in a hypothetical referundum, vote against even the smallest constitutional reform on the grounds that “it ain’t what the Almighty Fathers intended”. The very fact that you’re talking about the Founding Fathers’ intent as is if it has ANY BEARING on today’s politics shows just how deeply ingrained this personality cult is.