Reply #67: I'm sick and tired... [View All]

[dalus]

I'm sick and tired of hearing about how brilliant the Founding Fathers were. It's as if their writings were a bible that we should worship and adhere to until the end of time. Seriously, if these guys were so prescient then how come they didn't anticipate the emergence of political parties?

The Constitution was definitely a work in progress, not a complete guide to running the country. They didn't clearly spell out the role of the US Supreme Court, or the relationship between the three branches of the federal government. They worded the Second Amendment in a confusing and ambiguous way that gives courts huge latitude to interpret it as they choose. In fact, the entire Bill of Rights is horribly unclear as to whether it restricts just the federal government or all state governments, which is why the Supreme Court has found it necessary to justify applying parts of it at the state level by using the 14th Amendment equal protection clause. Probably most catastrophically, the Constitution did not spell out whether or not individual states had the right to withdraw from the union, leaving us to fight our most destructive war to decide that question.

I have great respect for the work and writings of Jefferson, Hamilton and others, but their writings should serve as a philosophical reference point for us, not dogma. We should constantly re-examine their ideas and decide for ourselves where they were right and where they went wrong. We should examine our present-day institutions, measuring them against the right ideas of the founders, and try to make them better serve those principles. However, we should also recognize those parts of our institutions that are based on wrong ideas and correct them. Likewise, we should admit that some of our institutions were just poorly thought out and should be revised based on the experience we've had over time. Our attention to philosophical questions will help us remember that the right way is not always the convenient way.

Back in 1787 there was an excellent excuse for ratifying a half-baked blueprint for the republic, namely that there were few examples in history to compare to, and most of those examples were in far-gone times and very different societies. Now we have successful democracies all over the world to compare to, as well as a 200-plus-year track record ourselves.

In short, if we don't know more about how to run a working democratic republic now than the founders did 200 years ago, we must be pretty dumb. If we're really that useless, maybe we should consider getting a king to run the place for us.