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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.

Surely there weren't any historical examples of that happening, like in the Mediterranean...

I kinda dislike how folks hold the founders up with some kind of religious reverence (for some, only when it suits their agenda). These guys may have been bright at the time, but you can tell they didn't think a lot of things through and certainly didn't "plan for scale". That we now have judges acting as pseudo priests "interpreting the founders" is just laughable, I doubt the founders envisioned their constitution still being in use 300+ years later.

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They pretty specifically expected it to be modified and changed out, so we've let them down by freezing it and no longer even passing amendments (let alone a new convention to replace it). Hard to say they should have built a system that was up for lasting more than two centuries though imo

The founders came from England, which has the world's longest unbroken political tradition (apart from 11 years during the English Civil War). England has top-level cabinet positions that were established 800 years ago. So I doubt the founders would be surprised that their constitution was still in use 236 years later.

Regardless, what the founders believed is relevant because they're the ones that wrote the currently operative legal document that governs the country. We can replace that document whenever we want! But until we do that, the document, and what its authors intended it to mean, are binding on us.

Is it really longer than the Catholic church?

Along this line of thinking, surely there’s an unbroken administrative / bureaucratic tradition running China that spans multiple royal dynasties and perhaps even the recent ideological upheaval. Can we call that an enduring government?

I don't think there is, since China's last dynasty ended in 1912. At that point, and in 1947, there were very clear breaks with previous governance

Fair point.

The founders wanted exactly what we have: A government beholden to the rich and well connected. That's why they agitated for revolution in the first place. They talked big about liberty and democracy, but when given the chance, they said very concretely: "We the people" means "We the rich, white people"

More directly, they all talked about how problematic political parties could be, and then did nothing at all to prevent them. They weren't exactly good systems thinkers.

you're being downvoted, i suggest folks read up on the whiskey rebellion, the economic depression after the revolutionary war, the economic problems and internal strife caused by policies that Washington and the other federalists enacted to "strengthen the republic" in the years between the war and the constitution being ratified.

https://archive.org/details/tamingdemocracyt0000bout/

They did not envision it to be used in its original state, and it hasn’t. But it also hasn’t changed much in a long time.

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