Is it really failure by their standards? How many of them owned slaves? How many of them viewed women as essentially property?
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
It turns out that a handful of young land-owning white men from the 1700s, born almost 200 years before the advent of game theory, didn’t actually properly anticipate every way in which the political system they were designing could fail.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 week ago
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I mean, I think they’d have considered a civil war less than 100 years after the founding of the country to be a pretty good indication of failure.
As for the modern world, they explicitly talk about trying to design a system so that a tyrant doesn’t become president. All the supposed checks and balances that were supposed to prevent that turned out to be as effective as wet tissue paper. The founders also cared a lot about the president not being corrupt, and drafted the emoluments clause(s) to prevent that, and Trump has just completely ignored those clauses. I think they’d have been pretty upset about that, and wondering why the law of the land was just being ignored.
farngis_mcgiles@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
it’s working as intended
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Lol they fucked up real bad. I mean, Washington wanted 2 terms to be the norm. So why didn’t he just advocate for that to be… ye know… written into the fucking constitution?
Also, they had a contingent election like just 4 years after his retirement, because checks notes Pres and VP are just 1st and second place? And electors cast 2 votes for the same office? NANI?!? What a bunch of mess. (Imagine if the Federalists just tell their electors to, instead of voting 65 for Adams and 65 for the VP, just vote all 130 for Adams, 0 for the VP candidate. Just win with a Federalist Pres and Democratic-Republican VP. Oh wait checks 1796 election that actually happened. They got a Federalist Pres and Democratic-Republican VP because of shenanigans. Imagine a trump-walz or harris-vance. What a dumb ass idea. It failed so bad, they had to write an entire amendment to fix this shit. 🤣
(When I read about that, my brain just had an aneurism, like WTF is that election system?!?)
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
The funny thing is that so much of it is based on the idea that everyone involved is going to be on their best behaviour, working for the good of the country, compromising with their opponents, and so-on. And, then it all falls apart as soon as one person realizes that they get an advantage as soon as they simply ignore the norms.
Also, don’t forget that there was less than a century between the revolution and the civil war. If your brand new form of government is so poor that a significant fraction of your population thinks a civil war is preferable to resolving things through that system, your system isn’t very good.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The civil war wasn’t about the form of government.
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
The civil war was due to the fact that the disputes over what should and shouldn’t be allowed couldn’t be resolved within the framework the government provided.
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
It was about State’s rights…
State’s rights suchs as the right to own slaves
droans@midwest.social 1 week ago
He didn’t, that’s just a whitewashed version we tell ourselves.
He just didn’t want the President to be viewed as a monarch or a lifetime appointment. He turned down a third term because he feared he would die in office and the public would believe that’s the norm.
VerifiedSource@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
The US was the first large scale modern democracy. Of course it has design flaws.
Parlamentarism, as we know it now, had only been recently established in the UK in the 17rh century.
Contemporary to US early democracy were absolutist monarchies based on aristocracy. Separation of powers envisioned by Montesquieu, Rousseau‘s social contract, were still new political ideas. The federalist papers and later US constitution were cutting edge political theory at the time.
It’s very impressive that the US has lasted so long actually and was able to adapt. The French established their first democratic republic later and were unable to create a stable state.