tea party

There is a natural, though ever wavering, balance between the fear of being interfered with and the fear of being abandoned. But when one loses the fear of ever being abandoned, there is no balance, and the only thing managing the maladies springing from the fear of being interfered with is the temper or the times and the presence or absence of frightening things. And who can say that the times aren't bad or that there are no fearsome things about?

Come at from a different angle - there is a profound need for less participation and more representation in a democracy constructed like that of the United States, but wide-open, instant and easy communication pushes in exactly the wrong direction. In fact the internet produces a profoundly strange effect: it creates a new reason for the older, parliamentary approach. Born of chaos, rather than founding reason, parliament better harnesses multiple forces from myriad fronts. Our approach was founded on the hope that elitism and ever-spreading education would carry the day. That hope was largely unfounded. Instead, we have long had the costly blessing of being, in one way or another, bifurcated, which produces such fundamentally stable politics that even our odd system could function.

Put a little differently, the Constitution, fundamentally a structuring document, is rightly to be judged on the function of the structure created. And the only points at which that structure has served (instead of merely failing to disserve) are those at which it has jammed up, and made it impossible to do things that, in retrospect, we are glad we didn't do.

The things that our governmental structure has positively done, by means of structure, are things that are don't right past the Constitution, such as judicially mandated desegregation, which has everything to do with Marshall and Lincoln, and not a lot to do with Philadelphia (though more than nothing, since Article III is fully an article of the sort I and II are, rather than of the sort IV through VII are, and that is a pregnant peculiarity).