The Broken Check and Balance
Only a country with as much going for it as the United States—scale, resources, location, historic openness to energy and ambition and change—could withstand a national governing structure as ill-matched to current conditions as America’s has become.
The intricate trade-offs and compromises behind the constitutional structures of the 1780s may have suited the fledgling United States of that era—which had a smaller total population than today’s Los Angeles, which ran only from the Atlantic coastline to the Appalachians, which had few international ambitions beyond survival, and which uneasily spanned both free and slave states. Almost every circumstance of today’s United States is different, except, of course, for the ambition of creating an ever-more-perfect Union.
What has kept the country going through these centuries of change is not the superbness of its original rules—which, significantly, have been adopted by few of the hundreds of new governments that have come into being in more detail back in 2010.)
