Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

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Mmmh, here's my take: they are not infallible superheroes. They were fallible human beings.

Are there better people, today, who could lead the country? Of course. Will they ever actually be elected to do so? Sadly, no.

America in the late 1700s was a weird moment in history where educated, forward-thinking intellectuals (not nobility, not just the moneyed elite — actually a lot of men who (mostly) deserved to be called intellectual) actually had a chance to make the rules. They made pretty good ones. Some flawed rules, but good ones.

We're not going to get that again. The real-time feedback of TwitterDemocracy would prevent us from ever getting a document as general yet meaningful as the Bill of Rights, with basically unfettered rights to speech and assembly.

So until I see a viable path to put people in charge who actually surpass them in wisdom and foresight, I'm going to stick to what they put forward. It has aged and worked amazingly well, and have 0 confidence that the politicians of today, if starting from scratch, would do better.

You might be interested in reading on many of the other democracies out there that update their constitutions frequently.

There are no other democracies out there that have the almost-unfettered rights to assembly and speech that the US has. This is important to me.

And FWIW, there are (by most measures) no other democracies out there which have gone as long under peaceful rule of law as the US. Every other democracy (save by some measures the UK) has fallen to coup or revolution in less than this duration.

Their latest constitutions may work to keep them stable as long as the US has managed. Or they may not. Time will tell.

> there are (by most measures) no other democracies out there which have gone as long under peaceful rule of law as the US.

Are you taking the end of the US civil war as the starting point? If so, then Switzerland has a longer duration of peaceful rule of law.

I don't see that as necessary, given that most of the US remained under continuous democratic governance. The rest... got there eventually.

Even if you do count from the end of the civil war, I would not consider my central thesis destroyed by the small and frankly uniquely weird country of Switzerland. Switzerland is a country that has done very well for its people, but the lessons which have kept it stable and safe over the past two centuries (have a lot of mountains, and don't be worth invading) are not ones which extrapolate out.

And let's be honest -- Switzerland was not functionally independent in WWII. It wasn't necessary to invade, because they did whatever the Third Reich wanted with their stolen gold and borders. This is not the stability I am looking for.

> Switzerland is a country that has done very well for its people, but the lessons which have kept it stable and safe over the past two centuries (have a lot of mountains, and don't be worth invading) are not ones which extrapolate out.

Would you say that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political thought has been valuable and influential in the world?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau

> Even if you do count from the end of the civil war, I would not consider my central thesis destroyed by the small and frankly uniquely weird country of Switzerland.

What exactly is your central thesis? It sounds like you're presenting an argument of American exceptionalism, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point here.

Freedom of assembly and speech are table stakes in most democracies, and the US doesn't even rank particularly highly (#45) in the World Press Freedom index:

https://rsf.org/en/ranking

The real outlier in the US is gun rights.

Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic or ideological flamewar, or any flamewar. We're trying for something else here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> It has aged and worked amazingly well, and have 0 confidence that the politicians of today, if starting from scratch, would do better.

It has aged well only if you ignore the fact that millions of Americans who were at first considered property, and then “freed” only to be incarcerated and discriminated against, don’t have a say in what “well” means.

Politicians of today understand today’s problems and are better equipped to find answers to those problems. They are armed with a team of educated aides and have access to political science research. I’m confident they could devise a better, modern constitution today.

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