Here is a counterpoint. The US foundational documents (Declaration, Constitution) are written in cursive/script. Public education certainly has something to do with creating citizens capable of participating in US democracy and reading these docs is one significant part of that. Obviously they can be transcribed so I don’t think this is super compelling but perhaps it is not anachronistic as it seems.
I’ve read most of the constitution on each 4th of July for a decade now. I’ve never read the cursive version.
You don’t need to learn to read cursive in order to learn the history, importance, or context of our founding documents. I promise that the script is NOT the most important thing about those documents, and someone who was unable to read cursive is still fully able to participate fully in our democracy.
From here: http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/all_amendments_usconst.ht...
I see the final amendment: << AMENDMENT XXVII - Originally proposed Sept. 25, 1789. Ratified May 7, 1992.
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened. >>
First: Holy Sh-t: This is a long time between propsal and passage / acceptance!
Second: Do I misunderstand? Do you consider this amendment academic? It sounds like reps cannot increase compenstation during their term.
> The proposed congressional pay amendment was largely forgotten until 1982, when Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper for a government class in which he claimed that the amendment could still be ratified. He later launched a nationwide campaign to complete its ratification.[2][3]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_...
Other than a single world government, or treaties with similar effect, I don't see how to achieve what I think we both agree would be a good outcome.
OP was discussing constitutions, structure of government. We haven't made that much fundamental progress on design of government compared with the eighteenth century.
Are there housekeeping fixes the Constitutions needs? Yes. Do they reveal glaring, fundamental errors in the system's design? No.
This segment is widely called the "Three-fifths Compromise" in American English. It refers to the fact that enslaved people would be counted as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of determining gov't representation.
From a modern perspective, this section is wholly demented and supports the institution of slavery. This support for the institution of slavery in the founding document of the United States is a terrible stain upon its reputation.
The biggest issue I have with the US Constitution in a modern society: It is too hard to change. (When is the last time the US had a serious effort to pass a new amendment? 1970s / 1980s-ish: Women's equality, but still it failed!) Many successful, younger democracies have found ways to allow non-extremist changes to their constitution, to support "futurism" (my own term) -- the progression of society. Personally, I am a big supporter of regular (frequent), small changes to a country's constitution to support, and facilitate, social change.
Sure. But that's a preference, nothing more. We don't have strong evidence one way or another, nor over-arching theories supporting or rejecting seldom-messed-with versus frequently-adapted constitutions.
That's my point: we haven't made progress beyond preferences. As such, denigrating the Constitution on account of its age falls flat. Modern concepts of governance were largely already in place at its drafting.
1. Modern gerrymandering is probably the Achilles heel that'll bring the US to its knees.
2. Judicial capture is the standard playbook for autocratic take-overs of democracies — there needs to be a reaffirmation process & it needs to be a "yes - no > 1/2*senators".
3. The electoral college is particularly vulnerable to bad actors at the state level, and the opportunity cost to capture the college is higher than the capture cost.
4. The Senate, itself, was a known-to-be-bad compromise to build a confederation, rather than a formal union into a single, sovereign State.
I'm not entirely convinced of the last one: I kinda like the idea if 50 separate competing democracies all trying to come up with great ways to be a state, with a fairly low barrier-to-migrate.
I guess your analogy still checks out. Neither Old nor New Testament are written in English. And thus English-speakers rely on translations.
The US constitution was objectively very far ahead of its time, and it still is a far better attempt at a constitutional order than most.
Very rarely can a country's problems be blamed on its constitution. The UK doesn't even have one and it's still one of the world's most advanced democracies.
Even more excitingly, some of the documents we consider constitutional aren't even statutes. My favourite is a pseudonymous letter to The Times sent in 1950, which authoritatively established a constitutional convention for when the monarch can refuse his Prime Minister a dissolution of Parliament[1]. (The writer, 'Senex', was the King's private secretary Sir Alan Lascelles).
Also:
> Neither side stood behind their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War.
Consider for instance John Jay, who thought that Christian rulers guided by Christian principles were necessary to maintain order and freedom, and thought the Republic would be doomed if it ever forgot this. A far cry from Jefferson's deism.
Actually, the usually trace back to the constitution, one way or another.
> The UK doesn't even have one
Yes, it does. [0]
It's not an explicitly separate written document, but that's not required of a constitution. The idea of a constitution predates the spread of the practice of having them as distinct documents.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_K...
It's not, but it helps.
It remains to be seen but I have my doubts esp. in a future socio-political context where post-modernism and cyberpunk ideals reign supreme.
Under most viable definitions of democracy, the US isn't the oldest. If you restrict to non-aristocratic (i.e., not limiting franchise by ancestry) representative democracy, Finland and New Zealand, among others, achieved that first; if you accept participatory democracies, the Iroquois Confederacy has it beat by even more; you need to tightly define “democracy” around exactly the US model at a particular time to make it first.
> It's also the legal foundation for the establishment of the country
No, it's not, the country was established before the Constitution.
didn't exist until 1918
>New Zealand
didn't exist until a century after the US was founded
>Iroquois Confederacy
extinguished utterly, nowadays an object of idle revisionism
OP mentioned the Declaration and the Constitution in the same sentence, but for the record, both are revered and held to high regard and do provide the legal foundation for the nation in its current iteration (Articles of Confederation were older than Constitution but have been cast aside due to their ineffective results).
As a whole, it doesn't, both the major parties have elements of it that they are strongly attached to, but each have also made amendments to it, and hacks around parts of it, key parts of their agenda.
> where it would be sacrilegious to even change the font, let alone bring it up to speed with almost 250 years of progress in ethics, political practice and technology,
Um, it's been updated quite a lot since initially adopted (and I’m not talking about the font or other presentational issues.)
Many of the world's young democracies exist because of America; notably those formed out of the collapse of USSR. All of Europe's democracies exist because of the US role in WW2. Same as the current governments in Japan and Taiwan. Don't get me wrong I am not arguing America is perfect, there have been plenty of egregiously harmful moves, including what's currently happening in Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. Although Iraq is technically a young democracy now because of the United States.
Can you explain what you mean by this? Continental Europe's relationship with republicanism and democracy dates back to the same roots as what spawned the ideas that led to the US's formation, and that is the European Enlightenment.
This is a misunderstanding of the actual concern there. The way I've heard it explained is, once it's all online in printed form and people can't read the original physical document, the online versions can be tweaked by the platforms and no one would be able to read the original to prove it's been changed.
This is an extremely common trope in sci-fi, where only a small group of people understand the language of the "sacred texts" and have been claiming it says something different than it actually does and no one is able to challenge it.
I think both versions stem from real-world religions where the translations have to make adjustments because the source language has concepts that don't quite fit in the new language.
The fact is that you can't teach everything and, as I recall my grade school, learning Palmer script actually occupied quite a bit of time at one point in school. (And it was always my lowest grade.) You can just as easily argue for required music classes, typing classes, cooking classes, or any number of classes appropriate for early elementary school.
Yes, I can attest to that. But it rapidly becomes easier if I stick with it for more than a few minutes. If you can read it at all, with effort, it's something you can acclimatize to.
Myself I've lost the ability to write cursive. Obviously I could get it back with a little practice but I see zero point in doing so. I barely even write anything vs type these days.
Me as well, to the point that when I do write, it's a lot slower and less legible than it used to be. Most of that muscle memory has left in the last 30 years since I've been heavily using keyboards and writing less and less each year.
I hold my pen so that it's pointing to the right, so that my hand trails the path of the pen tip. Do you...hold the pen so that it is pointing to the left so as to avoid smearing? Thus the pen tip is trailing the path of your hand?
If so, that's an ingenious solution to an annoying problem, don't know why I never thought of it before, but yeah that would make it impossible to write meticulously.
https://www.oldfonts.com/antiquepenman/wp-content/uploads/20...
I can read this, but mostly I'm doing it through context and word recognition, not letter recognition. It's a struggle. This means there are some words that take a while to get.
That's how most people read printed text as well. You're not sounding out every word, are you?
If someone's not familiar with 1800s cursive they're going to struggle and they're going to resort to trying to decipher individual letters - they will end up sounding out not only every individual word, but every individual letter.
With something that I only know well enough to sound out even when printed (e.g., Cyrillic), I have a hard time making head or tail of it in cursive form.
I'm not arguing you have to be 100% self sufficient, but learning to read what amounts to a specific font shouldn't be too much to ask.
Spending time learning how to read a font optimized for hand writing that you might need to read a handful of times in your life seems like it would fall into the same category of work that’s not worth the time
Because of this, I learned to read them.
Because of this, I got slightly more out of the maps (and cover) of The Hobbit than most normal people — Tolkien used runes as merely a font for Dwarfish, which was really just English.
I wouldn't say that this is any more useful than cursive.