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Comment by throw0101d | Hacker News Reader

> I was kind of surprised how the USA bounced back from Trump I. But I really wonder if there is going to be a similar recovery this time around. The amount of outright destruction is overwhelming.

It is as resilient as the people (in power?) want it to be:

> To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.

* James Madison, Papers 11:163, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-11-02-010...

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Why is it that every high-brow discussion of US politics soon ends up quoting one of the founding fathers? As an outsider, I think the fundamental issue in the US political system is that there doesn't seem to have been any new ideas since the eighteenth century. It's just a bunch of rhetoricians quoting the same ancient texts, as though the US faces exactly the same problems it was facing two and a half centuries ago.

maybe for some of the same reasons that discussion of computer science likes to quote Knuth? or big-O notation?

The political theories/philosophies developed by the founding fathers remain foundational for reasons.

First mover disadvantage. The US was among the pioneers of modern democratic system, and arguably the most successful one, which paradoxically trapped its descendants into thinking there must have been something magical about how it was initially set up and it should never get updated.

Many other latecomer nations didn't enjoy that kind of success - in fact many of them started with their first few presidents being brutal dictators, so they're under no illusion that their own "founding fathers" were infallible angels.

All of the ideas the founding fathers discussed arose in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the 1600s. If you're familiar with that conflict, particularly that between the Parliament of England and Charles I, a lot of the US founding fathers' particular obsessions (the word tyranny, for instance) make more sense. The real magic in the American Revolution was how spectacularly unambitious it was; all of the most important parts were already in place in Britain, and only denied to the colonies through sheer bloody-mindedness.

The US is not the first modern democracy; it's just the best at self-aggrandisement.

> The real magic in the American Revolution was how spectacularly unambitious it was; all of the most important parts were already in place in Britain, and only denied to the colonies through sheer bloody-mindedness.

I think the main 'innovation' was the splitting up of the Crown / Executive.

One failing was not taking political parties into account. It's not like they were unknown at the time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party#18th_century

There have been new ideas, and even a "second founding"[1]. But unfortunately, some of the ideas from the second founding era and beyond are still controversial.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Founding

> Why is it that every high-brow discussion of US politics soon ends up quoting one of the founding fathers? As an outsider […]

I, the GP, am Canadian, so have my own system to worry about.[0]

But if you're going to talk about the pros and cons of a country's system, it is useful to a certain extent to look at what the architects were thinking. And in this particular case they did have some insight into the weaknesses of what they thought up.

Another that I heard in a recent podcast[1] was the fact that the existence / creation of political parties was not put in anywhere in the US system (even though they had existed in the UK already), and so you can get into tribalism/clans, which we are now seeing the effects of.

[0] https://sutherlandhousebooks.com/product/the-crisis-of-canad...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhZBLpzcYx4&t=50m50s

> high-brow discussion of US politics

lol, implying you'll find that on HN

James Madison has been dead for a while. The supreme court has so far failed to check Trump's power and congress and the senate are in his pocket. If there ever was a time that those institutions should have acted in the interest of the nation rather than in the interest of the parties then a while ago would have been fine. Now it is late, if not too late. For all that its worth Madison's writings are irrelevant, what matters is acts and there are very few of those.

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