Maggie's Farm

That is a fascinating perspective, and I encountered something like it but not that focused fifty years ago at William and Mary. It seems to have acquired additional support and analysis since that time. I follow history but not historians and did not know this. Thank you greatly.

Let me offer a mostly-agreeing but slightly different perspective: We do need to reconvene and change some constitutional approaches. It's only natural, and we should have been doing it every fifty years. However, we have not been doing it and I fear greatly how bad we would be at it now. The people who would worm their way in to the task would be a collection of our worst possible choices. We would do better with the first four hundred names in the Cambridge phone book than with the Harvard faculty, as William F Buckley noted. (And Cambridge is pretty crazy, so that's saying a lot.)

It is similar to my view on many things about government at present. When considering war, sometimes we are justified and have the talent. But we no longer can do it well. So also with race relations, poverty, education, what have you - yes, we should do something to fix those, but we are now only able to make things worse while spending lots of money. Maybe it didn't have to get this bad (though I think bureaucracy has constant degrading function), but the point is that it did get this bad, and now we dare not do any of it.