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You’re saying the anthropology underlying the entire foundation of our structures of government have one, hilariously obvious flaw?! PLOT HOLE, AMERICA.

I also don't think he foresaw getting sued by Marbury.

Most Americans do not lack virtue. The big problems are that they're gullible--vulnerable to propaganda like all humans-- AND we are drowning in propaganda lies. Ppl who voted for this thought they voted for lower gas/grocery prices, an end to forever wars & deportation of violent criminals only.

Shamemaxxing was a thing back then. Kept people in line with the community.

A Republic of Virtue you say

Uh oh we’re screwed

back in the day it was thought, possibly correctly, that being kinda pretentious and wordy was good

proportional parliaments are provably more durable than presidential systems--though not invulnerable!--and for obvious institutional design reasons prospect.org/2023/10/23/2...

Washington: Beware political factions Hamilton: *winks directly at the camera*

from Goldwater telling Nixon it was time to pack it in to every Republican hiding under the table and hoping someone else would deal with Trump after the pussy tape, a total moral collapse of the GOP

the bit in this graph about how the rot of American civic and moral life is downstream from our worship of market logic -- whew, buddy, is that ever on point

This always seems to falls apart at these seams: a) Who determines virtue? Does Madison have much room to speak? b) When other places (i.e. Middle Eastern theocracies) follow this line of thought, we get the "morality police"; c) What is the evidence for CONTROLLED mutability of public virtue?

This quote overlooks the undue influence of money in politics/elections. Pathetic shit.

He’s right and he was right to say it

The Big Lie is that the founders had somehow figured out One Weird Trick to good governance. The reality is that good governance requires good people. Without the latter, no piece of paper means shit.

yeah, i think there are certain systems that can be built to be *more durable* against authoritarian takeover, but at the end of the day, if the people want Hitler they're gonna get Hitler

No, no that's the opposite of what Madison or even moreso Adams would have said. A public with civic virtue is not a problem for the constitutional order they were envisioning but a benefit. They worried that without civic virtue in citizens an aristocracy would exercise dangerous oligarchic power.

The whole point of "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" is that the whole thing falls apart if Congress is just a bunch of Renfields

'like a whale through a net' or something like that yeah?

Madison was against a Bill of Rights. Anti-Federalists have been proved right.

Jeffries has a solution to the gridlock: Make secret deals with his longstanding friend Kushner to supply the votes to pass Trump’s agenda in the lame duck.

The government is chock-full of self-serving "grubby power seekers." The current era is just exposing a lot of big flaws in the system's ability to withstand in the face of it. I really don't think "ideology" is the cause of the problem.

.. which is a clear direct cause of the dangerous ideologues being in the positions they are

Virtue left the U.S. in a rush with the cheering on of "greed is good"