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Quote by: Gods_Mercenary  Strong central authority is Tyrranny and a moneyed interest. At times, government may be non-malevolent, but power is the most addictive drug in existance. You can't only take part of Jefferson's theories because in the same sentence he would have said that government is the main Tyrranny we need protection from.
As to a change in the presidency, the current form pf presidency is not what the founders intended anyway. They intended a man who was submissive to congress in most issues and certainly not one who was the most powerful man in the world. |
What the founders imagined when they were designing this system was based on very few democratic prototypes to choose from at the time. While apparently
Franklin brought in some ideas from the Iroquois participatory democracy model, for the most part the US prototype drew from the Roman Republic model. There simply wasn't a big supermarket of democracy prototypes to choose from. They had to use their imaginations, and most of those Founders were the elite of their time, educated in the classical traditions of Europe, so knowing what we know about the mind now, we can assume their imaginations conscribed to what they knew at that time. That's one reason why our Constitution is called an experiment. Since then a lot of models have evolved. Ours is something of an antique. Perhaps 19th Century American Exceptionalism still holds sway in our thinking and accumulated traditions of American hubris makes questioning the document's greatness inhibitory.
As you said, power is a drug, and it works in many nefarious ways. Most of the Founders were from a European class structure in which as elites they had advantages they took for granted. The "drug of power" of their very positions can be expected to have dimmed their imaginative faculties, no matter how excited they each may have been about the new "revolution of individualism" they were in, and they had difficulty extending full humanity and a corresponding application of the Bill of Rights to all the individuals we are now willing to consider fully human in this country after some 200 years.
What they didn't know was that a presidential system itself has ontological implications built in, and no matter how much they didn't want it to become like the monarchies of Europe, they didn't recognize how evolution of institutions themselves can supersede the individual. We ourselves still focus on personality, when it's the institution itself that the next president will inherit, and much of what they say while stumping for election will vanish once they sit in the seat of power.
With the evolution of society, the growth of corporations, and the economic system that altogether has evolved, all along the way the government has had to try to adapt to meet the Constitutional mandates and the contingencies of reality. What's being tested in the process is the legal structure itself. Often the resolutions are an unhappy result of paradox, like applying the 14th Amendment, which is about individuals, to a corporate entity, the private corporation, and declaring that a corporate entity is a person under the law. The very notion of the revolution of individualism and the Bill of Rights is thrown into some sort of conceptual chaos with that.
What's evolved is a result of basic structures that were in place, some of those results have features that are almost Frankensteinian. The point is there may have been no way to interpret the Constitution that could have come out to look anything like what the Founders hoped for, and a kind of legal fundamentalism calling upon an originalist interpretaiton itself puts a chain around the pressures calling for a creative approach to problem solving that maintains democracy. If we find we are giving up our democracy for anything -- security from terrorism, for instance -- then perhaps there may be an inherent structural problem worth considering in the Constitution itself.