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What a Constitutional Crisis Looks Like
The system of checks and balances we have inherited is in danger.
(Author’s Note: The writers intended to compose anonymously under the nom de plume “Publius” in The Federalist Papers. I give the scholarly consensus of the identity of each writer. The actual fact is beyond my ken.)
That system assumes things about Americans that are less than complimentary, because of what the Founders believed about human nature. Just as they did not trust individuals, they did not trust what they might have called eklogikó sóma, the voters as a body, back when educated persons were expected to have studied Greek and Latin.
They feared “the mob,” which my people might have likened to a bison herd. You could shoot one from a distance and the rest would continue grazing as if nothing had happened. But if you did manage to stampede them, they became unstoppable to the point of suicide. That’s why some of the earliest evidence of human behavior in the Americas are called “buffalo jumps,” where Indians who lacked the technology to kill the animals would cause them to kill themselves.
This fear of mob behavior would be why the Founders gave us a republic rather than a democracy. That was balanced by fear of an authoritarian government, which is why they gave us rights against…
