But no other country invests such authority in a single document dating from the era of silk knee britches and powdered wigs. Sealed in moisture-controlled, bullet-proof glass containers that are on display in a special rotunda at the National Archives Museum in Washington DC by day and lowered into a multi-ton bomb-proof vault by night, the Constitution is to the US what the Bible was to medieval Europe or the Qur’an to today’s Islamic State…

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One might think that Americans would be impatient with a Constitution that frustrates any and all efforts at reform, yet the response has been the opposite: instead of growing angry, people have reassured themselves over the years that immobility is all to the good because anything they do to change things can only make them worse. In effect, they’ve taken the old adage, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ and turned it around. Since a fix is impossible due to the system’s deep-seated resistance to change, then it must not be broken at all. In fact, it must be perfect and therefore divinely inspired. And if the Constitution is divinely inspired, can the US be anything other than divinely inspired as well?

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The US is thus a strange combination of might and weakness; a country able to project military firepower to the far corners of the globe yet incapable of addressing its own basic structural weaknesses. It insists that its 18th century governing system is flawless and loudly thumps its chest at anyone who dares say otherwise. Yet anyone who has bothered to look into the matter knows that it just isn’t so. Although the US claims to have written the book on democracy, the fact is that ‘we the people’ have never had an opportunity to vote on the complicated checks and balances created in their name.

The three passages above come from a great article at aeon by Daniel Lazare. Lazare heavily criticizes the traditional idea of “american exceptionalism,” but does honestly point out that America is exceptional in at least one important way. Namely, the U.S. has an exceptionally screwed up political system that is seemingly impossible to fix! Oy.

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