{"id":64222,"date":"2023-11-01T01:00:17","date_gmt":"2023-11-01T05:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=64222"},"modified":"2023-10-31T09:16:54","modified_gmt":"2023-10-31T13:16:54","slug":"qotd-the-original-united-states-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/11\/01\/qotd-the-original-united-states-government\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The original United States government"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I think governments, being human institutions, evolve as people do \u2013 and evolution, as we know, is copious, local, and recent<\/em>. Put as simply as possible: If the government the Founders designed worked as intended (note: IF), it only really<\/em> worked for them<\/em> \u2013 that is, for Anglo-Celt misfits in a frontier society with, at best, 18th century technology and information velocity.<\/p>\n

And in any case, that government \u2013 IF it worked as designed \u2013 lasted the span of one long-ish (then, average now) human lifetime: 1788-1861.<\/p>\n

Most “political” problems, on this theory, can be boiled down to the attempt to retrofit old, unsuitable institutions to new creatures. To take the most basic example, that stuff about a “well-regulated militia” rests on the assumption \u2013 integral to a rough frontier society of Anglo-Celt misfits \u2013 that everyone is armed, and competent with their arms. This is simply not the case in a more settled society, with the higher information velocity that entails \/ requires, so we get all the endless wrangling over “gun control” (assuming anyone in that debate was ever arguing in good faith, which is also a big IF, etc.).<\/p>\n

One obvious counter to this line of thought is to put it mostly down to technology \u2013 just as the Founders couldn’t imagine drones and ballistic missiles and “assault rifles” and the rest while they were writing the 2nd Amendment, so the problems with government can almost all be boiled down to old institutions trying to cope, not with new people<\/em>, but with new technology<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2021-01-21.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think governments, being human institutions, evolve as people do \u2013 and evolution, as we know, is copious, local, and recent. Put as simply as possible: If the government the Founders designed worked as intended (note: IF), it only really worked for them \u2013 that is, for Anglo-Celt misfits in a frontier society with, at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,41,13,663],"tags":[715,49,1462],"class_list":["post-64222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","category-weapons","tag-constitution","tag-guns","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-gHQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64222"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85492,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64222\/revisions\/85492"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}