CURMUDGUCATION: The Hard Way

CURMUDGUCATION: The Hard Way:

The Hard Way

 The Fourth of July is always a popular time for folks to reflect on what this country stands for, and we come up with many fine lists both of the best and the worst. Today, I'd like to add my own item to the list.


America stands for doing things the hard way.

When it comes to running a country, the easiest way to do it is to put one guy in charge and let him tell everybody how to do everything. He can be picked by heredity or tradition or power or wealth; he can be installed by a committee of Important People, or by the roar of the crowd, or even a legitimate-ish election. But the important part-- the easy part-- is that once you have him installed, you just let him run everything. No debates. no discussions, no big arguments about What To Do Next-- just let your Grand High Potentatial Poohbah decide it all.

There's a Less Easy but Still Pretty Easy way of doing things, which is to use an absolute democracy. Every issue that comes up, you vote on. The answer chosen by the majority is the answer the whole country uses, and discussion of the issue is over. If you're in the minority, you just shut up, and stay shut up.

We certainly toyed with all of these. Early on many citizens wanted to just crown George Washington King of America and be done with it. The founding fathers wrote all sorts of rules that they didn't want to be held to (all people are created equal, but not really) and many envisioned a country ruled by the votes of the Right People.

But instead, we dedicated our country to doing things the hard way. We wrote down a bunch of foundational premises for running a country, and then we set up a mechanism by which, over time, those principles could be interpreted and extended to their natural conclusions, even if the majority of founders didn't agree with those conclusions. The constitution is the ultimate exercise in saying, "Look, I'm going to agree to these principles, and every time I try to weasel out of actually following them, I want you to bop me over the head and stop me."

Furthermore, we set up a system based on the principle of not shutting people up, sorting them CURMUDGUCATION: The Hard Way: