We're not on our first government per se in the US. When you look at basic, constitutional law & the ... mores of how elections work, there's generally a "revol

We're not on our first government per se in the US. When you look at basic, constitutional law & the ... mores of how elections work, there's generally a "revolution" about every fifty-eighty years. I'd call the last one at around 1965-1968. We're much closer to the British model - we consider the law actually independent of the government proper. The government depends on law, but there's a quite specific set of interfaces for government to change law. This model is not only surviving but thriving, around the world. I don't know how any modern state, post-WWII, survives without a security apparatus. Perhaps it not be the one we have now, but there will be one, should a government failure happen. It takes very little for the government security apparatus to encourage ratting out dissidents as was done in the Soviet Bloc, effectively drafting every citizen as part of the security apparatus. So the present size of such a thing, pre-collapse may not have anything to do with what it looks like post-collapse. But so far, the basic framework has survived ( knock wood ). There are disturbing parallels with the period leading up to the failure of the Whig Party in American history. But there were self-destruct mechanisms built into things then that aren't apparent now - I can't imagine receiving news of a whopper the size of the Dred Scott Decision today. But perhaps my imagination fails.