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From the outside perspective of a younger democracy, the fact that the US political system treats this ancient legal document with the same reverence that one m

From the outside perspective of a younger democracy, the fact that the US political system treats this ancient legal document with the same reverence that one might pay to the biblical stone tablets, where it would be sacrilegious to even change the font, let alone bring it up to speed with almost 250 years of progress in ethics, political practice and technology, seems like it might explain some problems.

yonaguska 4y ago
It's slow to change by design. I don't know that ethics and political practice really has "progressed" all that much just 250 years.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Well, amendments used to be more common. We just haven’t passed a non-academic one since 1971.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    I am confused by this post. From here: http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/all_amendments_usconst.htm http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/all_amendments_usconst.ht... I see the final amendment: << AMENDMENT XXVII - Originally proposed Sept. 25, 1789. Ratified May 7, 1992. No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened. >> First: Holy Sh-t: This is a long time between propsal and passage / acceptance! Second: Do I misunderstand? Do you consider this amendment academic? It sounds like reps cannot increase compenstation during their term.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      The reason I call it academic is this: > The proposed congressional pay amendment was largely forgotten until 1982, when Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper for a government class in which he claimed that the amendment could still be ratified. He later launched a nationwide campaign to complete its ratification.[2][3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Historical_background https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_...
- revscat 4y ago
  I would argue too successfully. There are fundamental changes that could and should be made to the Constitution, especially in regards to climate change and information warfare.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Climate change is too big for one nation, even a big nation, I'd say the de jure solution there is more a job for international treaties (while the de facto solution is making tech such that the right action is automatically desirable).
    - revscat 4y ago
      I think the idea of codifying the repair of the environment as a foundational legal concept to be an interesting one, and one arguably necessary to successfully combat the problem. Treaties tend to codify shared values between states; since almost all modern nations are capitalist, treaties tend to focus on trade and capital. Climate thus gets second tier status, which is the opposite of the ideal.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        I can sympathise with the argument, but economics (of which Adam Smith's capitalism; Karl Marx's communism; the original Liberalism, its successor Neoliberalism, and the Keynesian form between them, are all subsets) all pull in much the same direction with regard to the environment (i.e. valuing it mainly for what it can do and only protecting it when the cost of doing so is negligible, because the nations all compete with each other for power and influence under the constant threat of becoming irrelevant due to the growth of the others. Other than a single world government, or treaties with similar effect, I don't see how to achieve what I think we both agree would be a good outcome.
- teolandon 4y ago
  Yeah I can't think of any Civil Rights issues that have changed at all since 1787.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > can't think of any Civil Rights issues that have changed at all since 1787 OP was discussing constitutions, structure of government. We haven't made that much fundamental progress on design of government compared with the eighteenth century. Are there housekeeping fixes the Constitutions needs? Yes. Do they reveal glaring, fundamental errors in the system's design? No.
    - cnelsenmilt 4y ago
      I truly can't think of a more fundamental element of a democratic system than who is enfranchised, and there have been two or three enormous changes in the answer to that since the founding.
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      You are right. /s/ Here is a good example: <<Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons>>. If you choose to reply to this post, please carefully consider how Black and Brown Americans would feel knowing this was deeply embedded in this history of their country's founding document. (It is horrible!) This segment is widely called the "Three-fifths Compromise" in American English. It refers to the fact that enslaved people would be counted as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of determining gov't representation. From a modern perspective, this section is wholly demented and supports the institution of slavery. This support for the institution of slavery in the founding document of the United States is a terrible stain upon its reputation. The biggest issue I have with the US Constitution in a modern society: It is too hard to change. (When is the last time the US had a serious effort to pass a new amendment? 1970s / 1980s-ish: Women's equality, but still it failed!) Many successful, younger democracies have found ways to allow non-extremist changes to their constitution, to support "futurism" (my own term) -- the progression of society. Personally, I am a big supporter of regular (frequent), small changes to a country's constitution to support, and facilitate, social change.
deep_merge 4y ago
Right, sure, that’s all true. Now consider that many people can’t read the document. I guess your analogy still checks out. Neither Old nor New Testament are written in English. And thus English-speakers rely on translations.
patrick451 4y ago
What are you talking about? Do you think we still own slaves and prohibit women from voting in the United States? Updates to the constitution are exactly why neither of those things is true. These updates are called amendments, and the constitution itself outlines that process. In 250 years, we've passed 27 amendments. The most recent amendment passed in 1992. Pretending even the most strict constructionist treats the constitution as an immutable document is just ignorant.
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  At which point is it better to just write a new constitution? 100 amendments? 500? Or never?
qsort 4y ago
As another non-American, I'm curious as to why you would say that. The US constitution was objectively very far ahead of its time, and it still is a far better attempt at a constitutional order than most. Very rarely can a country's problems be blamed on its constitution. The UK doesn't even have one and it's still one of the world's most advanced democracies.
- lovich 4y ago
  Well if you go by the sentiments of some of the authors of the document, they’d likely be appalled we’re still using it. Jefferson wanted it to expire every 19? 20? years so that the country wasn’t governed by the sentiments of long dead men
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    The "founding fathers" had a diverse set of beliefs, you can pick and choose to support a variety of diametrically opposed points of view. Consider for instance John Jay, who thought that Christian rulers guided by Christian principles were necessary to maintain order and freedom, and thought the Republic would be doomed if it ever forgot this. A far cry from Jefferson's deism.
    - lovich 4y ago
      They did have varied beliefs especially between New England and the southern colonies, but I am referencing Jefferson here as he was one of the main authors of the constitution and not just a signatory
- azinman2 4y ago
  You have the Magna Carta
  - pmyteh 4y ago
    Kinda. Bits of it are still in force[0], despite us not having a definitive text, but much of it was written to deal with contemporary political problems and was repudiated fairly quickly. It's more important as the start of a (semi-mythical) tradition of political liberty then as an ongoing source of constitutional law. Even more excitingly, some of the documents we consider constitutional aren't even statutes. My favourite is a pseudonymous letter to The Times sent in 1950, which authoritatively established a constitutional convention for when the monarch can refuse his Prime Minister a dissolution of Parliament[1]. (The writer, 'Senex', was the King's private secretary Sir Alan Lascelles). [0]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9 [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascelles_Principles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascelles_Principles
chrisco255 4y ago
There's a reason why the U.S. is the oldest democracy. Strong culture. It's also the legal foundation for the establishment of the country and all laws passed hence are a derivative of it.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > There's a reason why the U.S. is the oldest democracy. Under most viable definitions of democracy, the US isn't the oldest. If you restrict to non-aristocratic (i.e., not limiting franchise by ancestry) representative democracy, Finland and New Zealand, among others, achieved that first; if you accept participatory democracies, the Iroquois Confederacy has it beat by even more; you need to tightly define “democracy” around exactly the US model at a particular time to make it first. > It's also the legal foundation for the establishment of the country No, it's not, the country was established before the Constitution.
  - _dain_ 4y ago
    >Finland didn't exist until 1918 >New Zealand didn't exist until a century after the US was founded >Iroquois Confederacy extinguished utterly, nowadays an object of idle revisionism
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    > No, it's not, the country was established before the Constitution. OP mentioned the Declaration and the Constitution in the same sentence, but for the record, both are revered and held to high regard and do provide the legal foundation for the nation in its current iteration (Articles of Confederation were older than Constitution but have been cast aside due to their ineffective results).
samatman 4y ago
Most Americans would greet "we must teach cursive so children can read the manuscript form of our founding documents" with the same bafflement you do. Even in the civic religion surrounding all that paper, this is not a normal expression of reverence.
Hnrobert42 4y ago
To be fair, it has been amended 27 times.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> From the outside perspective of a younger democracy, the fact that the US political system treats this ancient legal document with the same reverence that one might pay to the biblical stone tablets As a whole, it doesn't, both the major parties have elements of it that they are strongly attached to, but each have also made amendments to it, and hacks around parts of it, key parts of their agenda. > where it would be sacrilegious to even change the font, let alone bring it up to speed with almost 250 years of progress in ethics, political practice and technology, Um, it's been updated quite a lot since initially adopted (and I’m not talking about the font or other presentational issues.)
wonderwonder 4y ago
The world is full of younger democracies and very few contiguous older ones. Depending on how you want to measure it, the United States is the worlds oldest democracy based on an original constitution or set of rules. The longevity of the US constitutional democracy is in most part because of what an incredible job the original writers of the constitution did in drafting it as well as the massive effort and agreement required to change it. The same large scale leadership problems that exist today existed then. The key to a long term democracy is slow change, not fast. Many of the world's young democracies exist because of America; notably those formed out of the collapse of USSR. All of Europe's democracies exist because of the US role in WW2. Same as the current governments in Japan and Taiwan. Don't get me wrong I am not arguing America is perfect, there have been plenty of egregiously harmful moves, including what's currently happening in Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. Although Iraq is technically a young democracy now because of the United States.
- 7sidedmarble 4y ago
  > All of Europe's democracies exist because of the US role in WW2. Can you explain what you mean by this? Continental Europe's relationship with republicanism and democracy dates back to the same roots as what spawned the ideas that led to the US's formation, and that is the European Enlightenment.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Yes, you are right, my point is more straight forward in that without the usa stepping in to win ww2, all of Europe would be part of the Reich.
    - jleyank 4y ago
      Stepping in? Blame Japan for us entry and all of the downstream effects. Hitler was being careful to not give fdr an opening.
      - wonderwonder 4y ago
Izkata 4y ago
> where it would be sacrilegious to even change the font This is a misunderstanding of the actual concern there. The way I've heard it explained is, once it's all online in printed form and people can't read the original physical document, the online versions can be tweaked by the platforms and no one would be able to read the original to prove it's been changed. This is an extremely common trope in sci-fi, where only a small group of people understand the language of the "sacred texts" and have been claiming it says something different than it actually does and no one is able to challenge it. I think both versions stem from real-world religions where the translations have to make adjustments because the source language has concepts that don't quite fit in the new language.

yonaguska 4y ago

It's slow to change by design. I don't know that ethics and political practice really has "progressed" all that much just 250 years.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Well, amendments used to be more common. We just haven’t passed a non-academic one since 1971.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  I am confused by this post. From here: http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/all_amendments_usconst.htm http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/all_amendments_usconst.ht... I see the final amendment: << AMENDMENT XXVII - Originally proposed Sept. 25, 1789. Ratified May 7, 1992. No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened. >> First: Holy Sh-t: This is a long time between propsal and passage / acceptance! Second: Do I misunderstand? Do you consider this amendment academic? It sounds like reps cannot increase compenstation during their term.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    The reason I call it academic is this: > The proposed congressional pay amendment was largely forgotten until 1982, when Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper for a government class in which he claimed that the amendment could still be ratified. He later launched a nationwide campaign to complete its ratification.[2][3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Historical_background https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_...
revscat 4y ago
I would argue too successfully. There are fundamental changes that could and should be made to the Constitution, especially in regards to climate change and information warfare.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Climate change is too big for one nation, even a big nation, I'd say the de jure solution there is more a job for international treaties (while the de facto solution is making tech such that the right action is automatically desirable).
  - revscat 4y ago
    I think the idea of codifying the repair of the environment as a foundational legal concept to be an interesting one, and one arguably necessary to successfully combat the problem. Treaties tend to codify shared values between states; since almost all modern nations are capitalist, treaties tend to focus on trade and capital. Climate thus gets second tier status, which is the opposite of the ideal.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      I can sympathise with the argument, but economics (of which Adam Smith's capitalism; Karl Marx's communism; the original Liberalism, its successor Neoliberalism, and the Keynesian form between them, are all subsets) all pull in much the same direction with regard to the environment (i.e. valuing it mainly for what it can do and only protecting it when the cost of doing so is negligible, because the nations all compete with each other for power and influence under the constant threat of becoming irrelevant due to the growth of the others. Other than a single world government, or treaties with similar effect, I don't see how to achieve what I think we both agree would be a good outcome.
teolandon 4y ago
Yeah I can't think of any Civil Rights issues that have changed at all since 1787.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > can't think of any Civil Rights issues that have changed at all since 1787 OP was discussing constitutions, structure of government. We haven't made that much fundamental progress on design of government compared with the eighteenth century. Are there housekeeping fixes the Constitutions needs? Yes. Do they reveal glaring, fundamental errors in the system's design? No.
  - cnelsenmilt 4y ago
    I truly can't think of a more fundamental element of a democratic system than who is enfranchised, and there have been two or three enormous changes in the answer to that since the founding.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    You are right. /s/ Here is a good example: <<Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons>>. If you choose to reply to this post, please carefully consider how Black and Brown Americans would feel knowing this was deeply embedded in this history of their country's founding document. (It is horrible!) This segment is widely called the "Three-fifths Compromise" in American English. It refers to the fact that enslaved people would be counted as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of determining gov't representation. From a modern perspective, this section is wholly demented and supports the institution of slavery. This support for the institution of slavery in the founding document of the United States is a terrible stain upon its reputation. The biggest issue I have with the US Constitution in a modern society: It is too hard to change. (When is the last time the US had a serious effort to pass a new amendment? 1970s / 1980s-ish: Women's equality, but still it failed!) Many successful, younger democracies have found ways to allow non-extremist changes to their constitution, to support "futurism" (my own term) -- the progression of society. Personally, I am a big supporter of regular (frequent), small changes to a country's constitution to support, and facilitate, social change.

deep_merge 4y ago

Right, sure, that’s all true. Now consider that many people can’t read the document. I guess your analogy still checks out. Neither Old nor New Testament are written in English. And thus English-speakers rely on translations.

patrick451 4y ago

What are you talking about? Do you think we still own slaves and prohibit women from voting in the United States? Updates to the constitution are exactly why neither of those things is true. These updates are called amendments, and the constitution itself outlines that process. In 250 years, we've passed 27 amendments. The most recent amendment passed in 1992. Pretending even the most strict constructionist treats the constitution as an immutable document is just ignorant.

Jaruzel 4y ago
At which point is it better to just write a new constitution? 100 amendments? 500? Or never?

qsort 4y ago

As another non-American, I'm curious as to why you would say that. The US constitution was objectively very far ahead of its time, and it still is a far better attempt at a constitutional order than most. Very rarely can a country's problems be blamed on its constitution. The UK doesn't even have one and it's still one of the world's most advanced democracies.

lovich 4y ago
Well if you go by the sentiments of some of the authors of the document, they’d likely be appalled we’re still using it. Jefferson wanted it to expire every 19? 20? years so that the country wasn’t governed by the sentiments of long dead men
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  The "founding fathers" had a diverse set of beliefs, you can pick and choose to support a variety of diametrically opposed points of view. Consider for instance John Jay, who thought that Christian rulers guided by Christian principles were necessary to maintain order and freedom, and thought the Republic would be doomed if it ever forgot this. A far cry from Jefferson's deism.
  - lovich 4y ago
    They did have varied beliefs especially between New England and the southern colonies, but I am referencing Jefferson here as he was one of the main authors of the constitution and not just a signatory
azinman2 4y ago
You have the Magna Carta
- pmyteh 4y ago
  Kinda. Bits of it are still in force[0], despite us not having a definitive text, but much of it was written to deal with contemporary political problems and was repudiated fairly quickly. It's more important as the start of a (semi-mythical) tradition of political liberty then as an ongoing source of constitutional law. Even more excitingly, some of the documents we consider constitutional aren't even statutes. My favourite is a pseudonymous letter to The Times sent in 1950, which authoritatively established a constitutional convention for when the monarch can refuse his Prime Minister a dissolution of Parliament[1]. (The writer, 'Senex', was the King's private secretary Sir Alan Lascelles). [0]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9 [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascelles_Principles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascelles_Principles

chrisco255 4y ago

There's a reason why the U.S. is the oldest democracy. Strong culture. It's also the legal foundation for the establishment of the country and all laws passed hence are a derivative of it.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> There's a reason why the U.S. is the oldest democracy. Under most viable definitions of democracy, the US isn't the oldest. If you restrict to non-aristocratic (i.e., not limiting franchise by ancestry) representative democracy, Finland and New Zealand, among others, achieved that first; if you accept participatory democracies, the Iroquois Confederacy has it beat by even more; you need to tightly define “democracy” around exactly the US model at a particular time to make it first. > It's also the legal foundation for the establishment of the country No, it's not, the country was established before the Constitution.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  >Finland didn't exist until 1918 >New Zealand didn't exist until a century after the US was founded >Iroquois Confederacy extinguished utterly, nowadays an object of idle revisionism
- chrisco255 4y ago
  > No, it's not, the country was established before the Constitution. OP mentioned the Declaration and the Constitution in the same sentence, but for the record, both are revered and held to high regard and do provide the legal foundation for the nation in its current iteration (Articles of Confederation were older than Constitution but have been cast aside due to their ineffective results).

samatman 4y ago

Most Americans would greet "we must teach cursive so children can read the manuscript form of our founding documents" with the same bafflement you do. Even in the civic religion surrounding all that paper, this is not a normal expression of reverence.

Hnrobert42 4y ago

To be fair, it has been amended 27 times.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> From the outside perspective of a younger democracy, the fact that the US political system treats this ancient legal document with the same reverence that one might pay to the biblical stone tablets As a whole, it doesn't, both the major parties have elements of it that they are strongly attached to, but each have also made amendments to it, and hacks around parts of it, key parts of their agenda. > where it would be sacrilegious to even change the font, let alone bring it up to speed with almost 250 years of progress in ethics, political practice and technology, Um, it's been updated quite a lot since initially adopted (and I’m not talking about the font or other presentational issues.)

wonderwonder 4y ago

The world is full of younger democracies and very few contiguous older ones. Depending on how you want to measure it, the United States is the worlds oldest democracy based on an original constitution or set of rules. The longevity of the US constitutional democracy is in most part because of what an incredible job the original writers of the constitution did in drafting it as well as the massive effort and agreement required to change it. The same large scale leadership problems that exist today existed then. The key to a long term democracy is slow change, not fast. Many of the world's young democracies exist because of America; notably those formed out of the collapse of USSR. All of Europe's democracies exist because of the US role in WW2. Same as the current governments in Japan and Taiwan. Don't get me wrong I am not arguing America is perfect, there have been plenty of egregiously harmful moves, including what's currently happening in Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. Although Iraq is technically a young democracy now because of the United States.

7sidedmarble 4y ago
> All of Europe's democracies exist because of the US role in WW2. Can you explain what you mean by this? Continental Europe's relationship with republicanism and democracy dates back to the same roots as what spawned the ideas that led to the US's formation, and that is the European Enlightenment.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Yes, you are right, my point is more straight forward in that without the usa stepping in to win ww2, all of Europe would be part of the Reich.
  - jleyank 4y ago
    Stepping in? Blame Japan for us entry and all of the downstream effects. Hitler was being careful to not give fdr an opening.
    - wonderwonder 4y ago

Izkata 4y ago

> where it would be sacrilegious to even change the font This is a misunderstanding of the actual concern there. The way I've heard it explained is, once it's all online in printed form and people can't read the original physical document, the online versions can be tweaked by the platforms and no one would be able to read the original to prove it's been changed. This is an extremely common trope in sci-fi, where only a small group of people understand the language of the "sacred texts" and have been claiming it says something different than it actually does and no one is able to challenge it. I think both versions stem from real-world religions where the translations have to make adjustments because the source language has concepts that don't quite fit in the new language.