I agree that disavowal of the Constitution isn’t restricted to one party, but would go further: the Constitution isn’t really intended for “the people” at large

I agree that disavowal of the Constitution isn’t restricted to one party, but would go further: the Constitution isn’t really intended for “the people” at large. It’s intended for the set of people who would rise to power in its absence — call them the ruling classes. It’s an agreement between the powerful that this is how we get along, this is how we share and restrict power, this is how we maintain a government that avoids the descent into tyranny or dissolution. It may be that the Constitution is no longer a viable means of ensuring the peaceful transfer of power and of facilitating good-enough governance. It certainly has failed dramatically in the past to prevent civil strife. Is there an amendment that can fix whatever is wrong with the current situation and bring the elites back to the same page? What is wrong with the current situation? The fundamental problem is that the USA now thinks of itself as a direct democracy rather than a representative democracy and that modern technology has fueled the worst populist instincts of our population, creating an atmosphere ripe for demagoguery and factionalism. The Constitution had a solution for this — the indirect representation of the Senate, who up until the 17th amendment were chosen by the local state representatives. Indirect representation was meant to prevent “mob rule”. There is now no real difference in the makeup of the Senate and House of Representatives. Undoing the 17th amendment would only result in even worse corruption and factionalism, but the idea of indirect representation is the correct idea. After batting ideas around with GPT4 for a while, it seems one palatable amendment might be a three-fold change: 1) a 1-term term limits for Senators, 2) forbidding party primaries for Senate elections, and 3) changing Senate elections to Senate nominations, where any candidate who receives more than 20% of votes is sent to the current Senate for confirmation — the existing Senate, including the outgoing Senators, decide which of the nominees are to be confirmed. Confirmation is done Papal style — nobody goes home until the new Senators are confirmed by 2/3 majority. Combining a 1-term limit with Senate self-confirmation means that more candidates have a chance of becoming a Senator without having to resort to demagoguery or factionalism, and that over time the composition of the Senate will trend away from power hungry individuals to civic-minded servants.