America's 2.5 Century Political Fight Club

Our government is chaotic, rude, and famously inefficient. And working exactly as designed.

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Five, Issue 16

It's a moving world, but that's no reason
Shoot some of those missiles
Think of us as fatherless scum
It won't be forgotten
'Cause we'll never say anything nice again, will we?

And the wrong words make you listen
In this criminal world
Remember it's true, loyalty is valuable
But our lives are valuable too

The Sunday Reader, June 28, 2026

The United States of America has the longest-lasting government of the world’s major countries. We’re celebrating 250 years since the Declaration of Independence this coming weekend; our government turned 238 last Sunday, the anniversary of the June 21, 1788, ratification of the Constitution.

It’s fashionable to think of us as a young country compared to, say, France. But look closer: The American Revolution occurred in 1776; the French Revolution in 1789. The US Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787. The French First Republic was founded on September 21, 1792.

We’re still on that same Constitution.

The French are on their Fifth Republic. And that’s not even counting the Vichy Nazi puppet French dealio.

And of course while we were settling into our new Constitution Great Britain was still ruled by syphilitic George III until 1820. The final transition to a figurehead monarch didn’t occur until the Parliament Act of 1911.

So how has our government been so resilient and successful when all the rest collapsed regularly and frequently?

Simple. America bet on the bad guys and bad behavior.

Almost all governments are designed as efforts of utopian optimism, from Plato’s philosopher kings to Marx’s From each according to their abilities; to each according to their needs.

Not ours. The Founders believed we live in a criminal world peopled by a sinful mankind. So they designed a system of government that works best when swarmed by criminals and charlatans, a Political Fight Club that would bring progress and prosperity by making the bad guys fight each other.

And they had Ben Franklin.

Franklin is one of those characters who make fiction writing futile. No reader would accept a fictional protagonist who did a quarter of the accomplishments of the real Franklin. Do you wear bifocals? Thank Ben; he invented them. Buildings protected by lightning rods? Thank Ben.

Early to bed, and early to rise? Thank Ben, wearing his Poor Richard editor’s hat.

And we’ve hardly gotten started. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven wrote pieces for a musical instrument called the glass armonica.

Which Ben invented.

Ben Franklin is the essential American.

There likely would have been an American Revolution without him, and some sort of country would have emerged. But it is instructive to look at all the other forms of government over the last three centuries, fathered by all sorts of brilliant minds. The French revolutionaries counted Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and the Baron de Montesquieu as their intellectual guiding lights, and were led by Rousseau acolyte Maximilien Robespierre.

That didn’t end well. Robespierre led the Committee of Public Safety as it guillotined 16,594 “counter-revolutionaries.” The last of whom was Robespierre, ending the Reign of Terror.

Franklin is considered the ur-father of the American school of philosophy called Pragmatism. Pragmatists accept that the perfect is the enemy of the good; and negotiating the best possible deal is almost always better than standing on principle and ending up with no deal at all.

Despite the fact that some of these compromises will be very, very ugly.

Take the hideous Three-Fifths Compromise that counted three-fifths of a state’s slaves toward its total population. Franklin knew the Southern states would walk out of the Constitutional Convention if their enslaved populations were not counted. He decided no constitution was the worst outcome, so he lobbied delegates on both sides to agree to the compromise. (The southern states wanted slaves fully counted in the census while remaining enslaved.)

He did this while he was President of the Philadelphia Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, just weeks after signing a public antislavery letter that said “the Creator of the world” had made “of one flesh, all the children of men.”

So Franklin was under no illusion that mankind was not capable of evil. And while great minds from Plato to Robespierre had argued for philosopher kings, and then purges of those insufficiently illuminated, Franklin was a pragmatist.

After all, Alexander the Great had been tutored by Aristotle and conquered the known world; his empire lasted roughly 20 minutes after his death.

If you cannot count on mankind’s better angels, build a system that thrives on humanity’s worst traits and instincts.

Under Franklin’s pragmatic guidance the founders built a political fight club. The advancement of the people’s common good would depend not on the largesse of the kind and the good. No, the common good would advance as it was dragged along behind the venal petty greed so common to our species.

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I am by nature a creature of the night. My brain doesn’t really run smoothly until the sun is setting, and the words really began to flow as the rest of the world winds down into sleep. I have an office on the second floor of our home, and for decades I have repaired there to write in the after-dark quiet as the rest of the family slept.

My children were well familiar with this, of course, and as each entered high school they began dropping by to discuss the broader implications of the things they learned in school. All three children took the Advanced Placement American Government course in high school, and all three came to me frustrated, and for the same reason.

Why is the United States government so inefficient, so ineffective? Why is it so hard to get anything done?

WAD, as we nerds say. Working As Designed.

And when they looked puzzled, I said Do you know who was efficient?

Nazis. Nazis really got stuff done.

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 after a series of Nazi Party electoral victories. Within a decade Germany went from the dregs of the Weimar Republic’s depression to the industrial power that ruled continental Europe and had Volkswagens rolling off the assembly line like clockwork.

Of course there were a few drawbacks to Nazi rule.

World War II. The Holocaust. The Gestapo.

Tyrants and despots in general are very efficient. Mussolini made the trains run on time. Dissent tends to be less strenuous when Robespierre is dragging dissidents off to the guillotine.

There’s a sad old joke that says our Republic is the worst possible system of government...excepting all the other ones. But our system is actually wickedly clever, entirely designed to answer one key question: If mankind is inherently venal and corrupt, how do you design a system of government that doesn’t end up corrupted?

Our government is famously inefficient, choked with checks and balances until it’s impossible to Get Things Done. Nazis and other tyrants, on the other hand, are super efficient, which is good when you get Volkswagens and trains that run on time, and not so good when you get World War II and the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields, the Rape of Nanking, and whatever is currently going on in Cuba where the power grid has apparently collapsed.

If mankind is inherently venal and corrupt, how do you design a system of government that doesn’t end up corrupted? Franklin’s pragmatism guided the American Founders to invent a political fight club cleverly unbalanced to the point where it is pretty much impossible for any one side to control everything.

We’re all familiar with the three branches of the Federal government: Congress, which is the Legislative Branch; The Presidency, which is the Executive Branch; and the Judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court of the United States.

But the entire federal government also competes with the 50 state governments and their judiciaries. Look at all the initiatives launched to much ballyhoo by either the states, or the White House, only to immediately end up stalled in court. Here in Texas it’s almost impossible to keep track of how many times Washington is suing Austin, and Austin is suing Washington, and over what.

WAD. Working As Designed

Look closer at the Federal government, and see how it is set up for never-ending conflict. We have A Very Important Election this fall! But how much will things change? Look at how the staggered terms force conflict:

• The House of Representatives is based on population; the entire chamber is up for re-election every two years

• The presidency is up for election every four years

• Senators serve six years, with one-third of the chamber up for election every two years

• Supreme Court justices are appointed for life

So it’s impossible to sweep all three branches of government in a single election. Making things even more difficult, this Very Important Election has two-thirds of the Senate sitting on the sidelines; they’re not even running. And the staggering of terms means many incumbents are forced to swim against the political currents. Think of it this way: the senators elected in 2024, the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency, will never once stand for election while Donald Trump is in the White House.

It's not a perfect system by any means. The constant conflict is annoying. It tends to attract the kind of people you would not allow in your house under any circumstances. And there was a bit of a fuss – a half-decade, truthfully – over Abraham Lincoln’s election to the White House. But our Constitutional experiment has proven remarkably resilient, especially when you consider the shorter life spans of every other government.

There’s a theory out there that the Internet has made us more insular, that we gather with the like-minded in a bubble and stay there, never venturing out to see what they are talking about in all those other bubbles.

One of the…interesting…things about being me is that I’m in all the bubbles. I’m a military veteran. I’ve taught graduate school in the Ivy League. I’m a journalist. I’m a photographer.

So I have bubbles of active and retired military. Active and retired academics. Active and retired journalists. Active photographers…those guys never retire.

So no matter who is elected there are always a few of my bubbles wildly happy, and others bewailing the end of the world.

And then the chanting starts:

fight. Fight. FIGHT!!!

And somewhere, Ben is smiling.

So am I.

There’s no denying it’s a rude, crude, uncouth system, from bloody mixed martial arts battles on the White House lawn all the way back to Andrew Jackson supporters standing on White House furniture in muddy boots to get a better look at their standard-bearer.

Our political fight club isn’t gentle. Or dignified. And it’s often wildly unfair. These are the same objections that are lodged, fairly, against our political fight club’s partner - capitalism.

We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st Century, and given the wars, the financial shocks, the protests, the general cray cray, it’s easy to understand the nostalgia for the go-go 80s, the boom years. The rest of the world must be passing us by, no?

Oh wait…

Well that’s Per Capita Gross Domestic Product! That just means we’ve got lots of worthless billionaires and now, gods help us, trillionaires! It’s not like all that wealth is spread around to average American households! Oh, wait…

We’re not only richer than everyone else; the gap is growing.

In 1989 Boris Yeltsin, a member of the ruling Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, was on a 10-city speaking tour of the US. On a whim he had his motorcade stop at a Houston grocery store on the way to the airport. He was literally stunned speechless by the selection and sheer amout of food available to the average American. He didn’t speak for a long time afterwards, and when he finally did he told his staff that after visiting that American grocery store he’d felt the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed inside him.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Now it is 2026, and millions have come to America for the World Cup.

Millions are having their Boris Yeltsin moment. In Walmart.

@bower.eideEuropeans first time at Walmart😂 #funny #worldcup #Europeans #walmart #usa

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One tweeted Why did no one tell us ranch dressing is like crack? The TSA had to put out an advisory advising Cuppers that you are not allowed to have family-size bottles of ranch dressing in your carry-on luggage.

The gap is growing. And not just in condiments.

France’s Space Agency was once considered one of the pre-eminent launch programs, rivaling NASA. It has launched 24 rockets into space this decade.

SpaceX alone has launched 25 since May 1, 2026.

The gap is growing. And not just in space.

Of the top 100 largest companies formed since January 1, 2000, only one — Spotify, at Number 12 — is from the EU. Roughly 70 are from the US.

Nature is red in tooth and claw. No fish ever died peacefully in its bed.

Likewise, our politics and our economy are uncouth and uncool, rude and ruthless.

They are absolutely the worst way to run a country.

Excepting all the other ways to run one.

The founders considered democracy, and rejected it, for reasons that are right there in the name: dēmos - populace - and kratos - rule. The latter is the same root as in theocracy. They didn’t want priests ruling. And they didn’t want mob rule.

Ben was asked on the steps of the Constitutional Convention what kind of government we'd have under the new Constitution.

A republic, if you can keep it.

We're hanging in, Ben, best we can.

So here is my prediction for us, on our 250th birthday: be of good cheer! We may be rude and uncouth and consume ungodly amounts of ranch dressing, but America will thrive for centuries more.