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eli_sennesh comments on On saving the world - Less Wrong
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I've always taken the framing of the US Constitution as a cautionary tale about the importance of getting things exactly right. The founding fathers were highly intelligent (some of them, anyway), well-read and fastidious; after a careful review of numerous different contemporary and historical government systems, from the Iriquois confederacy to ancient Greek city-states, they devised a very clever, highly non-obvious alternative designed to be watertight against any loopholes they could think of, including being self-modifying in carefully regulated ways.
It almost worked. They created a system that came very, very close to preventing dictatorship and oligarchy... and the United States today is a grim testament to what happens when you cleverly construct an optimization engine that almost works.
With respect, I think you're giving the American Founders too much credit. Their values were not our values, and their Constitution works extremely well for the kind of society they aimed to create: a republic of white, male, propertied yeoman farmers whose main disagreements were whether to allow slavery and whether this "industrialization" thing would catch on. If the system appears broken today, it is because it is attempting to enforce the norms of a republic of white, male, propertied yeoman farmers on an increasingly urbanized/suburbanized, increasingly post-industrial and networked, increasingly multicultural nation spread across many times the population and land area of the original.
Times have actually, really changed, and so have values, but the dead hands of the Founding Fathers are still preserving their norms and values in our time. That is very good engineering.
My reading suggests that the main disagreements among the framers of the US Constitution (the "Founding Fathers" phrase is a bit too hagiographic for my taste) had to do with regional rivalry and the degree of centralization of power -- concerns which I wouldn't call modern as such, but could fairly be described as perennial. (Compare the modern urban vs. rural distinction, which drives most of the red vs. blue state divide.) Slavery factored into this, but mainly as a factor informing regional differences -- it wouldn't reach its ultimate apocalyptic nation-breaking significance until westward expansion had started in earnest and the abolition movement gained some steam. I'm unaware of any significant disputes over industrialization in early US politics.
Hamilton vs Jefferson comes to mind.
I thought that didn't happen until a decade or so later?
That doesn't qualify as "early"?
Should have been more precise. I was talking about the roughly 10-year period between independence and the acceptance of the US Constitution. The 1790s are early in the nation's history, all right, but that was a period of very rapid evolution in US politics.
You may know your American history better than I, but I do remember some nascent concerns over whether industry and finance could gain too much power versus the agricultural sector.
It's entirely possible I'm just wrong, though.
I believe Nornagest counted that under urban versus rural.
...Tolkien..? :-D