One must applaud a young woman like Ms. George for entering the fray, especially in defense of the system that produced Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. As Teddy Roosevelt said, get in the arena, dare greatly. But Ms. George is from Pennsylvania, where she may have seen the Pa. Dutch (buggy) bumper-sticker that reads “Ve get too soon oldt undt too late schmart.” She leaves the kiddie pool at her peril, and I hope the objections that greet her article provoke as much reflection as the problems that gave rise to it.
America goes through rough patches. The Constitution surely did not pass the test of time in 1860, so we tweaked it after the Civil War. Depressions happen. This article could have been written ninety years ago. Benjamin Franklin warned how difficult it was keep a republic. (He is also credited with a version of the lament quoted above.) Adequately honorable leaders are key to good government. From time to time, we forget that, and we elect douchebags. Then, enough of us come to our senses, and we elect better people.
As always, maybe this time is different. If the Constitution has failed, it has failed because it does not allow us to censor bullshit. That was never going to be possible, but technology has finally enabled bullshit to spread and truth to be suppressed or ignored. The idea that a lie can outpace truth has been around forever, but the fact that the lie can be everywhere before the truth is anywhere is new.
Trump is the first president with the technical wherewithal to make enough people distrust the MSM in favor of the Russian bots on FaceRook and Shitter. We could have survived AM radio and Fox News, but the idea that anyone takes anything of unknown provenance seriously just because it was sent to them by someone they “follow” is beyond ridiculous. The founders knew that voters were stupid; they just could not picture a technology that would make that fact so easy to exploit.
The great sadness in Trump’s ascendancy is the lesson that even if we could benefit from a good and powerful president, but if we give the presidency too much power, bad people will seek and win the job. Power not only tends to corrupt people how get it; it also tends to attract those already corrupted.
We are going through the selective pressure of an assault on truth. Either we will evolve to distrust the untrustworthy, or we won’t. But the problem is not systemic. The problem is us. Hopefully, young people like Ms. George will eventually think about ways to save the Constitution rather than reject it in favor of other approaches that have fared no better or never been tried at all.