RIP US Constitution
A New Government: Part One: An Overview
Eurasia Group released its annual world risks for the year of 2026, and number one was Political Revolution in the United States. Not that we will have a violent revolution; no, the revolution is already happening. The outcome will be one of Trump and Dictators in the future, or one of something new. The Constitution as it stands now is broken, irreparably. There is no going back.
Which makes options, especially new, democratic options imperative to get into the public space. While I understand I am just one person, an almost literal nobody in the US as currently constructed, I have though long and hard about the possibilities. I’ve looked around the world, systems that work, systems that don’t work, what could the US do that is different and better and fits with what our core values as a country are (or, increasingly, were).
Why not just amend the present Constitution? It has been flexible, and allowed for modifications; however, it has not been amended for 34 years (an approval of a proposed amendment from 1792), and has not been truly meaningfully amended for 55 years (18 year old voting age). 25 European nations, including Greece, Spain, and Portugal, have completely new Constitutions just since the last time the US amended ours. The systems we have are increasingly outdated, and not resilient enough for the modern misinformation-filled social media landscape.
But why does that matter? The inherent weaknesses in the Constitutional system we have deployed these 200 plus years has been covered for by unwritten rules and norms followed by previous generations of presidents and congresspeople. What we are seeing now is what happens when someone decides to ignore those unwritten rules, or a group chooses to abdicate their power to reign in a king-like president. The authors of the Constitution arguably knew this flaw was in the document; they thought America would restrain, through debate and voting, any overly ambitious man. They could not have seen the proliferation of laws that fed power to one branch, coupled with branches of government that suborned their own ambitions to a leading ambitious man. The checks and balances require vigilance, but the law is easily bent. The institution must be rebuilt, with an acknowledgement of what the modern world has become
In the following weeks I am planning to present a series of essays, first covering the background, justification, and as in this essay increasingly urgent need for a revolution of thought about what the US government should be. Following that, I will lay out a possible system of government; I do not pretend it’s perfect, or even not heavily flawed, but I want to put into documentation an idea and attempt to stir some debate. It is not, in my opinion, revolutionary. It borrows heavily from some other countries. But we have to do something and if my little nothing corner of the internet can provide something for someone to think about, then it will have done it’s job.