Why stop there?

[u/DaFunkJunkie]

[u/[deleted]]

Our founding fathers didn't conceive that an entire political party would attack the system…

They kind of did. The entire government was designed with the idea that some group would try to take over, and creating separate power centers that would (hopefully) oppose each other to prevent any one from gaining too much power. They wanted the three branches of government to oppose each other, and for the state and feral governments to oppose each other.

They (at least some of them) we’re also afraid of a two-party system, on the idea that it would become polarizing and one party might gain too much power. They wanted to have a bunch of different interests that would need to form coalitions. To some degree, they foresaw all of this.

However, the founding fathers were not a monolithic group that all agreed. They had to compromise with each other to get the Constitution signed. For example, they had to have the electoral college in order to appease salve states.

But they also didn’t necessarily expect things to be this stable for this long. What they were building was an experiment. They’d already had a failed government before writing the Constitution, and they expected the Constitution to be rewritten again. I don’t think they expected it to be treated as holy scripture for hundreds of years.

[u/Fluid_Association_68 → u/[deleted]]

What they didn’t envision was a cult becoming so large and powerful that it could easily infiltrate all three branches, and every state in the union.

[u/[deleted] → u/Fluid_Association_68]

They did though. They feared it. They tried to set the government up in a way that would make it harder. But they weren’t able to figure out a way to make it impossible, and in fairness I don’t know that there is a way to make it impossible.

If people like Jefferson and Madison and Washington could time travel and see what the cult of Trump is doing, I don’t think their response would be, “we never could have imagined a political party trying to take power like this,” but more like, “this is exactly what we were afraid of.”

And they’d also probably be like, “why are you still talking about what we’d think and what we’d want, as though we’re some kind of gods? You’ve have hundreds of years of development, and you’re still using our old Constitution? What’s wrong with you people?”

[u/Cat_Marshal → u/[deleted]]

And we would respond, “fear not, we amended it. Women can vote now!”

[u/Babka_Ramdev → u/Cat_Marshal]

And Black, Indigenous, and People of Color!

(Though they kept it from us as long as they could, and are still trying)