Transcript
A threads post saying “There has never been another nation ever that has existed much beyond 250 years. Not a single one. America’s 250th year is 2025. The next 4 years are gonna be pretty interesting considering everything that’s already been said.” It has a reply saying “My local pub is older than your country”.
the u.s. is ‘young’, relative to the world stage, this is true; but its constitution is among the oldest in the world… and it is starting to show its age.
Yeah, this is a misunderstanding among conservatives. Our legal system and government structure is woefully outdated, but our country is really young.
It’s like a teen athlete being really proud that he has the oldest sneakers of all the competitors.
Worse, it’s like a teen athlete being really proud that he has the world record for best stickballer, so he drops out of school to play stickball full time.
Then when everybody else wants to play an actual sport with actual rules where people wear helmets and don’t die, suddenly the teen starts starts swinging his stick through people’s windows and at people’s heads.
Your analogy has nothing to do with the topic. The topic is about the age of the countries, and their constitutions.
Yes, I’m suggesting that the US constitution was impressive and exciting and set a lot of new records, but everyone quickly moved onto bigger and better things while the US lagged behind pretending its outdated rules were still the best in the world.
So it’s like a teen who’s really proud of having the oldest sneakers of all the competitors then.
Constitutionalism is a new idea. Pioneered by America. Of course America will have the oldest until it collapses.
Because other countries modernize it. Well America worships it as a god. Even though it has been changed before.
It was “showing its age” a not long after it was made. Two years later the French based their first written constution on the US one. Then other nations followed suit over the years and wanted their own, and they already thought the French one was the better option as a starting point.
In fairness, given that the French are currently on their fifth attempt at a republic, the other nations were arguably wrong.
I’d say if you measure success by being able to change and try again instead of trying to keep a dead thing alive then maybe they were right
Thomas Jefferson believed the constitution should be a living document.
Nature itself dictates so through the length of a generation: If the constitution outlives human, we end up being ruled by the dead rather than by the living, as a democracy presupposes.
One could assume this would mean that they should last a lifetime, but in a letter to James Madison, Jefferson expresses the belief that each generation have the right to their own:
This was the ideas of a central founding father of American democracy. Yet today, authoritarian tools in the supreme court are using their perceived legislative intent of the founding fatgers to justify all kinds of fucked up shit. The intent of the founding fathers was that the nation should move the fuck on and not be stuck in the past.
They inspired a lot of longer lasting constitutions in other countries