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The conventional wisdom holds that America is a young nation. People repeat it. Textbooks assert it. And it's wrong. The United States operates the oldest government on the planet. Not one of the oldest. The oldest. No other country on Earth is still running on an 18th-century system. Germany's government dates to 1949. France established its Fifth Republic in 1958. Japan's constitution came in 1946. Italy's in 1948. South Korea's current system began in 1987. Spain's in 1978. Portugal's in 1976. Greece's in 1975. Every country you can name rebuilt its governing architecture within living memory. We're still running the original code. The Comparative Constitutions Project at the University of Chicago found that the average national constitution lasts just 17 years. Half of all constitutions die before their 18th birthday. By age 50, only 19 percent remain in force. The American system has been running for 236 years. Thomas Jefferson anticipated this would be a problem. In 1789, he wrote to Madison that no society can make a perpetual constitution, that the earth belongs to the living and not the dead. He calculated, based on mortality tables of the time, that constitutions should expire every nineteen years. The global average proved him almost exactly right. He wasn't alone. George Washington, at the close of the Constitutional Convention, said he did not expect the Constitution to last more than twenty years. The Father of the Country signed a document he fully expected his grandchildren to replace. Even Madison, who pushed back on Jefferson's automatic sunset idea, did so only because he thought frequent wholesale rewrites would be destabilizing. He championed the amendment process precisely because he expected future generations to use it. Not occasionally. Continuously. The three men most responsible for the American system all expected it to be revised or replaced within a generation. The American reverence for constitutional permanence isn't fidelity to the Founders' vision. It's a betrayal of it. We have now lived through twelve generations since ratification. Twelve generations governed by the compromises of men who owned human beings, who believed women should not vote, who could not have imagined electricity, automobiles, nuclear weapons, the internet, or a nation of 330 million people stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We are asking their document to solve problems they could not have conceived. We stopped using the tools they gave us. The last meaningful structural amendment was in 1971, which lowered the voting age to 18. Nothing substantive has changed in over half a century. Other countries do not treat their constitutions as sacred relics. France has rewritten its system five times and nobody there thinks the Fifth Republic is a betrayal of the First. Germany's Basic Law was designed from the start as a provisional document, and when reunification came, they kept it because it worked, not because it was holy. These nations understand that constitutions are tools. We put ours under glass in a marble temple. The conventional narrative frames American constitutional longevity as a virtue. Stability. Continuity. A system that endures. But longevity and quality are not the same thing. Our constitution has survived not because it functions well but because we made it nearly impossible to change. The honest assessment is this: we are not the young nation still finding our way. We are the ancient regime clinging to parchment while the rest of the world iterates and improves. France is not old because French people have existed for millennia. France's current government is 67 years old. We're 236. By the metric that actually matters, how long ago we last updated our governing system, America is the oldest nation on Earth. Maybe, it's time for us to grow up. |
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