when assessing the current political scene, and finding absolutely nothing that we're seeing today that wasn't going on in the post-Revolutionary era, and anticipated by and accounted for, however imperfectly, the founders. Scandal, corruption, abuse of power, lawbreaking, stupidity, partisanship, factionalism, dishonesty, propaganda, sectarianism, dereliction of duty, political fueds, viciousness, etc. And some of the founders themselves were guilty of such behavior.

And, while he was certainly not without his faults, both personally and politically, and was a bit too accomodating to monied and aristocratic elites for my comfort, I increasingly find myself admiring Alexander Hamilton (in addition to Washington and Franklin, of course), as perhaps the most prescient, wise and honest of the founders. While on the one hand he set up the foundation for our economic system, which ended up being abused for profit and power over the centuries and leading to much suffering, he also set up various checks and balances against such abuse, anticipating and warning against them, and himself never made a cent off of his economic reforms, despite having ample opportunities to do so, often quite legal.

Similarly, with regards to the constitution and our legal and political system, he also anticipated and warned against their abuse, and advocated a variety of checks and balances to guard against such abuses. He understood that people were all too often some combination of weak, foolish, corruptible, selfish and partisan, and that protections had to be put in place to guard against them, e.g. the Bill of Rights, separation of powers among three co-equal branches, etc. Unfortunately, his proposed checks tended to be more focused on protecting against faux populist demagogues who might exploit and rile up public anger for political gain (e.g. Jackson, Gingrich), and not on protecting against corrupt elites who would exploit their power and access for illegitimate gain. But he was not blind to the latter, and wrote extensively against it.

Imperfect as the system that they set up was, it has been refined and improved upon over the years, by design, via the amendment process, the principle of judicial review, and leaving much leeway for federal, state and local legislatures to fill in the blanks where powers were implied and unenumerated (which, of course, has been willfully or naively misunderstood by radical libertarians over the years, the most recent of which are Paulites and their ilk, and which the ever-prescient Hamilton also anticipated and wrote much about). The problem, though, is that such a system could only be as effective as the people running it. And we've been saddled with a particularly incompetent, corrupt, stupid and weak bunch of them of late (made possible, of course, by excessive and inherently unfair corporate and special interest influence on elections, itself made possible by an increasingly right-wing and activist judiciary).

What the founders certainly anticipated, but despite their best efforts couldn't possibly have fully protected us against, was the deleterious effect that the election of dishonest, corrupt, weak and stupid politicians, and an equally dishonest, corrupt, weak and stupid press, could and would have on the legal, political and economic system that they set up. Like anything, it's only as good as the people who run and mind it. But the means still exists, provided for by the founders, to replace these charlatans with better people.

I know that some here and elsewhere believe that we should scrap the whole system and start anew. But even were that possible, which I believe it is not, would we really end up with something much better than what we presently have? I believe not. More likely, we'd end up with something even worse (I can't think of a single successful revolution except for ours, and even that one is still being faught, legally and politically). The problem isn't the system that we've inherited, but its abuse and misuse by bad agents, who must be replaced.

I was obviously referring to the authoritarian school of German-Austrian political philosophy and practice, in which self-styled elites grab power and then use it to impose their will, however "benevolent" they imagine it to be, upon the masses, that culminated in the Nazi party.

In any cases, while the founders of the US were clearly "elites", in the sense that many of them came from money and power (less so, ironically, among the more conservative Federalists), and were much better educated than most Americans, and even "elitists", in the sense that may of them believed themselves to be most fit to lead and mistrusted the masses (Federalists especially do, at least in word, although the Republicans ended up being just as elitist in deed, if not more so), they nevertheless set up a political system that made it possible for literally anyone, in due time, to make it to the top--even women and African-Americans, through the amendment process. The specific political and legal structure that they set up initially was clearly elistist and only partly liberal. But the underlying framework was inherently liberal, and it's that liberal framework that has survived intact, even as the initial unliberal structure has withered away. The founders' brilliance and liberalism was in setting up the first viable liberal political and legal meta-structure, that lasts to the present day.

And the neocons refuse to acknowledge that, in fact simply lie about it.