Is America going to survive the chaos Trump is creating?

Mats Andersson

Probably not in its current form, no.

It’s really quite simple.

Either Trump gets away with changing the USA out of any recognition, or it gets changed to prevent anything similar from happening again.

I’ve remarked on this before. USA was one of the first attempts at making a government by and for the people. The US Constitution was, and still is, a remarkable document – easily 100 years ahead of its time.

That was 250 years ago. It is seriously outdated, and the process for changing it has, over time, become so cumbersome that Americans, uniquely, increasingly see it as a sacred text that cannot be changed, only interpreted, and even that occasionally requires thinking worthy of a circus contortionist.

Other democracies have standing committees that tweak their constitutions every twenty years or so, to bring it in line with developments. It’s never seen as a big deal. In the USA, the last amendment of any consequence to the general population was ratified in 1971. And that only dealt with the relatively small issue of of standardizing the voting age; before 1971, it could vary by state. (Another amendment, which dealt exclusively with the procedure for approving the salaries of Congress, was ratified in 1992, over 200 years after it was proposed.)

Thomas Jefferson recommended tearing the Constitution up wholesale every 20 years or so and writing a new one from scratch. He thought it was important that each generation got to define its own freedoms. Our standing committees in Europe are basically putting this idea into practice, even if we’ve become rather good at it after all those years and don’t usually do more than make small improvements to the constitutions we already have.