I’m hardly putting them on a pedestal. They simply got the ball rolling on our iteration of democracy. They had some great ideas, but little foresight or imagination into what their experiment would become. The Constitution could use a full refresh, borrowing what can be salvaged from the old and updated for modern society.
Surprisingly, what we have as a nation (imo some of the best ideas of our original constitution) were inspired by the politics of Indigenous Americans, in large part by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. But the problem with that adaptation was that colonists adopted ideas in a piecemeal way without paying full respect to the broader meaning of those ideas (also in context to cultural and social norms, etc.). The US Constitution didn’t pay much reverence to the collective social responsibility of being good stewards of the environment, and instead focused on the pursuit of individual liberties. This experiment has now, with its initial set of conditions taken with far less context than was needed, has evolved to what it currently is in a fraction of the time that Indigenous Americans had a relatively stable socioeconomic and political existence. We might all benefit from learning more about Indigenous democratic institutions, and I certainly wish I would have been exposed to this history sooner.
I’m hardly putting them on a pedestal. They simply got the ball rolling on our iteration of democracy. They had some great ideas, but little foresight or imagination into what their experiment would become. The Constitution could use a full refresh, borrowing what can be salvaged from the old and updated for modern society.
Surprisingly, what we have as a nation (imo some of the best ideas of our original constitution) were inspired by the politics of Indigenous Americans, in large part by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. But the problem with that adaptation was that colonists adopted ideas in a piecemeal way without paying full respect to the broader meaning of those ideas (also in context to cultural and social norms, etc.). The US Constitution didn’t pay much reverence to the collective social responsibility of being good stewards of the environment, and instead focused on the pursuit of individual liberties. This experiment has now, with its initial set of conditions taken with far less context than was needed, has evolved to what it currently is in a fraction of the time that Indigenous Americans had a relatively stable socioeconomic and political existence. We might all benefit from learning more about Indigenous democratic institutions, and I certainly wish I would have been exposed to this history sooner.