America: The 250-Year-Old Parvenu
Monday Memo 3/23 AD2026
To last, America’s institutions and its constitution need a shared memory.
The stories you tell yourself are powerful. So are the ones you let others tell you—if you are silly enough to believe the Gríma Wormtongues around you. You can tell yourself you are weak and become so. Likewise, you can convince yourself that you are inexperienced, a parvenu with no business being where you are. America has let such ideas creep into its head: the idea that it is a “new” country or that everything is unprecedented. We must return to basics—to the ground level. So much has been forgotten and much else was never learned.
At 250 years old, the United States is one of the oldest governments in the world. Should we act as if Russia is “older” than us? It has a presidential republic that has existed only since the 1990s; before that, it was a totalitarian regime, and before that, a monarchy whose members and aristocracy were murdered or exiled a century ago. Should we pretend that such a government has continuity? China’s 2,000-year-old imperial system was destroyed in 1911 and 1916; the Communists took power in 1949, exiling the old government to Taiwan.
In 1776 Americans declared independence from the Westminster Parliament and their German Hanoverian king, George III, but the Founding Fathers did not expel their memory. They claimed Magna Carta as their birthright—the works of Henry II Plantagenet, the Tudors, the Restoration Parliament, and the Glorious Revolution. We have allowed ourselves to be deluded by the idea that we are a new and experimental nation, so far that we have lost the advantages of being a serious and experienced country. The memo for this Monday is that we must return to the basics of how the American system evolved and why powers are distributed as they are. People who treated the separation of powers as an inconvenience have learned the hard way that Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and the other “old white guys” from the 18th century might actually have known what they were doing. It is time we relearned the lessons they did. We must recognize that political maturity requires what George Santayana called ‘retentiveness.’ As he noted in Reason in Common Sense:
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. —George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense
