The purpose of this essay is to take a long view of American history in order to discuss the American experience in government. It will consider what we have learned about governing ourselves during the last twenty years specifically. It will discuss mistakes we have made as a nation and what we have learned from them. It will also identify some of the major American contributions to the science of government since the founding of the nation.
It has been said that if the American Revolution was a revolution at all, it was a conservative revolution, unlike almost any other in history. It has also been said that it was merely a war for independence, fought so that that Americans, as citizens of the new nation, would have the rights they were supposed to have had as English citizens under the Bill of Rights passed by Parliament after the Glorious Revolution. Certainly the Continental Congress, the Confederation Congress, the Constitutional Congress, and the first government under the new Constitution were all dominated by solidest citizens in the country: state governors and legislators, the wealthiest men from each state, and the most respected academic were among these founding fathers.
These architects of the new nation were conservative because they wished to conserve the best aspects of English law and government, while eliminating those aspects of the British system that the colonists had experienced as being abusive. They knew that they were in the virtually unprecedented position of being able to design a new system of government with complete freedom, one that would be free from the ôdead hand of history,ö one that need not reflect any aspect of past histories or governments that the designers considered inadequate. And they took their task very seriously, knowing that their own survival, with the British Empire perfectly willing to reannex its former colonies if it had the chance, and the survival of generations t...