A republic built on a three-branch government was the product that the Founding Fathers sold to the peoples of America. The product was new (no one had thought of the separation of powers before) and, once adopted, it propelled the American people to the top of the world. In the tradition of Steve Jobs and Peter Thiel, the Founding Fathers did not conduct market research. They conceived of something that people did not yet know that they wanted (and maybe would not grasp that they wanted for a generation).
How the Founding Fathers managed to sell the product to the American people is somewhat of a mystery and motivates the book. The colonies that fought against a government were persuaded to join in government. And yet, there was no buyer's remorse. This is because the seller's motivations were pure. The Founding Fathers believed that their interests would be best served if they put people's interests first. This idea of serving the people rather than the king is truly American and is as integral to the American project as the separation of powers. In American companies, the ethos of serving the people rather than serving the king lives on as the concern for the flourishing of one's subordinates at the expense of seeking to gratify one's boss.
The Founding Fathers shifted the focus away from the states' parochial interests and towards the common concerns of repaying the national debt and settling new territories.
The genius of the Founding Fathers consisted in not trying to sell a compromise solution to the disparate American states. What was sold instead was a mechanism for resolving a conflict and reaching a compromise. (The mechanism has worked rather well, albeit not without hiccups. There was the Civil War, after all.) The United States Constitution is a mechanism for conducting debates; the Constitution is not a list of solutions. For instance, the exact balance between the Federal and the state powers is not circumscribed. The status of slavery was also left unsettled.
The Bill of Rights was an afterthought, and a fortuitous one at that. The Bill provides an explicit check on the powers of the government. Both the government and the gilded elites are held in check by the prospect of the people running around while freely speaking their minds and wielding guns.
Exceptional times called for exceptional characters. Both Britain and France shaped some of the characters whose values transcended the institutions of Britain and France and who joined in calls for something entirely new: first, the free colonies, and then the United States of America.
Collapsing populations make nations vanish. The population of American Indians imploded naturally, and much of their land was taken with little fighting. Will Americans similarly vanish? The U.S. population may implode, perhaps because people prefer to consume goods and services instead of having kids. Could it be that this very consumption will preclude the collapse? For instance, the consumption of AI services may spur the development of AI and, under the optimistic scenario, lead to unprecedented prosperity.
America is full of exceptional people. Will these people start something new elsewhere, where America's ideals will be built upon and live on? Will America find a way to prosper without a frontier?
The book's author is not concerned with the question marks above. Instead, he concludes with the admonition that the heroes of his book lived in a pre-modern world, and that we are therefore not supposed to understand them. First, it is not entirely clear what exactly it is that one is supposed not to understand. Second, is it not the author’s job to explain how to understand?
