Every few years, I post this political quote to remind us that this is all precisely part of the "Great American Experiment":
"Madison laid bare the heart of the new American system. The theme was not unity, but countervailing interests; in contemporary terms, gridlock. Federal versus state powers, executive versus legislative, and judicial versus them both: add the disparate economic interests of bankers and farmers, slaveholding southerners versus commercial-minded northerners, and thirteen semisovereign political units, plus indirect elections at the senatorial and presidential level to frustrate the raw, crude will of the people--and what you have is not chaos, as the critics might expect, but stability and above all liberty.
Gridlock at the public level guarantees liberty at the private level: this was the dirty little secret Madison dared to unveil in the Federalist Papers."
*From How the Scots Invented the Modern World
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