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You say the Founders didn’t anticipate elected leaders becoming detached from the electorate because they saw man as more good than bad. Yet the entire system of checks and balances was designed around the Calvinistic presumption of a universal defect of selfishness in the human spirit, that the resulting power-lust was so pervasive and predictable it had to be checked via a divide and conquer methodology. People could not be trusted.

No, that's NOT what I said. What I said was this: "The Founding Fathers understood quite well the human psyche and the concept of “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. While I’m not sure they envisioned the types of abuses we are seeing from our government today, they understood the propensity and potential for those abuses to occur."

In a sense, then, we both agree on this point, we just have different approaches that get us to the same place. They certainly knew that it was a possibility down the road, because it existed in THEIR day and they knew it COULD exist in the future of America.

But we are dealing with an ever-growing non-elected body, the Administrative State, immune to the feedback of the voice of the people. Add to that the failure to account for the potential for manipulation of the press, and even more insidious, the dulling and diffusing of the popular voice through statist control of the educational system, and you have to say they may have left a few exploitable weaknesses in the constitutional “Operating System.”

Absolutely true!

The Founders did not institute the two-party system.

Perhaps, but they began with a two-party system. Frankly, the more I see of the two-party system, the more convinced I am that the Parliamentary system works better with multiple parties requiring a coalition of parties in order to gain a majority. The best part, IMO, is that a Parliamentary government can be dissolved by the people with a "No Confidence" vote when things reach a point such as we have today in America!!

These Founders of ours; pretty smart people, imperfections notwithstanding. I continue to be amazed.

I absolutely agree!! We are incredibly blessed that, at that time in the history of the world, God gave America the best minds available to design and implement the framework of a government that capitalizes on the very best things about individuals. It is a crime, IMO, that they had to hand control of that government over to those with lesser ability who have engineered the mess that we have today!!