Why the Republic probably isn’t in grave danger

Reflecting on John Perry Barlow’s very eloquent warning about the danger to the Republic inherent in a second Bush term (see previous post), Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto offered a hopeful and (I think) largely accurate contrary view. The following is a paraphrase, but the sense is largely unchanged:

The reason that the American Revolution created a republic that has done so well for so long, while the French and Russian revolutions degenerated so quickly into tyranny, was that the American Framers didn’t try to create a government capable of doing great good in the hands of brilliant and well-intentioned people. Instead, they tried to create a government that couldn’t do too much to ruin the country in the hands of a bunch of corrupt morons. And they did a pretty good job of it.