The United States was born in battle. Its institutions were forged in war. Every eighty years or so, the United States shifts the way its political institutions work. The broad framework of the Constitution stays in place, but the federal and state institutions change their relationship to each other and change the way in which they work. So far there have been three such shifts. Each was made necessary because the existing arrangements no longer worked. Triggered by the extreme conditions of war, the institutional structure revealed its weakness and required a new institutional system to
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