Yet, perhaps most ironically, the framers did anticipate that deep ideological factions could rip the country apart and leave space for the kind of autocracy that they denounced in the form of the British monarchy. As a result, they wrote the Constitution to avoid a government that could devolve into a purely “tribal” political system under which certain points of view become more important than fostering the interests of the public as a whole. Today, we find ourselves mired in just that kind of political death spiral. What on earth is going on?
