The threat to the United States of America has always been disunity. At the time of its founding, the strongest and most politically important identities were state identities, and the central tension was between those who feared the (white, male) voting public and those who trusted it, so we built a system meant to calm those divisions. We balanced big and small states in the Senate. We balanced democratic and elite rule by handing the House to the voters, the Senate to state legislatures (popular elections came to the US Senate only with the 1913 ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment),
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