their classical knowledge ultimately steered the founders wrong on three crucial issues: First, on whether the new nation could subsist on “public virtue,” relying on the self-restraint of those in power to act for the common good and not their personal interest, a proposition that would be tested almost instantly during the War for Independence. Second, on party politics, which the classical writers taught them to regard as unnatural and abhorrent. Their misunderstanding of partisanship, or “faction,” as they tended to call it, nearly wrecked the new republic in the 1790s. Third, and most
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