History quickly revealed that the founders were mistaken. Without innovations such as political parties and their accompanying norms, the Constitution they so carefully constructed in Philadelphia would not have survived. Institutions were more than just formal rules; they encompassed the shared understandings of appropriate behavior that overlay them. The genius of the first generation of America’s political leaders was not that they created foolproof institutions, but that, in addition to designing very good institutions, they—gradually and with difficulty—established a set of shared beliefs
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