EMERGENCE, TEMPERED BY BOURGEOIS NORMS.

Somehow, the people kept the Republic, despite the Framers' misgivings.  "Many Founders Died in Despair About the American Experiment."

The image of the dog that catches the truck and wonders what to do next comes to mind.

People rightly marvel at the miracle that Jefferson and his longtime rival-turned-friend John Adams both perished on July 4, 1826. Less remembered is that the two otherwise ideologically and dispositionally opposed torchbearers for the flame of '76 had each soured on the fruits of their precious Revolution.

"Oh my country," Adams wrote in 1806 to Benjamin Rush. "How I mourn over thy follies and Vices, thine ignorance and imbecility, Thy contempt of Wisdom and Virtue and overweening Admiration of fools and Knaves!"

Founder disgruntlement was the rule, not the exception (and the exception to that rule was James Madison). "Those of them who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought," wrote the historian Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. "Although they tried to put as good a face as they could on what had happened, they were bewildered, uneasy, and in many cases deeply disillusioned."

Somehow James Madison could remain optimistic despite the British sacking the Federal Capital during his presidency.

Those mischiefs of faction, though?  Unanticipated and unintended consequences abound.

Imagine cooperating enough from 1765 to 1791 to produce the hot-headedness of colonial rebellion, the magnificence of the Declaration, the long-shot heroism of defeating the world's greatest navy, and the architectural inspiration of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, only to lapse almost immediately into the nastiest politics the country would ever see outside of the Civil War. Brilliant and energetic men went from blood brothers to sworn enemies overnight. It could not have been very easy on the nerves.

Washington's premonitory warnings against the degradations of faction are immediately recognizable in our 250th anniversary year, but they landed even harder at the time, and not just because of the pervasive sense of fragility. Even the most partisan of the 1790s factionalists believed (or at least hoped) that political parties would be a temporary unpleasantness to be discarded once the country and Constitution had been steered out of their initial crisis. Indeed, the so-called Era of Good Feelings, from 1815 to 1824, was marked by its lack of political competition, as the Federalists faded away and the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans held sway.

The Founders were unusually prescient and winningly world-weary when designing a government to restrain the many temptations of fallen man placed in proximity to power. But they did not quite understand that political parties—with all their truth-bending, soul-killing, pocket-lining corruption—would be a permanent feature of American politics. If they had, they'd have been even more depressed.

Political parties, which the political science types still grapple to understand, might have emerged to reduce information costs.  Call this policy bundle "Democratic" or this policy bundle "Republican" and hope for the best.  It's a rant for another day whether looking to expand the bundle both by putting more things in it and by applying national standards to local topics exacerbates the evils.

Don Antonio will get his after the weekend.

Perhaps it's the deconstruction of bourgeois norms that's what went wrong.

The Founding Fathers were Enlightenment men—schooled by the works of Scottish philosophers, thrilled by the possibilities of technological advancement, hopeful in the face of all contrary experience that man could be self-governing. With the possible exception of the much older Benjamin Franklin, no Founder came close to the Enlightenmentness of Jefferson. His hard-fought third-act founding of the University of Virginia was an ambitious attempt to pay forward the values of the American Revolution perpetually. "If a nation expects to be ignorant & free," he wrote, "it expects what never was & never will be."

That can-do revolutionary faith in future Americans, which Jefferson sustained more than anyone, rested on a paradox: The Founders were products of a moment that their own success hastened to a close. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and Hamilton may have all despised one another at various times in the 1790s, but they all agreed vociferously with the decidedly 18th century notion that disinterested, gentlemanly virtue was foundational to any hope for the new republic's success.

So mote it be.