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Notes -
Short, short time jumps. I'd be curious to correlate answers to the question about the USA over the past 250 years, with their answers to two questions:
When did Rome end?
Do you think that your father approves of you and your life?
The first is obvious. Do you think of Flavius Aetius before riding into battle against Attila, reflecting on himself as part of a Roman tradition that reaches back to Scipio; do you hear that and think "You absolute fool, don't you realize that the post-Marian reform legions were a completely different thing, and the imperium again, and the dominate yet again?"
The second, I'm curious to what extent the personal is the political. I have an older father, he was in his late 40s when I was born, and so many aspects of my world are inexplicable to him. Nonetheless I feel that he loves me and approves of me and my life. I suspect the feeling that the Founding Fathers would not approve of the modern USA because of it's inexplicability is related to an observation or feeling of rejection by one's biological ancestors.
As for my answer: I don't think that America has ever exactly been one thing. There are visions of America that failed, and visions of America that succeeded. The Founding Fathers were not, by nature, factionalists or followers, they were individualists to a fault. There were at least a dozen views of what America would be among the signers of the Declaration and the Constitution. Some of the Founders expressed different views at different times, and probably felt different ways at different times. It is hard to imagine that Thomas Jefferson had a consistent view on race when one reads his writings on the subject.
My view is more along the lines of how do you define a dynasty in sports, as long as you have consistent success and players who played together with other players, you have a single team. The break comes when you have bad seasons or you have a complete turnover in personnel. So the 1920-1964 Yankees constitute a single Dynasty, even though no single player could possibly span that period, and the game itself changed so much in that time. Because you never had discontinuity, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra played with Joe DiMaggio who played with Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. It wasn't until the down years that you see discontinuity.
Similarly, the Trump admin is a big change from the Bush II admin, but there are a lot of guys who served in both, and you can push that back through every Republican admin (and parallels in the Dems) to the start of the century, and probably earlier. Over time the population of the country has turned over, is demographically different, but there's direct succession. As long as that exists, there's America, and I think some of the founders would look at it and smile, at least some of the time.
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