After 1776, the founders designed a government that accounts for ‘a degree of depravity in mankind’

Two hundred fifty years after declaring independence, America faced a harder challenge: building a government to manage it. The Conversation reports that the Constitution's framers—Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, George Washington among them—grappled with how to design a system that could survive human nature's darker impulses. They landed on Madison's blunt conclusion: 'If men were angels, no government would be necessary.' The solution was radical separation of power across three branches, built-in checks and balances, and mechanisms to channel what they called 'factions'—destructive movements driven by demagogues—into productive ends. It was cynicism as constitutional architecture: the operating assumption that both leaders and citizens are capable of self-interest and corruption.

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