National Constitution Center CEO Jeffrey Rosen sees America as a loop, not a line — the same argument replaying from Hamilton to Trump. Parties switch sides, Jeffersonian one decade, Hamiltonian the next, as if conviction itself were seasonal. “The point of the Constitution was not efficiency, but liberty,” Louis Brandeis warned, and liberty, as Rosen reminded, depends on disagreement. Susan Demas pushed that idea toward the present: If tension is the safeguard, what happens when polarization replaces principle? The answer, buried in history, is that efficiency always ends in empire.
Nowhere is that danger clearer than in the Insurrection Act. For more than two centuries, no president dared use it against a state’s will — until Donald Trump. The founders drew that line to make tyranny difficult, not impossible. Once that boundary moves, federalism stops being a guardrail and becomes a weapon. Rosen called it an irony bordering on tragedy: The party born of Jefferson’s suspicion of power now cheering its expansion; a collapse of memory disguised as strength.
Lincoln Square
NEW EPISODE OF FIRST DRAFT DROPS AT 3PM ET: https://youtu.be/kK4v1jxYlV4
National Constitution Center CEO Jeffrey Rosen sees America as a loop, not a line — the same argument replaying from Hamilton to Trump. Parties switch sides, Jeffersonian one decade, Hamiltonian the next, as if conviction itself were seasonal. “The point of the Constitution was not efficiency, but liberty,” Louis Brandeis warned, and liberty, as Rosen reminded, depends on disagreement. Susan Demas pushed that idea toward the present: If tension is the safeguard, what happens when polarization replaces principle? The answer, buried in history, is that efficiency always ends in empire.
Nowhere is that danger clearer than in the Insurrection Act. For more than two centuries, no president dared use it against a state’s will — until Donald Trump. The founders drew that line to make tyranny difficult, not impossible. Once that boundary moves, federalism stops being a guardrail and becomes a weapon. Rosen called it an irony bordering on tragedy: The party born of Jefferson’s suspicion of power now cheering its expansion; a collapse of memory disguised as strength.
2 weeks ago | [YT] | 253