The 70-year itch...

This is an interesting read. As with any transition, there is opportunity for improvement or diminishment. The question is which fork in the road we will take.

The United States has been called the oldest nation in the world, in the sense that it has operated the longest without a major upheaval in its basic institutional structure.

From one perspective, this characterization is fair. The nation still rests on the Constitution of 1787, and no other government can trace its current charter back so far...

Shift the angle of vision and the continuity is less clear, because we have had two upheavals so sweeping that the institutional arrangements under which we now operate can fairly be classified as the Third American Republic. Furthermore, this Third Republic is teetering (these things seem to run in cycles of about 70 years) and is on the edge of giving way to a revised Fourth Republic with arrangements as yet murky to our present-bound perceptions.

The various phases described in the article have one thing in common: they all resulted in greater concentration of power. It's a testament to the genius of the Founders they were able to distribute power so widely that it's taken at least two major upheavals and over two centuries to reach the point we're at today, where Statist nannies oversee everything from your salt intake to whether or not you're performing the appropriate environmental rituals.

The current crisis of confidence and structure is a defining one of our generation. And the question remains: will it provide an opportunity for those who 'never let a crisis go to waste' in the quest for more control, or will it result in a rollback of Leviathan?

Stay tuned...