>Why lay our deficiency in those regards at the door of
>the Constitution? At the time it was written, how
>many countries were doing it better?
It was written over 200 years ago. Isn't that a rather odd standard to use in 1999?
>The Document doesn't forbid our having a better
>political system. It would support all the things
>you name, if only we demanded them.
You are really underestimating the institutional obstacles to popular democracy in the U.S., starting with those deliberately obstructionist constitutional institutions, the Senate and the Supreme Court, and going on down to the whole idiotic federal structure of the U.S., with its 85,000 governmental entities. For a country that professes to hate government we sure create lots of them. How can you create a sensible regional or national policy on anything from education to welfare to the environment with every Podunk school authority and water district claiming sovereignty over its precious half-acre of soil? And how about our state governments? What nests of incompetence and corruption they are - they make Washington look like models of flexibility and openness.
Doug