Suppose a government could be formed and supported on such principles, would it answer the great purposes of civil society; if the administrators of every government are actuated by views of private interest and ambition, how is the welfare and happiness of the community to be the result of such jarring adverse interests?

I THINK IT WAS maybe as long ago as 45 years or more ago, that I heard someone on the radio, certainly on an NPR program, talking about a video they made of a woman looking into the camera talking, leaving pauses, that you could show someone with advanced dementia.   As I recall, they said you could show them the video over and over again and they'd have a conversation with the video without ever recalling they've seen it before.   I think, among other things, it was meant to give care givers some respite from the terrible work of keeping an eye on a seriously demented person all the time.  

Watching the footage of Trump talking to the "AI" Teddy Roosevelt and him seeming to think he was talking to the real PERSON instead of a machine image,  it reminded me of that.  I think he really believed he was talking to Teddy, he sounded like that's what he thought later on.  Maybe that's what comes from him watching TV like Teevee Mike.    

That we could have Trump in his florid, corrupt, perverted, criminal dementia STILL IN THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENCY on July 2, 2026 is absolute proof that our Constitution has failed, totally and that the very structure of government that has created this situation is a clear and present danger to all of us and the world.    The "balanced powers" of John Adams was addressed so relevantly in "Centennial 1."

I have been anxiously expecting that some enlightened patriot would, ere this, have taken up the pen to expose the futility, and counteract the baneful tendency of such principles. Mr. Adams's sine qua non of a good government is three balancing powers, whose repelling qualities are to produce an equilibrium of interests, and thereby promote the happiness of the whole community. He asserts that the administrators of every government, will ever be actuated by views of private interest and ambition, to the prejudice of the public good; that therefore the only effectual method to secure the rights of the people and promote their welfare, is to create an opposition of interests between the members of two distinct bodies, in the exercise of the powers of government, and balanced by those of a third. This hypothesis supposes human wisdom competent to the task of instituting three co-equal orders in government, and a corresponding weight in the community to enable them respectively to exercise their several parts, and whose views and interests should be so distinct as to prevent a coalition of any two of them for the destruction of the third. Mr. Adams, although he has traced the constitution of every form of government that ever existed, as far as history affords materials, has not been able to adduce a single instance of such a government; he indeed says that the British constitution is such in theory, but this is rather a confirmation that his principles are chimerical and not to be reduced to practice. If such an organization of power were practicable, how long would it continue? not a day--for there is so great a disparity in the talents, wisdom and industry of mankind, that the scale would presently preponderate to one or the other body, and with every accession of power the means of further increase would be greatly extended. The state of society in England is much more favorable to such a scheme of government than that of America. There they have a powerful hereditary nobility, and real distinctions of rank and interests; but even there, for want of that perfect equality of power and distinction of interests, in the three orders of government, they exist but in name; the only operative and efficient check, upon the conduct of administration, is the sense of the people at large.

Suppose a government could be formed and supported on such principles, would it answer the great purposes of civil society; if the administrators of every government are actuated by views of private interest and ambition, how is the welfare and happiness of the community to be the result of such jarring adverse interests?

That last sentence certainly addresses the situation of the United States in 2026, it has for most of the periods of most of the history of the country to some extent, BUT IT NEVER HAS SO MUCH AS IT DOES TODAY.   And that isn't only relevant to the most corrupt presidency in American history which we are living through today, it is certainly as relevant for the New Taney Supreme Court and the Congress.   All under the corrupt Republican Party of 2026.   Of course, if you read me much at all you will know I have believed for decades that the most florid of that corruption has always resided in the UN-ELECTED Supreme Court,  having noted that was certainly true from the beginning of the term of the idolized John Marshall who repeatedly and consistently voted in his own financial interest as a holder of hundreds of human beings in slavery,  the man who imposed the first and most serious of unbalancings of John Adams' imaginary balance in the Marbury power grab of 1803.  

While I would not endorse everything in the collected Anti-Federalist papers, not even everything "Centennial" says there is a lot in them that shows that the government we are about to hold up as if it were the coming of the Millennial order, was more correctly predicted to have serious problems which that very idolizing prevents us from addressing.  That failure to fix the thing isn't done just for that reason, though.  THE VERY CULT OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE FETISH OF THE FOUNDERS IS IN THE FINANCIAL AND POWER INTERESTS OF THE WEALTHY OR THOSE WOULD NEVER HAVE PERSISTED AND GROWN INTO A STATE RELIGION AS THEY HAVE.   

He goes on from that passage to say this:

Therefore, as different orders in government will not produce the good of the whole, we must recur to other principles. I believe it will be found that the form of government, which holds those entrusted with power, in the greatest responsibility to their constituents, the best calculated for freemen. A republican, or free government, can only exist where the body of the people are virtuous, and where property is pretty equally divided[;] in such a government the people are the sovereign and their sense or opinion is the criterion of every public measure; for when this ceases to be the case, the nature of the government is changed, and an aristocracy, monarchy or despotism will rise on its ruin. The highest responsibility is to be attained, in a simple structure of government, for the great body of the people never steadily attend to the operations of government, and for want of due information are liable to be imposed on--If you complicate the plan by various orders, the people will be perplexed and divided in their sentiments about the source of abuses or misconduct, some will impute it to the senate, others to the house of representatives, and so on, that the interposition of the people may be rendered imperfect or perhaps wholly abortive. But if, imitating the constitution of Pennsylvania, you vest all the legislative power in one body of men (separating the executive and judicial) elected for a short period, and necessarily excluded by rotation from permanency, and guarded from precipitancy and surprise by delays imposed on its proceedings, you will create the most perfect responsibility for then, whenever the people feel a grievance they cannot mistake the authors, and will apply the remedy with certainty and effect, discarding them at the next election. This tie of responsibility will obviate all the dangers apprehended from a single legislature, and will the best secure the rights of the people.

I hold with most of that, on the basis of being a close student of the corruption of American politics, especially under the prevention of reform by the Supreme Court beginning in 1976, the very year of the Buycentennial, in Buckley v Valeo, and watching it destroy the bipartisan attempt to correct the flagrant corruption of Nixon and his campaign - the thing that J. D. Vance is trying to rehabilitate into a virtue a half a century later. 

The Court is clearly and plainly and, for decades, been at the service of the oligarchs, as the corrupt Louis Powell planned it to be in his memo to the wealthy and oligarchic  in his infamous memo that laid out the plan to capture the Court and so the entire government.   That scheme has worked beyond that corrupt white supremacist tobacco industry lawyer better than I can think he'd have believed it would. 

I'll leave you with this paragraph from Centennial. 

The wealthy and ambitious, who in every community think they have a right to lord it over their fellow creatures, have availed themselves, very successfully, of this favorable disposition; for the people thus unsettled in their sentiments, have been prepared to accede to any extreme of government; all the distresses and difficulties they experience, proceeding from various causes, have been ascribed to the impotency of the present Confederation, and thence they have been led to expect full relief from the adoption of the proposed system of government; and in the other event, immediate ruin and annihilation as a nation. These characters flatter themselves that they have lulled all distrust and jealousy of their new plan, by gaining the concurrence of the two men in whom America has the highest confidence, and now triumphantly exult in the completion of their long meditated schemes of power and aggrandizement. I would be very far from insinuating that the two illustrious personages alluded to, have not the welfare of their country at heart; but that the unsuspecting goodness and zeal of the one, has been imposed on, in a subject of which he must be necessarily inexperienced, from his other arduous engagements; and that the weakness and indecision attendant on old age, has been practiced on in the other.

I think it's pretty clear the first personage was George Washington, "a subject of which he must be necessarily inexperienced, from his other arduous engagements"  and the second was clearly Benjamin Franklin, "the weakness and indecision attendant on old age" whose original opposition to a two-house legislative, he would have had only a House of Representatives, led to what I hold is the second most corrupt feature of our governmental structure, the anti-democratically constituted Senate with the greatly greater powers given it than the more democratically constituted House.    

If Democrats do not win the mid-term election decisively AND ACT IN WAYS TO THWART THE ROBERTS COURT AND THE TRUMP REGIME,  we'd better start thinking about these things because the Republic that Franklin was asked about will have been lost, as Centennial seems to have foreseen.