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joshofalltrades
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
REWIND
REWIND
REWIND
The year is 1787, and you have been invited to the Constitutional Convention for a new country that has succeeded in winning its independence from Britain. Oddly enough you know what the state of the country will be up through the year 2020.
With this knowledge, you have enough charisma and pull with the other founders to:
1) change one thing that is already being put into the US Constitution,
2) add something brand new to it, or
3) wait until 1791 when the Bill of Rights is being ratified to remove, change, or add a new Amendment, and hope you don’t get a random infection from a paper cut and die because medicine sucked back then.
My answer in spoilers so I don’t inadvertently impact your own:
Even if you aren’t American, you are still allowed to speculate about what would have made your neighbor a little nicer to live next to.
By the way, this is just a fun thought experiment, don’t be a silly goose.
REWIND
REWIND
The year is 1787, and you have been invited to the Constitutional Convention for a new country that has succeeded in winning its independence from Britain. Oddly enough you know what the state of the country will be up through the year 2020.
With this knowledge, you have enough charisma and pull with the other founders to:
1) change one thing that is already being put into the US Constitution,
2) add something brand new to it, or
3) wait until 1791 when the Bill of Rights is being ratified to remove, change, or add a new Amendment, and hope you don’t get a random infection from a paper cut and die because medicine sucked back then.
My answer in spoilers so I don’t inadvertently impact your own:
My gut says to abolish slavery right from the get-go, and hope that progress accelerates somewhat faster from there. Obviously ending slavery from the inception of the nation would not stop racism or the inevitable atrocities pro-slavery people would have committed despite legal manumission, but it may have moved the schedule up somewhat and prevented the Civil War. Or maybe not! Maybe I am naive and picked low-hanging fruit, and early abolition would have killed America sooner. But since there’s no way of knowing, and if I was just making a selfish idealistic choice, that would be it. It wouldn’t be the only thing I would want changed/clarified, but I think it’s potentially the most important.
Even if you aren’t American, you are still allowed to speculate about what would have made your neighbor a little nicer to live next to.
By the way, this is just a fun thought experiment, don’t be a silly goose.
+8
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If not, I would probably codify a bunch of norms in the document itself.
Or convince them that the Senate was a stupid idea.
Like I said, it’s possible that would have just moved up the timetable on the Civil War. But I also think we let slavery settle in like an addiction and we are still to this day in withdrawal.
Basically trying to ensure that humane treatment of prisoners and foreigners is a thing.
This is basically the 14th Amendment.
but they're listening to every word I say
I would make it explicitly a State right. Like; The right of states to form a well regulated militia bearing arms shall not be infringed upon.
It would neuter it in the crib while still giving those that wanted it in its original form what they want.
Kind of like how the 3rd Amendment preventing the government from forcing you to house troops in your spare bedroom. Ridiculous now, a pressing worry at the time.
As for the rest? I would honestly make a Chartered US Bank like the FED a thing from the get go. Andrew Jackson did a number on the US once he eliminated the original. A Fed and SEC would probably make the US way more financially stable.
It's a choice made more difficult because a big reason(s) the North wins the Civil War is because of having more bodies and big industry behind it.
In 1776 it has neither of those things.
Slavery is the greatest evil present at the inception of the US but it is the riskiest fish to step on.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
My first idea is to guarantee all free men (preferably women too, but I'll get to that) the vote, and basing representation on the count of eligible voters in the state - no 3/5 crap, a voter counts and a non voter doesn't. If women don't vote they don't count, kids don't count until they turn 18, slaves don't count).
This shifts the balance of legislative and elective power immensely right off the bat, I feel having free blacks as a voting group right away helps with abolitionist movements, and if I can't get women the vote on the first try, it now becomes a weird racist thing ("how come their men count for more than our women!?") to get it done later. This also incentivises suffrage at the state level in the short term because the more people a state extends voting rights to, the more weight they carry in the legislature, if a state like New York emerges as am internal superpower because they have universal suffrage while half the country is only for literate white males without a criminal record them there is a suffrage arms race - you either submit to their dominance or become them and then why the battle anyway.
The second (and the one that actually might have flown at the time) is a change in the electoral college. Sweeping it aside wouldn't fly with the rest of the framers but a subtle change, divorcing it from the legislature entirely and basing it on voting population (with a much smaller population per elelctor than per house seat, and preferably not a factor of it either so people don't get married to the idea of them being basically the same thing - say one elector per 3500 voters) would neuter, but not eliminate, edge cases like Bush or Trump but does break the symmetry of the political parties, particularly once semi-permanent parties emerge over specific interest parties. This does not kill either of the parties we have but it kills a lot of patent bullshit both and their predecessors relied on to win elections they arguably shouldn't have.
The third is sidestepping the whole rule for balance between slave and free states entirely... But I think the only way to accomplish that is to constitutionally guarantee slavery, and that's an even bigger stain on history than the one we already have.
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I would add footnotes to define both "bear" and "arms"
On a related note, outlaw puns. Right in the constitution.
But given that this thread started with a Hamilton reference, I might as well run with the "American experiment" bit and try out something odd. How about actual universal suffrage? Let's skip the questions of qualifications and so on and try having the default mode for suffrage being "yes."
If you're an adult and living on the soil of this newfangled country, you've got the franchise. We'll maybe consider exceptions for edge cases like diplomats, etc., but otherwise, if your house, estate, apartment, hovel or tent's default location is on US soil, you get a say. New arrival who got off the boat five months ago? Gets a say. Seasonal workers from abroad pitching on on a farm or working with fishing fleets? While they're there, Gets a say. French professor's offered a teaching position for a year in a New England college? While he's there, he gets a say. British/Canadian merchant spending his winters selling stuff in Virginia and returning north in the spring once Quebec gets a civilized climate again? While he's there, he gets a say.
I have no idea how that would pan out in the long term, but it's kind of fun thinking through the implications of "democracy means everyone and I mean everyone gets a voice."
I don’t think the failing of the founders was that they couldn’t anticipate how powerful/portable arms could get. I think it is in their failure to foresee the extent of the intransigence and unwillingness to believe in facts, or perhaps a breakdown of equal and egalitarian moral ideals.
S’why I agree with bum upthread about the next priority being codifying norms.
The US would have really been a signal to the rest of the world then to get its shit together (slavery was still prevalent even if the transatlantic slave trade had ended in a lot of countries shortly after the US founding)
Edit:
This means we have 1 Virginia and 1 Dakota...maybe only 1 Carolina but I don’t know why there’s 2
Jefferson may have been awful and taken advantage of it, but he also tried to get rid of it because he knew it was horrible. It's just he priotitized the Nation more, and so when faced with the fact that trying to get rid of it would have either a)ripped the country apart or b) prevented the formation to begin with, he let it go.
His moral cowardice is not the worst the country had on the problem.
Though if I'm doing the whole thing over, I would find a way to completely eliminate the influence of state lines from any federal election whatsoever.
I dunno. It’s also possible for some incredibly awful thing to happen from having this fight early on in the republic. But I think it’s better to have it from the start than once our economy is built on the backs of slaves.
The obvious bad thing would be that, weakened by the civil war in the late 1700s, we lose the war of 1812 and end up a part of the UK again.
Ehhh. The Marquis de Lafayette was still alive and itching to kick British asses then. I’m sure we could have beat them once again. :P
Why do you rite like your running out of time?
Good god, that would be the worst timeline of all, we would become....Canada!
Think abooot it, oh my god it’s already happening, I can feel the free healthcare infecting me!
I think the most likely thing with starting a civil war in the late 1700s is that it isn't a civil war because the US just never takes shape. There's not enough time for the need to keep the union together to feel like a reasonable goal.
The mass industrialization and expansion of the 19th century slows to some percentage of what actually happened. Germany holds France without the arrival of US forces in 1918 and Japan annexes the majority of the Pacific twenty years later, and suddenly we're in the Man In The High Tower universe.
Yeah either the colonies would be absorbed by a European power or they'd get in a death struggle over westward expansion with Virginia probably being the strongest power.
So if Florida has 100,000 eligible voters, and 50,000 of them voted in 1804 and New York had 75,000 eligable voters, and 65,000 of them voted in 1804 then I say New York gets a bigger say in the 1806 house and presidential election than Florida does.
Create some healthy incentives to get as many people as is humanly possible into the ballot box.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
Far more likely it happens earlier than that with fragments of the original 13 being reabsorbed piecemeal.
If the US emerges intact and makes it to 1812, the war doesn't happen. By that point Britain didn't want us back - we didn't exactly win the war in our timeline but didn't have to deal with recolonization.
But we’d get all those people who were enslaved to help drive innovation and the economy in other ways. So the economy definitely would have developed differently, but I’m not sure it would develop less fast.
But yeah the US is so different without slavery, and we’re a giant butterfly flapping its wings thru the 20th century...