America the Durable

By Yuval Levin

Thursday, January 22, 2026

 

On August 8, 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia considered some miscellaneous amendments to the evolving text of Article I of the Constitution. In his notes from that day, James Madison recorded that, when he made brief remarks about how the proposed ratio of members to constituents in the House of Representatives would eventually render the House too big as the nation grew over decades, Massachusetts delegate Nathaniel Gorham objected to thinking so far ahead as pointless. “It is not to be supposed that the government will last so long as to produce this effect,” Madison quoted Gorham as saying. “Can it be supposed that this vast Country, including the Western territory, will 150 years hence remain one nation?”

 

It was a perfectly reasonable question. The American experiment in republicanism always seemed very precarious to its own founders. Gorham’s implicit sense that the United States might just be one transitional chapter in a story that would see numerous regimes rise and fall on this continent was widely shared.

 

Though it was far from obvious at the time, Madison’s confidence in the republic’s long-term prospects turns out to have been justified. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the political endeavor launched by that generation, we should not overlook how extraordinary the longevity and durability of our regime have been.

 

We Americans like to think of ourselves as a young nation. The European nations are old, and their roots reach back to a world that did not prioritize freedom, dynamism, toleration, or progress. The American Revolution represented a break from those ancient patterns. It launched an experimental innovation — and so stamped an inclination toward experiment and innovation upon our national character.

 

That story we tell ourselves is true, but it is not complete, and by now it might obscure more of our strengths than it reveals. The United States is no longer a trial balloon. Our national story may be shorter than many, but our government is actually older than pretty much any other in today’s world. Only the British can claim to have institutions with the same names as those they had at the end of the 18th century, and none of those institutions really do the same work they did back then. But the United States still has the government its people created in that age of revolutions. The American founding that began 250 years ago this year may be said to have concluded with the ratification of the Constitution 238 years ago, in 1788, and we have since had the same system of government, with only modest amendments and alterations.

 

None of the old Europeans come close to that achievement. Even the steady Swiss have had three constitutions since 1798. The French like to celebrate the revolution they launched in 1789, but the regime it created was gone by 1805, and they have since cycled through more than half a dozen forms of government. Germany and Italy didn’t even exist as unified nations until the middle of the 19th century and have both gone through several regimes since then. Most other governments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America are even younger. With the (sort of) exception of the tiny Italian city-state of San Marino, ours is the world’s oldest living republic.

 

But our political culture is not well equipped to appreciate its own durability. We still share the apprehension of the Founders that our politics hangs on a knife’s edge. Every generation of Americans has questioned its own capacity to sustain its political inheritance, trafficked in careless analogies to the fall of the Roman republic, and marveled at our continuing national existence.

 

Our civic vocabulary is deeply shaped by this existential insecurity. The American national anthem, for instance, is not a celebration of the beauty or glory of our country; it is a song about barely surviving the night. We all implicitly share the wonder it expresses at the improbable fact that our flag is still there.

 

This political hypochondria contributes to the perverse apocalypticism of our time. It keeps us from dismissing as ridiculous the common suggestion that our nation is at the very edge of death — a suggestion that serves as an excuse for all manner of political recklessness.

 

But maybe more important still, the sense of impending doom that has long characterized our politics keeps us from learning lessons from the American republic’s durability. The only people who comment on the sheer age of our government now are those who see it as a problem and are ashamed to live under a political order that has changed only modestly since the late 18th century. Opponents of our Constitution have long complained that we have a system of government suited only for a crude, agrarian aristocracy that couldn’t possibly serve us now that things are so much more complex. Back when the Framers did their work, Woodrow Wilson argued in 1887, “the functions of government were simple, because life itself was simple.”

 

This view has persisted and spread. It has grown thoroughly dominant among political scientists and legal scholars. But it remains, as it has always been, utter nonsense. Our republic is by now more than twice the age it was when Wilson dismissed it as an anachronism, and it has seen us through challenges much more complicated than anything he imagined. It has done that because the Framers could imagine those immense and complicated challenges — which they could do because they, like the time they lived in, were anything but simple.

 

In fact, the Founders of our republic were keenly aware of just how precarious republics tended to be. As Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist No. 9, “It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.” Democracies, Madison noted in the very next Federalist essay, “have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

 

The careful study of such past failures left the architects of the American republic persuaded that, to avoid a quick and sorry death for our regime, they would need to find ways to counterpoise the rule of majorities with the rights of minorities. To do that, they created a system that kept itself in balance by frustrating Wilsonian political scientists — that is, by preferring legitimacy to efficiency and sustaining simultaneous competing centers of power.

 

The logic of this system is ultimately rooted in the moral core of the Declaration of Independence, articulated a quarter millennium ago. Because we are all created equal, we are all possessed of equal rights, and we are entitled to a government that protects those rights. To be legitimate, such a government requires our consent, which, because we are all equals, it can obtain only by answering to the will of the majority. But when majorities threaten the rights of minorities or individuals, our government must remember that its fundamental purpose is the protection of those rights. So government action cannot be legitimate if it lacks the consent of the majority, and it cannot be legitimate if it attacks the rights of a minority.

 

How in the world is such a patchwork of contradictory demands supposed to be met by a system of government? The answer, as our Constitution demonstrates, is that it can be met by a government that is itself a patchwork of conflicting institutions.

 

That’s what Woodrow Wilson and a long train of confident, mistaken critics of the Constitution on all sides of our politics have always fundamentally rejected about our regime. They have sought a government moved by one integrated purpose at a time. And they argue that our Constitution’s liberalism is at best unprincipled or morally neutral, and at worst a clever cover for corruption. But in fact, that liberalism is a natural extension of the moral logic of the American founding, which is itself a function of our being equally created in a divine image. And it has proven itself not only principled but also practical.

 

That is why our system has outlived so many of its eulogists, and will outlive many more. What they see as the problem with our politics is actually the solution. And the durability of our system is a testament not only to its prudential ruggedness but also to its moral merits. At any given moment, some among us are almost certainly acting viciously and self-destructively. But over time, because of the ways in which our system curtails and redirects our political energies, Americans have ended up acting remarkably virtuously and constructively. Our near-term prospects often strike us as dim because we aren’t very good at learning from the long arc of our history.

 

This has been true of the key anniversaries of our founding. The 50th anniversary of the Declaration in 1826, the 100th in 1876, the 150th in 1926, and the 200th in 1976 all found our nation in what Americans of those eras sensed as moments of grave danger and loss of confidence. Those Americans weren’t wrong to think so. But they were wrong if they assumed, as many did, that our system could not recover its balance, sustain itself, and help us continue to flourish.

 

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But if we could see how and why our republic has endured for so long, we could grasp that it will continue to enable us to flourish if we let it continue to curtail and direct our political energies. That we are the world’s oldest republic is a promising omen for our future, but it amounts to a promise we can keep only if we are true to our political tradition — to the principles asserted at its outset, and to the institutions built in their light.

 

We have lived as one nation for far longer than Nathaniel Gorham (and perhaps James Madison) could have imagined. And we have done it thanks to them. To help our children inherit a gift no less valuable than the one passed down to us, we should appreciate the achievement marked by our country’s Semiquincentennial and grasp the counterintuitive truth that the advanced age of our republic is a good sign about its prospects.