THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT
The Founders of the American Republic were well aware that they were attempting to create something fundamentally different from what had been done before and even different from what their constituents expected. They were expected to create a new monarchy to replace the old. Instead, they set out to create something so different that they often referred to it as an experiment.
The experiment was that they created a state with substantial limitations on its power. They built a beta model, not for a government, but a protectorate. They wanted their creation to protect the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens but not to govern them. Unfortunately, they made the mistake and I think it was a fatal mistake of referring to their creation as a government. They simply borrowed the common word that applied to the monarchies of Europe and assigned it to their new invention. The purpose of a government, by the very nature of the word, is to govern. Once they accepted that word, the experiment was destined to fail.
A protectorate is negative in its function. It acknowledges the legitimacy of collective force but only for the protection of life, liberty, and property. A government, by contrast, is positive in function. It assumes the right to use collective force for any purpose it wishes, so long as it can claim that it is for some "good" purpose. Predator politicians can always come up with an appropriate justification for that.
Had the Republic been described as a protectorate from the outset, every time Americans speak of it they would be reminded that its purpose was to protect them, not to govern them, and this would have gone a long way to perpetuate the Founder's intent. To be sure, this by itself would not have been sufficient to prevent the predator class from infiltrating the protectorate and turning it into a government after all, but it would have been a great deterrent and could have slowed the process for another hundred years. It was, after all, a beta model. Like all experiments and first releases, it inevitably would fall to future users and future generations to improve upon its design, not scrap it.
