I too believe that we would be in a much better place today had we stayed with the Articles rather than the new constitution. We would have engaged in much less war precisely because the Articles made it very difficult to fund war. As they say, that is a feature, not a bug.

I tend to believe that historians have mis-identified the balance of power as envisioned by the writers of our constitution. Typically this is listed as being a balance between the various branches of the federal government -- legislative, executive, and judicial. But to me, that's like expecting your in-house accounting department to be capable of an objective audit, as those are all three branches of the same entity. That's not balance of power -- that's monopoly.

They way I see it, the balance of power they envisioned was between the states, the federal government, and the people. The states had their legislative body, the Senate, whose representatives were elected by the state legislatures and who were supposed to represent state interests and keep the Federal government from taking too much power away from the states. The people had their legislative body, the House, whose representatives were directly elected by the people and they kept the Federal and State governments in check. And the Federal government had the Executive branch, whose role was mostly envisioned as being executing the will of the people as the Federal government had not yet achieved self awareness.

The judicial branch was never formally vested with judicial review -- that is a prerogative and power they seized for themselves. They were initially seen as a restraint but not as a branch with authority equal to the Executive or especially the Legislative. The Legislative was where the power was supposed to primarily reside.

From my perspective, it is difficult to characterize what the Founding Fathers wanted, because I think their main focus was to protect freedom -- and that's not a form of government. I believe that they wanted to create a stable power vacuum, with a government just powerful enough to keep invaders away but not powerful enough to be a weight keeping the citizens down.

To me, the difference between republic and democracy is not irrelevant but rather exists on a continuum -- republic comes first, then democracy starts to become more and more stressed because people use the rationale of "the people want it" to justify seizing control over the levers of power so that they can take more from other people using the legal monopoly of government.

The only way this struggle ends peacefully is through withdrawal -- that's the non-violent way that agreements and cooperation gone sour ends without a fight. But that option died with the Civil War, and our republic died with it, replaced instead by an empire.

Great article and looking forward to the next installments!