Past Its Sell-By Date? America at 250

Every anniversary invites the same ritual: the parade, the speeches, the reassurance that the founders built something eternal. This one asks for something harder. Two hundred and fifty years in, a growing body of scholarship suggests the country’s troubles aren’t a bad stretch to wait out, but structural — baked into the design itself.

For this special 250th anniversary edition of the WhoWhatWhy podcast, we pulled short clips from five conversations that have passed through the show over the past year — five of the most incisive thinkers on the subject, each approaching that idea from a different discipline, and each caught in the moment where they speak their mind most plainly.

Constitutional scholar Maxwell Stearns on why the Constitution alone never held the country together — unwritten norms did — and what happens as those norms erode. 

Historian Colin Woodard on a nation stitched from rival cultures that never shared a founding story. 

Former US Deputy Chief Technology Officer Jennifer Pahlka on how a government that can no longer deliver quietly forfeits the public’s trust. 

Harvard’s Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die, on why we stopped doing the work of updating our institutions around 1970 — and what that failure now costs us. 

And Yale’s Stephen Skowronek on whether governing a fully inclusive republic under an eighteenth-century charter is even possible.

The through-line isn’t despair. But it prompts a question worth sitting with while the fireworks fade: What would it take to fix the ills these five have diagnosed — and do we still have the nerve to try?

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Full Text Transcript:

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. 250 years, a quarter of a millennium since a handful of men in Philadelphia signed their names to a document that called a country into being before the country existed. Consider what those men knew of the world. 2½  million people spread along a strip of Atlantic Coast. News that traveled at the speed of a horse. Power measured in muskets and sailing ships. A message from one end of the new nation to the other took the better part of a month. They wrote an operating system for that world, and it was a marvel for that world. Now run it forward. 340 million people. A message crosses the planet in the time it takes to blink. Weapons that could end the species before the horse could have cleared the first hill. Machines that think. Markets that move a trillion dollars while you sleep. And we are still, in 2026, asking the same 18th-century code to run all of it. Say it plainly that way and it sounds absurd. The same machine, unchanged at the core, expected to carry a load its designers could not have imagined in their most fevered dreams. This weekend, the sky over every American town will fill with the same fireworks, the same brass, the same practiced certainty that the thing they founded is the thing we still have. But under the bunting, a quieter conversation has been going on, and for the past few years, it’s grown harder to look away from the sense that something at the foundation has cracked. That the machine we are handed doesn’t run the way the manual promised, and maybe never did, that the republic has reached, if not its end, then something like its sell-by date. 

The polls are stranger still. Ask Americans whether democracy itself is worth defending, and a growing number simply shrug. It becomes an abstraction, a word on a coin. So this Fourth of July, instead of the fireworks, I’m going to share parts of five conversations, over the past couple of years — five scholars who’ve spent this past year circling the same wound from different directions: the historian, the constitutional lawyer, the technocrat, the technologist, the theorist of how democracies die, none of them content with the brochure. Each of them asking the question we’ve been 250 years too proud to say out loud: is the American experiment working? Did it ever? And can an 18th-century machine be made to run in the 21st century? Or is it finally time to write some new code? To begin, every schoolchild learns the same catechism: three branches, each checking the other’s, ambition contradicting ambition. A machine so ingeniously balanced it runs itself. My guest, Maxwell Stearns, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Maryland, reads those same founding documents and comes away with something closer to a confession: the rivalries were never benign; the guardrails were never rules, only norms, and norms wear thin. The dream James Madison sold us, he argues, is the very thing we’ve been living as its exact opposite. What you’re about to hear are excerpts, moments pulled from five full conversations on the WhoWhatWhy podcast over the past year. Each guest is named as we go, and the complete interview is a click away with the links in our show notes. Here’s the clip from Maxwell Stearns. 

Jeff: As you look at the events of the past 18 months or so, are you even surprised at how vulnerable the Constitution is, that in fact, it’s hard to imagine that it could have been as fragile as it seems to have turned out to be?

Maxwell Stearns: I wish I could say yes, but no, I’m not shocked. I will say there are certain things that have happened that I think are far worse than I predicted. But there were so many things that I had predicted. Anybody who read Project 2025 had a very clear sense of what the ultimate agenda was going to be, despite Donald Trump’s claim that he had no idea what that was about. It was quite clear that the people that were going to be surrounding him were motivated to bring to fruition many of the objectives articulated in that Project. And honestly, our formal constitutional structure is very, very thin. The thing that really has allowed this country to function for so long are informal norms that get beyond the formal structures. And it became increasingly clear since, really since the beginning of the information age, but even more so as we hit the period of the teens with the ascent of Donald Trump, that those norms were becoming threadbare, that people were —politicians were not thinking, if I break this norm, what is the consequence going to be in five, 10, 20 years? Instead, it was always with an eye toward getting the immediate desired result. And if we don’t have an ability to see the future consequences of our present erosion of democratic norms, then we are really headlong, heading right into a threatened demise of our democracy. And frankly, we were in crisis for a long time. The question is, can we educate the public enough? Can we convey enough hope so that people will understand that we have to take, finally, the notion of radical reform seriously, because nothing short of that’s going to do the trick.

Jeff: As you’ve talked about, as the U.S. has encouraged and exported democracy around the world, we’ve never actually exported our version of democracy anywhere else in the world.

Maxwell: Well, certainly that’s true. Yes, that’s 100 percent right. We’ve exported democracy around the world, especially since World War II, but never our system of two-party presidentialism. And there’s a pretty simple reason for that. It doesn’t work. And in fact, it never worked. And one of the things I try to convey in the book is we all have grown up — those of us like you and me, who have grown up here in the United States — we’ve been educated on this notion of American exceptionalism, that our system somehow magically endured longer than other systems, leading us to thrive. But we have thrived, we’ve thrived economically in many respects, of course, at great cost to particular groups of people. We look at the history, for example, the tragic history of slavery, the tragic history with respect to Native American communities as a result of Western expansion. But we’ve had a constant influx of immigrants; we have been protected in ways that European nations, for example, and other nations in other continents have not from hostile neighbors; we have two oceans and friendly neighbors north and south. And so we’ve thrived, but we’ve thrived in spite of our constitutional structure, not because of it. And it’s really vital for people to get past their childhood lessons of American exceptionalism and look at how other systems of government work and begin to think about, as I try to convey in the book, how ours could work so much better.

Jeff: There’s a map that Colin Woodard likes to show, not of the 50 states, but of 11 nations, rival cultures settled by different people for different reasons, carrying different ideas about power, freedom, and God, and quarreling with each other ever since. The country, in his telling, was never one country. What held it together was never blood or soil, but a story, a set of civic ideals we agreed to believe in together. Stop telling that story, and something rushes in to fill the silence. Here are some clips from my conversation with Colin Woodard. 

Jeff: Talk a little bit about what the core thesis of this is, the idea that America has never been a unified nation-state, but this kind of awkward federation of 11 regional cultures. Talk about that idea first.

Colin Woodard: Yeah, you summarized it very well. It goes back to American Nations, which came out in 2011. And the central observation, which makes it much easier to understand American history and our current political cleavages and our constitutional arrangements and much else besides, is that we were never one country. We’re this awkward federation of these, the legacies of rival colonial projects, different colonial projects that didn’t think that they were going to end up in a continent-spanning federation together: the Puritans in New England and the lesser sons of the great English country manor families, and the Scots-Irish and Lowland Scots moving into the back country, and certainly the Spanish Empire moving south to north into what’s now the southwest of the United States and so on. None of these different colonial projects thought they would end up in a country together, and yet they did, by an accident of history. And the repercussions of that have been with us since. Each of these colonial projects colonized essentially an almost exclusive strip of the country out through the 1830s. They were avoiding one another and they had various legal and other claims to different sections of states, and they migrated outwards. And once you realize those patterns, which don’t follow state or even international boundaries, you’ve mapped the tectonic plates of our cultural and national life. And so bonding all of this together into one country, which we suddenly had to do after the fact, after the American Revolution, these colonies accidentally found themselves in a country together, the United States of America. But they didn’t have a shared history or religion or ethnography or anything else with which to build a nation-state. And it took a generation and a half for them to really even begin trying to do so. And the results have always been contentious and contested. And we’re in another period where those rivalries are threatening to shatter the country apart and bring ruin to the republic.

Jeff: I want to talk about the alien invasion test. This idea that it has historically been enemy threats, threats to the country, threats to regions that have allowed us to be unified, but that today that’s not necessarily true anymore.

Colin: Yeah. I mean, if you’re fighting a Manichean struggle against the Nazis or against the Soviet domination of the planet and those kind of ideas, it’s easy to get everyone together. I’ve always said that the moment the space aliens arrive with their saucers overhead, suddenly humanity is going to be united for once in defense of the planet. But we’ve had times when we’ve been united without having a foreign threat or a foreign war. The fact that we haven’t had a threat against us for a long time probably helped further the divisions. But I think the big mistake was when we won the Cold War. I was an exchange student living behind the Iron Curtain in my junior year abroad when communism collapsed. I saw all that happen firsthand. I spent most of my 20s and most of the 1990s covering that region in transition. It was an amazing time period, but it was noticeable that the United States and the West, so to speak, didn’t say… that the narrative that came out wasn’t from our leaders, wasn’t, oh my gosh, liberal democracy, free societies have defeated a totalitarian Soviet system. It was communism was defeated by capitalism. Go capitalism. We’re going to have globalization. We don’t need to talk about our ideals, our national stories anymore. Nation-states are going to wither away. You don’t need to have a story of what your country is and who belongs. Only the primitive Balkan people were fighting each other and need those kind of things. We’ve all moved beyond it. Look at the EU, they’re dissolving their borders. It’s going to be the free movement of goods and services. And we just ignored and dropped talking about who we’re supposed to be. And it turns out that humans need those stories. We need them to have any kind of country to have coherent public action. You need to have a shared sense of where we’re going and what mission it is that we are joined together in a community for. And by dropping that, it created this big vacuum so that when the whole globalization thing started running aground on the shoals, the 9/11 attacks didn’t help the Forever Wars, but especially the 2008 financial collapse that discredited that whole view — suddenly demagogues and people were able to move in, like they always do into this vacuum, and give people scary blood, soil, and proto-fascist ideas. And this happened not just in the United States, but all over the place, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, all over the Western world. There have been these challenges, India and elsewhere. So yeah, I think that was a terrible mistake that led us down this path.

Jeff: Democracy isn’t only an idea. It’s also a DMV line, a benefit site that won’t load, a 911 call routed to the wrong country, the place where the promise meets the pavement. My guest, Jennifer Pahlka, spent years inside that machinery at Code for America, in the White House, watching governments struggle to do the plainest things it promised to do. And she came to see the small failures as something larger. Every time the state can’t deliver, a little more faith drains out of a system that runs on faith to survive. Here’s a clip from my conversation with Jennifer Pahlka. 

Jeff: One of the other aspects of this is it seems like those that are in charge, those in government, that they’re not really there to implement policy as much as they are to manage it somehow. And that that’s a distinction, really, with a difference. Talk about that.

Jennifer Pahlka: Yeah. I had a friend who worked on the broadband plan in 2013 who said to me, “Oh, no, no, I learned this the hard way. We manage, but we don’t implement.” And by manage means we hire people, we hire companies to do it. And then the work becomes the RFP and the contract management, not the actual work of getting the implementation done and done in a way that is faithful to the original intent. But it is, I think it derives really from this very core foundational belief that that’s what’s important, that the policy and the politics are what’s important. And the implementation is for creatures of less import, for people sort of lower down in the social status of government and particularly of our federal government. That it’s functionaries who will do that work of hiring the people to get it done. And really, I think that speaks to a concept that is not talked about that often, but first started to be discussed in the 1960s of what is inherently governmental. In other words, what can be only done by public servants in agencies and what can be outsourced. And we have taken a very, very aggressive view that pretty much everything can and should be outsourced. And in fact, going back to the ’60s, there’s really a sense that if this really materially mattered to the policy, it shouldn’t be. If it was just something that you could sort of paint by the numbers, do what you’re told, then it could be outsourced. And I think we really have to relook at that and say, what does it mean to manage versus to implement? What really needs to be in-house? It’s certainly not saying that we should bring everything in-house, but when we try to outsource things to such a degree that we don’t even really know what we’re asking for from the vendor, we don’t really know how the system is supposed to work. We don’t know what good looks like. We’ve really hollowed out government to that extent. Then I think we do great damage to the effort of democracy because we get these very adverse outcomes and we reduce people’s trust and faith in government.

Jeff: In most democracies, an angry, determined minority, call it 30 percent, is a problem the system contains. It forces them into coalition, into compromise, into the daylight. My guest, Daniel Ziblatt, who chronicled how democracies die and then how minorities come to rule, points to the uncomfortable American exception. Our Constitution doesn’t contain that 30 percent. It hands them the keys. The Senate, the Electoral College, the map itself, machinery built by design or by accident to let the few govern the many. Here’s a clip from my conversation with Professor Daniel Ziblatt. 

Jeff: How much difference does it make in a country like Norway that the population is so much more homogeneous than it is with what we’re trying to do here in America?

Daniel Ziblatt: Well, very interesting you raised that point. 20 percent of Norwegian people living in Norway today are foreign-born, which is a number very similar to our own numbers. So it’s true that the U.S. is a country that has been a pioneer, in a sense, in diversity and country of immigration historically, and since the 1960s as well. But what’s so fascinating is that a lot of Europe’s countries — facing different history, not Norway, but other countries with a history of colonialism, let’s say France — are the counterpoints to our history of slavery. And also have become in the last 30 years much more diverse political societies. And so I think we have more substantial challenges on this front given our history of slavery. But all societies are becoming more diverse and everywhere this is prompting a backlash. And there’s a kind of authoritarian backlash: in Sweden, there’s a right-wing party that’s in power in a coalition government; there’s Le Pen in France, almost won the presidency; in Germany, there’s far-right movements. And so there’s a real backlash everywhere. And what’s so fascinating is that these patterns of backlash look very similar from country to country. It’s usually around 30 percent of the electorate, which is a similar number, according to most estimates, of the MAGA core of the Trump base. The difference between the United States and a lot of these other countries is that our Constitution allows that 30 percent into power in a way that other countries don’t. So even in a place like Sweden or in Italy, where you have far-right parties in power, they’re always in coalition. They have to form coalitions. So this contains the damaging effects, I think, of these movements. In the United States, our system empowers this kind of minority, and that’s why we call this the tyranny of the minority. We have a distinctive angle on this, really pointing out that our political institutions and our Constitution, which in many ways are admirable and have served us very well at different points in our history, do have a problem that we have not updated our institutions. I mean, the thing to remember about our Constitution is that it’s a pre-democratic document. It’s the oldest written constitution in the world, which at some level your listeners may say, well, that must mean it’s worked pretty well. And I think that’s right. It’s a remarkable document. It’s worked very well throughout our history in producing stability. We did have a civil war, but compared to other countries around the world, it’s been a remarkably successful document. It’s given us our prosperity, I think, in many ways. But one of the reasons why the Constitution has worked so well is that from the very beginning, we have amended it, we’ve changed it, we’ve updated it. Think of the Bill of Rights immediately after the convention; think after the Civil War, the expansion of voting rights to African American men, the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal rights for all citizens; the beginning of the 20th century, the women were given the right to vote. And also the beginning of the 20th century, we began to elect our senators rather than appointing them. These all require changes to our Constitution. And this continued all the way up… People did the hard work of improving our democracy up through the 1960s. And what we note is that really beginning around 1970, we stopped doing that work. And unlike other democracies which have continued to, which often began in much less democratic situations than we did — our Constitution was, for all of its flaws, more republican and democratic, small-d democratic, than any other Constitution at the time — but whereas other countries have continued to improve their constitutions and make them more democratic, partly because of the difficulty of changing our Constitution, we’ve stopped doing that work. And I think you can’t understand the crisis that we’re in today without understanding the failure to continue to democratize our Constitution.

Jeff: For two and a half centuries, the American answer to every crisis has been the same: adapt. Bend the old Constitution to the new reality, amendment by amendment, ruling by ruling, and call it genius. My guest, Stephen Skowronek, who has spent a career studying how American power actually changes, wonders whether that method has finally run out of road. The Constitution worked, he suggests, in part because it left so many people out. We’ve never once tried to govern with everyone inside. Jefferson thought each generation should write its own. 250 years in, the question is no longer academic. Here’s a clip from my conversation with Professor Stephen Skowronek. 

Jeff: So isn’t it really, in that sense, the political equivalent of originalism, of trying to throw out everything and get back to where it was? Fantasy, though it may be.

Stephen Skowronek: Yeah. Well, I think this is the problem with originalism. Originalism has fostered two ideas. One stemming from the rights revolution, which is judicial supremacy, and the other stemming from the Reagan era, which is presidentialism, the unitary executive. And those two ideas are more about imposing a particular view of winners and losers than they are about accommodating and reconstructing the government in a way that ameliorates the tensions of our time.

Jeff: To what extent do you think understanding this, those things that we’ve been talking about, the repudiation, this paradox. To what extent is it critical, do you think, to understand these things in order to begin to make any progress in how we dig our way out of it, if we even can?

Stephen: Well, that’s the hope, that understanding the nature of the problem will help in solving it. Yeah, that is the hope. I can’t say that at this moment there’s a lot of room for optimism, but that is the hope.

Jeff: Yeah. I mean, I guess the other part of it is, and this may be where we’re headed, dare I quote Donald Rumsfeld, who once said that sometimes the solution to an intractable problem is a larger problem. And the case being here, that maybe things have to get worse before we can begin to dig out.

Stephen: Well, that’s possible. Certainly, one thinks of… we think about the civil rights revolution and how it was aided by the Cold War. That is, presence of a more ominous threat that pulls people together to change things. Yeah. So that’s very possible, but also not very reassuring or comforting.

Jeff: I mean, civil war or revolution do the same things.

Stephen: Yeah. The Adaptability Paradox is not a very happy book. And it is a very sobering look at the ability to reconcile democratization with constitutional government in the United States. But I’m trying to steer clear of the apocalyptic. I’m trying to say this is a unique circumstance. This isn’t just another one of those rough patches. There is something unique about this. There is something different. We have never tried to reconstitute American government under conditions of full inclusion. And the question is, can we do it?

Jeff: And there we have it. Five voices, one wound seen from five angles. Stearns says the guardrails were never rules, Woodard says we were never one country, only a story we agreed to tell. Pahlka says the machine has seized where it meets the ground. Ziblatt says the Constitution hands the keys to the angriest minority, and Skowronek says the whole method — adapt, amend, endure — may finally have run out of road. None of them is predicting the end of America. That’s worth saying clearly. What they’re describing is something harder to hold: a country that outgrew its own instructions and never stopped to write new ones. The men in Philadelphia had a phrase for it: a more perfect union. Not perfect, more perfect. They knew they were handing us a draft, not a scripture. Jefferson said as much when he argued that every generation deserves a constitution of its own. 250 years in, we’ve treated the draft as gospel. Maybe the most patriotic thing this anniversary asks of us is not another round of fireworks over the same old certainties. Maybe it’s the nerve to open the document again and ask whether it still says what we need it to say. Happy 250, and have a great weekend. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.