Happy Birthday, You Messy Bitch 💅🇺🇸

The True Genius of a Flawed Nation

This week marks the 249th anniversary of a bunch of men in sweaty wool clothing beta-launching a governance experiment that was somehow both radically ambitious and fundamentally flawed from the start.

If you really peel it back, we declared independence with no implementation plan and barely any shared beliefs beyond “No, not like that!” with a document that, while absolutely revolutionary, was basically a manifesto powered more by spirit than structure.

It was brilliant for sure and a novel concept at the time, but it’s important to remember that our Constitution came a full 11 years later and even that kind of reads like a group project written by people who absolutely did not agree on what the final product should be. They left it vague in spots that lacked consensus and just assumed future users would sort it out.

And we have been ever since.

We’ve literally spent the last two and a half centuries struggling to excise the deep flaws and egregious inequity baked into the very foundation of our nation. For context: at the time of the founding, only an estimated 6% of the population—primarily white, land-owning men—had the right to vote. So, this whole “American Experiment” hasn’t endured because it was perfectly designed. It’s endured because it was breakable and fixable at the same time. It’s endured because we built something just open enough to be argued with, amended, and repaired in public.

That openness is the whole point, and it’s why the United States Supreme Court’s recent embrace of constitutional originalism is such a profound threat. Freezing our founding documents in the biases and limitations of their own time is literal sabotage. Beyond the obvious racism and sexism inherent to originalism, this type of rigid reading of a flexible framework breaks the very mechanism that has allowed our nation to evolve.

Because despite all its foundational flaws and baked-in inequity and structural bias, this whole project still kind of works precisely because it is adaptable. What we inherited is a system that—often in spite of itself—has just enough openness for continuous revision and repair.

From the beginning, the American democratic system excluded most of the people living under it by race, gender, wealth, and legal status. And yet, its architecture contained pathways for those excluded to fight their way in and demand change. Trusting the unwashed masses was radical in the late 18th century, and it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary it was to give power to a broad electorate.

So what we ended up with is far from ideal—and definitely not just or equitable—but also not hopeless. The Founding Fathers inadvertently gave us the tools for change.

Since the moment we ditched the Articles of Confederation at the Constitutional Convention, every social movement, legislative amendment, budget fight, and public comment period has been part of an ongoing attempt to fix the bugs without bricking the system.

Through that lens, American brilliance may actually lie in our plasticity. Our answer to the rigid control of tyranny was to design a new system built for external input and iterative accountability—in the form of legal protest, free press, term limits, and elections.

Our whole setup has always been under revision, and that might feel familiar to folks used to building systems, not just studying them. To put it in terms my tech-savvy readers might recognize: we accidentally built something closer to agile than waterfall. I’ll dig more into what that means for governance in an upcoming piece, but for now let’s just say this country wasn't built on perfect plans etched in stone by flag-draped demigods. It was built on protest, feedback loops, and the messy, unglamorous collaboration of people who refuse to give up on something just because it’s broken.

So happy birthday America, you messy bitch. Thanks for being strong enough to hold all of our tension, our love, our rage, and our hope. As always, I’ll be wandering the service corridors of government doing my best Abbie Hoffman: yelling at you to do better while wearing a flag-print shirt and raising a glass to your genius.

Independence was just the start. The actual work has always been a group project. And that’s what I’m raising a glass to this weekend. Not perfection, but persistence.