“The world was awful until I came along”

That seems to be the attitude of lot of moderns.

This evening I heard a talk by Niall Ferguson in which he pointed out that most republics have failed, and that the interesting thing about the USA is that a republic survived. That should make us wonder — what is it about the USA that allowed it to survive as a republic?

That made me think about the classic distinction between conservatives and liberals, viz., when a liberal finds an inconvenient fence he tears it down, while the conservative first tries to find out why the fence was built.