Experiments Can Fail

Including America. Or else they're not experiments.

credit: Dr. Beata Mierzwa

Nowhere in America’s founding documents is the word “experiment.” But in his first inaugural address, George Washington spoke it. The “republican model of government,” he said, is an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

But is America experimental like jazz or a startup? Improvisational, everything in beta or quotation marks?

Or is it experimental, 17th-century-style—a process of trying and testing, a method of establishing facts through hypothesis, observation, and analysis?

And, if so, can the American experiment be said to have failed?

As John Jay, one of “our founders” (a locution I nominate for retirement), explained to a New York grand jury in 1777, Americans—with our big happy hearts and minds—were “the first people whom heaven has favored with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing the forms of government under which they should live.”

But republics, when America first branded itself that way, were known to be rare, fragile, and easily subverted—both by decadence and demagoguery within, and by autocrats and armies from without.

So the experiment to Jay was an experiment in grace. In wondrous beatitude, we Americans had been selected for a task, somewhere between an honor and a duty, to choose our government. What remained to be seen was whether we could pull it off. That’s where you get Ben Franklin’s (alleged) response to the question of whether the federal constitution of 1787 put a monarchy or a republic in place: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Bill Murray as Polonius.

That “if” is the experimental part. That “opportunity” Jay mentions is open-ended. Neither Washington nor Jay nor Franklin claimed that God had bequeathed to Americans a providence, fully formed, that was ours to enjoy for eternity.

Instead, their goofy, tryhard document, the Constitution, tries to make provisions for a lot of things that could go wrong, and then says, good luck. It’s less like stone tablets given to Moses and more like Polonius’s excellently blathering farewell advice to his son:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be, etc., to thine own self be true.

And then: My blessing season this in thee!

“To season” in Shakespeare is “to preserve” (as with salt) or “to weather or age” or “to make flavorful.” For flavor I might substitute “intensity.” Polonius’s blessing is meant to make his advice more intense—piquant, interesting, memorable, and ideally durable.