Next month, Americans mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence from the British Empire. Although the present US Constitution was written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and first implemented in 1789, during the anniversary celebrations this summer we can expect to hear widespread encomia to the genius of the Constitution as well as of the eloquence of Thomas Jefferson’s preamble to the declaration.

Don’t believe it. While it was a milestone for its era, the US Constitution is deeply flawed. The most successful contemporary democracies have learned from America’s mistakes in designing their own, more recent national constitutions. Pious American patriots sometimes say that “the Founders built better than they knew.” In reality, the Founders botched the job.

Consider two current controversies, over President Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House to build an official ballroom; and the Supreme Court’s involvement in partisan congressional redistricting in Virginia. In a country with a well-written constitution, neither would be a subject of controversy, because lines of authority would be well-delineated and unambiguous.

Can a president of the United States, a temporary occupant of the executive mansion, command upon a whim that much of it be demolished and rebuilt, on the basis of a design he alone has approved, with private, rather than public, funding? Surely, this is the kind of technical question that a well-written constitution would clarify. Congress authorized and funded the last extensive renovation of the White House under President Harry Truman, and under laws passed by Congress, major renovations are supposed to be reviewed and authorized in advance by the National Capital Planning Commission, or NCPC, and other agencies.

But Trump ordered the demolition of much of the White House before he sought approval from the NCPC, which he obtained only later, after a federal judge intervened to block construction and after he had stacked the commission with loyal appointees. The attempt of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress to belatedly fund the ongoing destruction has run afoul of parliamentary rules that govern what can be included in a funding bill under the procedure of budget reconciliation.

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By michael lind

Either the Constitution allows a current president to unilaterally reshape the buildings and landscape of Washington, DC, on his own authority — or it doesn’t. If Trump does have the constitutional authority to destroy a third of the White House on his own initiative, can a future President Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris demolish the Washington Monument and replace it?

Progressive Democrats as well as Right-wing Republicans make extreme claims about the location of authority under the Constitution — when it suits them. After Virginian voters, in a referendum on April 21, approved a plan by Virginia Democrats to gerrymander or rig congressional districts to lock in a Democratic majority in the state’s delegation to the US House of Representatives, the state’s high court struck down the measure as illegal because it didn’t follow proper procedures to amend the state constitution. The federal Supreme Court unanimously refused to review and possibly overturn the Virginia state supreme court’s decision.

Each of these cases illustrates a major design defect of the American federal constitution: the separation of powers, in the case of the White House ballroom; and America’s unique system of federalism, in the case of the Virginia gerrymandering case.

The Founders, bless their hearts, believed in the quaint 18th-century theory that safeguarding democracy and civil liberty required that executive, legislative, and judicial powers be allocated to different, independent, co-equal government branches. The theory was mistaken. We know it was mistaken because Britain and the other major English-speaking countries — Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — all have parliamentary systems, in which executive powers are wielded by the prime minister, a member of the legislature, with the British monarch serving as a ceremonial figurehead.

If the Founders had been right about the separation of powers, then Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand should be undemocratic, illiberal regimes dominated by an all-powerful legislative dictatorship. Indeed, in defiance of the theory of the American founding, most other democracies in the world today have parliamentary or hybrid systems, rather than American-style presidential systems based on the separation of powers. The Founders, though undoubtedly great practical statesmen, were wrong on this fundamental point.

To make matters worse, as the political scientist Juan Linz argued, liberty and democracy tend to be in greater danger in presidential systems, rather than in parliamentary systems. The reason is that the separately elected president can claim equal authority with the legislature, and in a constitutional deadlock, he or she is more likely to command the loyalty of the armed forces and internal security services. Conversely, the only way that a legislature in a presidential system can remove an independently elected president is impeachment.

In a parliamentary system, prime ministers can fall from power when their parliamentary party or coalition loses the majority. And between elections, they can be dumped by their fellow legislators, with a vote of no confidence or similar measure, whereupon they once again become mere ordinary members of parliament, if they do not resign from politics. Just ask Keir Starmer. This model renders impeachments of prime ministers unnecessary.

The separation of powers in presidential systems, then, is more likely to cause breakdowns of democracy than to prevent them. On Jan. 6, 2021, after Trump falsely claimed that the election had been stolen by Joe Biden, MAGA supporters seeking to thwart the ratification of the Electoral College results ransacked the US Capitol and forced members of Congress to flee to safety. On Jan. 8, 2023, after another Right-wing populist, Jair Bolsonaro, lost the presidency of Brazil to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, supporters of Bolsonaro broke into and damaged the Brazilian presidential palace, the legislative chambers, and the high court, in the part of the capital of Brasilia known as — what else? — the Plaza of the Three Powers.

In contrast, when the party of another right-wing Populist, Viktor Orbán, was reduced to a minority in the Hungarian parliament on April 10 of this year, Orban graciously resigned as prime minister. In Hungary’s parliamentary system, he had no alternative. He could not claim to be the sole tribune of the Hungarian people, as he had never been directly elected, only chosen by his party when it held a legislative majority.

To be sure, there have been prime ministers who have become dictators in effect, like India’s Indira Gandhi, who ruled by authoritarian methods during the 21-month emergency of 1975-1977. But in 1977, Gandhi lost her own seat in parliament in an electoral backlash only to be re-elected and serve as prime minister again from 1980 to 1984.

In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister from 2003 to 2014, was able to deepen his authoritarian rule only after he became president under a new Turkish constitution that converted Turkey’s parliamentary system to a presidential system.  Thanks, American Founders!

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American-style presidentialism, then, in other countries as well as the United States, encourages power grabs by chief executives, checked only by impeachments by the legislature and judicial rulings that a president might ignore (“John Marshall has made his decision,” as Andrew Jackson famously said when the high court displeased him, “now let him enforce it!”).

While the separation of powers is a constitutional crisis waiting to happen, the federal system inherited from America’s wise and enlightened Founders is simply a mess. Under the constitution of 1787, the authority of the states and their citizens is supposed to be protected from the federal government by two methods — a clear division of authority between state and federal governments, and the representation of the states as distinct corporate bodies, each with two Senators who initially were chosen by state legislatures. Since the founding, both of these parts of the American constitution have broken down.

Instead of a clear-cut allocation of different responsibilities to state and federal governments in a two-layer cake, we have something like a Streusel swirl, in which federal, state, and local authorities in particular areas are blended and intertwined. Much of the blending is the result of federal funding of state and local programs, including hybrid federal-state programs like Medicaid. The federal Department of Transportation, for example, pays in part for local bike trails and pedestrian walkways, in addition to federal interstate highways.

The reason is simple. When advocates for a policy can’t win at the level of the city council or state legislature, they often find allies in Congress to fund or mandate their favored program, federalism be damned. Interest groups on the Right as well the Left are willing to shop among levels of government until they find one that will do what they want. In the name of states’ rights, anti-abortion conservatives demanded that the Supreme Court return abortion policy to the states, and succeeded when  the Court repealed Roe v. Wade in 2022. Meanwhile, pressured by deep-pocketed tech investors, the Trump administration has sought a federal ban on state regulation of AI. When it comes to federalism in the United States, the working theory of both parties and all factions is that whatever level of government they and their allies control has the authority to carry out the policy they want.

The second protection for the states built into the US Constitution — the election of two senators from every state — lost its purpose long ago. Originally, US senators were elected by state legislatures, on the theory that they represented states as political entities. But the 17th Amendment in 1913 wrecked the structure by requiring that US senators, like representatives, be elected directly by citizens.

But while congressional districts that send representatives to the House are revised after every census, reflecting population growth and sometimes partisan gerrymandering, the rule that each state has two senators, regardless of its population, is part of America’s defective constitution and can’t be altered. The result is that the Senate is the most grotesquely malapportioned legislative chamber in any country in the world. A voter in Wyoming, which has around 590,000 residents, has 66 times the political influence in the Senate as California, with its 39 million residents. The genius of the American constitution!

Would foreign leaders drafting a democratic constitution today in any country think, “Let’s copy the US Constitution and create a bicameral system in which the population ratios in one branch of the legislature can be as uneven as 66 to one”? Would a constitutional convention in a newly democratic Iran or China choose a presidential system in which an independently elected president, unchecked by the legislature, could plunge the country into a foreign war or tear down or build national monuments in the national capital with private money and without legislative authorization? No, they wouldn’t. Rational founders in the 21st century would conclude that democratic stability and continuity are likely to be more secure under a parliamentary regime than in an American-style presidential system.

Madison, Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and the other members of the Constitutional convention of 1787 were patriotic, brave, well-informed, thoughtful, and public-spirited. These were unquestionably great men. Unfortunately, in looking for models for self-government on a national scale, they only had the examples of ancient, medieval, and modern city-states, leagues, and the proto-parliamentary British monarchy. With the few precedents at their disposal, and given the need to compromise to hold the shaky union together, the drafters of the US Constitution did the best they could at the time. But they screwed up. It’s time that Americans admit it.

His solution is equally blunt. He and his advisers insist that aggressive, universal tariffs, combined with deregulation and corporate tax cuts, will render cross-border supply chains less lucrative and domestic investment attractive for business.

The problem is that virtually every other Trump action since Inauguration Day has undercut the state capacity needed to rehabilitate core industries and shepherd capital and labor towards new ones. Instead of leveraging state power on behalf of massive public-private projects, research and development, and workforce training, Team Trump has subjected government agencies to DOGE’s ruthless budget cuts, and frozen funds from or threatened to terminate President Joe Biden’s flagship industrial policies.

The Trumpians are plotting to privatize a host of government services, and have sent a chill through research institutes vital to breakthroughs in advanced medicine, technology, and manufacturing. Meanwhile, the administration has largely crippled antitrust enforcement, thereby favoring powerful monopolies that can withstand or circumvent trade barriers over mechanisms to coax healthy domestic competition and investment.

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None of these actions furthers the purported aims of tariffs and targeted export controls: to create good jobs for the forgotten working class and turn depressed regions into desirable places in which to work and live. On the contrary, slashing and burning state capacity will hinder these goals. Most damningly, the Hamiltonian tradition the Trumpians claim to champion is a powerful witness against the belief that a crippled state can boost manufacturing.

These shortcomings haven’t stopped some of Trump’s most vehement critics on the labor Left, not least United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, from conceding that he is partly right on trade. The bipartisan Washington establishment of the late 20^th century made a colossal mistake in offshoring millions of jobs on the naive assumption that high-tech innovation and services would replace manufacturing, the historic engine of American upward mobility and growth.

But despite being motivated by fear over China’s phenomenal rise, Trump’s strategy has proved mostly incoherent, not to say contradictory, sowing serious doubts over whether America, after decades of outsourcing and regulatory capture by major multinationals, has the institutional know-how to meet the new president’s promise of industrial renewal.

Trump’s approach isn’t merely myopic, though — it betrays the legacy of the GOP statesmen whom champions of his tariffs regularly invoke to defend the current administration.

The populist Right’s evangelism for Trump’s protectionist impulses has long rested on the notion that he is boldly reviving the “American System” school of economics. This tradition stretches from Alexander Hamilton in the founding era and Henry Clay in the early republic to the heterodox economist Henry Charles Carey, the influential lawmaker Justin S. Morrill (architect of Civil War-era tariffs), and Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. These Republican statesmen and thinkers espoused a doctrine of development premised on diversified manufacturing, vast energy sources, scientific progress, and spreading education in the “industrial arts”.

Scholars describe this doctrine as unabashedly mercantilist. Yet 19^th-century Republicans maintained that it furthered the country’s founding ideals of self-government and associationalism: the notion that an industrious, republican citizenry will form voluntary organizations conducive to promoting shared interests that transcend divisions by region, sector, or class.

Neither laissez-faire nor statist, the old GOP that supposedly inspires Trump fused support for large developmental goals from disparate parts of society — inventors, aspiring industrial magnates, prospectors, advocates of “scientific agriculture”, financiers, and tradesmen. The intent was to spread commercial hubs built on regional interdependence, raising manufacturing and agricultural output while also curbing demand for goods from competitors like Victorian Britain.

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Tariffs underpinned this system by pushing farmers, merchants, and consumers to purchase US-made goods and support local industries. Post-Civil War, tariffs underwrote pensions for Union Army veterans and their families (then a huge constituency of the GOP). Tariffs were also meant to lessen the competitiveness of imports made by foreign “pauper” labor, attracting the support of skilled workers who had few other avenues to stable wages.

Like Trump, the Republican leaders of a distant epoch believed high tariffs were a means to building national wealth and power. And their aversion to foreign competition ran deep. Cheap foreign goods were, in modern parlance, the real source of “market distortions”, because, unchecked, they made profitable manufacturing less viable and threatened the livelihoods of skilled workers.

Even Republican reformers who, like Theodore Roosevelt, were more attuned to the daily needs of thrifty households and worried that tariffs had given rise to unaccountable monopolies tended to believe that free trade was decadent. On the verge of America becoming a world power, Roosevelt remarked that “pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fiber”. Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was channeling the same sentiment when he asserted in a recent speech that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream”.

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But this is where the similarities end. In fact, depicting Trump as a descendant of the old protectionist pedigree misses an important dimension of past Republican thought. From the Lincoln era to Eisenhower’s, Republicans deployed a range of policies besides tariffs to stoke development and progress. The party’s Trumpian incarnation entirely ignores these other strategies, when it doesn’t undermine them.

Take the legacy of Morrill, the lawmaker who, in addition to protective tariffs, authored the legislation that created America’s exemplary land-grant colleges. Morrill well understood the relationship between education in fields like agronomy and engineering and productive innovation. The Homestead Act from the same period, which distributed public lands to frontier homesteaders for a nominal fee, likewise reflected the GOP’s belief in the importance of “decentralized” economic growth for a democratic society.

By contrast, Trump’s sweeping cuts to university grants, including for regional public universities that serve his rural base, disregard the country’s pressing skills shortage. Meanwhile, his lofty campaign pledge to build 10 “freedom cities“, still embryonic, evokes not so much the producer populism of westward expansion, but the dystopian “startup societies” dreamt up by Silicon Valley — or a Middle Eastern petrostate.

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The administration’s axiomatic contempt for regulation is also not in keeping with the GOP’s historical view. Reductive histories portray the GOP as always preaching “small government”. But the party once had vigorous debates about the purpose and scope of regulation.

Despite occasionally assailing corporate malfeasance and grilling feckless CEOs in congressional hearings, today’s Right-wing populists have yet to match the Republican “insurgents” from the party’s Roosevelt wing, including the likes of Sens. Hiram Johnson and George Norris, who pushed for corporate regulation, public works, public utilities, and direct democracy, and took a stand against corruption. Though they were rarely “redistributive” in the social-democratic sense, such positions aimed to prevent abuses by the politically connected and to give working people a material stake in democracy.

Earlier Republicans were also quite experimental in their time. President Herbert Hoover, forever marked by his loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt for failing to alleviate the Great Depression, was, during his earlier tenure as Commerce secretary, a consummate technocrat who sought to deepen cooperation between various government bureaus and business associations to make policymaking more scientific.

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In stark contrast to DOGE’s modus operandi, Hoover’s efforts to reorganize government were founded on a belief in expertise and the legitimacy of using regulation to make markets more rational; the development of America’s burgeoning aviation sector, improvements in radio technology, and national business standards for product sizes were among his achievements.

Hoover was hardly a central planner. Judged by the current GOP’s ethos, though, his record of bureaucratic oversight epitomized the growth of the modern administrative state.

Of course, the New Deal realignment, which hobbled the GOP’s support for a generation, cemented the popular view that Republicans regularly opposed active government. But until the Reagan era, most mainstream Republicans accepted the New Deal order, occasionally endorsed breaking up monopolies, and eagerly supported generous federal funding for science and technology, even as they ritually affirmed the principle of “free enterprise”.

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Most famously, the Eisenhower administration’s vast Interstate Highway System updated Republicans’ past support for “internal improvements” for the Cold War era, further propelling the rise in suburban homeownership that characterized the postwar boom. And progressives’ arch-bogeyman Richard Nixon, now frequently regarded as the last “New Deal president”, signed NEPA and OSHA, the country’s landmark laws, respectively, for environmental protection and workplace-safety standards.

In short, major players in the Republican Party adopted a more flexible and interventionist view of political economy than is commonly recognized. Most MAGA influencers today would no doubt dismiss such evidence as not reflecting “true” Republicanism. Partisan progressives would similarly concur, at most allowing that “progressive Republicans” are extinct because the Democratic Party became their natural home.

This is to be expected. A few conservative think tanks and public intellectuals have sought to create a genuinely “pro-development” and “pro-worker” agenda for Republicans. But the anti-government tirades of Newt Gingrich, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, and their successors in the Tea Party movement did much to fix the partisan battle lines of the last few decades, few of which the MAGA movement has redrawn besides disavowing George W. Bush’s embrace of globalized trade.

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Trump’s GOP is thus fixated on slashing and burning its way through the state, rather than restoring faith in positive government. For a little while, even skeptics allowed that a new working-class base, plus rising tensions with Beijing, might push Republicans to embrace an industrial strategy that recovered some of their party’s authentic traditions of domestic progress.

That possibility has come to naught. While Trump proclaims “liberation” is imminent, the rapid loss of state capacity under his watch promises anything but. Tariffs excepted, there is little concrete government action to compel market forces to meet national economic objectives, and the GOP has bent over backwards to accommodate banking lobbies vociferously opposed to even minor restraints on financial predation.

One hardly needs to be a radical populist to see this doesn’t bode well for American society. As the most perceptive believers in the “American System” understood, an economy that fails to maximize its productive forces and promote workers’ well-being is destined to wither. If America is to avert permanent decline, it needs leaders determined to prevent the spread of servitude masked as “liberty”.

But developments this week may have changed that, with the tech giants daring to make their biggest encroachments so far in deciding what the public could and could not know.

On Wednesday, the New York Post published a major exposé on the activities of Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The investigation, based on leaked emails, revealed the manner in which Biden Jnr had used his father’s connections to pitch for lucrative contracts with Ukrainian businessmen. Since then, more news has emerged of the younger Biden seeking remuneration from Chinese firms, among others. In an election season this is, of course, explosive stuff — but it is also information that the American public have a right to know.

Since Joe Biden presents himself as the honest candidate in this election, the fact that his family members may have been enriching themselves through their connections is relevant to the decision the voters are about to make.

But Big Tech decided that they couldn’t know it. On Wednesday, after the New York Post story emerged, both Twitter and Facebook made an unprecedented move into overt censorship, with the world’s largest social media companies deciding to prevent the dissemination of the story. They did everything they could to stop it from getting out, with Twitter in particular blocking users from posting links to the Post’s article, initially claiming that sharing of the piece violated the platform’s rules on the use of hacked materials.

The idea that the Hunter Biden emails are the result of a hack is disputed. But even if the claim were accurate, it is not the case that these platforms usually take a strong line against stories based on hacked material. Over recent years, there have been numerous stories, from celebrity gossip to major political stories like the DNC nomination scandal at the 2016 election, which have come about solely because of the use of hacked information. Yet Twitter did not prevent people from sharing them, so the claim that “hacking” is the justification on this occasion is in fact nothing other than a retro-fit.

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Yet on this spurious basis Twitter took a range of extraordinary actions, which included locking the accounts of the official Trump campaign and of the White House Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, because they had dared to share the story. Such is the extraordinary power that the tech companies now have and the extraordinarily brazen behaviour they feel that they can get away with.

It is conceivable that Twitter might rightfully act if there were knowingly false information being disseminated ahead of an election by obscure or unknown actors seeking to affect an election. But it is quite another thing for the social media giant to decide that the reposting of a story in the New York Post — one of America’s oldest and most venerable papers, founded by Alexander Hamilton — should be cause to suppress the speech of the White House Press Secretary. This is not an attempt to prevent interference in an election — it is itself interference in an election. Interference carried out by Facebook and Twitter, tech giants and monopolies in possession of unprecedented amounts of power.

Perhaps people should have woken up to such actions by Big Tech earlier — but too often the platform’s targets seemed to be too obscure or unpleasant to find defenders. So they slowly — and occasionally in sudden purges — chucked out people who they decided to be “hateful”, so people such as Katie Hopkins or Milo Yiannopoulos.

Yet on top of this, Twitter went for a less overt form of control by using its power to quietly muffle accounts (“shadow-banning”) without anybody noticing. In the last year, this has been formalised by the site, which has made its users sign a new agreement conceding that the platform has the right to filter and manipulate which voices its users do or do not hear. But, most people decided, things go on as before and shadow-banning was just for other people.

So while the platform picked off or muted obscure or unpleasant figures, they — and the rest of us — clearly lost sight of exactly where a line could be drawn. And inevitably the bloated, over-rich, overpowerful and under-informed tech entities thought that they should decide where that line was.

So here we are, in the weeks before the election, with the platforms suppressing a story that affects one candidate, trying to pretend that one of America’s great papers is an unreliable source (and if they want to play that game, then wait until they discover the New York Times), and blocking the social media account of the White House Press Secretary.

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One other turn in this story deserves to be noticed. On Wednesday Twitter had as its top story a minor exchange in the confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett for a position on the Supreme Court, during which Senator Mazie Hirono claimed that the use of the term “sexual preference” was an anti-gay slur. Hirono said that the phrase — which Amy Coney Barrett had only used earlier in passing — is “an offensive and outdated term”.

The claim itself is of course a crock. “Sexual preference” has been used for years and has no pejorative connotations. Indeed it has been used multiple times recently by no less a figure than Joe Biden; and just last month The Advocate (America’s main remaining legacy gay publication) used the term in a Tweet. So the story about Senator Hirono “calling out” Amy Coney Barrett was nothing other than a piece of political posturing.

If Barrett had been a man, the Democrats would have accused her of misogyny by now. If she had not adopted two black children and loved them, cared for them and brought them up as her own, then doubtless they would have attempted to accuse her of racism. But neither of these charges being available they instead made an attempt to accuse Barrett of homophobia, based on nothing more than the use of a term which everybody used until yesterday. Meanwhile Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary chose to update their entry on the term “sexual preference”, in order to pretend that the new “offensive” spin on the term was widely, indeed authoritatively recognised.

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That this story — the most minor imaginable exchange which relied not just on a misrepresentation but a nasty little untruth — should have been the top chosen story on Twitter on Wednesday tells us something. This was not the story which users had put at the top of the site — it was the story that Twitter chose. And it did so on the very same day that an actual story from the New York Post could not be shared on the platform.

There have been many eye-opening moments with Big Tech in recent years. The companies have been repeatedly caught out lying, cheating and attempting to exert political influence under the guise of fact-checking. But Wednesday should be seen as a watershed moment — the moment when the last remaining pretences of the platforms were finally shed.

People may still use Twitter and Facebook. They may continue to find some value in them. But after this week there is no way of avoiding the fact that in doing so they are helping companies which have chosen to make overt interventions into the political process — and to do so in order that their chosen candidate wins.

We hear a lot about purported, exaggerated “foreign interference” in elections, but here is the real interference. It is done by an organisation more powerful than any government, more unaccountable than any politician and more sinister than anyone but the most crazed conspiracists could ever have guessed.

Breaking free from the EU will not solve all the issues facing Britain, but it should catalyse a serious debate in the future. And if Britons have the courage to reject a purgatory of endless Brexit recriminations and embrace a long period of rebuilding, they could do far worse than turning to the example of the Founding Fathers. Especially one of their leading lights: Alexander Hamilton.

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Interest in Hamilton has already undergone a revival, thanks in part to the musical bearing his name. But even in his own right he stands out as someone who planned, set up and nurtured many of the important institutions of the United States.

Alexander Hamilton had a hand in the creation of its currency (his portrait graces the $10 bill), in the foundation of the Treasury, a prototype central bank, as well as the Coast Guard and West Point military academy, on top of the US Army. He was also a mastermind of American foreign policy and its trade relationship with Britain.

He was one of the lead authors of the Federalist Papers, the collection of essays that sought to clarify, strengthen and promote the US Constitution. Few men or women have had as enduring an impact on their nation.

His name serves as shorthand for the establishment of the institutions, laws and skills needed for countries to be able to thrive, in the sense of enjoying durable economic growth, high human development and a stable public life. All of these factors are on the wane in Britain — and the wider world – and need to be revived.

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The nascent democracy within which Hamilton acted was as noisy, nasty and chaotic as the Brexit climate is today. His enemies used the press ruthlessly against him, but he was careful that the will of the people be channelled by institutions and laws, and that distorted accounts of his policies be rebutted.

He was diligent in seeking out political opponents and trying to convince them of his views, and Hamilton and the Founding Fathers generally are the benchmark for political classes in terms of their vision, comportment and the durability of their policies.

The conciliatory and relatively open way he and others built a consensus over the Constitutional Convention, when the United States Constitution was drafted, is a model for how relations across the British political spectrum, as well as relations between London and Brussels, should be handled.

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That they are not is in part a question of leadership, and the quality of the current political cohort. In time, it may be that Brexit catalyses a new generation of politicians and parties, and that these shape what “Global Britain” becomes.

Here, Hamilton would also be a useful guide. He might set the scene by counselling that, as the trade war between the US and China is proving, a globalised world is becoming a multipolar one where Britain will simply be a mid-sized power like South Korea and Australia.

The notion of Global Britain will need to be conceived in the context of this reality, with implications for corporate governance, tax laws, the legal system and the City. It may also mean that Global Britain is founded on a meaningful security and defence agreement between the UK and the EU.

Hamilton would then focus on at least two other areas – both at the centre of the Brexit vote. One is low, poorly distributed economic growth and the other is immigration.

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Economic growth in Britain has slowed dramatically and has become too financialised: it has increasingly relied on the accumulation of debt and priming by central banks to keep it going. The distraction of Brexit has meant that there has been too little attention paid to the rattling engine-room of the economy. It has been hollowed out by austerity and the labour market has changed radically for the worse in terms of the way workers have exchanged flexibility for security.

What debate there has been has focused on redistributive measures, a difficult policy to execute ahead of an impending world recession. What is much more important is to rediscover the source of high, organic economic growth.

The secret sauce of “growth” lies in many of the things Hamilton developed and that equally Britain is well known for — education, good institutions and laws. If he were with us today, Hamilton would lay out a plan to boost human development (education, longevity, mental health and equality), and to harness the parts of ‘intangible infrastructure’ (eg education, socially friendly use of technology, rule of law) that Britain is good at.

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Then given the uncertainty, animosity and opportunity afforded by Brexit, Hamilton might propose a very clear contract on immigration. The aim of this would be to lay out the conditions that immigrants are welcomed into Britain, the help given to them to settle, assimilate and find work, their rights in the UK and a framework that would ensure they are respected and integrated into British society.

Given his aptitude for the infrastructure of state, Hamilton would not neglect the neglected parts of Britain. He would recommend a Marshall-style fund to help reshape their economy and society.

Much of the media is obsessed with the short-term drama — and who could blame them, such is the entertainment value. However, attention needs to be drawn to the deeper issues facing Britain and the potential solutions to them if Britain is to truly prosper and be at peace with itself after Brexit.

Sometimes, history and historical figures can anchor and steer these debates. I urge Britons to look beyond usual historical references such as Churchill towards someone who embodies the idea of nation building — Alexander Hamilton.