I forget who observed that most modern states rationalized first and then became democracies, whereas the US became a democracy first and therefore never fully rationalized to become a modern state. https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1316021797960130560

America becoming a property-owning democracy before it had an actual government was perhaps Not Entirely Good.

Like, you don't have to be one of those goofy French guys who dream of a Bourbon restoration to consider that the ministerial revolution of government affairs in, like, c. 16th-17th centuries had certain advantages.

Meanwhile, America's rusticated autodidacts--literally, the Classical Bust avi guys of their day--got Periclean Athens mixed up with post-Gracchi Rome and wrote an incredibly vague, dumb, and confusing constitution completely inadequate to its own time, let alone to ours.