228 Years Ago, John Adams Warned Us — And We’re Proving Him Right

John Adams didn’t write the Constitution like a motivational poster. He wrote it like an engineer handing over a machine with a warning label: this will fail if misused. When he said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” he wasn’t sermonizing. He was stating a design limitation.