A river is made drop by drop. - Pete Buttigieg

the Constitution an attempt to structure the founders’ beliefs on how that trust could be distributed.

This feature of the Constitution was itself an expression of trust: trust in future generations. The founders were flawed men who were also cognizant of their limitations (much more so than some who would come along later, insisting that laws must only be understood according to the exact attitudes of the men who wrote them). They built into the system a way for it to become bigger than their own biases, trusting their successors with the power to improve upon what they had created. Decades after the founding, Jefferson wrote in a letter to a friend: “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind . . . we might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story. Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life — or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.