Did Benjamin Franklin think the constitution would last long?

Answer 1

Twenty years.

Answer 2

A long time.

It is interesting that some speak of the United States Constitution in the past tense, as if it no longer exists or is no longer relevant. This arises in a political movement in America, which holds that the American legal and political ethos is somehow "post-Constitutional".

It holds that that the basic Constitutional principles, as laypeople perceive them from a textual reading of the Constitution, or perhaps from a survey course in American civics in high school or university, such as "freedom of speech", etc., have somehow been eroded in their importance or relevance, in modern American governance.

It has even progressed in some quarters in America to the point of open defiance of the legally- and Constitutionally-limited governments in America. This has included activities such as the stockpiling of weapons in some kind of paranoid belief that Amendment II and some of the other Amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights have been drastically compromised, or even totally abrogated. It has also been characterized in the self-sequestration of a group of like-minded individuals, apart from the rest of society, and has culminated in incidents as the sieges at Ruby Ridge or Waco.

The reality, of course, for most Americans of rationality and, yes, of faith in the system, is that the Constitution, as in the common law, is alive and well in American legal jurisprudence. "Textualism", however, can only take the layperson only so far. It is a lack of familiarity, apprehension and comprehension of the various schools of Constitutional thought in American law and jurisprudence that has led to such disaffection.

In the final analysis, of course, an adherence to, as well as an understanding of, the 235 years of the continuity of, and, yes, the genius of, the Constitution, as reflected in the American institutions of, and supported by, government, is the best expression of the collective aspirations of American society. The reality is that, as with the growth and contraction of American commerce, which affects its momentary vitality, the American politico-legal is similarly "cyclical", where the Supreme Court of the United States, in a role analogous to that of the Federal Reserve as to the American economy, intervenes to moderate the extremes of polarity in the American political and legal dialectic.