I said that the Constitution was sclerotic, not you.
How long can a nation remain the world's leading debtor before complete collapse?
There's an old quip—sufficiently old that I won't bother adjusting it for inflation, and will attribute it to Doctor Evil—to the effect of "When you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank owns you, When you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank."

I share in broad outline your sense that the country appears increasingly untenable as a going concern. A savvy woman of my acquaintance, now ninety, is fond of pooh-poohing these fears: "We survived x; we'll survive y. You'll see." I think, "Maybe yes, maybe no, but nobody ever gets past z." We differ, of course, with regard to your utopian buzz. There are many more ways of being completely fucked up than there are of being merely dysfunctional. When the Divided States, post-union diplomacy having failed them, reach the grave impasse where the alternatives facing them are genocide or mass slaughter, I pray that they will find the wisdom to choose correctly.

cordially,