Why the Articles are still Useful

This is the post that gave me the idea of including the Articles of Confederation in the project.  This teacher was doing a course comparing ancient Rome with the US Constitution and he found that he had an extra day to fill.  He thought that the Articles would make a good bridge. 

Now I don’t know about you, but nobody in my classroom (including me) had ever read through the A. of C., and it turned out to be a damned interesting experience.  [You can try it here]  To begin with, it’s good to remind oneself from time to time that our first experiment with “republican government” was a colossal failure – a self-proclaimed “perpetual Union” (!) that lasted for less than a decade.
But beyond that bit of humility inducement, on the substance of it it’s pretty easy to identify –  in hindsight! – the many flaws of the government of the United States of America as they appeared in, say, 1787 or thereabouts.  You read through the A. of C. and you realize, as one of my students nicely put it, that it has “no provision for executive power,  legislative power, or judicial power.”  The trifecta of constitutional deficiencies.  It doesn’t really set up a “government” at all – it’s more like a “league” of sovereign States, in which those States promise each other certain things (mostly, to treat an attack on one as an attack on all and to contribute men and money to the common defense at the direction of the Congress).

He goes on to compare the difficulties faced by the United States in the 1780's to those faced by the EU today.  While rereading some of this, it seems like 'of course' that won't work or 'of course' that's the way you should do it.  But governing is hard and settling on the rules to govern with is extremely hard.  It certainly has not been perfected.  It's still useful to try and go back and work through the thought process that brought us the liberal democracies that we live in today.