RE THE RADICAL COUNTER WHIG FOUNDING FATHERS THE ROAD TO GETTYSBURG WHAT IS A CIVILIZATION?

"It seems to me we are threatened nowadays because so few of us take our fundamental political institutions very seriously any more." DK

Fair enough.

I believe, nevertheless, that the argument can well be made that it was the very nature of our founding institutions, fundamental political institutions,  which extended us, and more importantly, Western Civilization further out onto an already existing wrong foot, or as Wittgenstein once put it in another context 
' thin ice ', in the latter 18th Century, so to speak. 

Our American system was born out of a deep suspicion of any well ordered political system whatsoever.

In a sense, that was why, after all, that we eventually ended up in the macabre spectacle of a Civil War, " Four Score and Seven Years " later, a war which we had had, literally, 8 decades in which to find a way, politically, to ward off.

Everyone knew, from the beginning, the inevitability of facing the issue politically, and of its likely intractability, even from the early 18th century, well before 1776. 

Nevins' account, the three early, large, long, volumes, is a very long, spiritually demoralizing, and tiresome chronicle of only the last decade or so of that decades long, impotent, floundering, 'drift' toward the Civil War.

The American Rebellion, 1776, not a climax of Western Civilization;

1787, not one either;

the French Revolution, 1789, not one either;

The War of 1812, please;

the Louisiana Purchase, spoils of a wastrel; 

the Civil War, hardly a climax of Western Civilization;

the two World Wars, scarcely; 

the Cold War, not one at all, beginning middle or end.

The pinnacle or climax of Western Civilization, at least in the English speaking world part of the West,  had been some time around the death of Elizabeth, or the death of someone known under the nom de plume, Shakespeare.

Another good candidate for the pinnacle of Western Civilization,  is 1763, the end of the Seven Years War:  Britain defended us, from the French.

Fourteen years later, the American Rebellion, in gratitude.