You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Audio.

This talk features constitutional law scholar Noah Feldman, recorded live at TED 2017.

If you've been thinking about U.S. politics and trying to make sense of it for the last year or so, you might have hit on something

like the following three propositions.

One, U.S. partisanship has never been so bad before.

Two, for the first time, it's geographically spatialized.

We're divided between the coasts, which want to look outwards, and the center of the country which wants to look inwards.

And third, there's nothing we can do about it.

I'm here today to say that all three of these propositions,

all of which sound reasonable,

are not true.

In fact, our U.S. partisanship goes all the way back to the very beginning of the Republic.

It was geographically spatialized in almost eerily the same way that it is today,

and it often has been throughout U.S. history.

And last, and by far, most importantly,

we actually have an extraordinary mechanism

that's designed to help us manage factional disagreement and partisanship.

And that technology is the Constitution.

And this is a evolving, subtly,

supply designed entity that has the specific purpose

of teaching us how to manage factional disagreement where it's possible to do that,

and giving us techniques for overcoming that disagreement when that's possible.

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