> "So we ended up with a country that claimed that all men are created equal but did not actually adhere to this."

> yet we did eventually fix it. So much for the unchangeability of US government.

As far as I understand, African Americans were still not considered equal in many states over 100 years after the very bloody Civil War to abolish slavery of African Americans. I don't consider this a good example of a highly changeable government. Or am I misunderstanding your point of the US "eventually fixing it"? 100 years is not a trivial amount of time in a country that is only a little over 200 years old.

You're confusing government with citizens. The letter of the law changed but the culture lagged behind.

> You're confusing government with citizens. The letter of the law changed but the culture lagged behind.

I don't they are. The law that abolished slavery changed, but racial segregation was - by definition - inequality. That it was postfixed "but equal" really underscored how hard they tried to dress it up.

It was confirmed - by governments - in a number of cases, Plessy v. Ferguson being the canonical one.

> So much for the unchangeability of US government.

I didn't say it was "unchangeable," and ... well, that's obviously not true.

This is all about the difficulty of changing. My premise is that changes that push closer to the stated core principles of the founders are more likely to happen than others.

I wouldn't say rigidity "works" in this case, as several generations of slaves and women and other minorities might attest. Had we been more open to change in the spirit of the constitution rather than the word, perhaps there'd be less resistance.