Hamilton–Jefferson Equilibrium as Safety Valve

The Founders’ opposing ideals function as an enduring, informal political architecture: their competing legacies create ideological 'orbits' that keep U.S. politics within a zone of ordered liberty by offering rival but roughly symmetrical justificatory vocabularies that elites and movements can inhabit. When politics departs that bounded field—when rhetoric and practice no longer accept either orbit’s basic limits—constitutional stability becomes vulnerable. — Framing American politics as sustained by a two‑pole equilibrium matters because it gives policymakers and reformers a concrete diagnostic for when polarization has become system‑threatening and indicates whether remedy should be structural (institutions) or rhetorical (narrative recalibration).