George Washington’s ‘last great experiment’ and our political chemistry set

Shortly before his death, founding President George Washington said, “The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.”

The age of monarchs and their absolute, unaccountable control was coming to a close, and the American experiment with self-governance was showing the world a new way to manage the affairs of humanity. Washington would have known — he helped bring it about.

For nearly 250 years, our great experiment has proceeded. Often with mistakes and messy results, sometimes advancing, sometimes backtracking, frequently despite ourselves, never pleasing everyone at once, our system of self-determination has held its own against everything thrown at it. And we never had to crown another king.

Experiments are how we learn what works and what doesn’t, through trial and error, driven by curiosity. They never really stop. We are constantly experimenting.

When I was a kid — back in the Cold War days of civil defense drills, and hiding from nuclear blasts by diving under the desk with a history book to protect my head — I got a chemistry set for Christmas. I think a lot of kids my age got one. They’re probably illegal now.

I remember a brightly colored box, with a picture of a kid in a lab coat, holding a test tube that smoked in his hand. Inside were a couple dozen little jars of different chemicals, some test tubes, a small lamp that burned rubbing alcohol to heat things up and an instruction manual.

The manual walked the budding new chemist through several experiments to test the reactions of various chemicals, step by step. I imagine the purpose of these chemistry sets was to create a new generation of scientific geniuses who would cure cancer or invent new forms of plastic. All helpful stuff.

Like most kids, I immediately tossed the instruction manual and just started mixing stuff to see what would happen. My curiosity trumped my good sense.

I learned that, if I mixed blue liquid from one jar with gray stuff from another, everything started to bubble. Then I learned that, if I sprinkled in some of the yellow powder, and heated it up, Mom would yell down into the basement, “What the hell are you doing down there?”

It took hours to get the stench out of the house. This reminds me of the gnarliness of politics today, as we continue our great experiment in self-government. Make no mistake, every election is a new experiment.

Our political chemistry set came in a box illustrated with George Washington’s happy humans, full of all the ingredients required for political experimentation. But, like an unsupervised 10-year-old kid, we seem to have thrown away the instruction manual.

Our last few experiments….er, I mean elections, we have thoughtlessly tossed into the beaker all sorts of strange elements, just to see what would happen. 

Left unopened in the box are little jars marked respect, patience, caution and civility — ingredients that could temper a messy chemical reaction.

But instead we mixed rabid, fearful populism with voter apathy. We stirred government overreach into the mix and added some 24-hour news cycle, taxes and wealth disparity.

Then we heated this stuff up over the internet, and when it started to steam, we added a dash of government secrecy, and a spoonful each of foreign intervention and Hollywood. But it was only when we threw in a bunch of hyper-ambitious politicians and a dash of religious snake oil that the experiment went critical and blew up in our faces.

Our eyebrows are singed, the walls smeared with fetid goo, and a thick miasma-like pepper spray hangs in the air. Mom yells down at us, “What the hell are you doing down there?” But this might be exactly what George Washington had in mind. Trial and error.

So the cleanup begins. We throw open the windows to air the place out and get some sunlight on things. We scrub the walls clean of the residue of failure and sweep broken glass from the floor. Most importantly we search high and low to find that lost instruction manual, so we don’t screw things up again.

Our experiment never stops, and with each new election, we have a chance to get it right. That is the heartening beauty of the system that Washington and his periwigged amigos left to us. We’ll meet again in the lab soon.