AMERICAN IS A ????? CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC

It would be very interesting to be a descendant of Franklin. I'm sure that would provide you with considerable awareness and insight and I find that you have made a fair statement.
However, could we not say the very same about any good man from the beginning of time? I cannot imagine any other reaction, can you? Who would not marvel at the advancements in travel, science, and communications and yet still be appalled by the capacity that governments have to immure, indenture, and destroy?
To the original point of a Republic as an ideal government, I believe your great great-great-great-great-grandfather had similar notions; that a Republic was a gift to an enlightened people and that that this Republic required Social tolerance, political restraint, economic thrift, justice of virtue, and a philosophical understanding of that gift bolstered by a perennial thirst for maintaining independence from the arms of an overreaching government.

The fact remains; today the Republic is non-existent for U.S. Citizens.
They do not administer their own affairs as instead they allow popularity contests to determine who will establish and dictate their affairs for them.

They do not maintain a spirit of independence or philosophical understanding of such as they line up to register, apply, and submit in the great gathering of government goodies and "protections" in countless forms.

They do not exercise political restraint as they allow government to encroach into every aspect of their personal lives.

They do not exercise social tolerance or seek a justice of virtue as they seek endless statutes to establish what is deemed acceptable
And

They do not practice economic thrift as they have turned over the treasury to a private bank who prints monopoly money and calls it real.

well sorry ben.

we didn't keep it.