Political analysts attribute our current stalemate to a number of likely factors: the corrupting influence of big money; the fall of the old party bosses and the advent of primaries; and now the rise of a social media that is centered on forming virtual communities of like-minded people. All true, but the heart of the matter is this: The system is not supposed to work.

With a few notable exceptions, the men who drafted the American Constitution were much more concerned about the excesses of power than getting things done. They threaded it with checks and balances that made it easy for a determined opposition to stop any agenda. They considered parties to be an inherent evil.

Once they stepped down from the picture frame and walked into the hurly-burly of actual political life, though, the founding fathers spent much of their time hiring professional slanderers to accuse one another of treason, malfeasance and perversion.

Nor did they stop at libel. When their dominance was threatened, John Adams and his Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which tried to limit immigration and made malicious criticism of the president a felony. Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans responded with the doctrine of “nullification,” claiming the right of the states to simply ignore any national laws they thought infringed on their sovereignty.

The political was always personal and often dangerous. Election Days regularly turned to violence and shivaree; one such extravaganza in Baltimore may have cost Edgar Allan Poe his life. (One theory holds that he was kidnapped and plied with liquor by a political faction that wanted him to vote again and again as a “repeater.”) Debate was vigorous, but unilluminating. The Federalist congressman Roger Griswold of Connecticut once attacked his Republican colleague, Matthew Lyon of Vermont, with a wooden cane, beating him about the head on the floor of the House. Lyon, later jailed under the Sedition Act, defended himself by grabbing a pair of iron tongs out of the fireplace.

Politicians of the highest rank — DeWitt Clinton, Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson — routinely fought duels, and sometimes murdered one another. In the most infamous incident, as any fan of the Broadway show “Hamilton” can tell you, Aaron Burr, then the sitting vice president (spoiler alert) shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, one of the architects of our liberty.

Things tended to get done only when one party, like the Federalists or the Whigs, was driven almost entirely out of government — and then what was done created new resentments and stalemates. Hamilton and the Federalists established a central bank in 1791, only to see James Madison and the Republicans let its charter expire in 1811, throwing the country into financial turmoil. Madison re-established a central bank five years later, only to see Jackson and his Democrats let its charter expire again, 20 years later, setting off a horrific depression.