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At 94, the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield has given the semiquincentennial a bracing interpretation. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, he describes an America that is both the world’s oldest continuous democracy and a perpetually young nation — one that, in his Machiavellian phrase, must be “continually refreshed” like all regimes. The mechanism is the ballot: We are, he says, a country that renews itself every four years. The young are good, he adds, “because they’re revolutionary.”