59 and still naïve

Today is my birthday and, after a subway to work reading of a review in the 'New York Review of Books,' I realize how innocent I still can be.
The book, “American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Woman Who Shaped Early America” by Edmund S. Morgan (Norton, 278 pp. $27.95) sounds like an interesting read and I hope to acquire it soon.
What struck me in the review was the author’s take on 300 years of American history that argues that a small elite group at Philadelphia created a fictional organism known as “We the people,” and that all successful government must be based on fiction.
As for representational government, Morgan’s analysis is that “Popular government in both England and America has been representative government, and representation is the principal fiction by which the larger fiction of popular sovereignty has been itself sustained.”
He adds, “All government, of course, rests on fictions, whether we call them that or self-evident truths.”
The reviewer goes on to note Morgan’s further comments: “Like all fiction, political fictions require a willing suspension of disbelief by those who live under them.”
And finally, Morgan states: “The sovereignty of the people was an instrument by which representatives raised themselves to the maximum distance above the particular set of people who chose them. In the name of the people they became all-powerful in government, shedding as much as possible the local subject character that made them representatives.”
Those of you who know my obsession with politics might wonder at calling myself naïve. I daily rant about things I feel are politically unjust or just plain stupid (to say nothing of the distractions that distract and cushion so many people from realizing just what is going on). As I read the review, in which Morgan makes his case and, while recognizing that all government requires consent of the governed and that people accept “plausible opinions to support consent” even though they are “at variance with observable fact,” Morgan considers the idea to work; straining credulity, but not breaking it.
So, my naivetes is in thinking that there is a way to make politics and government actually work.
So, while I know reading Mr. Morgan’s book will cause me to become angry and disillusioned (but I still will read it, it sounds intriguing as he reminds us that his heroes are those “who went their own way against the grain, regardless of custom, convenience, or habits of deference to authority. . . the Americans who sassed their betters and got into trouble, the people for whom the Bill of Right was written.”) I fall back on historian Howard Zinn: “No form of government, once in power, can be trusted to limit its own ambition, to extend freedom and to wither away. This means that it is up to the citizenry, those outside of power, to engage in permanent combat with the state, short of violent, escalatory revolution, but beyond the gentility of the ballot-box, to insure justice, freedom and well being,” as I continue my Quixotic mission.