One of the effects of deep engagement with Greek and Roman history was that the founders developed an unusually long temporal view. They were reading about political decisions made two thousand years earlier and tracing their consequences. This made them acutely aware that the decisions they were making would be read in the same way by people they would never meet. Jefferson wrote explicitly about designing for posterity. Madison's constitutional design anticipated political pressures that had not yet emerged. The long view is not nostalgia or abstraction — it is a practical tool. When you are thinking in decades, short-term political pressures recede in relative importance. Trade-offs that look difficult in the immediate term look different when weighed against multi-generational consequences. What changes about your current decisions when you extend the timescale you are thinking in?