What the Founders Would Say Now

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.

When the American republic was founded, the Earth was no more than 75,000 years old. No contemporary thinker imagined it could possibly be older. Thus Thomas Jefferson was confident that woolly mammoths must still live in “the northern and western parts of America,” places that “still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us.”

The idea that mammoths or any other kind of creature might have ceased to exist was, to him, inconceivable. “Such is the œconomy of nature,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”

Those illusory behemoths roaming out there somewhere beyond the Rockies remind us that the world of the Founding Fathers is in some ways as alien to us as ours would be to them. A distance of two and a half centuries is too long for us to be able to fully inhabit their universe, but not long enough for us to be capable of viewing them disinterestedly or dispassionately. In trying to imagine how they would perceive the state of their republic in 2025, the risk is that we invent our own versions of Jefferson’s nonexistent beasts. The originalist fallacy that dominates the current Supreme Court—the pretense that it is possible to read the minds of the Founders and discern what they “really” meant—in fact turns the Founders into ventriloquists’ dummies. We express our own prejudices by moving their lips.

Yet asking what the Revolutionary leaders would think of America now has long been a spur to critical thinking. The interrogation of how well or badly the present condition of the nation matches the founding intentions is one of the vital forces behind the American political project. It kindles the fire that blazes in Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July speech of 1852, during which he said of the Founders that their “solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.” It is the test Abraham Lincoln presents in the Gettysburg Address: whether the form of republican government created “four score and seven years ago” by “our fathers” might be about to “perish from the earth.” It underpins Martin Luther King Jr.’s resplendent rebuke at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

We do not have to sanitize the Founders into secular sainthood to ask what their republic has done with that legacy. We can use their magnificent words to reproach many of America’s contemporary follies even while recognizing that some of their actions prefigure those follies. It is quite possible, for example, that many of the Founders might be enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump’s unilateral imposition of swinging tariffs on foreign trade—albeit not of the bellicose rhetoric that accompanies them. In 1807, Congress, with Jefferson as president and James Madison as secretary of state, prohibited cargo-bearing American vessels from sailing to foreign ports and forbade the export of all goods out of the country by sea; imports also declined, largely because it was impractical for ships from abroad to make the trip if they had to return empty.

Jefferson thought of this as the invention of an experiment in “peaceful coercion” that might do away with war and make possible an enlightened era of universal peace. He persisted with this foolishness for 14 months while agricultural prices fell sharply and thousands were thrown out of work. In his book Empire of Liberty, about the early republic, Gordon Wood notes, “Perhaps never in history has a trading nation of America’s size engaged in such an act of self-immolation with so little reward.” If he were to update the book, he might wish to add “until now.”

Conversely, most of the leading revolutionaries would likely be dismayed to discover that their republic now allows women not only to vote but to hold public office. The vile misogyny of Trump’s invective against Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election would have repelled them, but they would have been more astonished that one of the main contenders for the office was female than that she was a person of color.

To acknowledge that the Founders could be as wrongheaded as any of their successors is also to marvel at how acute their thinking could be—even when they were woefully misguided. George Washington, Jefferson, and Madison all owned slaves. Their unwillingness or inability to confront at the birth of a new nation what Jefferson acknowledged as an “abominable crime” is the gaping crack in the foundation on which they built the republic: the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.”

Yet they were not stupid. “I tremble for my country,” Jefferson wrote, “when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” The Founders knew very well that the simple word all was indeed, as Martin Luther King would point out, a promissory note. Lincoln put his finger on it when he said that Jefferson “had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”

Lincoln’s point remains potent: Equality was indeed a cruel abstraction for women, Native Americans, and the nearly one-fifth of the American population that was enslaved at the time of the republic’s founding. But the word was intended to transcend the time and circumstances of its utterance and to make a claim on the future. There is no going back from that all. The Founders might at first be amazed by the evolution of their republic into one that guarantees the principle (if not the practice) of racial equality, but they would recognize on reflection that they had planted a seed that would blossom in heroic struggles for justice.

The Founders would be taken aback, not just by the geographic scale of contemporary America but by its cultural and ethnic diversity. It is true that they already lived in a multicultural world—in 1790, only about 60 percent of white Americans were of English ancestry. Most of the rest were Irish, German, Scottish, French, Dutch, or Swedish. The French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur celebrated “that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.”

Yet the Founders preferred to imagine American blood as unmixed. The Federalist Papers call Americans “people descended from the same ancestors.” In the aftermath of a war of independence that was also in effect a civil war, they were for obvious reasons much more interested in generating a sense of unity than in recognizing diversity. It seems likely that they would be confounded by the problem of how to preserve an “unum” when the “pluribus” is ever more disparate. They might in fact wonder at the ability of the United States to do so at all—to survive as a multicultural, let alone multiracial, entity.

They might have concluded, though, that they had left it an invaluable legacy by writing on their new nation’s birth certificate a phrase that can be—and has been—easily mocked. When the Founders included “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence as one of the three primordial human rights, they were making large claims, not just about the meaning of a republic but about the meaning of life.

They were drawing on one of the basic ideas of the Enlightenment—John Locke, for example, had declared, “I lay it for a certain ground, that every intelligent being really seeks happiness, which consists in the enjoyment of pleasure, without any considerable mixture of uneasiness.” Pleasure, in this sense, is more about human self-fulfillment than the self-indulgence of the rich. We might now call it well-being. This happiness is a radically egalitarian idea—everyone has an innate right to seek it. And there is an implicit embrace of diversity in that equality: No two ideas of happiness will be exactly the same.

But the elevation of happiness was also a radical challenge to the religious insistence that the point of life was to pursue sanctity through suffering. It is easy to forget that Christian Churches taught their flocks that our fate as human beings was to spend our time on Earth (in the words of a prayer I recited as a child) “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” To declare happiness as a foundational idea for a new kind of state was to suggest that human beings should be able to live enjoyable lives in the here and now.

Both of these ideas of happiness are under attack in contemporary America. Trumpism is all about the “considerable mixture of uneasiness” that Locke wished to exclude—the wallowing in self-pity, the horror-movie thrills of imagining American carnage, the terror of invasion by migrant hordes. Even the pleasures that Trump offers his followers are sadistic ones, predicated on his invitation to enjoy the pain of others. His happiness is a zero-sum game: “Real” Americans can experience it only if others are miserable.

This would be anathema to the Founders. The Declaration of Independence does not rest on any claim to American exceptionalism. On the contrary, it bases the necessity “to institute new Government” on the alleged violation of rights that are not national but universal. They belong to mankind first, not to “America First.” Likewise, the Bill of Rights is, as Jefferson wrote, “what the people are entitled to against every government on earth.”

The Founders would be equally repelled by a contemporary-American reaction against their belief that the meaning of collective political life is not dependent on religious faith. The separation of Church and state was essential to their republic. They understood from European and recent colonial history that true religious freedom is impossible if faith is intertwined with government. Thus the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Or as Jefferson put it: “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” The neighbor who believes in 20 gods or no god must therefore have the same political rights as the one who is an orthodox monotheist.

The Founders would thus be dismayed to find their insistence on establishing the political sphere as a neutral space in relation to religious belief and unbelief now flatly denied by, for example, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who insists that what they really meant was that “they did not want the government to encroach upon the Church—not that they didn’t want principles of faith to have influence on our public life. It’s exactly the opposite.” The Founders would have asked Johnson which set of religious principles they wished to hold sway over public life.

If the Founders would not have recognized themselves in this distorting mirror, there is nonetheless far too much about today’s America that they would recognize all too well. They did not know where their republic would go, but they knew exactly where it was coming from. They knew what theocratic politics were like, because they or their ancestors had lived under established Churches—as Madison put it, “We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it.” They knew exactly why it was necessary to stop officeholders from accepting gifts from “any King, Prince, or foreign State” without the consent of Congress; Benjamin Franklin, when he received a valuable snuffbox from the king of France, was so sensitive to possible perceptions of bribery that he sought congressional approval to keep it. It is not hard to surmise what he would have done with the offer of a Boeing 747 from Qatar.

It is true that the Founders did not think of their republic as one in which all citizens could be active participants in political life. Every state retained property qualifications for voters or officeholders, and this of course suited the interests of the economic elite, to which the Founders belonged. But their limitations on democratic participation were not mere expressions of snobbery and self-interest. The Founders were not wrong to believe that full citizenship is possible only for people who have the economic means to exercise it. It is hard to be free when you’re mired in poverty—and easy to override the principle of equal citizenship when you are superrich.

The great problem of contemporary democracy is, indeed, that suffrage became universal but the kind of economic dignity imagined by the Founders as its necessary condition did not. In this regard, one thing we can say with certainty is that the Founders would be horrified by the spectacle of Elon Musk handing out $1 million a day to voters in swing states—a subversion of the democratic process even cruder and more grotesque than their worst fears.

The Founders imagined that access to property—then thought of primarily as the ownership of land—would spread, and that the political nation would expand accordingly. This may be a very conservative idea, but if we apply it to contemporary America, it would have radical consequences. The Founders would surely be distressed to find, for example, that the modern equivalent of land ownership—having one’s own home—is ever more out of reach for young Americans.

The Founders would also be perplexed by the growth of oligarchy. They were mostly rich men who believed, as the rich usually do, that economic inequalities arise naturally from the “diversity in the faculties of men”—so wrote Madison in “Federalist No. 10.” Yet, as Gordon Wood observed, they nonetheless “took for granted that a society could not long remain republican if a tiny minority controlled most of the wealth.” If they were told that the top 0.1 percent of Americans currently holds 14 percent of the country’s wealth while the bottom half holds just 2.5 percent, they would surely have calculated that the odds on the survival of their republic had become very steep.

Likewise, they would be deeply depressed by America’s rapid loss of a common sphere in which political arguments can be teased out as a collective enterprise. What is most invigorating about the Founding Fathers is not even what they thought. It is how they thought. They did their thinking aloud. The pseudonym used by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay for The Federalist Papers is Publius, redolent of both public and the people. The Federalist Papers think through complex questions but do so in a language written to be read in coffeehouses and taverns. When Jefferson observed that “where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe,” the second requirement was as important as the first. The Founders imagined a republic of readers.

Even while they were anxious to limit the vote to men of property like themselves, they understood that there were no such limits on the right to hold an opinion. The opening of the Declaration of Independence acknowledges that it is written out of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”—not, notably, heads of state or popes or grandees but people in general. And its authors knew that the opinions even of women and working pe

Fintan O’Tooleمصدر