What would the Founding Fathers think of today’s America? How would they advise us to address the great domestic and foreign challenges of our time? Would they be proud of contemporary Americans for preserving their handiwork, or would they despair at what has become of the United States in the 21st century?
The answer to all of these questions is the same: Who cares? Seriously. Who cares what James Madison would have thought about internet regulation? Who cares what Thomas Jefferson might have said about the war in Ukraine?
–Michael Lind, Forget the Founding Fathers, ca. November 17, 2023
There are many things about America that distinguishes it from the rest of the English-speaking world. Two interesting peculiarities, which I had raised in The Work-Standard (3rd Ed.), is that America has an unusually large population of Americans with German ancestry and lacks an official language. While it is true that English is widely spoken by most Americans, that is only because what passes as an “American Culture” is dominated by a small minority of British Americans who adhere to Protestant denominations that originate from the English-speaking world. The latter is what accounts for why the definition of Americanness, despite America becoming more racially diverse than at any earlier point in US History, has consistently been defined by that same minority for the past two centuries alone.
Yet, as Michael Lind noted in his article in Compact Magazine, there is another peculiarity which is unique to America. It is significant that, perhaps outside of the UK, no other English-speaking country except America has a fervent devotion to its Founders. Nobody from Canada, Australia and New Zealand cherishes their nation’s Founders or dogmatically defers to their Constitution as much as the Americans. Lind argued that this American trend cannot be the result of the centuries-long conflict between Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism.
There is an important distinction to be made that I think Lind should have made more explicitly clear. It is one thing for somebody to stress the reindustrialization of the Rust Belt or for somebody else to advocate for the US to maintain its commitments to the Empire of Liberty. It is a whole different matter altogether to view the Founding Fathers and the Constitution as infallible or immune to any criticism. Even as a proponent of Hamiltonianism, I do have my own criticisms of Alexander Hamilton. Sometimes, I wished Hamilton named a designated successor for the Party, realized sooner that James Madison was more loyal to Thomas Jefferson than to the Federalists, and helped the Federalists design their own foreign policy stance on Latin America (in opposition to the Monroe Doctrine). There are plenty of other examples, but those three stand out the most to me.
Therefore, I strongly agree with Lind that a certain segment of US politics has been trying to create a Personality Cult to the Founders for the purposes of promoting specific interpretations of the US Constitution. It has to be a specific segment because Lind mentioned that all the other major political forces in American politics are either indifferent or opposed to that Personality Cult for a variety of reasons:
Even after World War II, significant political subcultures in the United States ignored the cult of the Founding Fathers. Squabbling Marxist sectarians identified with Lenin or Trotsky or Bukharin or Luxemburg or Kautsky, not Madison or Hamilton or Jefferson. Libertarians had little use for either Jefferson’s agrarianism or Hamilton’s developmentalism and neomercantilism, and found their prophets in modern émigrés from Russia (Ayn Rand) or Austria (Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek), not the early American republic.
Meanwhile, the powerful technocratic progressive strain on the American center left has for more than a century championed expert rule informed by social science, which, like natural science, is supposed to be constantly updated by new findings. In this vision, there is little value in social science more than a decade or two old, much less 18th-century political philosophy. No wonder that references to the founding are rare among today’s progressives, except when they quote Jefferson and other Founding Fathers on the separation of church and state. Barack Obama’s slogan in his Inaugural Address, a “new foundation,” sank when launched and was quickly replaced by the slogan “win the future,” which was closer to the orientation of American progressivism. Meanwhile, the identity-politics faction, the other important school on today’s left, has no use for the Founders at all, except as defendants to be arraigned on charges of racism, genocide, patriarchy, and homophobia.
Thus, it should not be surprising to find out that the Personality Cult emanates from the post-1945 rise of so-called “American Conservatism” as the byproduct of the Cold War. In America, as opposed to other nations, Conservatism is a modern phenomenon at best and a type of Neoliberalism at worst. This “American Conservatism” emerged in response to three trends:
- The Soviet Union and the CMEA/Warsaw Pact countries
- American Progressivism’s implementation and continuation of the New Deal
- Post-1945 American attitudes on race and religion.
These three trends resulted in “American Conservatism” becoming a fusion of ideas that revolved around expanding the Empire of Liberty and rolling back the New Deal in favor of the Market Economy on the basis that doing so will promote family and religious values. To ensure that it had the authority to back its ideological assertions, so-called “American Conservatism” exerted a dogmatic deference to its own definitions of the US Constitution and the Founding Fathers. It was never about taking the best ideas of the Founders, rejecting the unsound ones, or trying to improve upon their achievements. Instead, it was more about defining Americanness according to the notion that America was founded for the purposes of promoting and exporting Neoliberalism.
The consequence of fostering such a Personality Cult is that it becomes easier to argue that sensible policies like prohibiting child exploitation or the forty-hour workweek are somehow unconstitutional. The Constitution at that point becomes an abstract, old document detailing what can and cannot be done, oftentimes at the risk of feeling irrelevant and divorced from the times.
To make sure that “constitutional” prohibitions are enforced against populists on the right and social democrats on the left, some members of the fusionist right—or the undead right—propose returning to the Lochner era (1897-1937), when the US Supreme Court frequently struck down workweek maximum hours, child-labor prohibitions, and other such reforms on the grounds that they violated free-market economics or the sanctity of contract.
In The Washington Post in 2014, George Will, a former communitarian conservative who is now a libertarian, wrote: “Judicial activism isn’t a bad thing”: “Conservatism’s task, politically hazardous but constitutionally essential, is to urge courts to throw as many flags as there are infractions,” by striking down great numbers of municipal, state, and federal laws that run afoul of the tenets of free-market fundamentalism.
Will’s effort to save the right from statism brings to mind the critic Kenneth Tynan’s description of T.S. Eliot’s midcentury bid to revive verse drama, which Tynan compared to the exertions of a swimming instructor demonstrating various moves while standing in an empty pool. The call for judicially imposed anti-statism represents the desperation of elite libertarians who are beginning to lose some of their influence on the American right after having masqueraded for decades as conservatives.
The lesson to be learned from this article is that not everything from the Founders or the Framers of the Constitution deserves to be revisited. The Founders are not infallible and should be open to criticism. What deserves to be revisited are ideas that are capable of withstanding change over the centuries. After all, Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty was only able to stay relevant after the early 20th century because people like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were able to modernize the concept and laid the foundations of today’s post-1945 world order.
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