America’s Daddy Issues: Why the Founding Fathers are Holding us Back
Graphic by Madeline Barber
In the White House, in the halls of Congress, in think-tank board rooms, and in an increasing number of dining rooms nationwide, crucial policies that will define a generation are being debated. Will America continue to be plagued by mass shootings? Will women in this country have a right to their own healthcare? Who will be able to vote? And how? And where? A substantial amount of time is rightfully devoted to answering these questions. However, considerably less attention is given to something just as important: the type of evaluative questions used to talk about the policy questions themselves.
How people question their way to possible solutions significantly affects the type of solutions proposed in the first place. Thus, it is necessary to ask good questions in search of ‘answers’ to policy. Yet, in examining how policies are thought about, there are a concerning number of constraining and irrelevant criteria that severely limit the range and imagination of solutions. One of the most common of those stagnating questions is one many people have heard asked of a policy before: “What would the Founding Fathers think?”
It may not appear so at first, but this question carries a substantial amount of weight in policy arenas. The question of what the founders meant by the Second Amendment is perhaps the most pervasive question when discussing and analyzing gun issues. In the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the conservative justices used a historical methodology of reading the law, meaning that they based their decision not on the plain or modern meaning of the words in the Constitution but on what it is hypothesized the framers really meant by the words. Not only are conceptions of the founders’ opinions derived from guesswork regarding the psyche of long-dead men, but they are also as unhelpful as they are arbitrary. America holds itself back by adhering to bits and pieces of what its creators might have thought.
This proposition borders on blasphemy in a country where the founders are revered—even worshiped—by figures across the political spectrum. Nonetheless, this common practice of excessive veneration, though it may be useful for gaining political popularity and making generic feel-good statements, is pointless for evaluating critical policies. The framers were a varied group of men with all sorts of ethical and moral stances, some of which are inexcusable today; they were never in agreement as to a proper vision for America. Not to mention, the country has changed so much since its conception that any of their original visions aren’t even relevant. They were humans, not idols, and evidence has shown that practical organization management is not served well by founder worship. Also, rather paradoxically, the Founders were personally opposed to their own deification, and did not see themselves as the end-all-be-all of their country. Therefore, America’s obsession and deference to the Founding Fathers in contemporary decision making is not moral, sensical, institutionally practical, or even something that was personally desired by some founders, and thus the founders’ beliefs are an irrelevant and unhelpful consideration for modern American policy making.
Of the many things that can turn people off of America’s Founding Father reverence, the first and probably most discussed factor is the founders’ personalities and moral stances. The founders were undoubtedly intelligent, ingenuitive in their time, and invaluable to the nation’s history, but they were also severely flawed on all fronts from their personal lives to their bigoted politics. Though it is more or less universally acknowledged today, it is worth re-establishing that a troubling number of the founders enslaved human beings. Consequently, it seems morally questionable to not only revere the founders but also to actively consider their opinions when choosing current policy. After all, as historian Joseph Ellis accurately puts it, “when the founders talked about ‘we the people’, they were not talking about black people. They weren’t talking about women, and they weren’t talking about Native Americans. Whenever race enters the question, the founders are going to end up disappointing you.” This general description of the aggregate attitude of the framers is, even by common knowledge standards, accurate and true. Though the founders were never a singular group with a unified set of ideals, it is non-negotiable that a sentiment of dismissal towards non-white, non-male people prevailed at the Constitutional Convention and beyond. While it is fair to acknowledge the founders for what they started, it is unethical to give them such influence in contemporary politics—especially regarding present-day issues of morality in the law.
Another argument against deference to the Founding Fathers is based purely on logic, or rather, on the faulty assumptions made in the logic that attempts to justify the concept of idealized founders. Though there are many such fallacies, there are two that are deserving of special attention. First, the adoption of the ‘founders’ as a unified and cohesive group, united in the righteous path forward for their new nation, is massively erroneous. Historian David Sehat, in an interview about his new book with a strikingly poignant title—“The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible”— explains both the framers’ division and their misrepresentation as a unified front. He says the founders “had deep, deep disagreements among them about all kinds of things; about the proper interpretation of the Constitution, the role of the federal versus the state level governments, whether the federal government could intervene in the economy.” He also adds that, since there was no unified position taken by the founders, modern politicians all over the spectrum “recreat[e] the founders…first into a cohesive group of visionaries that didn’t have any disagreement; and then, second, into people that would agree with them.” Given the fact, then, that the founders were not united under any one set of ideals, the entire concept of appealing to the founders is null. In other words, appealing to the ‘founders’ can mean anything, and thus, in a policy debate, it means nothing. This concept of the ‘founders’ as a singular and unanimous pillar of the United States is completely fictional, and only serves as a wildly ambiguous buzzword.
Second, there is a prevailing assumption and tone among those who invoke the founders that the country has only recently begun to stray from its fathers’ intended path. Yet this assumption is deeply incorrect, as well. The United States deviated from the intentions of its creators long, long ago—and that is perfectly fine. For example, at the outset, many of the founders viewed “the vote itself [as] reserved for people of wealth and education.” However, that began to change almost as soon as the founding generation was out of office, with the Jackson administration expanding the vote to include nearly all white men. Moreover, many of the horrid moral stances taken by some of the founders were eradicated from law long ago. By 1923 —a hundred years ago— slavery was outlawed and women could vote. Even then, America was far different from what its founders had envisioned. Therefore, considering that the country began to evolve past the founders’ vision long ago and has achieved progress that wouldn’t have been possible with strict adherence to the framers, it is only rational to conclude that excessive deference to the country’s forefathers is unnecessary. Politics will be alright without them. It has been for a long time.
Yet another argument against founder veneration rests on the best practices of organizational and institutional practicality. That is to say that, at least in the business world, it has long since been recognized that organizations that refuse to evolve or leave the past behind are destined to flounder and fail. To be sure, the United States is no mere business, but it is an institution made up of countless organizations. Thus, some business theories can apply to government, especially those theories related to organizational stagnation and refusal to abandon old values. In a Harvard Business Review article, Donald Sull discusses the concept of active inertia, explaining why it is absolutely critical that businesses avoid getting trapped by the ideology of their founders. Sull defines active inertia as “an organization’s tendency to follow established patterns of behavior—even in response to dramatic environmental shifts.” Organizations experiencing active inertia become “stuck in the modes of thinking …that brought success in the past,”and as they panic due to the changing environment, they fall back even harder on their old ways instead of innovating. This leads to their eventual decline. Unfortunately, America seems to be exhibiting the same traits as a company in active inertia. The world that America has led in the past is changing. In its panic, the United States is accelerating and expanding its old activities — worsening existing partisanship, electing evermore populous and raucous politicians, and straining further the already tedious legislative process. Meanwhile, it refuses to consider massive, fundamental changes. America, like a company whose market share is slipping from its grasp, is not standing idly by and watching it happen. No, the country is acting to try to course correct, and is acting more quickly and rashly. The nation is in constant chaotic movement. Yet, since the actions the nation is taking are only bland extensions of what used to work and not meaningful reforms, nothing of substance really happens.
The same Harvard Business Review article suggests that the Founding Fathers are a cause of America’s active inertia. One of the four hallmarks of the phenomenon is the process of values transforming into dogmas, which is when values “harden into rigid rules and regulations that have legitimacy simply because they’re enshrined in precedent… like a petrifying tree, the once-living values are slowly replaced by the cold stone of dogma.” This process of values turning into dogmas is evident in America’s relationship with its founders. The Founding Fathers have been adopted not as people, but mistakenly, as previously noted, as a singular American value. The fabricated and vague value, sometimes called “the ideals of the framers,” has since been enshrined— literally, on Mount Rushmore — and made into a dogma from which it is difficult to stray. Again, the United States is not a business, but this very broad concept of values hardening into dogmas is certainly relevant in this conversation. The founders have become a sort of dogma, restricting policy makers’ thinking and serving as an impediment to change. Just like in business, America’s obsession with the founders’ values is an inhibitor that holds the country back from dynamic innovation.
If, after all of the arguments above, there still exists some urge to listen to and defer to the founders in America’s contemporary politics, then let one more argument dismiss that: the argument that one of the most esteemed framers, Thomas Jefferson, made against the utilization of the founders as a policy criteria for future generations. In a letter written around the start of the French Revolution, Jefferson says this about the proper lifetime of the influence of any one generation or one set of laws:
“I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it…On similar [grounds] it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please.”
Thus, even Jefferson recognized that it would make no sense to rely on the founders’ ideas and legacies forever. He acknowledged that the world belongs to the current generation, and that they should defer to themselves for its proper care.
The United States, instead of endlessly deferring to its founders, should look to contemporary leaders for advice and guidance, and not be afraid to look at the modern systems and personalities of allied countries, businesses, and non-governmental organizations. There is no need to throw away the founders entirely, but there is a need to change and adapt the American experiment to the present context. It is necessary to renew—not necessarily to revolt against—the founders’ principles in order to prevent them from holding America back at this crucial point in history. After all, the founders designed the Constitution, and thus America as a whole, to have evolutionary capabilities. The living, then, must seek to be more courageous and to carve out their own paths independent of the framers. The leaders of today must not undermine themselves by reasoning with or hiding behind what the founders may or may not have thought centuries ago. It is time to be brave. It is time to be bold. It is time for the current generation to determine its own fate.