To fight Trumpism, liberals should embrace the Founding Fathers

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

*Washington resigning his commission. Even George III thought this act made him one of the greatest of all men.*

The Founding Fathers aren’t much in fashion among liberals these days. A good friend of mine has been trying to get a novel about Thomas Jefferson published for three years. He has approached more publishers than he can care to name, publishers of all sizes, reputations and political persuasions. He tells me that while most mainstream, as well as niche publishers, have turned his manuscript down, a small number of right-wing houses that typically publish conservative polemic are deeply interested.

My friend’s problems with publishing Jefferson mirror the liberals’ problem with the Founding Fathers in general. At best they are dismissed as outdated dead white men, and at worst as evil slaveholders. But as an immigrant who came to this country inspired by the vision these men laid down, I don’t feel that way. Neither does my 4-year-old who proudly dressed up as George Washington, of her own accord, for Halloween last year. She stood proudly in her little tricorne hat and blue colonial coat, her face full of determination, as if she too was leading an army (she was particularly inspired by the stories I told her of Valley Forge and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware). Both she and I believe that while these men’s flaws were pronounced, and vastly so in some cases, the good they did far outlives the bad, and they were great men whose ideals should keep guiding us. More importantly, I believe that a liberal resurrection of the Founding Fathers is in order today if we want to fight the kind of faux patriotism foisted on us by the Party of Trump (“POT”. We can no longer call his party the Republican Party — that party of Dwight Eisenhower, of Ronald Reagan, of respect for intelligence, fiscal responsibility, international stewardship and opposition to real and not perceived evil, is gone, kaput, pushing up the daisies, as the memorable sketch would say: it is an ex-party).

First, let’s acknowledge the bad. There’s no denying why some liberals feel hesitant about embracing the Founding Fathers. These men who laid out ideals of equality and justice also owned human beings, a glaring contradiction that’s impossible to ignore. They were patronizing toward women and scoffed at their intellect. They would almost certainly have thought that people who looked like me or my daughter could not be equal citizens of the Republic. Washington and Jefferson, in particular, were deeply enmeshed in this brutal institution – Jefferson far more so than Washington, who freed his slaves in his will – and it’s fair to question how they could write about liberty while denying it to others. As early as 1775, Samuel Johnson was asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”; the hypocrisy was obvious on both sides of the Atlantic. For those of us who call themselves liberals and believe in human rights, this hypocrisy is hard to reconcile.

But we must remember the times in which they lived if we want to free ourselves of the disease of presentism. As wealthy Virginia planters, it would be virtually impossible to imagine Washington or Jefferson not owning slaves. Their acceptance of slavery was, however evil and anachronistic it seems to us, common among people of their era. However, their ideas about free speech, religious tolerance, separation of powers, and individual rights were not. In other words, as Gibbon said about Belisarius, “His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times; his virtues were his own.” In addition, it is important to not bin “The Founders” in one homogenous, catch-all bin. Washington freed his slaves and was a relatively beneficent and enlightened master for his times, loathe to participating in the wrenching practice of separating families, for instance; Adams and twenty-two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence did not own any at all; Franklin later became an abolitionist; Jefferson was probably the biggest culprit – not so much because he owned many slaves but because the gap between his soaring rhetoric and the reality at Monticello, not to mention his relationship with Sally Hemings, is glaring. To recognize these differences between the Founding Fathers is to not excuse their practices; it is to recognize the possibility of human improvement and the fact that in every age there is a spectrum of men and morality.

Now, the good. We can fault the Founders for mirroring the weaknesses of their times, but while those weaknesses did not endure and were bent and vanquished by the long arc of history, their strengths endured for all time. The concepts that the founders impressed upon their country and the world, first in their state constitutions and then in our revolutionary national constitution, weren’t just unusual; they were radical and revolutionary. In a world ruled by monarchs, where questioning authority was dangerous, where the equality of religious worship would be regarded as blasphemous, where anything approaching due process was at the pleasure or disapproval of a monarch with divine rights, the Founders’ vision was nothing short of magical. They gave us the foundations that allowed later generations to end slavery, to fight for civil rights, to push for greater justice, and yes, to be able to criticize these same founders as hypocrites who did not fully embrace their own lofty proclamations.

Perhaps the ultimate paradox of America’s founding is that the same ideals which the Founders proposed but themselves failed to live up to could be used as potent weapons to create the kind of society that even people who despise them dream of. They accomplished this improbable feat by embedding in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution a North Star which we are still striving toward. Every time we fall short of it, every time the forces of repression or autocracy threaten to take us back, the star shines and holds us in its constant, fixed, unidirectional thrall. “All men are created equal”, it whispers in perpetuity. Abraham Lincoln recognized this eternal value of the Declaration when he said in 1859,

“All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

As liberals, these abstract truths are ours to embrace—not as an excuse for the Founders’ failings but as tools to continue their work toward a more just , freer society. And that work has never been as important as before. Not for the first time and not for the last, America faces the prospect of a president who, in his words and actions, in his very nature, has showed himself to be the kind of authoritarian, monarchical figure that the Founders despised and warned us against. At best, Donald Trump is clueless about executive overreach, and at worst he believes in actively weakening the separation of powers that lies at the heart of this country’s founding. Whether it’s suggesting that he will tamper with interest rates, nominating unqualified cabinet officials who he thinks should bypass standard Congressional confirmation, constantly attacking the press as the “enemy of the people”, and most infamously, rejecting the results of a democratic election in 2020, it is clear as day that Trump cares little about the Constitution; it is unlikely that he has read it. His soaring rhetoric about free speech, parroted by his enabler-in-chief Elon Musk, is only a pretext for curbing speech that he doesn’t like.

What should liberals, and in fact all Americans, do in the face of such obvious contempt for the Constitution? Quite simply, go back to the source, read the Founders’ own words (or go back even further, to the words that inspired them). These men’s lives and careers were devoted to freeing this country from the yoke of an authoritarian king, so it is hardly surprising that they produced a veritable volcano of writings opposing concentrated executive power and emphasizing the separation of powers.

James Madison, primary author of the Constitution, on investing any one branch of the government with too much power:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
– Federalist No. 47

Thomas Jefferson, alluding especially to the sharing of power between a president and his cronies:

“The concentrating [of these powers] in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.”
– Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785

Alexander Hamilton, especially colorfully:

“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper…despotic in his ordinary demeanor, known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty…when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, to join in the cry of danger to liberty, to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion, to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’” – Objections and Answers Respecting the Administration, 1792

Patrick Henry, fiery orator:

“If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute! The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him; and it will be the subject of long mediation with him to seize the first auspicious moment to accomplish his design.”
– Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788

Elbridge Gerry, very perspicaciously holding forth on the curious ascendancy of authoritarians to power:

“The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” – Records of the Federal Convention, May 31, 1787

And finally, an on-the-nose warning from Hamilton:

“History will teach us…that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” – Federalist No. 47

There are countless other quotes.

I used the word “liberals” in the title of this post, but it’s only because of my observations regarding liberal ambivalence and contempt about the Founding Fathers. Reclaiming the Founders and their patriotism is not liberals’ responsibility and privilege alone. The lessons the Founders hold apply to us all, and especially to those who voted for Trump, thinking that he would cure the ills that they thought the other side failed to remedy. I sympathize with their sentiments and understand that the last twenty years of a disrupted, outsourced, unequal economy have left them dispossessed, disgruntled and angry. They are right to be angry with the liberal elite who have abandoned the working class and are obsessed with their pet cultural issues. But as they say, caveat emptor. These voters were disappointed with their cat, who they thought would make quick work of the mouse in the house. So they kicked the cat out and thought they would vote for a cat who they are hoping will finally rid them of the pest, but do they they realize that even if – and and that’s a big if- he does this, he might well drag in the bubonic plague? The cure might be worse than the disease.

The Founders are unifying also because they serve as a kind of Rorschach blot, a mirror in which we can see what we want to see. But unlike a Rorschach blot it is not just an illusion. Both conservatives and liberals can claim the Founders to make their case. In fact depending on the situation, each side can use the same belief system of a particular Founder to make their case. For instance, consider Jefferson’s emphasis on states’ rights and opposition to federal authority. Conservatives can – and do – invoke states’ rights to argue against executive encroachment in their states, and liberals can – and do – invoke states’ rights to argue against executive encroachment in their states. For liberals who have touted the value of federal laws in areas like climate change and abortion, states’ rights are going to start looking pretty good under the Trump administration. And for conservatives who have touted states’ rights in the same areas, but in opposite directions, federal laws are going to start looking pretty good under the Trump administration. This is a feature and not a bug, because it means both sides can claim the Founders and both can agree on their value.

The bigger point to remember here is that all of us, irrespective of our political beliefs, need to go back to the sources, to our origins, to the words that made us, in a honest and unbiased manner. Faux patriotism is divisive; it engenders bitter acrimony, muddies the waters and marks us as hypocrites. But true patriotism unites us and makes us proud to be the intellectual descendants of Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison. It enables us to celebrate their commitment to religious and individual liberty, to cast aside their human failings and march forward with their unifying ideals of equality and freedom. But for that we need to let go of our timidity in invoking the Founders’ names, stop constantly apologizing for their flaws which are all too well known, and embrace them and their ideals wholeheartedly. On a practical level, we should embrace constitutional history; read about it, discuss it at the dinner table and in discussion groups and in town hall debates. And as Ronald Reagan memorably said in his farewell address, if parents don’t teach their kids this history, their kids should nail them on it. Liberal and conservative alike, civic education begins at home.

In my post, I remarked on the first lines of the Declaration of Independence as our North Star. But the trajectory of our country can well have another North Star – George Washington. I have been reading about the Founding Fathers for many years, and I have always found that Jefferson’s, Adams’s or Hamilton’s reputations, while preserving their greatness, nevertheless accumulate a bit of tarnish; as you know more about them, Jefferson comes across as a rank hypocrite and a drama queen, Adams as crusty and inept, and Hamilton, while perhaps the most brilliant of them all, as a sycophant and power-grabber. Only Washington’s reputation seems to only enlarge the more you read about him. His physical and psychological courage, his dignity and modesty, his inner strength and outward empathy, his tendency to inspire through silence and through leading from the front, his relatively benighted views about slavery and women and his revolutionary lack of monarchical ambitions, seen in his resignation of his commission at a time when his countrymen would have accepted his elevation to a king – all only seem to coat him with a sheen of greatness.

Let’s spare no words: George Washington would have hated Donald Trump and all he stands for with every fiber of his being (he also would have hated most of our politicians, on both sides, but that’s a different post). He would have hated Trump’s narcissism, vanity, and greed, his lack of empathy (and his projection of false empathy), his fundamentally anti-democratic mindset, his corruption and adultery, his insistence that he be surrounded by loyalists and yes-men, and most prominently, his monarchical trappings and power grabs. So liberals and conservatives alike: if we cannot unite around Trump, if we hate you for electing Trump and you hate us for not electing him, let’s at least unite around George Washington who will be as sure a guide to our future as anyone in our history. As they said about him, he was first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. Let him remain so and inspire our common vision.