By Christopher Moore
Americans have a weird habit.
We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that “the Founding Fathers” were twelve identical old guys sitting around a table nodding in agreement while bald eagles circled overhead and patriotic music played in the background.
That’s not history.
That’s fan fiction.
The truth is, those men argued. Constantly. They challenged each other, called each other out, changed their minds, and occasionally thought the other guy was completely full of it.
And if social media had existed in 1789, I’m convinced half of them would’ve been subtweeting the other half before lunch.
Yet today we hear it every five minutes.
“The Founders intended…”
“The Founders would’ve never…”
“The Founders wanted…”
Which Founder?
Jefferson?
Madison?
Hamilton?
Adams?
Franklin?
Because if you actually read them instead of quoting memes with powdered wigs on them, you’ll discover something that ruins a whole lot of modern political arguments.
They didn’t agree.
Not on everything.
Not even close.
One of my favorite examples is Thomas Jefferson’s famous 1789 letter to James Madison.
Most people know one line:
“The earth belongs… to the living.”
It sounds beautiful.
Like something you’d frame on a wall next to a mountain landscape.
It isn’t.
It’s a political hand grenade.
Jefferson wasn’t writing poetry.
He was asking an incredibly uncomfortable question.
If dead people don’t own land anymore…
Why should dead people permanently own governments?
Why should a generation that’s been gone for two hundred years get the final say over institutions, systems, and structures the rest of us still have to live under?
And Jefferson didn’t just throw the question out there for fun.
He actually tried to do the math.
He estimated that a generation lasted about nineteen years and argued that constitutions should effectively expire with the people who created them.
Think about that for a second.
Not because you have to agree with it.
Because somebody had the guts to ask it.
Now here’s the part that almost nobody talks about.
America didn’t adopt Jefferson’s idea.
James Madison read the letter, took it seriously, and then basically said…
“I love where your head’s at…
…but I think you’re wrong.”
Madison wasn’t defending tradition for tradition’s sake.
He was defending stability.
He argued that if governments kept resetting themselves every generation, contracts would become shaky. Property rights would become uncertain. Courts would lose legitimacy. Businesses wouldn’t know what rules they’d be operating under twenty years from now.
And eventually people stop trusting the system.
When that happens, they don’t suddenly become lovers of democracy.
They start looking for someone—anyone—to take control and promise certainty.
Humans haven’t changed all that much.
We still trade freedom for certainty faster than we’d like to admit.
The Constitution we inherited isn’t Jefferson’s victory.
It isn’t Madison’s either.
It’s the product of that argument.
Jefferson pulling toward continuous reinvention.
Madison pulling toward durable institutions.
The rest of the Founders somewhere in between trying to build a government that could survive human nature.
That’s what makes it brilliant.
Not that they all agreed.
That they didn’t.
Which brings us to today.
Both political parties love to wave around “the Founders” like they’re pulling an ace out of their sleeve.
Conservatives point to originalism and tell us they’re simply following what the Founders intended.
Progressives quote Jefferson every time they want to rethink an institution.
Both sides conveniently forget that Jefferson and Madison couldn’t even agree with each other.
That’s awkward.
Conservative justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito often rely on original public meaning, presenting it as though the Constitution arrived complete, settled, and waiting to be discovered.
But the men who wrote it spent half their lives arguing over what liberty actually meant.
When courts invoke the Founders as though every major question was answered in 1787, they aren’t continuing the debate.
They’re declaring it over.
On the other side, Democrats push court expansion, national voting standards, ranked-choice voting, or the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact while quoting Jefferson’s language about change.
Then many of those same voices defend lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court—a concept Jefferson himself would’ve looked at sideways.
It’s funny how principles seem to become flexible depending on who’s holding the majority.
Republicans do the same thing.
They defend the Electoral College as though age alone proves wisdom.
By that logic we’d all still be using dial-up internet and bloodletting to cure headaches.
Something being old doesn’t automatically make it good.
Something being new doesn’t automatically make it bad either.
That’s the whole point.
Donald Trump’s allies invoke the Founders while arguing for broader executive power and expansive immunity doctrines.
Progressives invoke the Founders while proposing structural reforms they insist carry little risk.
The Federalist Society quotes Madison.
The left quotes Jefferson.
Everyone collects their favorite Founder like political Pokémon cards.
Nobody wants the whole deck.
Because the whole deck argues with itself.
That’s the part we’ve lost.
The Founders never built a system where quoting them ended the conversation.
They built one where disagreement was the conversation.
Article V might be the greatest example of that.
Jefferson wanted to tear the engine down every nineteen years.
Madison wanted to make sure nobody threw a wrench through the block every time they got frustrated.
The Constitution settled somewhere in the middle.
Routine maintenance instead of complete rebuilds.
Any mechanic will tell you that’s usually the smarter approach.
What we’ve done instead is turn the Founders into a giant appeal to authority.
Republicans quote Madison when it helps them.
Democrats quote Jefferson when it helps them.
Everybody suddenly develops selective amnesia whenever their favorite Founder says something inconvenient.
That’s not intellectual honesty.
That’s outsourcing your thinking.
There’s one last irony that makes me laugh.
If Jefferson was completely right…
Then Jefferson doesn’t get the final word either.
He’s one of the dead.
His own philosophy strips away his authority just as surely as everyone else’s.
Quoting Jefferson doesn’t settle the debate.
According to Jefferson…
It starts one.
Maybe that’s the lesson.
The Founders weren’t extraordinary because they agreed.
They were extraordinary because they argued without believing disagreement made someone an enemy.
They challenged each other.
They sharpened each other.
They admitted they didn’t have every answer.
Imagine that.
Two hundred and fifty years later we’ve somehow decided honoring them means pretending they already answered every question we’ll ever face.
I think it’s exactly the opposite.
Some of their ideas became law.
Some never did.
Some of the ideas that became law were later amended.
Some probably should’ve been sooner.
That’s not failure.
That’s the entire point of a free society.
I don’t honor the Founders by treating them like prophets.
I honor them the same way they honored each other.
By asking hard questions.
By challenging assumptions.
By accepting that brilliant people can disagree.
And by refusing to outsource my brain to men who would’ve been the first to tell me not to.
-The Gun Loving Hippie Dad … Who Fixes Stuff
Keep reading
The 9th Amendment: The One They Don’t Want You to Know About
Rights beyond the Constitution's written list.
The Two-Party Scam: How Republicans and Democrats Hijacked the Constitution
How parties fit into the constitutional system.
