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.
[From the October 2025 issue: Jill Lepore on how originalism killed the Constitution]
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.
[From the September 2003 issue: Our reverence for the Founders has gotten out of hand]
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 people percolated upward into political institutions. Madison wrote, “Public opinion sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.” The quality of public discourse thus mattered as much to him as the forms of government did. This much wider public sphere had to be capable not just of dealing with intricacies but of guarding them. Madison wrote that the chief responsibility of the people was to maintain the “complicated form of their political system.”
The public arena therefore had to be kept clear of the detritus of mere insult. Franklin, who made his fortune in what we would call the media business, boasts in his Autobiography,
In the Conduct of my Newspaper I carefully excluded all Libelling and Personal Abuse, which is of late Years become so disgraceful to our Country. Whenever I was solicited to insert any thing of that kind, and the Writers pleaded as they generally did, the Liberty of the Press, and that a Newspaper was like a Stage Coach in which any one who would pay had a Right to a Place, my Answer was, that I would print the Piece separately if desired, and the Author might have as many Copies as he pleased to distribute himself, but that I would not take upon me to spread his Detraction.
In drawing attention to his own refusal to publish personal abuse, Franklin was of course acknowledging that the newspapers were otherwise full of it. The Founders themselves were often fractious, splenetic, and happy to attack one another through paid proxies. But they nonetheless believed that the vigor of public debate must ultimately serve rational purposes. The press was a blacksmith’s shop full of heat and resounding with heavy blows, but that was because it was where ideas of the common good were being hammered out.
In this light, there is little doubt that the Founders would be particularly appalled both by the loss of so many local newspapers in contemporary America and by the conduct of a president who smears the press as “the enemy of the people.” Madison wrote that “a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people” was as vital as good roads to the maintenance of “a general intercourse of sentiments.” The shattering of public opinion into algorithmically generated echo chambers, the monetization and weaponization on a massive scale of insult and detraction, and the reduction of complexities to tribal slogans would probably have led him to conclude that the republic was on its way out.
The collapse of a shared public sphere has in turn made possible a closed-mindedness that would dismay the Revolutionary generation. Political tribalism inhibits one of the essential tools of democracy: the capacity to change one’s mind, which is what the Founders did so radically throughout the Revolutionary period. Franklin was well into his 60s when he began his journey from loyal British monarchist to supporter of American independence. Jefferson didn’t want a federal constitution but came to regard the one that emerged as “unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men.” Madison initially believed that the attachment of a bill of rights to that Constitution would be unnecessary and perhaps even dangerous. When he came to think differently, he not only drafted the Bill of Rights but did more than anyone else to get it adopted.
This capacity not just to change one’s mind but to transform it was essential to the very creation of the United States as we know it. The American revolutionaries were men who changed their minds. In 1776, almost no one thought of an independent America as anything other than a broad alliance of 13 sovereign states, bound together by friendship, mutual interest, and bilateral treaties. A decade later, few thought of it as anything other than a federal state. Which also suggests that most of the Founders would be at once proud that their Constitution has endured so long and puzzled by the obdurate retention of institutions and practices (the Electoral College; the Senate’s grossly disproportionate representation of voters) that worked for the 18th century but do not work for the 21st. They would have agreed with Chief Justice John Marshall when he wrote in 1819 that their Constitution was “intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” They might even have regretted their failure to create more workable mechanisms to amend it.
There is also a more fundamental sense in which the Founders would struggle to understand how contemporary America can continue to function. They would wonder how it might be possible for anyone to fully envision a country as large as the U.S. became after their deaths. They wanted a big country—one of the core arguments of The Federalist Papers is that a large republic is likely to be better at resisting control by self-interested political factions than a small one. They certainly imagined their new nation becoming a continental power.
But how large is too large? Madison in particular worried that a very extensive country would become prone to autocracy. If, he wrote, a republic were to acquire “the dimensions of China,” it would be difficult to resist a government capable of “veiling its designs from distant eyes” while “turning the prejudices and interests real or imaginary of the parts agst each other.” This would “gradually enable the Executive branch of the Govt. to overwhelm the others, and convert the Govt. into an absolute monarchy.”
The United States does indeed now have the same physical extent as China, and the rest of Madison’s prediction for the likely fate of a republic on that scale has moved far beyond the realm of speculation. The sight of ICE agents on the streets of America veiling their designs behind masks would have appalled the Framers. They would have demanded their own history lesson to help them understand how a republic founded, above all, on civil liberty had over time generated a massive apparatus of national security with so little public scrutiny.
They would need no such lessons, however, to understand how Trump has mastered the art of turning the republic’s red and blue parts against each other by stoking both real and imaginary prejudices. They would see how this polarization has both enabled and been enabled by the overwhelming domination of the executive over the legislative branch. The danger they were most anxious to avoid—a government that (in Hamilton’s words) “unites all power in the same hands”—is now a peril they would recognize as urgently and immediately present.
What would surely have sickened them most is the sycophancy of legislators who abandon their duty of independent judgment and act as fawning courtiers of a monarchical presidency. Whatever else the Founders can be accused of, they were spectacularly innocent of servility. They would have had nothing but contempt for representatives who surrender their constitutional powers because they are afraid of arousing the ire of the president’s supporters.
In “Federalist No. 71,” Hamilton writes of the people “beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate.” He suggested that citizens needed politicians “who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure.” He had a ready-made term for the sheer cowardice of so many legislators in today’s Congress: “servile pliancy.”
The Founders knew what a swaggering oligarchy looks like when it floats above the rest of society, as Jefferson saw in the European societies of his own day, “where the many are crouched under the weight of the few, and where the order established can present to the contemplation of a thinking being no other picture than that of God almighty and his angels trampling under foot the hosts of the damned.”
They knew what it was like to be subject to a despot who, in Locke’s words, “set up his own arbitrary will as the law of society”—this is the essence of their complaints against King George III and his junto of ministers. And they knew how demagoguery could turn into despotism. Hamilton forcefully cautioned in “Federalist No. 1,” “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.” They knew that these rough beasts, unlike the mammoths of Jefferson’s imagination, were real and would never go extinct.
This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “What the Founders Would Say Now.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
