American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

by Joseph J. Ellis

By definition, all efforts to harvest the accumulated wisdom of the past must begin from a location in the present, so the questions posed of the past are inevitably shaped either consciously or unconsciously by the historical context in which they are asked.

To put it differently, a racial fault line runs through the center of the American experience, and Jefferson straddles that divide with uncommon agility, making him our greatest saint and greatest sinner, the iconic embodiment of our triumphs and tragedies. Rather than side with his most ardent admirers or his most acerbic critics, we need to recognize not that the truth lies in between, but that Jefferson is a fusion of both sides in their most enigmatic shape, the Mona Lisa of American racial history.

From 1820 onward, Jefferson became indistinguishable from most ardent proslavery advocates in using his states’ rights philosophy to construct a firewall designed to block any and all restrictions on slavery.

Madison would also die bankrupt, as would James Monroe and most of Virginia’s planter class, all victims of an inherently unprofitable slave economy.

Martin Luther King, Jr., liked to buoy the spirits of his supporters by observing that “the arc of the moral universe bends upward toward justice,” a thought he borrowed from Theodore Parker, the nineteenth-century antislavery theologian. But nearly a century and a half after slavery was ended, the dark side of the Jeffersonian legacy continues to cast a shadow over King’s hopeful words, reminding us that Jefferson never intended his lyrical version of the American promise to include blacks, and the very belief that it should was a recent, mid-twentieth-century idea. Each lurch forward along the arc of racial equality, in fact, has generated a backward surge that exposes residual prejudices called to the surface of American life from some deep pool of racial resentment that was always there and, if Jefferson was right, always will be. Instead of an upward arc, then, the dominant racial pattern since the end of slavery has been a cycle in which progress actually generates resistance to its continuation.

As Baldwin succinctly put it, “The people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

He was throwing down the gauntlet to Jefferson when he observed, “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”6

The fact that they died on the same day in 1826, which happened to be July 4, and the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, has always seemed too providential to be true, the kind of event that no novelist would have dared make up.

“Our whole banking system I ever abhorred,” he thundered, “I continue to abhor and shall die abhorring,” adding that his dying regret would be to exit life in a “bebanked, bewhiskied, and bedollared nation.”

The salient fact is that the Great Convergence during the middle decades of the twentieth century, which Kuznets celebrated as “the new normal” and that most senior citizens in the twenty-first century fondly recall as the Golden Age, was in fact an anachronistic interlude largely dependent upon government policies enacted during national and international crises, then continued by both political parties in the 1950s and 1960s. In effect, the New Deal and Great Society programs ameliorated the unequal impact of industrial capitalism on the distribution of wealth.

Not for nothing did Reagan begin his presidency by declaring that “we should pluck a flower from Thomas Jefferson’s life and wear it on our soul forever.”

From either a historical or a philosophical perspective, the emergence in the 1980s of a New Right movement based on a demonic view of government seems strange. For it required a massive dose of amnesia to blot out the considerable benefits that had accrued to two generations of the American population over the preceding half century, and it required a radically revisionist view of American history to depict the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, and Medicare as illegitimate aberrations that must somehow, like most of the twentieth century, be revoked.

Madison had become a more conspicuous star in the American political firmament, no longer regarded as the behind-the-scenes operative counting noses and massaging egos. Washington asked him to draft his inaugural welcome to the Congress; then the House, unaware of Madison’s confidential role, asked him to draft the response, making the initial exchange of political pleasantries a case of Madison writing to Madison.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched….We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. Thomas Jefferson

originalism provided a seminal source of philosophical authority that placed all advocates of the “Living Constitution” on the permanent defensive by stigmatizing their interpretations as latter-day impositions of their political agenda, while originalists posed as detached students of the pristine values embedded in the document itself.

Scalia’s opinion in Heller openly and unapologetically violated those core convictions of the historian’s craft. He began with the presumption that the right to bear arms was a nearly unlimited individual right, assembled evidence to support that conclusion, and suppressed or dismissed evidence that did not. Nor did he attempt to conceal what he was doing. Indeed, he subsequently called attention to the intellectual agility and debater-like skills required to make his case. The problem that Scalia faced in Heller was that the preponderance of historical evidence went against his case, which was all the more reason why he was so pleased with his acrobatic performance.

The great sin of the originalists is not to harbor a political agenda but to claim they do not, and to base that claim on a level of historical understanding they demonstrably do not possess.

The fate of 320 million Americans will be decided by five judges who, citing nineteenth-century dictionaries to translate words from an eighteenth-century document, misguidedly claim they are only channeling the wisdom of the founders.

If we are seeking guidance from the past on how to make foreign policy decisions in a deliberative rather than improvisational fashion, preferably like past decisions that we now know proved prescient, George Kennan deserves special notice. Kennan was the chief architect of the doctrinal framework for American strategy in the Cold War that came to be called “containment.” His central insight, made public in his “Sources of Soviet Conduct” (1947), was to turn the ideological prophecy of Marxism-Leninism on its head, for he argued that communism, not capitalism, was sown with the seeds of its own destruction, thereby making any direct military conflict with the Soviet Union unnecessary. If the United States and its allies blocked Soviet expansion into Western Europe and confined its sphere of influence to the Eurasian continent, the inherent contradictions within Soviet-style communism would, over time, make both economic growth and political control unsustainable. Kennan opposed the Vietnam War as an unnecessary and misguided waste of American resources, then lived long enough to celebrate the vindication of his vision with the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991.