I try and follow U.S. politics, and I pick up some of it on these boards, and something that strikes me about the whole area is that the Founding Fathers are brought up a lot, usually in the context of the Constitution. The 2nd Amendment is probably the best example of this*; you get people “What did the Founding Fathers intend by this?”. The overall theme seems to be that their opinions are given great weight when examining the law and society.
So…why, exactly? Obviously they had great ideas for their time, but if they suddenly appeared in the present, I wouldn’t want them anywhere near politics nowadays. I don’t give a crap what they thought about people’s right to bear arms; what the law says should be decided by people now, not by people who lived hundreds of years ago. The Magna Carta was a very useful document, but I don’t care what the writers of that would think of politics today.
Could someone explain to me why such reverance is given?
I suppose it gives a sense of continuity; after all, trying to follow the principles they set down have guided us fairly well for the last 200+ years. If we only followed what people now think about things, we’d be changing governments about as often as Italy does/used to.
In our view (well, mine, anyway) they created something that was unprecedented. Yes, we know that the British and, before them the Romans and Greeks, had forms of representative government. But this one was without an emperor, or a monarch of any kind. And, furthermore, they did it twice. Most people forget about the Articles of Confederation that immediately followed. It worked, sort of, for a while, but was found to be inadequate in many respects. So – without a war, or a coup d’etat, by compromise and negotiation, they created the Constitution.
The men (and of course back then women were not permitted to be directly active in politics) who devised this were so amazingly the right ones in the right place at the right time that it’s scary.
Of course, some of the images most people have is rather simplistic, and they were not as all-knowing and flawless as we would like to believe. George Washington dam near lost the war. He was not a great general initially, and owed much to help from France and a few German officers.
Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant scholar and writer, synthesized much of his writing from others who had gone before; he was definitely a slaveowner and then of course there is the whole Sally Hemings story.
But to a limited extent it is. It is possible to peacefully change the Constitution; in fact, as I’m sure you know, it has been done several times. Again, one of the strengths. It can be changed, but it’s hard to do.
It’s partly born of the Constitutional system we have, that all laws are subordinate to it, that the Constitution (updated though it may occasionally be) is inviolate. Therefore, any new laws must be held up against it, to compare for inconsistencies; and in doing so, we must know the intent of the writers.
It’s partly born of 200+ years of evolution of language, because while the Constitution can be read with relative ease today, it takes an understanding of the use of English back in the day.
It’s partly born of 200+ years of technological and social development. You mention the 2nd Amendment — in crafting that amendment, we must remember that the people of the day were not in favor of a standing army. The mandatory quartering of British troops was, we are told, one of the hot-button issues; and as the Colonial army was (at first) almost entirely of volunteers, the relevance of the 2nd Amendment must be seen in the light of those times.
And it’s also that, well, the Constitution doesn’t go farther back than that. So who else’s opinion on the Constitution should we consult? British common law is often considered and cited in legal opinions here, because our legal system borrows from it, but our system of government has no earlier precedent to cite.
It’s also partly because The Founding Fathers are the core of our national myth (not in the sense of “fable” but in the sense of a sacred story concerning our origins). Probably a large part of what’s widely believed about the FF (by either side of the political spectrum) isn’t necessarily true, but it’s so ingrained in our national consciousness that changing the prevalence of that belief is almost impossible.
We had a collection of Free Spirited; Angry Geniuses that actually did something about a remote, unfair ruler. They cast off the chains and attempted to forge something new and different. They had a lot of help, oddly enough from another Monarch, who may well of sealed his own fate in aiding the fledgling Country.
Politically Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and other were amazing in their ability to shape the future of America.
Their writing still rings out true today when we have such diminished expectations from our modern leaders. The reality of what they accomplished when read into outshines the silly myths that have grown up around them.
For all his flaws, George Washington was an able leader of men and established for all time the idea that a President would peacefully step aside after eight years. For his time, he was a right honorable man and freed all his remaining slaves upon his death. General Washington was no great tactician, but he was a charismatic leader. He is what the Colonies needed at the time. He also appeared to be above corruption, as did Adams. These are rare and admirable traits in both their time and ours. They all had flaws, but they were great men. Rarely has such an assemblage of worthy people been gathered together.
The Founding Fathers were a product of their time, the Age of Enlightenment, and they didn’t call it that for nothing. Can you imagine any current set of politicians having the nerve to purposefully exclude religion from government? Why they’d be hounded out of office in a trice! And this notion of free speech? How can you maintain order when people are allowed to speak freely? Elected government … a mythical process from ancient times, hardly the thing to base a modern society on!
Really, the founding fathers were fucking brilliant and put most modern political leaders to shame, I think because they are products of their times, and these are strangely ignorant, supersititious times.
I think, to give you an outsider’s perspective, the only politicians I respect more than your Founding Fathers are Mandela and Cromwell, and those two partly for sentimental reasons, too. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and the rest did a great thing, built a great work. Both they, and their creation, may have their flaws, but it takes nothing away from their achievement.
Of course, really you should give the credit to Freemasonry
The US Constitution may not be a perfect document, but the mere fact that it has worked quite well for over 200 years is remarkable indeed. The intellect and the public service orientation of these men is incredible. Comparing Washington, Adams, and Jefferson to George W Bush is like comparing Einstein to Paris Hilton. We care about what they think because they were quite simply the best leaders the nation has ever known.
Well, one reason, of corse, is quite simple: they were the ones who wrote (and argued over) the document on which we now base our Law (when we’re in the mood).
Who better to consider when deciding what a law might mean than the actual authors of that law? (At this point, there are two divergent threads of thought that battle incessantly: those who believe we should follow the words as written and those who believe we should try to discern what the authors meant in spirit and how they would want that law used, today. However, even this battle requires that the opponents look, to some degree, at the people who wrote the text.)
If people now want to change what they decided back then, there is a mechanism to do so. That mechanism is called “amending the Constitution”, not “just blowing it off”.
Well, I would, provided they had a chance to get up to speed on all they had missed since their time. They were smart (some of them brilliant), thoughtful, sane, and benevolent, and though they had their differences of opinion, worked together for the common good. You don’t find groups of leaders like that every day.
What’s lost on many today, revolutions usually tend to start from the bottom and work their way up, so to speak. The framers had a lot to lose, and didn’t gain anything personally by sticking their neck out in defiance of the Crown. So, the revolution started at the top, and by no means had popular support. Many of the signers of the Declaration indeed lost everything and had terrible things happen to them and theirs for years after. They constructed an enduring document, a written constitution, and a representative democratic-republic that overall is the best form of self-government yet devised. A better question might be why so many hold the framers in ill-disguised contempt as “a bunch of dead white guys, why should we be governed from the grave, etc” and want to chuck the whole affair in lieu of anarchic mobocracy.
Nothing that’s been said above isn’t true, and said better than I ever could.
Another reason might be the emotional bond that many of you in the UK hold for the Monarchy. We’re not all the same race, religion, and most of us haven’t been here for thousands of years (yes, I know I’m stereotyping Europe, esp. in modern times). But all of us share a few things that tie us together and that have avoided all but one civil war in this vast country, and the ideals of the Founding Fathers are one of them.
And I’ve noticed that even the scuffiest protestors nowadays, while seemingly rejecting the whole corrupt Merkun system, are asking for it to live up to its ideals–justice for all, equality, and an inbred confidence that they have the right to speak up, no matter where they came from.
To elaborate on this point: one of the few post-1791 provisions in the Constitution which gets argued over, and litigated, as much as the earlier text is the Fourteenth Amendment. We’ve had some good Fourteenth Amendment exegeses on this Board.
Such discussions inevitably involve consideration of the 38th Congress, and what its members had in mind when they drafted the Amendment. This isn’t because of any “reverence” for the 38th Congress, which was a group of politicians much like any other, but because its members happened to write an important and sometimes ambiguous text.
So while there is a fair amount of “reverence” for the Framers–much of it justified–I don’t believe discussions about “original intent” are a fair example of it.
