We Have Failed Our Founding Fathers

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Last Updated on: 14th May 2025, 02:52 am

Without a doubt, the “Founding Fathers,” the most notable names behind the American Revolution and the creation of the United States, had their problems. The most common criticism is to point out that they owned slaves. Beyond obvious issues stemming from the cultural and political era of the time, though, they also had characteristic flaws, personal problems, and failures in logic — just like other humans. However, that said, they were also visionaries, very thoughtful people, and extremely brave men with a lot of foresight.

The United States was supposed to be different. It would be a nation of ideas and ideals. It would not be a land of blind loyalty and pure tribalism. And it led the world in those ways for many years, maybe not perfectly, but it was a leader in these respects.

We were never a nation full of intellectuals and objective thinkers, of course. We have always been a nation of humans, and any large group of humans is going to have a mixture of true intellectuals and primitive chest-thumpers. However, we let educated, striving, highly accomplished leaders shape and run our society for a long time, for many, many decades. We decided that our presidents and political leaders should be better than us, should be honorable and of the highest character, should be well educated and even brilliant. They should come to the table with the best ideas, and be able to persuade others of their merit.

Again, we would be a nation of ideas and a nation of laws, not a traditional, conservative nation of blind loyalty and blatantly subjective tribalism. We’d be led by science. We’d be led by progressive exploration and societal evolution, not held back by corrupt cronyism. And it went well, for many years.

Now, our country is being driven off a cliff. We have a chest-thumping president who is proud to ignore and attack science; who rules his party with such disdain for facts and discussion that if he said the sky was orange, every other Republican policymaker would have to agree or would be shunned and driven out of the party. “Facts? I’ll make up ones that suit me.” It is no longer about big ideas and advancing society in a fast changing world. It’s no longer about dialogue, discussion, and debate. It’s about wanting everything to be unrealistically simple. It’s about reactionary politics and only thinking about the immediate future, not the long term. Heck, it’s often not even about the present, but about wanting to go to some time in the past.

Rather than trying to lead the world in the technologies of the future, our country leadership is intent on attacking the roots, stems, and leaves of those new industries while trying to revive old, dirty, counterproductive industries of the 19th century.

Rather than being intellectually-led political leaders on the forefront of human society, we are regressing massively as we shun the world and return to old, failed ideologies. And forget about being a nation of laws. The law of the land, increasingly, is like that of a kingdom — “I have the power, so the law is whatever I say it is.”

We are returning to the undemocratic rule of a tyrant, and our Founding Fathers would be ashamed of us and ashamed that we are throwing away what they created.