When the American republic was born, the world, according to the knowledge of the time, was at most 75,000 years old. No one could imagine that the Earth was older. That is why Thomas Jefferson was convinced that woolly mammoths still lived „in the northern and western parts of America,” where nature remained untouched. The idea that a species could disappear was inconceivable to him: „Nature does not allow any of its races to disappear,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia.
„Those imaginary mammoths, wandering beyond the Rocky Mountains, remind us how alien the world of the Founding Fathers is to us. And, conversely, how strange our world would be to them. After two and a half centuries, we can no longer think like them, but we cannot look at them with detachment either. Trying to imagine what they would say about America in 2025, we risk inventing our own ‘mammoths,’ projections of ourselves into the past,” writes Fintan O’Toole in The Atlantic.
The error that the US Supreme Court often makes – the idea that we can truly know what the Founding Fathers wanted – turns those figures into ventriloquist dummies. We speak, but we move their lips.
However, the question „what would they say now?” has always been a fruitful exercise. It fueled critical thinking, from Frederick Douglass, who praised the founders for their „manly strength” in contrast to decadent times, to Lincoln, who wondered if the government „of the people, by the people, for the people” would survive, and Martin Luther King Jr., who saw in the Declaration of Independence a moral „check” that America had to honor sooner or later.
### The Sins of the Founders and Their Insight
We do not have to turn them into secular saints to acknowledge their legacy. We can even use their own magnificent words to judge America’s current mistakes. For example, many of them might be pleased with Donald Trump’s idea of imposing unilateral tariffs – although probably not with his bellicose rhetoric. In 1807, Jefferson himself banned American foreign trade, believing it would achieve „peaceful coercion.” The experiment was a total economic failure.
But the founders would undoubtedly be amazed to see women in politics. Trump’s invectives against Kamala Harris would have horrified them, but even more shocking would be the fact that a woman, and a woman of color at that, can run for the presidency, as The Atlantic further writes.
The most important of them – Washington, Jefferson, Madison – owned slaves. Their inability to confront what Jefferson called „an abominable crime” is the fatal flaw in the foundation of the republic born from the idea that „all men are created equal.” Yet, they knew that those words would have consequences. „I tremble for my country,” Jefferson wrote, „when I think that God is just and that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
When Lincoln said that Jefferson had the „coolness and foresight to insert into a revolutionary document an abstract idea applicable to all men, in all times,” he understood that the „all” was a promise. The founders planted a seed that, over generations, blossomed into movements for justice and equality.
### A Republic Greater Than They Could Have Imagined
The founders would be overwhelmed by the diversity of America today, as Fintan O’Toole writes. In 1790, only 60% of white Americans had English origins, the rest were Irish, German, Scottish, French, or Dutch. Yet, they preferred to believe in a „nation of the same blood” to strengthen unity after the war. Today, they would wonder how a republic of „out of many, one” can survive when the „many” are so different.
They might discover that their most precious legacy is the very expression „the pursuit of happiness.” For them, inspired by Locke, happiness was not a whim, but an equal and universal right – the right to fulfill one’s life in freedom, not to suffer in the name of sanctity.
But today’s America seems to have forgotten this meaning. O’Toole writes that Trumpism glorifies fear, resentment, and the pleasure of seeing others suffer. A happiness based on hatred of the other would have been a blasphemy for the Founders.
The Founding Fathers would also be dismayed to see how the principle of separation between Church and state is distorted today by politicians like Mike Johnson, who claim that they „wanted religion to influence public life.” Jefferson was clear: „If my neighbor believes in 20 gods or none, it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket.” For him, freedom also meant the freedom not to believe.
### Inequality – A Deadly Danger
The founders, wealthy but not blind, knew that a republic cannot endure if a small elite holds almost all the wealth. If they were to find out that today 0.1% of Americans control 14% of the country’s wealth, and half of the population only 2.5%, they would probably calculate that the republic’s chances of survival are minimal.
They would be shocked by the spectacle of a billionaire who „gives a million dollars a day to voters in key states,” a grotesque caricature of the political corruption they feared.
### The Disappearance of the Public Sphere
The founders also dreamed of a republic of readers. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay signed their articles in the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym Publius – „the public man.” Newspapers were where ideas clashed, not where people were insulted. Benjamin Franklin was proud that he did not publish personal attacks in his newspaper because „freedom of the press” does not mean the freedom to defame.
If they were to see today’s America without local newspapers, with algorithmic „bubbles,” and with a press demonized by a president who calls it „the enemy of the people,” Madison would conclude that the republic is on the verge of collapse.
### A Republic Too Large, a Democracy Growing Fragile
Madison warned that a republic the size of China would be vulnerable to autocracy because a distant government could „hide the truth from the citizens.” In today’s America, spread across a continent, they would see signs of such a drift: the excessive power of the executive, the polarization between the „red and blue states,” and politicians’ obedience to an authoritarian leader.
> „Citizens need politicians who will serve them even at the risk of displeasing them,” Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 71. Today, many congressmen practice exactly the opposite: a „servile submission.”
The founders knew what an arrogant oligarchy looks like – they saw it in 18th-century Europe. They knew how a tyrant is born: first, he flatters the people, then he enslaves them. „Many of those who have destroyed the liberties of republics,” Hamilton warned, „have begun as demagogues and ended as tyrants.”
Jefferson was looking for mammoths that did not exist. But the real monsters of history – tyrants and opportunists – have never disappeared, concludes Fintan O’Toole in the article from The Atlantic.