Brands points to some typically hostile opinions on the part of their contemporaries.
Much of what followed immediately was nonsense. I admit I stopped reading shortly thereafter.
If too much love for the Founders is a bad thing, what do you think the right attitude toward them is?
I think that we should respect and admire them for the things they accomplished that really were outstanding. The decision for independence in 1776 was a remarkable thing. I try to imagine anybody in this country, any members of the political leadership class today, taking such a bold step. I think that the strongest criticism that can be made of politicians today is that they look for the safe middle ground, and they look to get re-elected.They look for the sort of thing that's not going to alienate too many people.
Well, good heavens—launching a revolution is about as alienating as you can get. And there was a lot at stake. When they talked about their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, they weren't kidding. Certainly their lives and fortunes were at risk. As for their sacred honor, that was something that history would have to debate.
As I say in the article, there are all sorts of debates over important issues today, issues of money in politics, gun control, affirmative action, immigration, all sorts of hot-button issues. The most remarkable thing is that the political system prevents any really open and honest discussion of these issues.
One of the things that strikes me as mind-boggling is this timid reverence toward the Constitution, as though it would violate the spirit of the Founders to rewrite the Constitution. My God—they tore up their connection with Britain and waged a war to terminate it, and then they sat down and in three months wrote this Constitution anew. None of them would have thought that something they had written over the space of three months was supposed to last for all time.
And I think they would have been appalled at our timidity in taking on issues that are as important to us as those issues were to them. It seems to me that if we want to be in the spirit of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin and all, we ought to have a constitutional convention about every twenty or thirty years. Times change.
The Founders were willing to make drastic changes in the governance of America, yet we're not willing to make even the smallest changes. That's what I would like people to think about when they think about the Founders. They were a group characterized by courage and boldness. I don't think they were any wiser than we are, but they were a whole lot more willing to take risks on behalf of what they believed in.