America’s Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves

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With America’s 250th birthday just a few short days away, it is worth asking what the nation’s Founding Fathers would think about the decrepit state of American democracy and government today, after two and a half centuries of development. Their judgments would likely put a damper on even the most festive Independence Day celebrations.

It’s popular these days to claim that the Founders simply could never have comprehended a character as venal and antidemocratic as President Trump. Although that sentiment might soothe the consciences of the millions of Americans who allowed Trump’s self-interested authoritarianism to flourish, it reeks of sloppy history. Hucksters like Trump found power as irresistible in the 18th century as they do today — the Founders knew plenty of toxic Trumpian types.

Our Founders understood that the real test of American principles would come when the rights that exist on paper clash with the impulses of a charismatic and amoral leader. Those threats seemed to emerge from every corner of the new nation. In fact, America was awash in so many demagogues and aspiring strongmen that New York Gov. George Clinton penned a warning to his fellow countrymen in 1787 about the dangers of buying into the politics of division and hatred.

“Beware those who wish to influence your passions and to make you dupes to their resentments and little interests,” Clinton wrote. “Personal invectives can never persuade, but they always fix prejudices which candor might have removed.”

Clinton might as well have been speaking about a MAGA movement characterized by a seemingly inexhaustible level of grievance and victimhood.

The sputtering rage of a Trump rally would have been nothing new for Clinton’s fellow New York politico Alexander Hamilton, who remarked later that same year that “the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation,” and that “wounded pride [and] irritated resentment would be apt to carry the states” if a demagogue mounted a presidential campaign. Far from failing to see a future Trump coming, Hamilton’s fears would have been right at home on a modern cable news network.

But while the Founders were clear-eyed about the manipulative power of mass resentment, they also understood how a politician willing to stoke those resentments among the voters would have little problem stomping on America’s constitutional framework in order to unethically reward his friends and unjustly punish his political enemies.

In a December 1787 letter published by the Maryland Gazette, Maryland Attorney General Luther Martin urged the people to keep a close eye on the awesome powers of the presidency. “The president … has the power of pardoning those who are guilty of treason,” Martin said. “No treason was so likely to take place as that in which the president himself might be engaged — the attempt to assume to himself powers not given by the constitution … [and] to secure from punishment the creatures of his ambition, the associates and abettors of his treasonable practices.”

What would Martin think of Trump’s flurry of pre-emptive pardons for nearly 80 close friends and MAGA allies, including multiple individuals implicated in attempts to undermine the 2020 election? Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Sidney Powell all escaped the due course of justice thanks to their close relationships to the president. So did former campaign staffers Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon and others. Trump’s pardons have also rained down on a long list of pals convicted of financial fraud, from reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley to Florida nursing home executive and tax cheat Paul Walczak.

A Congress compromised by its fealty to Trump would have been the greatest of insults to a founding generation that prided itself on creating a system where the legislature stood proudly independent of the chief executive. They would have regarded with horror the Supreme Court’s decisions this week to vastly expand presidential power in ways that would have been unimaginable even a generation ago, while effectively neutering the original intent of Congress in creating independent agencies.

Worse still, Congress seemingly has no desire to reclaim its constitutional prerogatives from what now looks like a blatantly imperial presidency. The bit-by-bit dismantling of our legislature as a co-equal branch of government predates Trump, but the shift toward a practically unchallengeable White House has reached a dangerous point under his watch. Of all the disappointments of modern American government, the surrender of Congress to the White House may be the thing our Founding Fathers feared the most.

Writing under a pseudonym in the Virginia Independent Chronicle in 1788, a Founding Father quoted a warning from the great Scottish philosopher David Hume: “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom, that it must steal upon them by degrees, and disguise itself in a thousand shapes in order to be received.”

America finds itself celebrating its 250th birthday under the gathering clouds of that warning. Authoritarianism has stolen upon us by degrees and now is terrifyingly close to a tipping point that will forever change the shape of our republic — if what emerges can even be called a republic at all. If we are to live up to the promise of the American experiment, the people must come together and stop our national collapse before the light of our democracy flickers out.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

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