Our Founding Fathers Got It Right

Roughly 4,500 Words. The most durable government ever designed.

(“Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States” by Howard Chandler Christy (1940))

Locked up for 120 days in Independence Hall, Philadelphia (1787), 55 brilliant statesmen mulled over every important political document from 5th century Athens, 1st century Rome, 17th and 18th century Age of Enlightenment to derive a formula for creating a government that would not fail. It’s unlikely such a convention will ever happen again.

To that end, they created the world’s greatest guide for forming a government: the US Constitution. Government so small you almost couldn’t see it, with three branches to check on each other (to prevent one individual or branch from becoming too powerful), the whole document, one page. (A government so small that in 1814, when the British invaded Washington and burned it down, they were shocked to find almost no government buildings. The few workers grabbed the few documents, Betsy’s flag, and ran. Compare the Eurpean Constitution, the Maastricht Treaty, 254 pages that no one reads or understands, much like the UN Chater, 74 pages that speak nebulously of human rights rather than clearly of civil rights.)

That some of those revolutionaries were white racist misogynist slave owners is irrelevant. Frederick Douglass in the 19th century and Clarence Page in the 20th century (essayist on PBS NewsHour), both Black, made essentially the same point: do not go there. They rose to the occasion. They knew their limitations, knew slavery was wrong.

Knew that if all states were to ratify the Constitution, there had to be a compromise: no mention of slavery; Black Americans would count as three-fifths of a person. That was the deal.

But knew, long run, the Constitution was the ticket out of slavery. Just not then. Exhausted from the Revolutionary War, the framers concentrated on approval of the Constitution—asking the nation to read the reasoning behind every Article—The Federalist Papers.

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From their research at Independence Hall, the Constitution’s drafters were clearly inspired by the “Funeral Oration of Pericles” in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, where Pericles states that Athenians are an open and free society, occupied in myriad pursuits, not worried that our enemies are walking among us. We’ll fight them if we have to—our generals and soldiers, motivated to preserve what we have created, see our enemies simply as marauders. Why, with a smaller but better-trained army, we usually defeat them, the Persians, for example, on the Plain of Marathon. [1]

Before today’s “woke” anti-Americanism, the “Funeral Oration of Pericles” was required reading in the nation’s schools—as was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. They made students proud to be American.

Versus the New York Times Magazine-promoted 1619 Project, or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which leave students hating America—why France’s education minister proclaimed on national television: “Do not look at woke America! In France, we teach students the history and culture of France. It bonds French citizens with love of their country. Plus, French institutions, by law, are forbidden to ask students, citizens, or job applicants any question with respect to ethnicity, race, sexual preference, or religion. Laïcité.”

US schools should do the same. Teach the history and culture of British and American democracy—the democracy that created the freedom and opportunity that fostered a population of five million in 1790 to grow to 330 million, today, the world’s third-largest nation. An extraordinary singularity: most Americans aren’t born here; they come here. Like the Athenians, grateful to live in a free society, unlike the “woke,” they are willing to defend their country. [2]

It is why American schools should not celebrate the history and culture of other nations. Americans fled those nations! [3]

And it is why American schools shouldn’t be used as an instrument of political activism. [4] They were not designed for that. American schools were designed to teach reading, mathematics, and history so that students, as future citizens, will instantly recognize threats to democracy, the very reason Thomas Jefferson inaugurated the world’s first public schools. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which causes anything connected to that concept to fail, were not on Jefferson’s mind. In business, DEI is a distraction that causes firms to take their eyes off of their sole purpose: making a profit. Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank. In education, DEI is the distraction that causes teachers to take their eyes off their sole purpose: teaching basic subject matter—why, for the last 50 years (since the War on Poverty), according to the US Department of Education, only 36 percent of the nation’s students are proficient in reading, math, history, and science. [5] Why the US Navy, unable to obtain new recruits, reduced the reading level of its entrance exam to fourth grade, the level at which the average American high school senior today graduates. [6]

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Greek city-states did a great thing: they left each other alone. (Until the Peloponnesian War.) 100 years, though, Greek direct democracy failed, as Athens grew too large for the whole city to vote on every issue, and the Greek language, so nuanced, allowed clever demagogues to twist it to convince an unsuspecting majority to follow them—into oligarchy.

Rome solved that problem by creating a republic, a government of elected representatives. And, by following the advice of one of the world’s wisest statesmen, Cicero, who said that a government must have two legislative houses: a large house for the people (House of Commons, House of Representatives) and a smaller house for big business, large landowners (House of Lords, Senate), or the government will fail. It is why the US has a bicameral legislature and an Electoral College: to give extra weight to smaller states or smaller groups of citizens, the rich, for example.

That the Greek city-states did not interfere with each other is definitely the vision of the Founding Fathers: expansive state and local government, very limited national government. In the Civil War, the South thought it was fighting for states’ rights, except what the South didn’t understand is that the US is a constitutional democracy, not simply a democracy in which the majority always gets its way. Constitutional means legal, means a state cannot just vote 99 to 1 to murder or enslave people it doesn’t like.

In 1933, our nation’s founding principle of limited federal government was reversed. President Franklin Roosevelt grafted his unprincipled New Deal onto the Constitution—which the Supreme Court immediately declared illegal. The court would not allow such a leap into socialist dictatorship. [7] In 1861, the nation fought a civil war because it believed a nation half-free, half-slave, could not survive. [8] In 2061, a nation half-free, half-progressive may fight another civil war? [9]

Notes

1. What 5^th century Greece created was Western civilization: the notion that all social, political, and economic activity should focus on the individual, not the community. The community (the state) does not provide freedom; it protects freedom. The community does not tell citizens what to do—why Western civilization is an evolutionary step forward for mankind, not simply one alternative.

2. Only 9–15 percent of young Americans (ages 16–24) indicate a willingness to serve in the US military. Katherine L. Kuzminski and Taren Sylvester, “Short Supply: Identifying and Addressing the Root Causes of Declining Propensity for Military Service,” December 11, 2025, Center for a New American Security (CNAS)—a Democratic Party-funded think tank—cites Department of Defense surveys.

3. Asian students take classes after school and on Saturday to learn their language and culture. That should be the model for all ethnic studies: after, not during, school.

4. “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Vladimir Lenin.

5. 2024 national average scale score for reading, fourth grade: 215. Proficient is 300. National Center for Education Statistics, NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress).

6. “US Navy Lowers Bar for Recruitment by Removing Education Requirements,” The Maritime Executive, January 29, 2024. Note: 77 percent of young adults 16–24 are also disqualified from military service due to obesity, physical fitness issues, drug use, or criminal records (Kuzminski, Sylvester). If schools can’t teach students to read, they should at least give them courses in physical education.

7. In his 1933 inaugural address, Roosevelt declared (in no uncertain terms) that the Constitution is so flexible it can be made to mean whatever we want it to mean. Why in 1935, under enormous pressure from Roosevelt (who threatened to add six justices to the Supreme Court who would approve anything he asked), the court buckled. Checks and balances: out the window.

8. A nation half-free can survive if its citizens prefer security to liberty. Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, New Deal America, China. Cuba and North Korea are perfect examples of an entrepreneurial people sacrificed to a communal society. Were Cuba not communist, Havana, rather than Miami, would be the financial capital of Latin America. With China, however, a nation with no history of democracy, where citizens care only about family and money, a nation half-free, half communist can perhaps survive.

9. Was January 6 battle number one, and Minnesota 2026 battle number two, where, to crush a progressive stronghold, President Trump sent in the US Army?