Were the founding fathers "woke"? Well, compared to the modern-day GOP — definitely

It is, of course, deeply ahistorical and borderline offensive to call the founding fathers of the American republic a bunch of "woke" liberals. Yes, I can hear the objections coming in from all directions, and we'll get to those — but let me explain. 

It's all relative, and if the relative standard is the troglodyte ideology of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and their various followers, hearkening back variously (and incoherently) to the Jim Crow era, the Confederacy and even medieval Europe, then the comparison is easy. With ideas gleaned from reading Greek and Roman philosophers and from the Enlightenment that surrounded them, the men who founded the United States were, given their era and their backgrounds, as "woke" to the themes of justice and equality and universal human rights as could possibly have been expected of anyone. 

Let's do a thought experiment, shall we? Compare and contrast the fertile, curious and open minds of our most renowned 18th-century founders — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, George Washington — names so often invoked by Republicans in tones of stultified reverence but with no actual comprehension, with present-day Republicans. Imagine a deep-thinking, competent statesman like James Madison (whether or not you agree with his opinions!) confronting, let's say, Kevin McCarthy. Consider Madison and Hamilton composing their Federalist Papers and struggling to parse the difficult, often painful compromises needed to get ratification of the new Constitution from slave-owning states. Then consider McCarthy remarking, after the political infighting and 15 ballots needed for him to gain the House speakership — with his colleagues inexplicably chanting "USA! USA!" in frat-boy style when the excruciating embarrassment finally concluded — that Republicans of 2023 had, in the process, somehow "learned how to govern."

Done with the thought experiment already? I thought so.

Hearing pretty much anyone on today's extremist right invoking the founders is invariably cringeworthy. Consider Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during her unfortunate "60 Minutes" interview in April, giving voice to her unhappiness with the separation of church and state. We should ditch all that, she suggested, because "the founders read their Bibles all the time and lived their faith."

That would almost be comical, if not for the fact that Greene was doing the authoritarian's primary work: undermining the foundations of democracy and normalizing bad ideas. Greene's no-longer-BFF, Rep. Lauren Boebert, was even more direct in saying, "I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk." That's either deeply ignorant or profoundly insidious or both. If they knew any history and were sincere in their understanding, Boebert and Greene might understand that the founders knew enough about the dangers of religious fervor to understand that the separation of church and state was essential to building America's new democracy. As journalist and historian Garry Wills writes, it was "a stunning innovation."

This points us directly at the question facing this country, as well as quite a few other countries, where wannabe authoritarians (and aging grifters) appeal to bigotry and Christian nationalism in an effort to gain power in the face of economic inequality and population shifts, largely by attacking an imagined "deep state" and a "woke" cultural elite.

That question is whether intelligence, good faith and renewed collegiality can prevail over proud ignorance, bad faith and an intransigence that even advocates violence. Can we correct our course? It's not a question with easy or obvious answers.

OK, let's get back to those obvious objections, because I rode right over those, didn't I? How can I possibly claim that the founders — many of whom owned, bought and sold other human beings, brutalizing them and disrupting their families to an extent difficult to imagine — were actually "woke," even in relative terms? In some sense, of course I can't: There is no possible excuse for the heinous historical crime of chattel slavery.

That said, perspective is important in history and I don't believe in "presentism," the idea that we can hold people who lived in other times to the moral and legal standards of our own. It's also important to note that even in their own time most of the founders understood slavery had to be stopped. That consciousness manifested more in spirit than in deed, and certainly can't correct for some obvious hypocrisy.

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Hamilton and his wife, Eliza, for example, worked to bring a gradual end to slavery in New York State, but Hamilton trafficked in enslaved people, for his father and almost certainly for himself. Washington offered freedom to his human property in his will, but not during his lifetime. The painful case of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, lifelong slave-owner and father of enslaved children, is even more complex.

Did these founders give more than lip service to the idea that all men are created equal? In many cases, including that of Jefferson, they understood slavery, both intellectually and spiritually, as an abomination but were too deeply entrenched in the economic system of slavery to extricate themselves. John Adams, less conflicted because he always opposed slavery, was much less idealistic — or "ideological," a word he had fun with in his famous letters to Jefferson — about public opinion and human nature in general.

Historian Stephen E. Ambrose writes that amid all the contradictions of his personal life, Jefferson never relinquished his idealism about all men being created equal: 

In his last message to America, on June 24, 1826, ten days before he died on July 4 (the same day that John Adams died), Jefferson declined an invitation to be in Washington for the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote, "All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them."

There is no way to lessen the magnitude of the founders' failure to live up to their own rhetoric. But there is little room for doubt as to how they would view the right-wing mania for book banning, or the current Supreme Court's efforts to tear down the walls between church and state. They would be astonished at the rank unfreedoms justified by invoking their names and saddened by conservatives' efforts to ossify the Constitution in an imaginary past. Jefferson, for one, thought it should be amended by the people frequently, to keep up with the more enlightened human mind and the particular issues of their own times:

[O]ther laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

It is important, indeed crucial, to reclaim our 18th-century founders from those who have used them far too long as mere props of a sham patriotism. As James Baldwin wrote, specifically addressing our nation's history of racism: 

In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly…. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

We must face up to the ugliest aspects of our history and also to its noblest and most inspiring words and deeds. The erasure of history, DeSantis-style, will mean the certain doom of America. Ralph Waldo Emerson, as quoted in the preface to Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," lamented that America "has a bad name for superficialness," concluding: "Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it."

America's founders, with all their flaws and limitations, faced the "terror of life," writing about justice and equality in the context of holding a brand new nation together in greatly trying circumstances and pointing it at much higher goals than they would live to see. What could be more woke than that?