WHAT THE FOUNDERS WOULD SAY NO W

They might be surprised that the republic exists at all.

- BY FINTAN O'TOOLE

When the American republic was founded, the Earth was no more than 75,000 years old. No contemporary thinker imagined it could possibly be older. Thus Thomas Jefferson was confident that woolly mammoths must still live in “the northern and western parts of America,” places that “still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us.”

The idea that mammoths or any other kind of creature might have ceased to exist was, to him, inconceivable. “Such is the economy of nature,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”

Those illusory behemoths roaming out there somewhere beyond the Rockies remind us that the world of the Founding Fathers is in some ways as alien to us as ours would be to them. A distance of two and a half centuries is too long for us to be able to fully inhabit their universe, but not long enough for us to be capable of viewing them disinterestedly or dispassionately. In trying to imagine how they would perceive the state of their republic in 2025, the risk is that we invent our own versions of Jefferson's nonexistent beasts. The originalist fallacy that dominates the current Supreme Court—the pretense that it is possible to read the minds of the Founders and discern what they “really” meant—in fact turns the Founders into ventriloquists’ dummies. We express our own prejudices by moving their lips.