Why should Americans always defer to the Founding Fathers?

[mangxema]

Opinion of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution from a fairly moderate guy:

I wouldn't say 'always defer'. I guess some people do (particularly knee-jerk Republicans), but for the most part it's more like 'keep it in mind as a baseline'. As others have said, we are a young country, and they are the only thing that we have in our history that could advise us on avoiding tyranny. We could try to draw from greater European history, but that is of limited applicability because the US is different. I don't mean in a sense of 'better'--although I happen to think so, but I'd probably think differently if I grew up somewhere else--just different. You can't just transplant ideas from elsewhere and implement them here because we have different priorities (namely a greater emphasis on personal freedom and independence) and we'd respond to things differently.

So when they, some of the best minds from an era of great political turbulence, say, 'Seriously guys, mixing religion with government is just asking for trouble,' (i.e., the First Amendment) we tend to take their advice, at least so long as there's no overriding reason not to. Obviously a lot has happened in the centuries since; to try to discern how the Founding Fathers would respond to the internet is absurd. But our Constitution was designed to be flexible and minimalist. Everything that is in there was put in there intentionally, and for a specific reason. Thus 'deferring to what the FFs intended' is really a shorthand for 'remembering the strategic protections that have served us pretty well so far'. At least for me.

Think of it like a city wall. Generations ago people built a wall around our city to protect us against marauding armies. But that hasn't happened in a while, so you want to blast a hole in it. The problem is here the marauding army is the dark side of human nature, which will never go away, so tearing down the wall is probably going to bite us in the ass at some point.

 

[The Yankee]

Since the Founding Fathers are not some monolith and often left wide berths on given policies, there's something in it for everyone.

 

[mangxema]

Well, yes. Which is why people will try to debate what they really meant, as opposed to whether we should care about their opinion at all.

 

[Cutlass]

Many people don't try to debate what they really meant. Instead, they try to dictate what they want them to have meant. And occasionally even find some miscelleneous phrase they said to 'prove beyond all dispute that all of the FFs really meant this, and so the Constitution obviously says what I say it says'.

 

[mangxema]

I find that most frustrating myself.

 

[The Yankee]

Well, yes. Which is why people will try to debate what they really meant, as opposed to whether we should care about their opinion at all.

But that's why they're so important in debate. This country has a political system under a constitution that's only been amended seventeen times since 1791.