I experienced a brief, uncharacteristic and one might argue unwarranted burst of political optimism a few nights ago and it wasn’t the alcohol. The approximate cause was an article in the Atlantic by the astute Irish observer of the American political scene Fintan O’Toole. “What The Founders Would Say Now,” read the title.
As an example of how remote their lives stood from ours today, O’Toole reports that at the time of the founding contemporary thinkers believed that the Earth was no more than 75,000 years old. That came as news to me, though no more fake than a lot of what passes for truth these days. Thomas Jefferson, who we tend to think of as an American visionary, believed that woolly mammoths roamed the great as yet largely unexplored northern and western regions of the new nation.
The writer’s point is that the current conservative Supreme Court’s adherence to originalism, at least when it suits its agenda, is a fallacy. The founders couldn’t possibly have visualized the superpower the new United States of America was to become. The one thing they seemed to agree upon was that the Constitution would need to adapt to unforeseeable circumstances.
So when did my rush of optimism kick in? Perhaps it started when O’Toole discussed the founders’ including “the pursuit of happiness” among humanity’s self-evident truths. “Pleasure,” the author writes, “…is more about human self-fulfillment than the self-indulgence of the rich.”
I had a minor epiphany that what comes next, in reaction to the Trump era, will be a new movement based on the very opposite of what seems to attract the MAGA base to the president. It will be distinguished by a flowing of decency, respect, honesty, truth, kindness and liberty. In other words, the constituent elements of the pursuit of happiness. The opposite of authoritarianism. Though, to quote General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.”
I occasionally tip into catastrophic thinking — what do you expect from somebody raised by a father whose governing mantra was “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” — but I experienced a similar surge of hope when I heard that Zohran Mamdani had come out of nowhere to win the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.
It wasn’t the candidate, at least not the candidate alone, who’d I’d previously hardly heard of, as what he seemed to stand for and was running on — affordability. That doesn’t sound especially romantic but it’s the life-blood of a healthy community, and most seem to agree that community is where democracy will go to shelter in the coming months and years.
Again, that sounds pretty standard stuff but affordability also serves as a segue to the Declaration’s self-evident truths. Things are seriously out of whack. “If they were told that the top 0.1 percent of Americans,” writes O’Toole of the founders, “currently holds 14 percent of the country’s wealth while the bottom half holds just 2.5 percent, they would surely have calculated that the odds of the survival of the republic had become very steep.”
It feels as if a correction is coming, must come, and not just to the stock market. The lines outside the soup kitchen at the Unitarian Church of Old Souls in my New York City neighborhood appear longer than they ever have before. Yet just one block west some of the richest people on Earth live on Park Avenue.
But as with my reaction to Mamdani’s ascent it’s really nothing more than intuition that leads me to believe that something’s got to give. Donald Trump may be our best ally because he’s not trying to disguise his program. He’s taking the frog — that’s us — and throwing us straight into boiling water. No turning up the heat gradually. People tend to react viscerally when they see an army occupying the streets of their city.
It appears unlikely that the United States Congress or the Supreme Court, which appears poised to eviscerate what’s left of the Voting Rights Act and deliver the Republicans a permanent majority in the House of Representatives, is going to ride to our rescue. O’Toole writes that among the current developments the founders would have found most appalling was the domination by the executive of the legislative branch. “What would surely have sickened them most,” he says, “is the sycophancy of legislators who abandon their duty of independent judgment and act as fawning courtiers of a monarchial presidency. Whatever else the Founders can be accused of, they were spectacularly innocent of servility.”
I’ve noticed over the years that some of the most ardent believers in American democracy are refugees from authoritarian regimes. My grandparents, who first fled the Russian Revolution and then the rise of Nazism in Europe, felt that way when they reached America’s shores.
My mother, who arrived as a fourteen-year-old, told me she felt instantly at home in a way she never had in any of the places where she previously lived. I don’t think it was because America, and New York City in particular, was so welcoming. It was because America was too busy and indifferent to pry into your life, to care who you were or where you came from. Nothing was stopping you from succeeding or falling flat on your face.
The Founders were fully aware of the risks of tyranny. They’d just overthrown a king. If our elected representatives have lost their courage that leaves only we, the people, to rise to that sacred responsibility.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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