I think I explained how Napoleon fits in, as a response to your original Basing 21st Century politics on something written in the 18th century is weird bit. France has laws based on an early 19th century system, its motto is an 18th century slogan, its modern constitution straight up begins by #including an 18th century document.
I can't actually find a reference to 'founding fathers' in the linked page but maybe the confusion here is a misunderstanding of what that usually means in political speech - it's an invocation (often derived from context) of some principle they espoused or are said to have espoused. It's functionally equivalent to standing in front of that 18th century slogan.
And their slogan is still on coins (Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite). But how exactly does Napoleon figure into that again? In the way the Founding Fathers still influence modern US politics?
> It's functionally equivalent to standing in front of that 18th century slogan.
I don't think it quite is. There's references to phrases from founding documents - which Americans often invoke ("we the people", "shall not be abridged", etc). But there's still an awful lot of reference to "Founding Fathers" specifically. I'm not sure you can listen to more than a few hours of right wing radio in the US without someone invoking Madison, Jefferson or whoever else fits their particular talking point for that moment. The individuals' names, and their writings, are still very much referenced outside of individual slogans.
Remind me which of those they were, considering much of the founding fathers directly based much of the nation on the French system of government and after Enlightenment ideals, which famously rejected the role of God in Government
That's the intersting part, yes. And not just the founding fathers, if you look at Napoleons code civil, the constitution Germany passed after WW II and the like they all share some basic principles and values. Almost seems back then they had more insight to human nature than we have now, at least sometimes.
Why do Americans believe trying to interpret the Founding Father's intent is a reasonable way to debate policy? If the opinions of 18th century wealthy men have merit today it should be because we believe their reasoning applies to current circumstances, not because they were the Founders of anything.
I'm not saying I necessarily disagree that "a small accountable republic driven to progress only on issues where there was minimal to no opposition" is desirable today, but you have put forward no valid argument for it.
Not at all, the Founding Fathers, as implies their name, founded a nation. Voltaire did nothing like that. Philosophers are quoted all the time, and yet nobody really tries to justify his plans by interpreting what these philosophers would think about them. That's not splitting hairs, it is about not drawing falls equivalents.
This might be a controversial point, but I've always wondered why people are so insistent in thinking that the Founding Fathers somehow had some timeless advice on how to run government and that nothing they could have believed has any chance of being wrong.
We're always talking about how other models of thought or industry are outdated (people on the whole prefer Freud's vision of the mind to Descartes'), so why does Washington get a free pass on everything?
I'm a fan of most aspects of Founding Father's ideals (still not sold on bigness being bad), just weird how much hero worship goes on for 250-year old ideas.
That American obsession with the founding fathers always puzzles me as a non-American. France is in tis 5th Republic, the second since WW2. Germany went through a lot of Government changes since the 18th century as well, as did a lot of other countries in Europe. With the exception of some wierdos nobody puts those long gone governments on a pedestal.
That is an extremely simplified view of the founding principles of the US. The federalists were a pretty well known contingent of the founding fathers as well.
Jefferson is a fascinating example of how contemporary historical revisionism is invoked in an extremely selective manner. Jefferson was a Francophile and was probably the founding father most closely aligned with continental European Enlightenment thinking. For example, he’s the source of the notion that the founding fathers were “deist.” Jefferson was, and maybe Franklin, but most of the others weren’t. He’s the main source for the notion of “wall of separation of church and state,” which is much closer to French secularism than what either the Constitution says or what the other founders likely intended. (At the time, several states had “established” churches, so the notion that the establishment clause required a wall of separation is quite odd: https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/inte....) The Supreme Court ginned up the modern doctrine almost solely based on one of Jefferson’s letters. (To be fair, they properly understood what Jefferson meant.)
Today, there’s a lot of “guilt by association” attacks on various ideas Jefferson held. When critics attack Jefferson for being a slaveholder, they also attack notions like federalism or small government or gun rights as being conceived out of a desire to protect slavery. But they never attack his ideas of secularism, even though they could. Until the mid-20th century, “science” (or what passed for it at the time) was more aligned with things like slavery and eugenics. In the famous Cornerstone Speech, for example, the Vice President of the Confederacy declares the new rebel nation to be founded on the scientific truth that the races aren’t equal, and characterizes abolitionists as “zealots.” See: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto.... (Which they were—abolition among white Americans was driven mainly by Quakers and other religious fundamentalists. Lincoln’s Republican Party was a fusion of capitalists and religious nuts.)
The Founders were of diverse positions and ideas on the topic.
A couple overly simplistic examples:
Jefferson wanted the Constitution rethought every 19 with modern wisdom to prevent it becoming a carceral joke society laughs at as dated and sad.
Madison felt the future was forever obligated to fit themselves into a past framework as a kind of thank you for the hard work the long dead performed.
“They did not want a strong federal government” is overly reductive and normalizes into a boring sound bite what was really a complex and lengthy back and forth.
It would be fair to say that most feared a strong executive turning autocratic/monarchic but that’s about all they agreed on readily.
I suppose I fall into Jefferson’s camp. Paraphrasing, he wrote to Madison “clearly the dead so not rule the living.”
To the flames with this outdated gibberish. To us it’s all hand me down spoken tradition we never witnessed anyway.
You should both read up on the history of the French Revolution, as well as the definition of the word "conceived". Yes, the parent was off in calling out the French Revolution specifically, but the actual statement made was spot-on.
The American Revolution was, in fact, built on earlier and contemporaneous ideas, found in myriad writings of mostly non-American Enlightenment thinkers who had been working out various new, altered, subversive, or otherwise novel ideas, studies, and classifications in political theory (among other topics) for nearly 125 years before American founders built upon them in both the Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution. A basic review of political theory in the Age of Enlightenment would both confirm for you the correctness of the parent's statements (despite the errant inclusion of the French Revolution), as well as help you see exactly where the American Revolution got the whole of its ideas. America's founders very much imbibed on the Enlightenment, particularly works of political theory.
The French Revolution was not in any way "conceived of" as a result of the American Revolution. Instead, it had been growing in its own specifically French/European manner among the salons and their philosophes, and was quite in step with the march of Enlightenment across much of Western Europe. Ultimately this was brought to a head when, seeing that the Americans' disregard for English rule was something they, too, could emulate in order to bring Enlightenment ideals to practical fruition in France, shit got started in the Estates-General in May 1789 (just two months after the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, bringing the fully Montesquieu-esque political system into reality).
I apologize if I seem overly pedantic, but when you call out someone to check a timeline based on two words in an otherwise sound comment that added something to the discussion, you should at least ensure you have your own timeline correct--particularly if you are going to be bandying about the idea that Historical Event X "was not even conceived of until after" Historical Event Y. History rarely works like that, especially when it is happening but a handful of years apart.
Ultimately, what Abbé Sieyès said in his famous pamphlet, "What is the Third Estate?", is so applicable to both revolutions as to further indicate that a revolutionary wave was both forming and interacting on both sides of the Atlantic (trans-Atlantic intellectual and cultural history is an eye-opening field of study):
"What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something."
The Americans espoused the same sentiment. Neither the American founders nor the Estates-General were owners of that idea, though. They both took it from 125 years of hundreds of intellectuals hammering it out.
And yet, everyone seems to be obsessed with figuring out how the words of these long-dead fellows applies to stuff they never would have imagined rather than trying to figure out what would make good policy today. Founding-fatherism is basically the unofficial state religion of the US now.
Crazy to me how many people would rather not consider the Founding Fathers in politics today. Just because we have smartphones and internal combustion engines doesn't mean that general political ideas have changed much at all. People scare and disappoint me lately.
The french rights pronounced by the French Revolution had nothing to do with the idea of a Creator and were very similar in concept with many of the Founding Fathers'. So this does not seem like a reasonable argument to make.
It seems that, regardless of one's political position, folks always want to try to map the motivations and views of the so-called "founding fathers" of the US to their own. This is likely because they play an important role in the American mythos, and are generally held in high regard by people across the political spectrum.
In reality, the politics of that day don't map onto the modern world. The backdrop of that era was colonialism, and competing for who would profit from the spoils of the new world. It was one where Lockean liberalism was compatible with the genocide of natives and enslavement of black people. The world is unimaginably different from that of the founding of the US; politically, economically, socially, and ethically.
The phrase “founding fathers” is gross and embarrassing as an American. They weren’t deities and they didn’t happen to invent the ultimate possible government for all time. We’re using computers to talk about stuff they literally wrote on animal skins with bird feathers! They rode horses to go visit other states, we have global fiber optic networks. Even if they were good ideas then, it’s not remotely the same world we’re living in now.
I can't actually find a reference to 'founding fathers' in the linked page but maybe the confusion here is a misunderstanding of what that usually means in political speech - it's an invocation (often derived from context) of some principle they espoused or are said to have espoused. It's functionally equivalent to standing in front of that 18th century slogan.
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