What the Founders Would Say Now

"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 œconomy 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."

"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."

At the Founding, common belief held that the Earth was no older than 75,000 years, prompting expectations that woolly mammoths still lived in unexplored American regions. Thomas Jefferson expressed confidence that such creatures persisted in "the northern and western parts of America" and viewed extinction as inconceivable. The notion of living prehistoric beasts highlights how alien the Founders' worldview can appear today. Two and a half centuries' distance prevents immersing in that universe and complicates dispassionate judgment. The originalist approach that seeks to recover precise Founders' intentions risks projecting contemporary biases and turning historical figures into rhetorical puppets. Evaluating alignment between founding intentions and the present remains central to political critique.

Read at The Atlantic