"It is fashionable in these days to regard [George] Washington- and
America's other Founders - as irrelevant, as dead white men, as
antiquated, and as morally abhorrent because some of them owned black
slaves. This attitude is a mistake for any American to take.
The Founders remain vitally relevant to the conduct of American domestic politics and foreign policy, not because they could see the impact of such future developments as transcontinental railroads, the cell phone, ballistic missiles, Social Security, and nuclear weapons. They clearly could not, and so have little value to us as soothsayers.
The Founders eternal relevance for Americans is based on their study and knowledge of human beings, of how human beings act and interact, and of the manifest imperfectibility of human beings. When the Founders met in 1787 in Philadelphia to write the American Constitution, as the brilliant professor Daniel Robinson has said, they drew on the totality of the "political life of early America [which itself] is an extended treatise on the nature of human nature..." The Founders' wisdom must remain in the forefront of American thinking not because they were demigods but because they were, by their own admission, flawed human beings who used that knowledge about themselves and others to shape a nation capable of an ongoing effort to build an equitable society, preventing the growth of tyrannical power at home, and savvy enough to survive in a world of competitive nation-states and frequent wars.
- Michael Scheuer, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq
The Founders remain vitally relevant to the conduct of American domestic politics and foreign policy, not because they could see the impact of such future developments as transcontinental railroads, the cell phone, ballistic missiles, Social Security, and nuclear weapons. They clearly could not, and so have little value to us as soothsayers.
The Founders eternal relevance for Americans is based on their study and knowledge of human beings, of how human beings act and interact, and of the manifest imperfectibility of human beings. When the Founders met in 1787 in Philadelphia to write the American Constitution, as the brilliant professor Daniel Robinson has said, they drew on the totality of the "political life of early America [which itself] is an extended treatise on the nature of human nature..." The Founders' wisdom must remain in the forefront of American thinking not because they were demigods but because they were, by their own admission, flawed human beings who used that knowledge about themselves and others to shape a nation capable of an ongoing effort to build an equitable society, preventing the growth of tyrannical power at home, and savvy enough to survive in a world of competitive nation-states and frequent wars.
- Michael Scheuer, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq
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