The Founding Myth

It is no accident that the term “Founding Fathers” was first used in 1916 by, of all people, Warren G. Harding. The reason I say “of all people” is that of Harding’s writing H. L. Mencken said “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered”, perhaps the mildest criticism he lodged of Harding. The reason I say “it is no accident” is that in 1916 the United States was beginning its transition from the Anglo-Saxon country it had been to something more diverse. We needed our founding myth more than ever to bind us together. Ties of blood and heritage would no longer suffice.

I don’t know whether Harding was aware of it but Plato had explained it nearly two millennia earlier. A polis needs a “noble lie” to bind it together and give it meaning. Our founding myth was that the framers of the Constitution were wise, noble, selfless men who in their learning and understanding of the human heart crafted the finest form of government known and that George Washington was the father of our country. That, of course, is an epitome. Beyond Washington the man the basis of democracy as we understand it is the willing relinquishment of power.

We are in the process of casting that founding myth aside. I do not know if we can survive as a nation without it or what would replace it.

In a piece at First Things, Patrick Deneen explicates our founding myth, continuing with remarks on more recent developments:

While elites may suffer self-inflicted blindness to the nature of their position, the rest of society clearly sees what they are doing. The uprising among the working classes across the developed West arises from a perception of illegitimacy—of a gap between claims of the ruling class and reality as experienced by those who are ruled. It is no coincidence that these rebellions come from the socialist left and authoritarian right, two positions that now share opposition to state capitalism, a managerial ruling class, the financialization of the economy, and globalization. These populist rebellions are a challenge to the liberal order itself.

Our ruling class is more blinkered than that of the ancien régime. Unlike the aristocrats of old, they insist that there are only egalitarians at their exclusive institutions. They loudly proclaim their virtue and redouble their commitment to diversity and inclusion. They cast bigoted rednecks as the great impediment to perfect equality—not the elite institutions from which they benefit. The institutions responsible for winnowing the social and economic winners from the losers are largely immune from questioning, and busy themselves with extensive public displays of their unceasing commitment to equality. Meritocratic ideology disguises the ruling class’s own role in perpetuating inequality from itself, and even fosters a broader social ecology in which those who are not among the ruling class suffer an array of social and economic pathologies that are increasingly the defining feature of ­America’s underclass. Facing up to reality would require hard questions about the agenda underlying commitments to “diversity and inclusion.” Our ­stated commitment to “critical thinking” demands no less, but such questions are likely to be put down—at times violently—on contemporary campuses.

The legitimacy of prior elites might have been derived from divine right or noblesse oblige. I would suggest that today’s elites will strive for authenticity rather than legitimacy, a quality even further beyond their reach. It takes the form of adopting the dress, speech, and mannerisms of races and classes other than their own, unable to differentiate between authenticity and pretense. Even more recently it has taken the form of claiming that self-chosen identity grants authenticity.

Authenticity does not convey legitimacy any more than pretense does authenticity. I don’t honestly know whom today’s elites are trying to fool. Themselves?