5 Reasons Why Modern Wing-Nuts Would've Hated The Founding Fathers

If you’re a Democrat (or, for that matter, a progressive of any stripe) the chances are you’ve heard conservatives evoke the founding fathers when dismissing your beliefs on economic issues. The term “socialist” has become such a toxic epithet in our political culture that the two chief candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have spent considerable time confronting the term – with Hillary Clinton correctly pointing out that it doesn’t apply to her center-left views, even as Bernie Sanders valiantly strives to remove its stigma by self-identifying as a “democratic socialist.”

In light of all this, one might be forgiven for assuming that America’s founders were unilaterally right-wing in their economic ideology. After all, if this wasn’t the case, liberals could easily debunk attempts to delegitimize them by simply citing the incontrovertible facts of American history.

Which brings us to the five reasons why liberals can be just as comfortable as conservatives in claiming the founding fathers as their own.

1. The founding fathers constantly disagreed with each other.

It is easy to talk about the founding fathers as if they were a monolithic body, but as records of the Constitutional Convention and The Federalist Papers clearly demonstrate, the men who created this country disagreed on everything from the enumerated powers in each branch of government and the abolition of slavery to, yes, the role that the state should play in regulating economic policy.

Since there are too many examples of the latter to comprehensively discuss in one article, I’ll limit my exploration to one of the most fundamental questions of all — the general welfare clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1), which empowers Congress “[t]o lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence [sic] and general Welfare of the United States.”

When conservatives argue that “general welfare” does not cover left-wing economic policies, they often cite James Madison (from The Federalist No. 41), who argued that it should be construed as narrowly as possible, insisting that “it would have been difficult to find a reason for so awkward a form of describing an authority to legislate in all possible cases.” Less than four years later, however, Alexander Hamilton argued that the term “general welfare” simply referred to Congress’s power to impose taxes for any program that would serve the broader public interest, pointing out (in his Report on Manufactures) that “it is therefore of necessity left to the discretion of the National Legislature, to pronounce, upon the objects, which concern the general Welfare, and for which under that description, an appropriation of money is requisite and proper.”

While legal and historical scholars disagree to this day as to whether Madison or Hamilton was correct, there is no question that they shared the same basic difference of opinion on economic questions as many Americans today. That said, there is one point on which they would not have disagreed.

2. The Constitution was created because America’s first government was too weak.

Despite their penchant for name-dropping the Constitution as proof that the central government should be as weak as possible, conservatives ignore that the Constitution was actually written because America’s first federal government was tooweak. Signed in 1781, the Articles of Confederation did not allow Congress to impose taxes, impose uniform tariff policies throughout the country, or effectively address the economic concerns of ordinary citizens — in particular, those who had incurred massive debt during the American Revolution and were being hounded by their creditors.

This last detail is especially important, since James Madison himself later wrote that it “contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Constitution and prepared the mind for a general reform” than any other problem. As a result, the Constitution included protections for citizens facing bankruptcy, explicitly allowed Congress to collect taxes, and in general focused on fixing the problems that had become apparent in the Articles of Confederation.

That said, as Madison admitted in a private letter in 1832, economic powers that didn’t appear in the Constitution weren’t always rejected or not adopted because the federal government wasn’t intended to have them. “Without knowing the reasons for the votes in those cases, no such inference can be sustained,” Madison observed. “The propositions might be disapproved because they were in a bad form or not in order; because they blended other powers with the particular power in question; or because the object had been, or would be, elsewhere provided for.”

3. George Washington created the United States Post Office.

This may not seem like a big deal today, but when President Washington signed the Postal Office Act of 1792, he created what was then the most far-reaching and sophisticated postal service in the Western world. In the process, the post office actively worked to make Americans into better democratic citizens by shaking them out of the provincial mindsets they would otherwise develop from living on farms or in small towns before the Industrial Revolution. As historian Richard R. John explains in his award-winning book on the subject,

“By facilitating the regular transmission of information throughout the length and breadth of the United States, the postal system provided ordinary Americans with information about the wider world that they could obtain in no other way.”