What To Do About The Founding Fathers?

I was gonna keep my big mouth shut this year on July 4th, especially because things are so important right now. But the left is absolutely correct in one way: symbols do matter. What they're wrong is that symbols shouldn't matter: symbols are bullshit, a way to convince lazy people who don't do their own homework that a certain pre-programmed set of opinions is true. And by giving up Jefferson and Washington without even so much as a fight to reclaim them for the good they did, the Left is surrendering two of the very most powerful symbols in American history that will be the exclusive property for the American Right to use and win the lazy minds of moderates.

Getting involved in world affairs is a big enough undertaking that there has never been such a thing as an historical figure who kept his nose clean, even by the standards of ordinary people. It's not just that you do things on the job: war, murder, theft, bribery, blackmail, humiliation of underlings, that ordinary people never have a chance to do, it's that you have the temperament that a life full of that kind of dirt appeals to you.

We need to teach and explain exactly what Jefferson and Washington and Franklin and Madison did and why they are vastly more complicated than we were ever taught. Just as Jews need you all to explain the antisemitism of Mohammed and Luther and the Vatican and even FDR - who never opened a single border to Hitler's refugees and could have stopped Auschwitz with a single bomb to a traintrack. The only option left is to explain what the Founders did, everything - bad and good, constructive and evil.

But no matter what good we do in our own lives, future generations will judge us and our leaders just as harshly: for being Nazis to animals - imprisoning and killing billions every year for our own gastronomic enjoyment, for stinting on recycling and letting the planet decline into ruin, for willingly killing off a million species, for potentially drowning hundreds of millions near the coasts when sea level rises, for potentially starving hundreds of millions near the equator when temperatures rise and wetland turns into desert, for enabling totalitarian control of whole continents because we wouldn't boycott social media before it's too late, for writing our woke slogans on phones that were made by wage slaves in East Asia.

Do we deserve it? Probably somewhat, we're all complicated, the bad exists along with the good, and what we think of as virtuous deeds or things we do without a second thought may damn every one of our legacies. It's all part of the whole person, all part of the good and the bad impact, part of the stories told about us to the future.

But if we simplify Jefferson and Washington and Franklin and Madison to the equal extent to which they've been simplifed so far, the vast majority of people will believe the explanation that is most flattering to themselves, and in the land of the USA, the vast majority will always choose to believe these people are heroes before they accept that they're uncomplicated villains.