As America prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, former President Barack Obama has once again invited Americans to dwell on the shortcomings of their inheritance rather than its greatness.
Speaking at the gala opening of his presidential center in Chicago last week, Obama declared that the Founders “fell terribly short” of the lofty principles they proclaimed our great nation should embody. The former president went on to say that he was referring primarily to the persistence of slavery in the early republic. That’s fair, at least to some extent. No honest reading of American history can deny that slavery was a profound moral evil, nor that the Founders left significant unfinished business to later generations. Yet as Americans prepare to commemorate the most successful experiment in self-government in human history, it is striking that the Left is constitutionally incapable of discussing the achievements of the founding without immediately turning to its failures.
This has been Barack Obama’s consistent reflex since he first stepped onto the national scene more than two decades ago. Rather than treating the remarkable American story as a cause for gratitude, he persistently returns to it as a source of national (and ceaseless) self-reproach.
To the self-consciously Woke, the story of the American founding is not one of heroism, perseverance, constitutional self-government, and expanding liberty. It is almost entirely an account of injustice and oppression, punctuated by all-too-infrequent moments of improvement. For the Left, America’s shortcomings are its defining feature. To focus too enthusiastically on the nation’s accomplishments is to turn a blind eye to the suffering of anyone who wasn’t a white heterosexual male. To recite a catalog of grievances (most of which have, in the eyes of the Left, been only partially addressed) is a more truthful reading of history.
For progressives afflicted with various stages of Trump Derangement Syndrome, nostalgia for the Obama era runs high. The dedication of this new presidential center was a welcome opportunity to indulge in the pleasure of remembering not only Obama’s eight years in office, but also the themes to which he returned so regularly. Last week, the former president did not disappoint his listeners. When he moved from saying that the Founders “fell terribly short” to conceding that “they did have the foresight, the genius to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect,” the unmistakable implication was that the story of America is one of gradual moral enlightenment, with each generation correcting the failures of those who came before it. It is a vision of history that invariably casts the present as wiser than the past and political progressives as the heroic agents of that progress. It also conveniently places Barack Obama at the zenith of that narrative, anointing him the living symbol of a nation finally becoming what it was always meant to be.
There is a far better — and far truer — way to understand the American founding.
The Founders never claimed perfection for themselves, nor do contemporary conservatives assign perfection to them. The men who gathered in Philadelphia nearly 250 years ago knew they were ordinary human beings, as much in need of grace as anyone. Nonetheless, they humbly attempted something utterly unprecedented: the creation of a constitutional republic grounded in the conviction that rights come not from government but from God, and that a legitimate government exists not to dispense those rights but to secure them.
The Left is all too fond of pointing out that the Founders failed to live fully by the principles they proclaimed. Fair, perhaps. It is then worth asking why the greatest reformers in American history chose — every time! — to appeal to those very principles rather than reject them. The abolitionists, the champions of civil rights, and generations of ordinary Americans seeking a more just society all found in the Declaration a standard against which the nation could be judged and, when necessary, corrected.
The Founders did not just leave unfinished business. They also left an inheritance.
As Americans prepare to commemorate 250 years of independence, that inheritance (and not the inevitable shortcomings found in any human story) is what must command our attention and our reverence. We are the beneficiaries of constitutional self-government, religious liberty, federalism, free enterprise, and a conception of natural rights that transformed not merely a single nation but the world. This sacred inheritance is the product of statesmanship, sacrifice, and above all, a profound understanding of human nature.
Barack Obama is right about one thing. Every generation inherits the responsibility to preserve and strengthen the American experiment. Two and a half centuries after the founding, the great question is not whether our forebears were imperfect, but whether we will prove worthy of all that they have entrusted to us.
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Greg Sindelar is interim president and CEO at the America First Policy Institute.
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