Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders

Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them-including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson-came to deem America's constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond...