Is America living up to the ideals of the Founding Fathers?

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights.’ Two hundred and fifty years on, Thomas Jefferson’s insistence on human equality and natural rights remains both America’s founding promise and its persistent critique.

How much of the American project still holds? Critics point to an imperial presidency that increasingly rules by executive order – a charge given renewed force by the expansive use of presidential power by both Donald Trump and Joe Biden – alongside sprawling federal bureaucracies, agencies unaccountable to the electorate and a surveillance state that would have horrified the authors of the Fourth Amendment. Others see a Congress paralysed by partisanship, unable to legislate or govern without a vast apparatus of courts and executive agencies.

Meanwhile, the Electoral College, Senate and Supreme Court are increasingly attacked as affronts to the ‘consent of the governed’, even as their defenders insist they are vital safeguards against the tyranny of the majority. The Supreme Court has itself become the arena for many of these battles, simultaneously checking Trump on issues such as birthright citizenship and expanding presidential control over parts of the federal bureaucracy. Are the dysfunction and dispute that rack Washington merely a feature – rather than a bug – of the system the Founders created?

Then there is the deeper tension, one which was present long before the rise of Donald Trump: can a nation founded in part by slaveholders proclaiming universal equality ever fully honour that proclamation, or does the gap between promise and practice define America as a nation of contradictions? Contemporary battles over immigration, birthright citizenship, race and voting rights suggest that Americans are still arguing over who enjoys the promises made in 1776. Was the Civil War a unique rupture in American history, or has conflict – between races, regions and political tribes – always been part of the American story?

Is America’s political dysfunction evidence that the Founders failed – or that successive generations of Americans have failed to live up to their inheritance? Has America drifted from its founding ideals, or are its problems, tensions and means of correction precisely what the Founders anticipated? And, 250 years later, should Americans still use the Founders and their ideals as a yardstick for contemporary politics?