People sometimes ask what the Founding Fathers would think of American politics today, or where they would come down on particular policy questions. It’s a speculative exercise; we can’t know. But we can take some educated guesses about where individual Founders would have stood today based on their personalities, their philosophies, and their biographies.
Of course, we begin with a demographic disclaimer: By “Founding Fathers” here I mean generally the leaders of the American Revolution and those who made and signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. All of them were men. All of them were white. Almost all of them were well-off. Almost all of them were married heads of families. None of them were openly gay. Almost all of them were products of, and lived all or most of their lives on, the Atlantic coast. Almost all of them were Anglo-Saxon in ethnic origin and Protestant in religion. Some of them had college degrees, while many others were almost entirely self-educated; nearly none had post-graduate degrees, as there were almost no post-graduate institutions in the colonies. Add those factors together, and you get a demographic profile that today would lean heavily Republican.
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