For the site today, Jay Cost, author of Democracy or Republic? The People and the Constitution, has written a characteristically thoughtful rebuttal to a trollish article by Michael Lind (published, unsurprisingly, in Compact), in which Lind urges Americans to “Forget the Founding Fathers.”
Cost takes Lind’s argument — that looking to the principles of the American founding for guidance is largely a waste of time, and that those who do so are in a “cult” — more seriously than it deserves. It seems designed to inflame. But Cost’s rebuttal transcends Lind’s rhetoric. At a time of widespread consensus that there is something wrong in our national life, it’s not cultlike behavior to look to the Founding for restoration. “If states are like bodies that tend to decay and a prudent strategy is to arrest the decline through a return to original principles, then the Constitution becomes an essential document for understanding what we should do next,” Cost writes.
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