Alongstanding contribution to the present nervous state of the nation is a systematic discontent with its Founding on the part of some of its citizens. The phenomenon saw its birth in the 1960s, that decade of calculated commotion whose activists, energized by the twin obsessions of youth and sex, came eventually to settle upon an ingenious general principle for thought and action: that whatever is established is suspect, simply by reason of the fact that it is established. That left the way wide open for all sorts of disruptive social experimentation. Since that time, the discontent over the country’s Founding—fueled and fomented in good part by academic intellectuals who were undergraduates in the Sixties—has grown steadily and gained in intensity.
The phenomenon could now qualify for the status of a movement, made up of two principal parties, which can accurately enough be labeled respectively as progressive and conservative; both parties criticize the Founding, but from distinctly different points of view; both focus attention on the key documents of the foundation—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—with greater emphasis given to the latter. The progressive point of view is emphatically secular, and for that reason its advocates are disquieted by the importance that the Founders characteristically assign to religion. Their reading of the Constitution comes from a historicist point of view, meaning that they believe the ideas the document contains must be reassessed from a twenty-first-century perspective. This implies not that the Constitution needs to be rewritten, but that the words it contains must be interpreted to resonate with contemporary consciousness. The sensitive interpreter learns not to be slavishly literal in his reading; he has developed the capacity, so to speak, to look above the words just as written, in order to discover any penumbra which might be emanating from them, within which can be found any number of useful revelations. The progressive attitude toward the Founding documents could be generally described as one of creative expectation.
The conservative point of view is dominantly Christian, more specifically Catholic, given those who are today its most prominent and articulate spokesmen. Their attitude toward the Founders is more sharply negative than that of the progressives, as is their attitude toward the Declaration and the Constitution. In both documents they see very little of merit, making them unworthy of our continued respect and loyalty. The most outspoken members of the party are Patrick Deneen, a professor of constitutional studies at the University of Notre Dame, and Michael Hanby, a scholar at the Vatican’s Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. It is specifically to the position advocated by these two scholars that Robert R. Reilly directs the defense of the Founding that he impressively presents in America on Trial.1 In general, Deneen argues that the Founding is based on a false anthropology, a lie about the nature of man, while Hanby sees it as based on a false metaphysics: the Founders were wrong about the nature of reality. The most trenchant charge both men level against the work of the Founders is that it is the origin and cause of the decadent state of American culture we now bear witness to. Reilly does not deny the current enfeebled condition of American culture. This sorry state of affairs, however, is not caused by the Founding principles, he argues, but rather by factors totally extraneous to them, and which over time have served to undermine their efficacy. The result is that we now find ourselves in a situation where “the Christian and natural law perspective that animated [the] Founders is being lost.”
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