The Founders Weren’t Wizards, and the Constitution Isn’t a Spellbook

There’s a particular kind of magical thinking among white Americans when it comes to their history. It manifests in different ways, but the symptoms are always the same: a belief that the American founding was a miracle, that the Constitution is a sacred text, and that if we just invoke the right words—"checks and balances," "separation of powers," "original intent"—then democracy will heal itself, like some kind of enchanted parchment reasserting its will against tyranny.

Of course, none of that is true. But the fact that so many people need it to be says everything about how deeply American white identity has been bound up in a myth, rather than in history.

The Fantasy of the Founders

For white Americans who want to believe that the system just works, the founders become a stand-in for divine architects—enlightened men who designed a perfect machine that only goes awry when people fail to respect its sacred gears. This requires ignoring the fact that the founders were, by and large, not designing a democracy, but a system that would preserve their power while keeping the people they feared—poor folks, Indigenous nations, enslaved Black people, and even most white men—out of decision-making.

Even the most seemingly "progressive" of them—that you’ve heard of—were hypocrites. George Mason, for instance, ranted loudly about the evils of slavery but never freed the enslaved people who made him rich, or did anything else about it. The Constitution they crafted made slavery permanent, empowered a tiny elite, and built in enough ambiguity to let future generations argue over what they really meant, as if divining the will of oracles.

But history isn’t prophecy. The founders were not gods, and their ideas weren’t flawless. They were just powerful men making a deal with each other—one that worked out very well for them and very badly for almost everyone else.

The Constitution as Holy Relic

Then there’s the Constitution itself, which white Americans have been treating like a sacred relic for centuries. Not a legal document that has been repeatedly amended (because it was full of problems), but a timeless scripture that, if interpreted correctly, must hold all the answers. The idea that democracy just needs the right court decision, the right incantation of “separation of powers,” and the system will self-correct is one of the most persistent and dangerous delusions in American political culture.

The Constitution didn’t prevent a Civil War. It didn’t stop Jim Crow. It didn’t protect Black citizens from mass incarceration or Indigenous nations from land theft. And it sure as hell didn’t do anything to prevent a mob from storming the Capitol in 2021, waving flags that invoked its supposed purity. The Constitution doesn’t do anything. People do. And people—especially white people—have spent generations deciding which parts of it they care about, and which they’re happy to ignore.

This Isn’t Just a Right-Wing Problem

It's easy to see this kind of delusion in far-right nationalists. These are the people who scream about the founders while hoisting Confederate flags, the ones who think "1776" is an incantation to ward off diversity, the ones who claim to love the Constitution but have clearly never read anything other than the Second Amendment. But the truth is, this kind of magical thinking grips American liberals just as tightly.

Liberal nationalism clings to the same myths—it just does so with a kinder, more inclusive vocabulary. This is the belief that "America is an idea" rather than a place built through genocide and enslavement. It’s the conviction that the arc of history naturally bends toward justice, rather than being forced there by people willing to fight for it. And it’s the unwavering faith that if we just say the right words—"democratic norms," "the rule of law," "our institutions"—then the system will snap itself back into place.

This is why so many liberals were—and are—shocked by Trump, as if American democracy had always been stable and fair until 2016. This is why they put so much hope in Robert Mueller, in impeachments, in the courts, in voting as the singular tool of salvation—because they truly believed that the system, if properly appealed to, would protect them. Even now, faced with an anti-democratic movement that openly states its goals, too many still think the right legal challenge or procedural fix will turn the tide.

It won’t. The people who believe the system will save them are the people who’ve never had to fight it. Black Americans, Indigenous nations, immigrants, the working class—none of them have ever had the luxury of assuming that America’s institutions would protect them. They’ve always known that progress happens in spite of the system, not because of it.

Magical Thinking Is the Problem, Not the Solution

White Americans—liberal and conservative alike—have spent centuries telling themselves that history is a story of progress, where things inevitably get better because the system is just that good. That belief has allowed them to excuse every failure, every injustice, as a momentary glitch in the grand design, rather than a fundamental flaw in the way this country was built. It lets them treat democracy like an autopilot function rather than something that has to be actively fought for.

And that’s how we got here—at a moment when authoritarianism isn’t creeping in, it’s kicking in the front door, and far too many Americans are still clutching their pocket Constitutions like talismans, waiting for the system to save them. But systems don’t save people. People save people. And if history teaches us anything, it’s that the ones who fight hardest to make democracy real have never been the ones who were included in the deal from the beginning.

So maybe, instead of summoning the spirits of the founders every time democracy is in crisis, we should finally let them rest. They had their shot. This fight is ours.