The Left’s Rediscovery of the Founding Is Opportunistic and Shallow

By Jack Butler

Sunday, July 06, 2025

 

The Fourth of July weekend is an especially fitting time for patriotic displays. It is meant to celebrate the nation’s Founding and its principles on the anniversary of the occasion of its self-declared separation from England. Ostensibly animated by this spirit, many on the left have spent the past few days protesting Donald Trump’s actions as president on the basis that we have “no kings” in this country, echoing similar protests just a few weeks ago.

 

That they are doing so nearly 250 years after the Declaration of Independence shows the endurance of the Founding era as an essential part of our politics. The left is welcome to attempt to invoke it. But the nature of this attempt, weighed against both immediate and more distant history, makes it awfully convenient — and fundamentally flawed.

 

There has been a certain whiplash in the left’s treatment of the trappings of patriotism. Now, some on the left are embracing Revolutionary garb. In the American Prospect earlier this year, Harold Meyerson called for protesters embracing the Founding to protest Trump to “have some fifes and drums, some three-cornered hats.” For true fealty to our “patriotic heritage,” they could perhaps add “some burnings in effigy, that sort of thing.” When the Tea Party embraced such trappings, however, it met accusations of racism from the left. The NAACP condemned “its drive to push our country back to the pre-civil rights era.” And I’ve straight-up lost track of whether patriotic flags are acceptable.

 

Newfound left-wing champions of American patrimony inspire further suspicion given that, not long ago, many of their fellow-travelers were busily theorizing about how it was all fundamentally compromised, and that we needed to move past it. (Both notions have a long pedigree on the left.) In 2019, the New York Times Magazine launched the 1619 Project, with Nikole Hannah-Jones as its chief advocate. It quickly became conventional wisdom on the left. Its thesis is that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.” Furthermore, “slavery — and the anti-black racism it required” were so fundamental to “everything that made America exceptional” that 1619, when slaves first came to American shores, was America’s true founding, not 1776.

 

A generally dismissive attitude has until recently extended to the political system the Founders bequeathed to us. In 2022, Jill Filipovic’s philippic against the Supreme Court, which, after Dobbs, she urged “should officially be understood as an illegitimate institution” that must be “snuffed out,” reflected a broad consensus on the activist left. In The Atlantic, Wilfred Codrington III urged the abolition of the Electoral College. “The disempowerment of black voters” is “core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been,” he asserted. In New York, Jonathan Chait railed against the “Senate’s pro-white bias.” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie agreed with both Codrington and Chait. Bouie, in separate columns, called for an end to the Electoral College “in its current form” and for us to consider the removal of the Senate’s veto power.

 

In the lattermost publication, however, law professors Ryan D. Doerfler (Harvard) and Samuel Moyn (Yale) outdid them all. They advocated that we “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” After all, it “would be far better if liberal legislators could simply make a case for abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having to bother with the Constitution.” How regal.

 

Contrary to such condemnations, the preservation of these pillars of our political system ought to be the standard by which we measure our politics. Determining whether Donald Trump has exceeded his authority as president (and this publication has argued that, in certain instances, he has) requires recourse to the very system that, until recently, many on the left wished to overhaul. Or that, at least, many of them were content to flout when doing so appeared to benefit them. Just because Joe Biden’s memory isn’t what it used to be isn’t an excuse for others to forget the flagrant abuses of presidential power he attempted. And those on the left now longing for a return of Barack Obama ought to remember his dubious ukases.

 

It is not impossible for those on the left to invoke the Founding sincerely, even if many of them have trouble doing it. Many on the left proudly claim as a forebear Martin Luther King Jr., whose advocacy for full equality for African Americans was all the more persuasive when it made America’s Founding principles its lodestar.

 

Recent political history, however, makes the left’s modern embrace of the Founding seem, at best, highly opportunistic and unlikely to endure its momentary utility. Even its more sincerely held varieties seem more like an attempt to reimagine modern leftism as the fruition of what the Founders would have wanted (much as FDR tried to present the New Deal). True patriotism, proper reverence for the Founding, must rest on surer foundations — on Fourth of July weekend, and at every other time of year.