The Founding Fathers are a hit. Their stock is riding such a bubble that their reputation has never been so high. Franklin, Hamilton, the Adamses, Jefferson, Washington -- they might as well be celebrity commodities like Britney, Tom Hanks and World War II nostalgia. Merchandise them any which way and cash rolls in. It would have been exciting if the founders were being plumbed for inspiration, as how-to guides to rebelling against the past and experimenting on the future. But they're being worshipped as ends in themselves. This "founders chic," as historian and Franklin biographer W.H. Brands put it, may be good for business. But it's politically stifling and culturally gutless. It suggests that the present has no better ideas to offer, no greater methods and philosophies than the Founders'.

It may even be dangerous. So much powdered-wig reverence for the past, as opposed to healthy, democratic engagement with the past, bears false witness against the present. The past is not understood as prologue but spun into myth and legend to justify the indefensible, so that the sheer stupidity of grafting Jeffersonian rhetoric on Babylonian settings manages to become an acceptable national crusade and the private religious faith of a few founders becomes public dogma. Such Founder-worship is, in sum, the most effective way to insulate the present from its realities and the surest way to prevent improvements on the Founders' designs. It is the way to regression.

It is also the clue to last week's funereal orgy in Ronald Reagan's name. With so many stains on the "shiny city on a hill" and so much red ink leaking from its ramparts, George Washington or John Adams couldn't be brought back from the dead for a revival show. Ronald Reagan could. His last act would be as understudy for all those powdered wigs the nation has been grooming for so many years. As the Great Projectionist he never was much interested in details so long as what he felt, whether it had any connection with reality or not, was conveyed convincingly enough. The handling of his funeral would be no different.

Like those scenes in soap operas where a character kicks off and everyone gathers for steamy, self-serving eulogies, it would be staged as a weeklong tribute to politics as fairy tale. Not only would Reagan be compared to the Founders. He would be made into a Founder, or at least a founding myth, which is accurate so far as the modern Republican Party is concerned. The GOP wouldn't be very far along without Reagan. He showed the party how to feed his beloved Middle Americans the fictions they craved while letting the media scrounge and squirm for facts few beef-eating patriots were interested in anyway. Mostly, he taught the party how to capitalize on the most potent weapon at the GOP's disposal in the last 25 years: prejudice, or what is colloquially known as the culture wars. Reagan gave mild bigotries a human face by making poverty and inequality casually tolerable again and minorities of race or thought casually contemptible. He would reconstruct America according to his image of the Founders' image, a twice-removed fantasy that would indeed change the presidency.

It started six paragraphs into his inaugural address. "You and I, as individuals," he said, "can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?" Because, came the answer over the next eight years, we don't have to be. And it wasn't just borrowed money he was talking about, but borrowed prestige from two centuries of predecessors' achievements: After all, went the self-absolving blessing that was the inaugural's last line, "we are Americans." So he could run up the largest deficits in history (until then), the last trade imbalance in history (until then), turn the nation from the world's biggest creditor to its biggest debtor, alternately slash and raise taxes more than any president before him (but not since), enlarge civilian government and massively enlarge the military, enable in the Iran-Contra affair the most serious constitutional scandal since Watergate (and lie about it), tally up a larger number of senior officials indicted, forced to resign or accused of illegal or unethical conduct than any administration in the 20th century (more than 100 individuals not quite bound by legal limitations) -- and still be called the founding father of the modern conservative movement while being elevated to Rushmorian ranks. With fathers like these, delinquent sons were a matter of time, sleaze and deceit; a presidential imperative.

Bill Clinton tried, God love him. But George W. Bush succeeds. He is not just the Reagan progeny. By today's standards, he is another founder in embryo.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net

© 2004 News-Journal Corporation

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