I love Roman analogies and there are many to choose from! The soldiers in Washington made me think of Caesar coming to Rome with his army. Anyway, I agree with you that the Constitution is in a sense frozen in time. But I would make three points. First, the thought that we could do better today, in our political climate and with our leaders, is risible. Second, the extent to which our understanding of the written constitution is frozen in time is not just a product of our constitution’s age, but of the tools our legal elites now use to interpret it. Third, we have an unwritten constitution of norms and traditions, and frankly it’s our unwritten constitution that is in greater danger from Trump than our written constitution. For example: the constitution allows for a large standing army even though one would have been anathema to the founders, but the unwritten constitution certainly doesn’t allow the regular army, under federal control, to quell protests in American cities, nor does it allow the awful things we have seen in Washington and elsewhere over the past few days, the lead-up to the Trump bible photo op being a great example.

Well, of course you’re right that the founders, like nearly all Europeans and European colonists in the eighteenth century, had terrible views on race. On the other hand, I disagree entirely with the view that the founders have nothing to teach us. As a general matter, I don’t ever want to say that we can only learn from the morally enlightened, because that means throwing out the past and its wisdom wholesale and because there’s no doubt that in a couple of centuries many views that are accepted today will be seen as flagrantly wrong. Focusing more specifically on the founders, my point really is that they were readers of history in a way that we aren’t, and there is a lot of wisdom (in my view) in their caution about too much direct democracy and in their view that the health of a republic depends on the virtue and education of the citizenry.

The founders would have seen George Floyd as chattel. This country was built largely by people stolen from Africa and enslaved. Spike Lee calls this “original sin.” With respect, the founders had nothing to teach us about the problems we face. The founders created them.

Steve