The Founders Weren’t Perfect — But They Changed the World

The Founding Fathers are easy to criticize today. And to be fair, there’s a lot to critique. They didn’t include women in their vision of citizenship. They compromised on slavery in ways that caused untold harm for generations. Those failures are real, and we shouldn’t sugarcoat them.

But if we stop there, we miss the bigger picture. These men were rebels in the truest sense of the word. They didn’t just break away from Britain — they broke from every form of government in human history. For the first time, they declared that people have rights that are endowed by nature itself. Rights that come from being human, not from a monarch or a parliament.

That idea wasn’t completely new in theory — philosophers had been talking about natural rights for decades. But what was radical, unprecedented, and astonishing was building an actual government on that foundation. A government of, by, and for the people. A nation created from scratch on the premise that people could govern themselves.

Was it perfect? Absolutely not. They compromised — sometimes painfully. They knew that if they didn’t compromise, there would be no union at all. The United States would have died in the cradle. Their ultimate goal was survival and formation: creating a country where that radical idea could take root, even if its branches were uneven and unjust at first.

It’s easy, from our vantage point, to call them hypocrites or worse. But imagine being the first to stake everything — wealth, reputation, life itself — on the hope that people could govern themselves. That gamble changed the course of history.

So yes, critique the flaws. But also stand in awe. Because the Founders weren’t assholes. They were rebels who launched the greatest political experiment the world had ever seen. And we’re still living it.