Here’s a small thing I wish about how we discuss the “founders”, the group of men who wrote the documents and created the institutions that remain the legal and political bedrock of the contemporary American republic (though a good third of the nation’s populace is poised to shatter that bedrock into dust).

More than anything else, I wish that every single American today poised to debate, discuss, characterize, reject, claim, venerate or condemn the ‘founders’ would at least give them this much: they did not agree on a great many issues. They did not speak with one voice. They were not one mind on anything despite being all men and all white. Anybody who invokes ‘them’ should have the courtesy not to invoke ‘them’ but to invoke the specific founders and the specific sentiments they have in mind, with an acknowledgement of the dissenting (plural!) views. And go beyond the men gathered in various halls and drafting rooms: consider the entire generation of people living in the continental states at the time of the Revolution. Consider those who sided with the British! Consider those who took an interest in other European patrons! Consider the slaves! Consider the freedmen and women! Consider women as a whole! Consider indigenous people inside those states and beyond their borders! Consider the men with property who did not show up in Philadelphia or New York or Yorktown. Consider the ordinary soldiers of the Revolution. Consider the farmers and the merchants of towns.

You can say something about all of them and more besides. You want to invoke the heritage of this republic? Even if you just stick to the documents, show some goddamn respect for what went into them. Recognize that their authors ran the gamut from near-monarchists to proto-Marxists, from slaveholders to abolitionists.

I don’t want to hear anything about the “Founding Fathers” from people who can’t be arsed to even read the most basic debates that informed the government they created—and for that matter the government they uncreated in recognition of its manifest failure.