The subtitle of this small volume is “The Disillusionment of America’s Founders.” The creation of the United States of America has been hailed (at least in this country’s mythology) as the world’s greatest experiment in democracy. The idea that our country’s founding fathers became pessimistic about the future of the nation they created intrigued me.

Rasmussen focuses on Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson, along with a few other notable figures. For contrast, at the end of the book, he offers up James Madison, the optimistic exception to the rule—and the longest-lived of all the founding fathers.

George Washington dreamed of a non-partisan government, decrying the factionalism that developed shortly after ratification of the Constitution and his elevation to the presidency. In fact, his chaotic cabinet suffered from the friction between Federalists and Republicans, exemplified in Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, two men who wound up despising each other.

The main contrast between these nascent political parties was that the Federalists craved a strong central government and the Republicans favored a diffusion of power—to states and even to the local level.

Hamilton, who could never be president because he was foreign-born, was a visionary who created the early banking system that rescued the national government from bankruptcy. But he also favored a strong standing army (and himself as its flamboyant general), an alliance with Great Britain, and a desire to involve the budding republic in a war with France. Reading Rasmussen, one gets the sense it was a good thing the duel with Aaron Burr turned out the way it did.

Washington trended toward Federalism, along with Hamilton and Adams, causing no small irritation to Jefferson, who believed in dividing counties into wards, where political power would reside. He felt this truly gave “power to the people.” Try to imagine finding this many politic players, and how their myriad “fiefdoms” might play together (not so well, I suspect).

I think that if the Federalists had succeeded in creating a stronger central government from the beginning—over the objections of the agrarian, slave-holding Southern states—we’d have suffered fewer growing pains in the long run. (Do not confuse New Federalism with the original—these people favor states’ rights over a strong national government.)

Not long ago, I read a Paul Krugman piece that compared the slavery-driven Civil War with the current division among states on the abortion issue, and that the anti-abortionists will never be satisfied until they have achieved a national ban (much as slaveholders, on the flip side of the coin, wished for their detestable institution to be legal throughout the land). Of course, this is a very imperfect analogy. Can you imagine men going to war and killing each other over what is essentially a female right? Uh huh.

Rasmussen does an excellent job of drawing from the personal papers of the founders, as well as from scholars who have delved deeply into their lives. He is good at explaining the nuances in the development of the Constitution and its flaws. Pointedly, he demonstrates that the founders were well-aware of these flaws and in some cases foolishly believed they would be rectified over time. In particular, for example, some of them believed that if slavery were spread to the western territories, it would become diffuse and slowly die out on its own accord.

Though somewhat scholarly, I feel Rasmussen did a good job of making the 18^th century relatable to us in the 21^st. I found his work very instructive for the historic perspective on our country’s development.

David Brooks explains that democracies operate with a positive-sum economic mindset. The benefit is a rising standard of living, generally across the board. The American experience supports this idea. Autocratic governments, by contrast, have a zero-sum mindset. Benefits accrue to the powerful few; everyone else can go hang.

The disillusionment of the founders suggests that their pessimism may have been prescient after all. To read about their personal preferences, blind spots, and prejudices, illustrates how we wound up where we are today…and perhaps where we’ll wind up in the future.