Dear Dr. Boli: My history teacher wants us to write a paper about what the Founding Fathers believed, blah blah blah. I looked it up in Wikipedia, but it’s, like, pages long. Could you summarize it for me? —Sincerely, Megan, Sitting in Mrs. Trump’s Sixth-Period American-History Class Waiting for the Bell to Ring.
Dear Miss: The Founding Fathers were a diverse lot, but they seem to have held certain views in common that they all agreed were fundamental to the foundation of a successful republic.
First of all, political parties were bad. That was one principle on which the Founding Fathers unanimously agreed. They soon divided themselves into two factions that disagreed on every other subject, but they agreed that political parties were bad.
Second, standing armies were bad. The Founding Fathers firmly believed that standing armies begat a host of evils, all of them tending toward tyranny. An army should be mobilized to meet the current emergency, and then disbanded before it could do more harm than good.
Third, we must resist the temptation to meddle in the affairs of other countries. We had plenty of affairs of our own without worrying about anybody else’s.
So those were the Founding Fathers’ principles, and it just goes to show you that they were all a bunch of ignorant goobers who didn’t know the first thing about running a country. Fortunately we outgrew them.