I think this is not an uncommon opinion and it’s becoming more and more mainstream. And that sort of thinking is an attempt to cancel America. It’s not just saying that America has done certain bad things and we need to fix them. It’s saying that the founders were bad so we get to relitigate everything. America can always be improved, but you can’t just slap the label “America” on whatever grab-bag of ideas you want. America is an opinionated nation (in the sense of “opinionated software”). And there is an ongoing movement to cancel those opinions.
See, this, right there, is the root of the majority of our problems. The world isn't twitter.
Twitter is majoritarily left leaning, middle class, white, US male, millennials [0] stop making it sound like the world is out to cancel the US. It's a tiny minority of the world on a big website, a big fish in a small pond. Don't shape your view of the world through twitter.
It's like going to a KKK rally and being upset everyone is racist.
Can you see how a reasonable person might read this as catastrophizing? The tweet you linked to is pretty banal, and appears factual. I'm having trouble even connecting the dots from "many of the founders were slaveowners" to "let's cancel America". The nuns taught me the same thing in 1980s Catholic grammar school.
It would be a perfectly fine observation if that was all. But it goes further and says that “the next time someone says we can’t question their judgment on guns or whatever, show them this image.” That logic—or lack thereof, it’s an ad hominem—can be used to put all of our founding principles on the chopping block. It’s an attempt to delegitimize the animating principles of our country.
I'm having trouble with this, because it implies pretty directly that Lincoln betrayed the founding principles of the country when he abolished slavery. Obviously, you don't mean that. But how does your argument square with it? Or with women's suffrage? Is it just that Lincoln was nicer to the founding fathers?
> 8. That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom: That, as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that "no persons should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law," it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.
But that viewpoint is plainly at odds with the actual beliefs of the founding fathers who owned slaves, right? That is clearly a reinterpretation of the words that didn't match what the founding fathers meant by them.
(Even if you discount those like Washington who owned slaves and felt bad about it, plenty owned slaves and thought slavery was a good and important thing and put their names to those words.)
Is it enough to believe internally that you are vindicating what America's founding principles really were in order to be able to criticize the actual beliefs of the founding fathers without "cancelling America"?
> But that viewpoint is plainly at odds with the actual beliefs of the founding fathers who owned slaves, right? That is clearly a reinterpretation of the words that didn't match what the founding fathers meant by them.
The founding principles are not the beliefs of individual framers. They're what they collectively agreed on and wrote down and committed to. And slavery was not one of the principles they committed to. There is a document that committed to slavery as a founding principle, it's called the Constitution of the Confederate States. And we fought a civil war to wipe that document off the face of the earth. Here is what the Vice President of the Confederacy said about the founding in 1861: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto...
> The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time.
Lincoln and the Republicans were rejecting the compromise the Constitution included to enable slavery to continue. But they, quite correctly, didn't view rejection of that compromise as rejection of the founding principles. They saw it as a vindication of those principles.
> Is it enough to believe internally that you are vindicating what America's founding principles really were in order to be able to criticize the actual beliefs of the founding fathers without "cancelling America"?
If you want to make the argument that "gun rights are incompatible with the founding principles, as articulated in the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, etc." then that's a fine argument to make. That was the same kind of argument Lincoln and the Republicans made in arguing to end slavery. But that's very different from saying "it doesn't matter what gun rights are a principle articulated by the founders because those guys owned slaves and we don't need to defer to the principles they articulated." That's trying to cancel America.
But what they collectively agreed to and wrote down was a pro-slavery document. It drastically boosted the electoral power of plantation states by counting slaves. It enshrined a national mandate to hunt down and recover slaves who escaped to the north. The one part of the Constitution Article V prohibits amending is the moratorium on slave importation laws!
Clearly, despite whatever lip service they felt they needed to pay to their forefathers, Lincoln's Republicans sharply reconsidered the consensus of the founding fathers, tore up the old rules, and remade them.
And whatever deference you want to give to Lincoln's political rhetoric over his actions, I don't see how you can muster any similar defense for the 19th Amendment.
And, respectfully: so long as the path we take to reaching a reconsideration of the 2nd Amendment --- a reconsideration supported by a pretty big faction of constitutional scholars! --- follows the rules in the Constitution, nothing has been "canceled". We're using the tools we've been provided specifically for the purposes they were provided for.
> But what they collectively agreed to and wrote down was a pro-slavery document. It drastically boosted the electoral power of plantation states by counting slaves. It enshrined a national mandate to hunt down and recover slaves who escaped to the north.
This reading is illogical and ahistorical. Illogical because there is a logical difference between a document that enshrines slavery as an animating principle, and one that contains compromises with slavery to preserve the fledging union between the free states and the slave states. The Constitution is the latter kind of document.
To address your specific example of "boosting the electoral power of plantation states," for example, you have it precisely backwards. Today Constitution apportions votes based on the number of "persons" in each state. Then, as now, that includes every person, whether or not they can vote or otherwise have legal rights. And nobody disputed that enslaved persons were persons (and that is how the 1789 Constitution treats them--it distinguishes between "free persons" and "all other persons"). Therefore, the baseline was for each enslaved person to count fully towards representation of the slave states. The free states argued that enslaved persons should be excluded from the count because under the laws of the slave states, they were treated like property. That argument succeeded in part, and the compromise operated to reduce the power of the slave states.
> Clearly, despite whatever lip service they felt they needed to pay to their forefathers, Lincoln's Republicans sharply reconsidered the consensus of the founding fathers, tore up the old rules, and remade them.
What did Lincoln reconsider? Did they reconsider federalism, gun rights, bicameral legislature? There are a whole host of principles underlying the Constitution, the virtues of which were extolled at length in the Federalist Papers. Did he reconsider any of those? What they reconsidered was a compromise that enabled certain states to retain slavery, but which didn't serve as a foundation for anything else in the Constitution. As Frederick Douglas observed, it took almost no revision to the Constitution itself to eliminate slavery. The 13th/14th/15th amendments were all directed at preventing the south from re-establishing slavery and protecting newly freed people.
> And, respectfully: so long as the path we take to reaching a reconsideration of the 2nd Amendment --- a reconsideration supported by a pretty big faction of constitutional scholars! --- follows the rules in the Constitution, nothing has been "canceled". We're using the tools we've been provided specifically for the purposes they were provided for.
We are cancelling one of the most foundational aspects of rule of law, which is: what did the people who wrote this legal document think these words meant? People designed a system with inter-locking rules. They had a design! What does "freedom of speech" mean? What does "freedom of the press mean?” What does "the right to bear arms" mean? If we can disregard what the people who wrote those words thought they meant, because those people owned slaves--if that becomes a valid mode of argumentation when it comes time to applying those rules--then the notion of constitutional governance would become a farce.
To appreciate the problem that arises, compare to how the German constitution handles things: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1.... In Germany, there is an explicit hierarchy of structural and substantive principles that guide constitutional interpretation. For example, Germany is a federal republic, and Germany’s constitutional court interprets the basic law with an express eye to considering federalism concerns, and related concerns such as separation of powers, etc. They take it very seriously over there. In US constitutional scheme, we rely on our understanding of the framers’ Constitutional design to effectuate these principles and serve that same purpose. If we can dismiss the framers’ deliberate design because of their moral shortcomings, then it would become trivial to eviscerate these principles. At that point I’d demand a new constitutional convention because what would be left wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.
First, let me just say that it's rarely a pleasure for me to write a brief comment and get an essay in response, but I'm always glad to get one from you, and I appreciate you taking the time.
Having said that: no, I think you have this pretty much wrong. I took the time to read Sandefur's National Review article, and while I don't find much of what he writes persuasive, I also don't think his argument can be conscripted as cleanly as you suppose it can be.
Sandefur is a biographer of Frederick Douglass and writes about what F.D. believed to be a viable legal argument for constitutional abolition of slavery. Sandefur acknowledges that historians find many of these arguments strained; for instance: the Slave Trade Clause doesn't mention slavery, just "importation of persons", and the Fugitive Slave Clause mentions only "persons held to service or labor". That's interesting and all, but there's a reason the Fugitive Slave Clause is a proper noun: it was talking about slavery. Meanwhile: at the time, F.D.'s arguments didn't work. We had to fight a war to get rid of slavery. Lincoln had to preempt the constitution to eliminate slavery.
I don't dispute that compromise with northern abolitionists forced the framers to couch their language more carefully than they would have otherwise. But then: the author of the tweet you're talking about also didn't blot everyone's faces out. And the fact that there were convicted abolitionists among the framers makes it all the more notable that the document they ultimately ratified protected the institution of slavery, so much so that slavery had to be abolished by name in the 13th Amendment.
Your three-fifths compromise argument makes my point for me: as I said, abolitionists wanted slaves to count zero. Slavers fought to have their chattel property counted. Historians appear to accept that the result of this --- padding southern-state representation with slaves --- strengthened and prolonged the institution of slavery.
All of these arguments, by the way, seem reasonable! It's an interesting debate! My answer to "have Volokh and the National Review refuted the 1619 Project" is not the same as my answer to "have they shown the constitution of the Fugitive Slave Clause to be an anti-slavery document". But, more importantly: just the fact that we even have to have this debate, and to rewrite the story of US history most of us were taught as children, is a pretty strong indication that what we're talking about isn't a revolutionary reconsideration of the founding principles of the country.
Using the tools the framers gave us to bring the Constitution into line with our current principles isn't a refutation of the framers, any more than it was when we gave women the vote. You don't need to wait to demand a constitutional convention! Generate the support you need and do it now! That's the point of an amendable constitution.
(I don't think 2A is going to get amended at all, for what it's worth. But it's also the case that people smarter than both of us, including some who've sat on the Supreme Court, reject the way it's currently interpreted. I think it's a dumb amendment, and I love this country and its system of government.)
It is an attention to argue that the founding principles of this country are open to legitimate debate and that people who love America can hold that some of them were simply wrong without loving America any less.
What I don't get is this newfound attempt to argue that what we once called the Great Experiment is immune from criticism, to portray the success of America as an inevitable result of the holy prophets who gave us the Constitution on stone tablets and not the work of men who made mistakes and learned from them.
> It is an attention to argue that the founding principles of this country are open to legitimate debate and that people who love America can hold that some of them were simply wrong without loving America any less.
So you agree that it's an attempt to attack the founding principles.
> What I don't get is this newfound attempt to argue that what we once called the Great Experiment is immune from criticism, to portray the success of America as an inevitable result of the holy prophets who gave us the Constitution on stone tablets and not the work of men who made mistakes and learned from them.
Nobody is saying that the founding principles are "immune from criticism." But they are the bedrock on which our country is built. And they warrant more deference than the kind of arguments Parsa is making. Parsa's ad hominem is not a logically valid basis for criticizing the founders' principles regarding gun rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem. The founding principles deserve better than that.
Societies need shared principles. When I became a U.S. citizen, I took an oath to "support and defend the Constitution." What does that mean? To me, that means buying into the basic premises of our republic. Free speech, freedom of religion, protection of private property, equality before the law. And yes, also the right to bear arms. Those principles aren't immune from criticism, but to make society workable the burden for doing so must be high. A functioning society can't relitigate its founding principles with every routine policy debate. But that's exactly what Parsa's argument invites. If we shouldn't give full effect to the second amendment because many founders were slaveholders, we can cast aside every constitutional principle for the same reason. Federalism, private property, free speech--we get to relitigate everything on a blank slate.
And they warrant more deference than the kind of arguments Parsa is making.
The argument is practically an anodyne American political discourse cliché and you're treating it as some kind of important and concern-worthy attack on the foundations of the US social order. How is that warranted? Here's an example from a comedy movie of the early 90s, itself set in 1976:
He could believe the sentiment has reached some kind of popular fever pitch, though it'd be hard to reconcile that with the Long Hot Summer of '67. When the red dots on JPEGs turn into political assassinations, it'll be easier for me to see this moment as somehow uniquely disruptive.
The Constitution you took an oath to defend includes a mechanism for altering it, which is why we no longer have chattel slavery, why women can vote, why we vote for senators, why we have a federal income tax, and why we have presidential term limits, all of which contravene consensus principles among the founders.
You could even litigate some of these changes --- maybe it's a bad thing that we directly elect senators! --- and your argument still fails, because to survive, it has to establish that "fuck the beliefs of these old dead white guys" is a uniquely disruptive idea, when in fact it's an idea we've had over and over again throughout our history.
> The Constitution you took an oath to defend includes a mechanism for altering it, which is why we no longer have chattel slavery, why women can vote, why we vote for senators, why we have a federal income tax, and why we have presidential term limits, all of which contravene consensus principles among the founders.
Sure. If people want to amend the Constitution to get rid of the second amendment, have at it. I’m not talking about attempts to amend the Constitution or argue in favor of such amendments.
But you don’t have to amend the constitution to whittle the second amendment (or any other constitutional principle) down to nothing as a matter of practice. (Look how we’ve created a fourth branch of government, the largest of them all, without ever amending their constitution.) And if you can’t reference “here’s what the people who wrote this thought ‘the right to bear arms’ meant and why it’s important,” than you enable whittling it down to nothing.
> because to survive, it has to establish that "fuck the beliefs of these old dead white guys" is a uniquely disruptive idea, when in fact it's an idea we've had over and over again throughout our history.
It’s always been a terrible idea, and it scares me every time it mutates into a new and terrible form. Civilized countries don’t work this way. You routinely hear ad hominem attacks on federalism whenever it gets in the way of some attempt to impose nationwide rules. But we’re hardly the only federal republic. Somehow, Canada and Germany manage to take federalism seriously. They don’t give it lip service, they give it due weight. And they manage to govern while accommodating federalism concerns instead constantly re-litigating such a foundational concept.
I think you're just reading the rhetoric differently than I do. I don't read "these dead white dudes were slavers, so we should ignore the constitution". I read "these dead white dudes were slavers, so we should fix the constitution."
Many (maybe most!) of the changes the left would prefer for the constitution are things I wouldn't support. But then, that strongly suggests few other people will support them either, so I'm not too wound up about them. Adrian Vermuele genuinely and non-ironically believes that the constitution should be reorganized around the Catholic church, and he's got tenure from Harvard Law! I don't worry too much about his batshit ideas either, because of all the theocracies we could have, the Catholic one is among the least fun, and nobody is going to support it.
It's good that we can bat the ideas back and forth, though, if only to spot the bad ones! Vermeule and Deneen? Bad! Free cheeseburgers for everyone this Friday! But less reverence for the moral principles of slavers? I could be convinced!
Colin Kaepernick Tweeted today that 'July 4th is a Celebration of White Supremacy'.
This is an existential attack on the nation by a popular figure defended and support by most of the press and major international corporations.
I don't have the reference, but yesterday, in response to an arguably racist Tweet about a white person doing something within the range of normal, but being interpreted as negative, the top Tweet response from a Black woman with over 10K likes was simply 'White people are a disease'. Nobody though to take this down as 'hate speech it seems'. This is definitely an 'existential' statement about the system, not just the narrower BLM ideal of rectifying police injustice etc..
There is a legit movement to rectify past wrongs obviously, but there are definitely existential aspects to this that cannot be ignored.
So those are very populist examples, but there are definitely more foundational intellectual movements afoot as well.
'Cancel America' is sadly, a thing, mixed in with all the other things.
I'll debate existential attacks with people who know what the word "existential" means, but not with people who think the term could apply to a Colin Kaepernick tweet.
So I'll ignore the ugly ad-hominem and spell out in very basic terms why Colin's words are very powerful and such narratives will have 'existential' consequences, so that a child could understand.
Colin is a very popular figure in America, far more so than most politicians or news anchors, for example. Celebrities such as him have quite immense power to influence popular opinion, if they chose to.
If you have a look here at Google Trends, he's not quite as popular as 'the brand that defined brands' - Coca-Cola - but almost [1]. Right now he's in the same 'league' as Coke. That's a big deal.
He took a 'bold' statement some time ago and was a global lightning rod for the press, he's now a 'known' figure in many places even outside America.
When he 'took a knee' to take a stand against police brutality, there were some who took umbrage because he was standing against the flag, which is a national symbol, not really a symbol of policing. At the same time he courted obvious controversy, though in support of a legitimate cause, he could plausibly defend his actions as merely just antagonising against police brutality. I'm a little bit cynical, but it's definitely reasonable.
Culture wars ensue.
The debate, to the extent that it's about the nature of police fairness, or police aggression, or even possibly the nature of policing - is all within the framework of normal concern. It's big, but it's the kind of things nations deal with.
However - making a statement such as 'July 4ht is a Celebration of White Supremacy' is obviously a statement of a completely different order.
Colin is saying the National Celebration of the USA is a Celebration of White Supremacy - which implies very directly that the state is, promotes, and defines White Supremacy.
This rhetoric isn't really about 'police brutality' anymore - it's a fundamentally different way of perceiving America. And since he's not some random Tweeter - he has a huge following, a lot of people hugely sympathetic all over the world esp. in the press, and major brands that support his cause, namely Nike, Netflix, and probably others - his views will resonate.
That major industrial constituents, popular brands and sports figures, and most of the media apparatus are willing to go along with his statements, which as a reminder, cast America as state of 'White Supremacy' - definitely implies have 'existential' consequences for America.
FYI 'existential' as it relates to the very nature or 'existence' of a thing, in this case 'America'.
When Nike, CNN, and Netflix are 'ok' with 'July 4th is a Celebration of White Supremacy', we have evidence of a very broad movement by some to completely dismantle the nature of what America is. I believe it's mostly on the fringe, and that most people sympathetic to issues such as 'police brutality' are not really interested in a fundamentally new America, but nevertheless, their acquiescence to radical positions such as 'America is a state of White Supremacy' is obviously going to embolden more of this.
The rhetoric is all over the place including important institutions ostensibly defending Truth.
Near where I live, Concordia University has this new program to 'decolonize light' [2]. Yes, you read that correctly. Millions of dollars of tax money, at a respected institution to decolonize the very idea of light as in 'light waves' and 'physics' because the objective reality in which we use to try to understand the material world is 'Colonialist'.
So let's compare to the Colin scenario.
Having a Uni. program to try to get a better understanding of Aboriginal history and culture, and maybe to perceive how they thought about the world, is interesting. Controversial maybe, but definitely within the bounds of academic thought. This would be Colin 'taking a knee against police brutality'.
But starting a program to very literally put 'Aboriginal Wisdom' and their 'interpretation of light' on equal footing with what is just an objective, material view (and has nothing to do with 'Western' or 'Colonial) - is an existential challenge to the institution itself.
Concordia University is now promoting completely arbitrary 'make believe' as of equal merit to objective science, physics no less, obviously for political and social reasons, having nothing at all to do with any kind of Science, in any meaning of the word.
So an institution designed to help bring forth the Enlightenment, is now chartered to do literally the opposite: promoting made up rubbish as 'Truth'. I'm fully supportive of cultural and religious studies, in their place. But this would be like having the 'Biblical Study of Physics' as in 'How Noah's Ark Was Able To House All The World's Animals' - and post that up as 'Science' on par with 'Colonial Science'.
Finally, I will add as another little example, of which there are many: "Faith in Whiteness: Free Exercise of Religion as Racial Expression Khaled A. Beydoun*" [3]
So this is a deeply bigoted and racist rant, passed off as academic material, and published in a respected legal journal, that attempts to conflate the challenges of the justice system in the 1950's, with - you guessed it - White Supremacy.
Were 'respected' academic to point out that people of different racial backgrounds faced challenges in American courts, and by the way, courts all over the world, and that this is worthy of consideration - this would be like Colin 'taking a knee' to draw attention to some special cause.
But it's not. The racist author, who ironically labels himself an export on Islamophobia, writes mostly about a vague and evil concept of 'Whiteness' as the 'root cause' of the issues. In a paper with quite a number of references, he doesn't ever bother to try to define what 'Whiteness' really even is (other than that it's vile and evil), and of course, completely ignores the fact that racial inconsistency is not an American, or even 'White', phenom. And of course he doesn't bother to indicate that Justice Systems of European nations tend to actually have a considerable degree of integrity with respect to most other parts of the world. But that's nit-picking.
His treatise is not like 'taking a knee' or 'BLM', it's more akin to saying that 'America is a state of White Supremacy' - again, an 'existential' re-articulation of what the nation is. He is a tenured prof, this is published in a respected legal journal.
So there are a few examples of forces promoting a fundamentally different, antagonistic view of America, backed by highly 'legitimate' institutions, credentials, governments, major brands, popular figures, the press, and considerable budgets - all the while leveraging the goodwill of a lot of regular people who would be happy to support more classical progress, but who wouldn't otherwise agree with statements like 'America's National Holiday is a Celebration of White Supremacy'.
That almost nobody would agree with Colin's bigotry, and that obviously quite a substantial number would be truly offended, and that he faces absolutely no consequences, is a good measure of where the balance of popular power on such issues currently resides.
This is not about taking down Confederate Statues - that's a normal 'debate' if you want to call it that. It's about taking down George Washington, then Lincoln, the Flag, and everything else.
For many, just recently "White Supremacy" now equates to "Western Supremacy" which is left to the readers imagination. I suspect that, for example, advocating for democracy, defending the idea of innocent until proven guilty, criticism of repressive regimes, promoting free enterprise or espousing about the sanctity of the individual, or perhaps just Christianity could be seen as promotion of western standards and therefore a supremacist. Where before a white supremacist was just literally a neo nazi, now they might or might not be any politician from 30 years ago.
Like software, America is not the set of opinions it happens to have today but the process for changing those opinions. A healthy software development project has leadership that feels comfortable changing the software as they learn more about how people are using it. If, say, Kubernetes adds support for adding containers to an already-running Pod, that's not an attempt to "cancel" Kubernetes, it's an attempt to improve it.
The founders were, in fact, people who made serious errors of moral judgment, in the way the tweet you link points out. That's a reason we shouldn't, in fact, trust every opinion they had. We can still follow their opinions on process and principles - we can believe that all men were created equal, and take it to the logical conclusion that they didn't. We can believe in a representative democracy with certain features. We can believe in the various branches of government. We can believe, as they did, that people with their facilities of reason can govern better than any king with divine right.
If you really think that admitting that the founders owned slaves is an attack on the heart of America and that you cannot love America without agreeing with the founding fathers about slavery, well, that's the first good argument I've heard for canceling America - but you're the one making it.
> The founders were, in fact, people who made serious errors of moral judgment, in the way the tweet you link points out. That's a reason we shouldn't, in fact, trust every opinion they had. We can still follow their opinions on process and principles - we can believe that all men were created equal, and take it to the logical conclusion that they didn't. We can believe in a representative democracy with certain features. We can believe in the various branches of government. We can believe, as they did, that people with their facilities of reason can govern better than any king with divine right.
Agreed. Add to that separation of powers, federalism, limited government, protection of private property, gun rights, free speech, religious freedom, etc. Because those are also principles that the country is built upon.
> A healthy software development project has leadership that feels comfortable changing the software as they learn more about how people are using it.
Your software analogy is very good, but it supports my point, not yours. Software, like our country, is built on structural principles. Kubernetes is built on containerization. UNIX is based on exposing everything as a file. L4 is based on various principles associated with microkernels. Those principles transcend any specific features. For example, you can argue against systemd on the basis that it contradicts the UNIX principle of having small, independent programs that each do one thing. We shouldn't be able to attack those principles through ad hominem attacks on the people who articulated them.
> If you really think that admitting that the founders owned slaves is an attack on the heart of America
That's not what the tweet is doing. Read the whole thing. The tweet is invoking that fact to attack one of the founding principles, specifically gun rights.
Apply your software analogy to the logic of the tweet, say in the context of ReiserFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS. ReiserFS has a design principle that various kinds of metadata are stored in a "single, combined B+ tree keyed by a universal object ID." That principle permeates the structure of the whole file system. Is it proper to attack that principle by saying "Hans Reiser murdered his wife?" That's exactly the sort of reasoning in the tweet.
Agreed. Add to that separation of powers, federalism, limited government, protection of private property, gun rights, free speech, religious freedom, etc. Because those are also principles that the country is built upon.
The framers didn't believe in limited government. They didn't even incorporate their own bill of rights into the states! Their successors had to do it for them! The framers were concerned about limiting the federal government. And the people concerned about making sure the Constitution affirmatively protected religion? Yeah, those'd be the antifederalists. The only thing the Constitution says about religion is that the government should be kept the hell away from it.
These are nitpicks, but I think they're important, because the argument you're constructing uses terms that are used by American conservatives, and in that context they mean very different things. The American right seeks to limit all government, laboratories of democracy be damned. Would the framers wouldn't have batted an eyelash at the idea that a state constitution might impinge on the second amendment? Was it unusual for locales to prohibit firearms at the time?
Gun rights aren’t a founding principle; the second amendment only applied to militias. Previous drafts of it, as well as the Federalist papers make this clear.
I think this is not an uncommon opinion and it’s becoming more and more mainstream. And that sort of thinking is an attempt to cancel America. It’s not just saying that America has done certain bad things and we need to fix them. It’s saying that the founders were bad so we get to relitigate everything. America can always be improved, but you can’t just slap the label “America” on whatever grab-bag of ideas you want. America is an opinionated nation (in the sense of “opinionated software”). And there is an ongoing movement to cancel those opinions.