Can You Love America While Facing Its Hardest Truth?

In this special episode of our series on the American Founding, hosts Kathryn Johnson and law professors Ilan Wurman and Joshua Kleinfeld take on the hardest question about American patriotism: slavery.

Drawing on Ilan’s new book, The Constitution of 1789, they lay out what the Founders actually wrote about slavery — and what they deliberately left out. Almost without exception, the Founders viewed slavery as profoundly evil, though many of them did not match their behavior to their ideals. They designed the Constitution as a containment strategy: a set of political compromises meant to prevent slavery’s expansion and lead eventually to its extinction, not to sanctify or permanently entrench it. The South later abandoned the Founders’ understanding, developing the “positive good” theory of slavery that led to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision and helped trigger the Civil War.

The conversation then turns to today. The hosts push back against the 1619 Project and the broader progressive claim that America is uniquely and permanently defined by slavery. America is permanently defined by overcoming slavery. They ask what a non-propagandistic history actually requires — and what a mature patriotism looks like in light of it.

They close with the most personal question of all: Why do you love this country?

This is the rational — and based — discussion of the American Founding that you won’t hear anywhere else.

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