Barton Swaim’s “What the Founders Didn’t Trust,” in the July 1 Wall Street Journal online edition and the July 2 print edition, treats the 18th-century American Founders as a unified philosophical school whose “anthropology of original sin” licenses a specific 2026 policy program: a unitary-executive Supreme Court decision that consolidates regulatory power in the hands of whatever populist president happens to be in office. The op-ed runs roughly twelve hundred words; this column walks through six passages where the technique is deployed. I drafted Founders’-anthropology columns along these lines in the 2010s. I knew what the form was for. What I did not know, in the years I was drafting them, was that the form would end up licensing a Supreme Court decision in 2026.
Ponder a wonderful passage in Paul Johnson’s “A History of the American People” (1997). Noting the “dismal succession of nonentities” to take the job of British prime minister from 1763 to 1782, Johnson observes that “this might not have mattered quite so much if the men they faced across the Atlantic had been of ordinary stature, of average competence and character.” As it was, “the generation that emerged to lead the colonies into independence was one of the most remarkable group of men in history—sensible, broad-minded, courageous, usually well educated, gifted in a variety of ways, mature, and long-sighted, sometimes lit by flashes of genius.” Johnson calls the American Founders “the Enlightenment made flesh, but an Enlightenment shorn of its vitiating French intellectual weaknesses of dogmatism, anticlericalism, moral chaos, and an excessive trust in logic.”
— Op-ed, opening paragraph
The load-bearing quote is what we used to call the passage that gets dropped at the top of the column to do the work the rest of the argument needs done, before the reader has had time to notice what is being framed. The WSJ catalogue I helped build has it under frame-engineered relabeling, A.1. The op-ed needs the Founders to be a unified philosophical school with a distinct “anthropology” if the rest of the argument is going to land. The Johnson passage is doing that work in paragraph one.
The post-2000s Founders historiography does not let Johnson stand. Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969; revised with a new preface by UNC Press in 1998) argued that the American Revolution was a “republican” revolution and one of the great utopian movements in American history, with intellectual roots running through ancient Greece and Rome, English commonwealth thought, and the Scottish-Enlightenment political science of Hume and Ferguson — not the Christian theological-anthropological tradition the column deploys as the Founders’ philosophical school. The phrase “Enlightenment shorn of its vitiating French intellectual weaknesses” is the no-true-Scotsman move in its most efficient form: the American Enlightenment is defined as that-which-is-not-French, and the work of engaging the American Founders’ relationship to the French and Scottish sources — Montesquieu’s separation of powers is the structural spine of the Constitution, Hume’s political economy runs through Hamilton’s manufacturing reports — is never done.
Such a collection of statesmen might have been expected to create a government rooted in the doctrine that man naturally seeks the good. The French, under the spell of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, built their revolution on his theory that man comes into the world pure and only encounters moral defilement from “society.” The triumph of the American Founders lies in their having done the opposite. The doctrine of original sin—and its implication that humans tend toward rank self-interest and degeneracy—animated every part of the constitutional structure the Founders erected. Arguments about the depth of their religious convictions miss the point. Even the skeptics and deists among them, of whom there were few, happily adopted Christianity’s moral outlook.
— Op-ed, second section
The motte-and-bailey move — the motte is that the Founders were Christian-influenced men, which the historical record supports; the bailey is that the Founders’ constitutional design is best understood as an instantiation of Christian theological anthropology, which the historical record substantially complicates. The “happily adopted Christianity’s moral outlook” is the move’s surface. Jefferson’s edited Bible strips the miracles. Madison’s detailed notes on the 1787 Convention show a political operator working through interest-balancing, not theological anthropology. Hamilton was a deist. The unanimity claim is the load-bearing fabrication. The actual scholarship has the framers in a multi-year knife-fight over the meaning of republican government, the wisdom of a Bill of Rights, the scope of federal power, and the place of slavery in the new republic. The column needs them to be one thing so it can deploy them as one thing; the actual record has them as several things in a sustained argument.
The Rousseau contrast does additional work. The column needs the Founders to be the unified opposite of what the French did, so that the Founders’ anthropology licenses a specific set of contemporary policy positions by opposition. But the Founders’ relationship to the French Enlightenment was not opposition; it was selection. Montesquieu is the structural source of separation of powers. The Rousseauian reading of the Founders-as-anti-French-Enlightenment is the no-true-Scotsman at the level of national character — defining the American project as the negation of a foreign project, then licensing whatever the negation requires.
Madison famously observes in No. 51 that government’s existence itself testifies to the morally defective state of its subjects. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he writes. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Or Hamilton, in No. 15: “Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”
— Op-ed, third section
The quotes are real, verbatim, and they do say what Swaim says they say. The column is using the quotes to license a much broader claim: that the constitutional design as a whole rests on an “anthropology of original sin.” Madison No. 51 is a defense of separation of powers and checks and balances. Hamilton No. 15 is an argument for a stronger union under the proposed Constitution. Neither is a treatise on theological anthropology. The operator’s vocabulary for this is the quote-that-confers — a real, well-sourced passage gets deployed to license a much larger claim than the passage itself supports. The quote is doing consensus-work. The interpretation is not defended.
The receipts the column does not assemble: Madison in Federalist No. 10 — the philosophical anchor for the separation-of-powers tradition Swaim cites two essays later — adapts David Hume’s political science rather than anything in the Augustinian or Thomist line, per Douglass Adair’s 1956–57 demonstration in the Huntington Library Quarterly. Hamilton and Madison cite Blackstone for legal expertise and Montesquieu for separation of powers. Hume is in the canon these essays draw from; Augustine and the Church fathers are not turned to as principal sources. The two essays Swaim quotes are real political arguments for separation of powers and union. The interpretation he hangs on them is theological anthropology. The interpretation is doing the work; the essays are doing the citation.
What Swaim also leaves out is the part of the Founders’ actual record that would complicate his anthropology. Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufactures was a masterclass in industrial policy, subsidy, and state-directed economic development. The Founders didn’t just build a negative Constitution to block human mischief; they built a positive state to project power, absorb debt, and develop industry. By cherry-picking Federalist 51 and 15, Swaim creates a Founders-as-austerity-monks fiction. He takes “checks and balances” and relabels it “anti-statism,” ignoring that the checks and balances were designed to enable a strong, functional federal government to manage a continent — not to paralyze it.
Roughly the past 125 years of American government have departed from the Founders’ self-understanding. Woodrow Wilson and his Progressive heirs created an assemblage of government agencies whose technocratic managers bore no accountability to elected leaders. The expansion of social-welfare programs, begun by the New Deal and supercharged by the Great Society, hypothesized that recipients would use the dole as a chance to get ahead rather than a way to avoid productivity. American leaders in this period negotiated agreements with hostile foreign powers—Russia, North Korea, Iran—in the belief that generous treatment by the U.S. would coax those powers into better behavior. Socialism, rose-tinted as ever, beckons again today.
— Op-ed, fourth section
The “125 years” framing does the work. It positions the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and contemporary foreign-policy engagement as a single continuous “departure” from the Founders’ self-understanding. The framers of these programs were, in many cases, self-consciously invoking Founders’ authority: Wilson’s administrative-state vision was defended in constitutional terms; the New Deal’s defenders framed the contest as one over the Founders’ intent; the Great Society was explicitly defended as a fulfillment of the Founders’ commitment to equality. The column flattens 125 years of contested political theory into a single Rousseauian aberration.
The WSJ technique catalogue has an entry for this — the austerity-thrift archetype, §A.2. Suffering produced by preferred policies is reframed as character-building for the sufferers; the reader who benefits from the policies is allowed to feel that the policies are ennobling the ones who bear them. Here the move is: the welfare state is a Rousseauian departure from the Founders’ anthropology, so the people who suffered under welfare-state retrenchment were actually being returned to the proper anthropology of self-sufficiency. The technique works the same way in 2026 as it worked in 1981. The false-dichotomy shell game — the WSJ catalogue’s §A.6, strawman of progressive positions — runs in parallel: lump the New Deal, the Great Society, and diplomatic engagement with hostile powers into a single bucket labeled “gambles that human nature might repair itself,” so that defending any one requires defending all three.
The foreign-policy passage is a non-sequitur in a column ostensibly about the Founders’ anthropology. The engagement-with-rogue-states tradition is grounded in the post-1945 liberal-internationalist tradition, with which the Founders had no engagement. Swaim deploys the Founders’ anthropology as a rhetorical weapon against a foreign-policy position the Founders could not have addressed. The lineage is manufactured. The column asserts the lineage. The column does not document the lineage.
Some number of influencers on the American right, variously called postliberals or national conservatives, want to use industrial and social-welfare policy, formerly instruments of the left, for allegedly conservative ends. They place more faith in human nature than the Founders did. A note of hope: The Supreme Court this week signaled its sympathy with the Founders’ distrust of human nature by overturning Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the 1935 decision that endorsed the creation of all those independent, expert-led federal agencies.
— Op-ed, fifth section
The piece runs two audience segments in a single paragraph, and the structure is doing two pieces of work at once. To the long-standing editorial-page majority, the “postliberals” passage functions as discipline: the postliberals are out of bounds because they place “more faith in human nature than the Founders did.” To the post-2024 populist reader the editorial page is courting — and the July 2026 Trump v. Slaughter context is the operative backdrop — the Humphrey’s Executor passage functions as reassurance that the Supreme Court is on the editorial page’s side of the administrative-state question. The WSJ catalogue has an entry for this too — §A.3, the multiple-audience-targeting analytic — and the column runs it with high efficiency.
The “place more faith in human nature than the Founders did” is the line that does the work. The postliberals are being excluded from the Founders’ lineage on the precise ground that they have the wrong “anthropology.” This is the no-true-Scotsman move at the level of contemporary intra-coalition politics: articulating a “truly conservative” position by distinguishing it from a less-principled deviation. The NR catalogue’s §B.3 calls this the principled-conservatism pivot. In this case the less-principled deviation is the postliberal / national-conservative movement the WSJ Opinion apparatus has been engaged in active coalition-discipline against since the 2024 realignment. The Founders’ anthropology is being used to police the boundaries of what counts as legitimate liberty-frame politics in 2026 — at the precise moment when the liberty-frame coalition is being asked to ratify a unitary-executive ruling the Founders’ own constitutional design would have distributed across separated powers.
The postreligious belief in humanity’s essential goodness, together with the loss of any understanding of sin—quaint word!—was supposed to lead to a gentler, less judgmental world. It has done the opposite. Reject the doctrine of man’s depravity if you like; the world’s abundance of depravity still demands explanation. The revolutionaries in France explained it by making clergy, nobles and monarchy the sources of everybody’s woes. The Marxists blamed the bourgeoisie and capitalists. Their descendants today, similarly bereft of any conception of fallenness, pin the world’s ills on people who hold the wrong political views. When the authors of the Federalist Papers spoke of the “passions of men,” or of men consistently failing to behave like angels, they acknowledged themselves, too, as passion-prone and defective. The old understanding of man as inherently flawed had a humbling and leveling effect, just as the rejection of it has encouraged political actors across the West to treat their opponents as subhuman spreaders of evil. To recover a saner, less embittered politics may be as simple, and as difficult, as recovering the Founding Fathers’ anthropology.
— Op-ed, closing section
The piece constructs a single ideological lineage: Rousseau → French Revolution → Marx → Marxism’s “descendants today” → “people who hold the wrong political views” → “subhuman spreaders of evil.” The line is presented as if it were a documented intellectual tradition rather than as a rhetorical construction. The slippery-slope move — a chain from an 1789 event to a 2026 civilizational crisis, with no evidence supplied for any link in the chain — does the lineage-construction work. The NR catalogue’s §B.5 calls this the civilizational frame: a policy dispute is inflated from a set of specific disagreements into a civilizational crisis traceable to the rejection of a sacred tradition. Specific political actors cannot be argued with; the abstract category can be mobilized.
The “subhuman spreaders of evil” phrase is the editorial-page deployment of the dehumanization mechanism inverted: the column is critiquing dehumanization, but the construction of a single Rousseauian lineage from the French Revolution to contemporary political actors licenses the reader to identify the contemporary political actors with the Rousseauian lineage — and the Rousseauian lineage is, in this column’s terms, the source of all the modern world’s ills. The dehumanization critique is doing dehumanization work. The closing-line cadence — “To recover a saner, less embittered politics may be as simple, and as difficult, as recovering the Founding Fathers’ anthropology” — is engineered for retransmission. The WSJ catalogue’s §A.13 calls this the threat-inflation closer: the closing line inflates the contemporary political moment from a set of specific policy disagreements into a civilizational crisis, traceable to the rejection of the Founders’ anthropology. The threat-inflation closer is paired with the catalogue’s §A.5, the closing-line cadence, which designs the final sentence for take-home and lift-to-social-media.
So here is what the twelve hundred words actually do, taken together.
The piece opens with a Paul Johnson passage the post-2000s Founders historiography has substantially revised, and the column deploys the older Johnson synthesis as if it were still the field. The piece treats the Founders as a unified philosophical school when the actual record has them in a multi-year knife-fight over the meaning of republican government. The piece reads Madison No. 51 as a treatise on theological anthropology when Madison was making an argument for separation of powers — and when Madison’s Federalist No. 10 (per Adair) adapted Hume’s political science, not Augustine’s. The piece manufactures a lineage from Rousseau through Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and post-1945 foreign policy, and treats the Founders’ “anthropology of original sin” as if it were a settled philosophical truth rather than a contestable theological claim. The piece brackets the Founders’ actual institutional outputs — three-fifths, the fugitive-slave clause, the dispossession of indigenous nations running in parallel with the constitutional design — to license a 2026 policy program the dead men could not have endorsed.
The doctrine of original sin, in Swaim’s hands, is not a call for humility. It is a shield for the guys who already own the place. The editorial page’s column, timed two days after Trump v. Slaughter, is the legitimating instrument for a unitary-executive ruling that consolidates regulatory power in the hands of an executive whose documented public record includes calling political opponents “vermin,” demanding the mass deportation of citizens, and treating democratic losses as existential evil. The Founders’ anthropology is doing the philosophical cover for that project. This is the original sin scam: take a profound truth about human nature, twist it until it protects the exact people who are abusing that nature, and then have the nerve to call your opponents utopians for noticing.
The postreligious belief in humanity’s essential goodness was supposed to lead to a gentler world; instead, the rejection of it has encouraged political actors across the West to treat their opponents as subhuman spreaders of evil. To recover a saner politics requires recovering the Founding Fathers’ anthropology, which means recognizing that the men who wrote the Federalist Papers acknowledged themselves as passion-prone and defective.
We used to call this the priest’s blessing on the king’s theft. Today we call it constitutional originalism. The only thing that has changed is the quality of the tailoring. Swaim has built a majestic, sweeping narrative of American decline to justify a literal handover of the regulatory state to a single, highly polarized executive. He strips the Founders of their material interests, their class position, and their ownership of human beings, replacing all of that with a theological aura that justifies deregulation. It is a totalizing inversion of reality, designed to make the dismantling of democratic guardrails look like the defense of them. It is a sanctified racket.
The Founders distrusted human nature. The editorial page that just ran this piece places supreme faith in its own ability to dictate what the Founders thought. The original-sin column is itself an act of original goodness — faith in the operator, faith in the form, faith that the audience will not check the receipts. The anthropology of original sin, applied consistently, would extend to the editorial page itself. It is not extended. The mirror is the operation.
— Phukher Tarlson