“Original sources!” American History professor T.K. Barton exhorted us, a cigarette always dangling from his mouth as he lectured. We Colorado College students were held captive more by the question of when the lengthening stalk of ashes might fall to the floor than by the lecture itself most days, but T.K. got us to pay attention. “Don’t tell me what some numbskull thought Thomas Jefferson said. Tell me what Thomas Jefferson said himself,” Barton insisted.

It’s still a good lesson for journalists, and for all of us trying to sift the truth from the chaff of information and disinformation and opinion and self promotion out there. Listen to what the real people involved are saying, not to the talking heads. More than anything, go back every so often and listen to what our founders said.

An old colleague of mine, Thomas Ricks, a former military reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, decided to take that admonition literally a few years ago and ask the question:  Is our nation what it was supposed to be, what the founders hoped it would be? What kind of country have we become?

He went to the original sources of the country itself, in other words, to try to figure out if the country we live in is what they intended.

It’s an even better question at the end of 2020, a year that saw a challenged election, a pandemic that has killed more Americans than died in combat in World War II, and a year of racial protests to rival the civil rights era.

Is this the America the founders dreamed of?

Ricks’ answer, laid out in his new book “First Principles,” is decidedly mixed.

“I think they [the founders] would be pleased to see the machine they designed has proven both durable and flexible,” Ricks wrote.

The founders would marvel that their first principle that “all men are created equal” still drives the country, and that the right to equality before the law has expanded dramatically beyond what was originally imagined, Ricks believes.

“Over the last 150 years there has been progress in expanding the franchise, so that women and nonwhites now exercise far more political power than the founders envisioned.”

At the same time, Ricks thinks the founders would be appalled at how money has come to dominate American politics. “They did not design the country to be an oligarchy, governed by the rich few,” Ricks found. “Most would have deemed such an outcome inconsistent with being a republic.”

“Property monopolized or in the Possession of a few is a Curse to Mankind,” John Adams once said. “We should preserve not an Absolute Equality. – this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme Poverty, and all from extravagant Riches.”

After seeing how coronavirus has attacked the poor, and Black and Hispanic populations so much worse than others, the founders would probably admonish us that we have still have a long ways to go.

And Ricks sees in our politics now an acute loss of the first principle of all first principles – virtue.

Virtue meant public spiritedness to the founders, putting the common good over your own interests, principle above “faction,” by which they meant party. Virtue is something we don’t talk about much anymore, but back in revolutionary times, the founders used the word “virtue” more often than “democracy” or “republic.”

Without a focus on the public good, the common interest over self interest, the founders feared American democracy would suffer the same fate as those of the Romans and Greeks: institutions would fail, civilization wither, and tyrants reign.

“Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” George Washington wrote in his farewell address. 

The coronavirus in particular reminds us that our country still needs to dedicate itself above all to the “public welfare:” the health of everyone, not just the people we agree with most. The constitution twice mentions “the general welfare” as the supreme law. “With that in mind,” Ricks observes, “Americans need to put less emphasis on the … rights of the individual and more on the rights of people as a whole.”

The founders believed that to be truly free was more than a matter of pursuing individual interests unimpeded, it was to share in self-government, to have a real voice in shaping the forces that govern our lives. Freedom is not just from things, it’s also freedom to meaningfully contribute to the common good.

The only thing that can really go wrong with this whole experiment, the founders believed, is if we don’t contribute, if we neglect the care and feeding of our democracy.

“More than anything else, I have learned in researching this book that America is a moving target, a goal that must always be pursued but never quite reached,” Ricks concluded. “There is little certain about our nation except that it remains an experiment that requires our serious and sustained attention.”

With his cigarette bobbing, Professor Barton used to tell us students emphatically that the beauty of the American system was that it enshrined an unfinished argument, without resolving that argument. More government, less government? More freedom, or more equality? Back and forth we could argue and tinker and evolve, without ever breaking the framework. The checks and balances that keep us arguing are the best feature of our government, he told us, not a flaw.

“With a little luck,” Barton used to lecture us excitedly, “the argument will rage forever and ever!”

And then those ashes would fall to the floor.