As Americans head to the polls on November 3rd, for some voters the very soul of the nation is at stake. Arguments from both Republicans and Democrats attempt to portray the other side as fundamentally un-American. The two sides invoke, in some form or another, the founders’ ideals to illustrate their point. Democrats declare that President Trump abuses the constitution and the rule of law, undermining the system of checks and balances the framers created. Meanwhile, the Republicans allege that Biden’s America would be anathema to the founders, portraying the Democrats as against religious freedom and proponents of tyrannical “big government.” But what exactly was the founders’ vision of America? And, moreover, does today’s republic hold up to it?

America was unique in its creation because of the founders’ disdain for oligarchy and aversion to dogma. True, the American electorate in 1776 could very well be described as an oligarchy of sorts, due to its limited number of electors (they had to meet stringent property qualifications and women and African Americans were barred from voting). But the founders envisioned a country that was not characterized by the rigidness of European aristocracy, nor its reluctance to challenge established conviction, but by radical innovation and merit. In short, they wanted a meritocracy: a land where anyone with talent and hard work could reach the pinnacle of success. The French statesman and philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville who visited America in the 1830s wrote in his famous treatise Democracy in America that no two generations in the United States could expect to hold on to their wealth; because of intense competition between the brightest individuals, an institutionalization of wealth—such as Europe’s nobility at the time—would be all but impossible in the young republic. In Thomas Jefferson’s own words in his letter to John Adams in 1813, America deserved to be governed by a “natural aristocracy” of citizens endowed with “virtue” and “talent,” not the “artificial aristocracy” of “wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” that characterized European monarchies. So powerful was the founders’ vision of equality of opportunity that it led directly to the notion of the American Dream—an ideal that made America a beacon for the ambitious across the world, and an emblem of freedom for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” drawn to its shores, as the poet Emma Lazarus put it. 

But unfortunately, this vision of America wanes. More and more of our top jobs in finance, industry, and government go to applicants from elite, private colleges with expensive entry fees only affordable for the richest families. Marriage has become tied closer to class, with interclass marriages decreasing drastically, leading to the formation of an educated elite that lives and works between itself. Social mobility has stagnated as income inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, reaches record highs. And our economy is increasingly captured by superstar firms—such as Google, Apple, and Amazon—with sprawling corporate empires that reach across multiple sectors, twisting the rules of free-market competition. The pandemic has supercharged all these trends and especially exacerbated racial inequality. (Native, Black, and Latino Americans are around two and a half times more prone to catching Covid-19 and nearly five times as likely to require hospitalization as white people; African Americans alone are more than twice as likely to die from the disease as white Americans.) What is more, the current president, Donald Trump, seems keener on exploiting polarized politics instead of tackling—or even acknowledging—the country’s problems.

Yet there remains hope. In this era of global confusion and rising authoritarianism, America still evokes dreams of success. The same radical disruption that characterized earlier times—the same spirit, the American spirit the founders championed in 1776—is not fully lost on us today. And despite the divisive nature of our current politics, we can still come together: the founders of this country were no strangers to confrontation. Despite George Washington’s warnings that a party system would divide the nation, even before he became president the intellectual pluralism mandated by democracy inevitably led to discord. There were those who wanted a radical break from Britain and those who simply wished for representation in parliament. There were those who wanted a constitution and a vigorous national government and those who resisted, favoring a loose confederation of states. If Americans today reflect somberly over the dismal state of contemporary politics, they need only look back to the presidential election of 1800—only the third presidential election in the nation’s history—when Jefferson’s supporters disparaged incumbent president John Adams as a “repulsive pedant,” and Adams’ partisans described Jefferson’s America as a country where “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”

The America of the founders was just as divisive as the one we have today; partisan bickering is no stranger to this nation. But the founders managed to come together—they managed to set their differences aside for compromise. In 1776 they mobilized against Britain; in 1787 they drafted a constitution; and after Jefferson won the election of 1800, Adams agreed to a peaceful transfer of power. If the founders could organize a defense against the world’s largest superpower, legislate what is essentially the world’s first constitution, and assure a peaceful transferal of power at the height of partisan animosity, surely we can put unity first as well. With luck, a Joe Biden presidency would replace the divisiveness of the Trump era with such patriotic solidarity, and Republicans and Democrats could come together as they have in the past. In doing so, we can tackle America’s rising oligarchism, and renew the founders’ vision of a country that champions merit, not status, achievements, not birth.