Founders Maybe Weren’t Geniuses

Trump has proven you can never be skeptical enough

“Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness,” a seven-part sketch comedy series, delivers Larry David’s cynical, ornery take on American history. David appears Zelig-style at the center of famous, if highly fictionalized, historical events. He attempts to boot the hateful Mary Todd Lincoln from the White House after her husband’s assassination, lists complaints against King George III that didn’t make the Declaration, and steps in as Meriwether Lewis selling his boondoggle expedition to his wife. Sometimes he’s just “that guy” who annoys everyone — cutting in line at Depression-era soup kitchens, insulting Susan B. Anthony at her dinner party, whining at being left off the invite list to the Boston Tea Party. And just to show that satire is not dead, Trump's July 3 anti-communist rant from Mount Rushmore was not that far off the mark of Larry David’s sketch depicting Joe McCarthy’s crazed communist conspiracy-mongering that leaves his colleagues slack-jawed. In other settings, David reminds us that Americans’ obsession with technology comes with inescapable downsides (e.g., telephones that entrap us in pointless, interminable conversations; the petty, passenger-unfriendly rules of airline travel).

Plainly, Larry David is consumed with our current political nightmare. Throughout the series, he effectively drills down on a contradiction at the heart of our contemporary democracy: We lionize the Founding Fathers and fetishize our history, even as we recognize that their handiwork failed us in critical respects.

There is something deeply cathartic about watching Larry David as Democrat Samuel Tilden wig out (Episode 2) upon winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College in 1876. “No, no, I won, I won…. What the f**k is an electoral college? …What kind of country is that? … No, it’s not a democracy! Who made this up, the Electoral College, the Founding f**cking Fathers, what a bunch of morons!”

Amid the hilarity, the point is powerful: We could do with less veneration of every aspect of a system that has led to such plainly destructive results. Democrats would certainly get credit from their frustrated base (and the country at large) if they would occasionally show genuine outrage in response to outcomes that defy common sense. Instead of treating every constitutional jot and title as sacred, they might actually suggest we are not permanently consigned to live with the Founding Fathers’ shortcomings. If we idolized the imperfect architects of our system a little less, we might utilize the amendment process (not to mention exercise some legislative leeway) to avoid democratic train wrecks.

As amusing as many of the sketches are, Larry David’s tour de force comes in a sketch (also from Episode 2) featuring George Washington’s announcement that he will not be seeking a third term. In furtherance of the cause of democracy, he states he will suggest that future presidents not serve more than two terms. David mulls about in the crowd, then asks what would happen if a subsequent president declined the suggestion. Ah, says Washington, not a problem! The Congress and the US Supreme Court could pass an amendment to prevent someone from serving more than two terms. Yeah, but we could end up with a “narcissistic asshole” who doesn’t care about the Constitution, David counters. And what if the Supreme Court turns out to be a bunch of “yes men” and Congress “a bunch of pussies who care more about party than country”?

Washington becomes mildly agitated by the notion that such future characters of such low character could upset the Founders’ best-laid plans. He recommends that after every election, we would simply have a peaceful transfer of power with the loser accepting the results and endorsing the winner! Again, David pops up to point out that this wouldn’t help if we get a “sociopath” who instead would foment a revolution, someone who would enrich himself and his family at the expense of others, send troops into cities who kill fellow Americans, attack universities and the press, and even cheat at golf. Jimmy Kimmel deadpans from the crowd that he doesn’t see how a president, like a big baby, would possibly take time to attack critics. Washington, unnerved, maintains that we would never elect a president of such poor character.

David presses on, raising the possibility that a future president could be so depraved as to have a pedophile as his best friend. David taunts the crowd: “What if he were a deeply corrupt con man; a pathological liar who preys on people’s prejudice?” Washington becomes incredulous, slow to grasp the risk that the American people could be a “collection of dupes” easily manipulated by a pathological narcissist. The crowd begins yelling at one another, a brawl breaks out, and a despondent Washington looks out on the crowd, finally concluding: “We’re f**cked.”

The “sociopath” whom Larry David described has been popping up to torment us throughout the 250^th celebration, reminding us of voters’ folly in electing such a charlatan and flouting a system with limited, imperfect mechanisms to foil his efforts to sabotage our democracy. David’s comic brilliance helps distill the delicious interplay between, on one hand, the Founders — men of reason, skeptical of human nature…but perhaps not skeptical enough to anticipate the pure mendacity of a Donald Trump and the moral unseriousness of the masses — and, on the other hand, the realization of their worst nightmare in the person of Donald Trump.

For 250 years, we have relied excessively on the hope that democratic norms largely unsupported by legal coercion would hold the system together. But we aren’t obliged to keep gambling that our luck will hold, and that the villain at the center of our national trauma will self-destruct. We can cease to be passive observers constrained by an imperfect system that inherently favors the richest, most ruthless, and most corrupt. We would all benefit from a political system with more cranky, Larry David-esque provocateurs.

So we can thank him for a timely reminder: Greater irreverence and willingness to innovate a system created by very imperfect Founders may be precisely what we need to arrest our drift into an authoritarian dystopia.