We’re trying to live up to this pseudo-ideal we’ve inherited from the founding fathers of non-partisanship and rigid adherence to principle – we’re trying to live up to a phantom, because the founding fathers were not like that at all.

Historian David Sehat explains how America’s current, fundamentally incoherent portrait of the founding fathers shuts down honest discussion of the nation’s past and present, and why history reveals America’s founders as divided, compromising, contradictory politicians.

David is author of The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible from Simon & Schuster.