 For those who predict the American experiment can't last, and who worry the social fabric is disintegrating at a time of rising political division, it's worth remembering that back when the ink had barely dried on the Constitution, the founding fathers were deeply pessimistic about the future of the country they had created. Hamilton called the Constitution a frail and worthless fabric. Washington lamented the growth of political factions. Adams thought a lack of civic virtue doomed the Republic. Jefferson watched sectional divisions between North and South with horror, calling the sacrifices made by the generation of 76 useless because it would be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons. My only consolation, he wrote, is to be that I live not to weep over it. Their pronouncements seem almost histrionic to the modern era. In Fears of a Setting Sun, Syracuse University professor Dennis Rasmussen wrestles with the founders' near-universal pessimism about the future of the country they created. Partly I think that's because they thought that so much was at stake. They really thought that the future of Republican government and the future of human liberty was riding on this American experiment, and so the potential failure of that experiment they thought would be a world historical calamity. I mean, they did have really grandiose hopes. You read what they've write, and they really think they're coming up with a new system that's going to secure liberty for the future that had never been done before. They're worried that what they think is this world historical achievement is going to fail. It's not just Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson. Virtually all of the founders who lived into the 19th century became disillusioned for one reason or another. Only one founder stood out as an exception. So I'll confess, I assumed that Madison would be disillusioned too. I initially set out to write a book about five disillusioned founders, but really his final years were ones of almost defiant optimism. Part of it is just temperament. He had a more even keeled temperament than the other founders did. Part of it was that he just expected less from politics than they did. He didn't have the sometimes grandiose or utopian hopes that some of the other founders did. And one of them really, I think, is just that he had lived so long. He's the one who outlives all the other founders. He lives until 1836. By the end of his life, the country had weathered a half century's worth of storms, and he thought, well, the longer it endures, the more durable it seems. Should Americans see the founders disillusioned as a sign that America's flawed beyond hope? After all, we are still beset by many of the fears the founders identified. I think the fact that their worries are still with us, but that the country is still with us, the Constitution is still with us, you could take in either of two directions. On the one hand, you could say, well, the country has lasted this long despite these problems. It's probably, as Madison suggested, going to last a good deal longer. We can live with these problems in a way that we sometimes don't think we can, right? We hear people pronounce the end of American democracy at every turn, and the fact that it hasn't ended in the past 230 years suggests that maybe Madison was right in the last a good deal longer. On the other hand, these problems probably aren't going away. We sometimes seem to think that with the right tweak to the political system, if we just get rid of the electoral college or the filibuster or whatever the pet worry is, then all will be right, then American politics will be fixed. But the fact that these problems have been with us since the very outset, since the founders themselves suggest that they might be more systemic, more baked in than we sometimes dare to hope.