Neustadt Lecture 'Founders Chic: Why Americans Think the Founding Fathers Have All the Answers'

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Professor David Sehat - Americans love the Founding Fathers, and American politicians constantly invoke them. Listen to American political debate for any length of time and you will hear the Founders enlisted in support of all manner of things: limited government, gun rights, progressive taxation, and more. But why do American politicians do this? And why does it work with the American electorate?

In this lecture, David Sehat dates the origins of the phenomenon to the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At a time of political strain and transformation, Roosevelt wrapped himself in the American Founders and, in turn, started the fight over the Founders and their ideals that we continue to see today.

Professor David Sehat is a cultural and intellectual historian of the United States. He writes broadly on American intellectual, political, and cultural life. He is the author of The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (Simon and Schuster, 2015) and The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford, 2011; updated edition 2015), which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.