For the site today, Jay Cost, author of Democracy or Republic? The People and the Constitution, has written a characteristically thoughtful rebuttal to a trollish article by Michael Lind (published, unsurprisingly, in Compact), in which Lind urges Americans to “Forget the Founding Fathers.”

Cost takes Lind’s argument — that looking to the principles of the American founding for guidance is largely a waste of time, and that those who do so are in a “cult” — more seriously than it deserves. It seems designed to inflame. But Cost’s rebuttal transcends Lind’s rhetoric. At a time of widespread consensus that there is something wrong in our national life, it’s not cultlike behavior to look to the Founding for restoration. “If states are like bodies that tend to decay and a prudent strategy is to arrest the decline through a return to original principles, then the Constitution becomes an essential document for understanding what we should do next,” Cost writes.

Trying to take Lind at least as seriously as Cost does, I can identify a few other flaws in his argument. For one, Lind appears to imply that there is nothing exceptional about our country. He writes that “the cult of the American founding has no parallels in other English-speaking democracies,” giving the examples of Britain and Australia, nations whose citizens tend not to care much for those who set down the principles by which they are governed. Well, maybe they should care. The fact that America is distinct in this regard is not something to find embarrassing, as some kind of Anglosphere deviationism, but something of which to be proud.

It is also not new. Lind claims that “the cult of the Founders in its present form is only a few generations old.” He notes that, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, “Republicans honored Alexander Hamilton and disparaged Jefferson; Democrats did the reverse.” Why this is cited as evidence that Americans after the Founding cared little for it is perplexing. It is, rather, evidence that the Founding set the terms for our political debate. As partisan differences took hold, partisans looked to the Founding’s principles as a way to hold their political opponents accountable and to set themselves as superior. It wasn’t always pretty. But it’s not evidence that the Founding’s importance diminished steadily over time and was only revived somewhat recently.

Lind has no choice but to acknowledge Abraham Lincoln as an exception even in the misleading portrait of post-Founding America that he attempts to paint. He admits that Lincoln, in the tradition of Henry Clay, called “for a return to the idealism of the founding period.” But Lind holds the following 1862 remarks by Lincoln as proof that he, too, thought we should not be bound by it:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the equation. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.

This is dubious on its own terms. Lincoln’s remarks in this speech follow a lengthy discussion of his proposed plan for gradual, compensated emancipation to end the ongoing Civil War. It is clear that Lincoln’s “quiet past” refers to the antebellum period, and the “stormy present” refers to the war tearing the nation asunder, a war he was trying to end. These are considerations of prudence that he is advocating, not alterations of principle.

Lincoln, who evidenced a reverence for the Founding during his entire public career, would never have endorsed the latter course. This is a man who, in one of his earliest public speeches (at age 29), called for “a reverence for the Constitution and laws.” Who in 1859 gave “all honor to Jefferson” for having “had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” And who, at Gettysburg in November 1863, described the United States as “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and the ongoing war as a test of whether “that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Abraham Lincoln’s dogmas were consistent: They were those of the American founding, with the Declaration as an “apple of gold” in the Constitution’s “picture of silver.” Lincoln’s example has provided a template for statesmen and citizens in the decades since.

Lind is right to reject the racialist strain that taints American history. But to cast the Founding as inseparable from prejudice is to ignore that some of the most profound challenges to it have been motivated by prejudice. Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, explained in 1861 that the fundamental belief of his government was that the American founding’s belief in equality was an “error.” As both a theoretician and a politician, Woodrow Wilson, a deeply racist man, likewise attacked the Founding. He chastised those of his fellow citizens who “have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776” and claimed, quite contrary to Lincoln, that “the Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day.” And from the other direction have come those statue-toppling mobs who claim the Founding is fundamentally racist, either because of the flaws of the Founders themselves or because the structure they bequeathed doesn’t discriminate sufficiently, in Ibram X. Kendi fashion, on behalf of the right people. Would Lind join their obliviating crusade?

This is not to say that the Founders, the Founding, or their principles are perfect. But the Founding itself ought rightly to remain the standard by which we measure our politics. What would that standard be otherwise? Correctly rejecting racialist thinking yet wrongly rejecting the Founding legacy, Lind is left adrift. The best he can do, aside from offering token praise of certain Founders’ views, is to invoke milquetoast social democracy as our national salvation. That is, he sees America’s national salvation in becoming less uniquely American. In this light, his inability to comprehend America’s tendency to revere the Founding becomes more intelligible. But it does not become any more defensible.

Two figures Lind references would have had something to say about his contempt for the American Founding. A young Abraham Lincoln would have seen in this disdain evidence that “the silent artillery of time” makes fealty to the Founding harder. But that same Lincoln entrusted to all of us the task of preserving what has been left to us. And Calvin Coolidge would have seen in Lind’s denunciation a familiar folly: a desire to progress beyond the Founding that masks a desire to return to older modes of governance. The truth of the Founding means that the “only direction” in which those who deny it “can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people,” Coolidge said. Lind is welcome to go backward. But the rest of us have no obligation to follow him.

Now both Cost and I have taken Lind’s inflammatory rhetoric more seriously than it deserves. But some things are worth defending however unseriously they are attacked. The American founding is one of them.