alt Hacker News> Just that those making the constitution weren't that good at it.
They were exceedingly good at it. In my country’s constitution we have all sorts of things from the american constitution, like due process, because we literally have no indigenous words for these concepts.
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And some other country might be liking those Founding Fathers concepts' even more.
So? Doesn't change the fact that they weren't very good with not letting class/race/gender/etc position influence their policy making.
And that's the claim we're discussing whether they've been good at, not whether they came up with some good new concepts like "due process" and "the right to free speech".
They had "due process" but they also had slavery.
They had "equal rights" and voting but not for poor not land-owning plebes or women.
They had "free speech" but also McCarthyism.
Their constitution didn't prevent laws describing how e.g. blacks can't sleep in the same hotels or go to the same schools as whites to be applied and be considered compatible with it.
And didn't prevent a globally huge per capita prison system, primarily targeting blacks, even today.
They were extremely good, but they were not near angelic geniuses gathered together and possessed of greater wisdom and capacity by virtue of that gathering than any people ever before or since, which is what many people who like to talk up the founding fathers would have.