>You’re complaining about where the founders didn’t follow their principles to their logical conclusions. But you overlook that you’re using the founders’ own principles to criticize how they fell short

Which is irrelevant, since it's not their influence on modern principles and their related concepts that's in question, but to whether "a constitution interpreted precisely as written by wealthy, landed 18th century white men disenfranchises every person who is not a wealthy, landed 18th century white man, roughly in proportion to how much they share in common with such a person.

It's precisely to the degree we don't interpet the consitution "as written by wealthy, landed 18th century white men", and, for example, extend it to women, blacks, the non land-owning poor, etc, that's

So, again: if you lived in a place that interpreted the constitution exactly in the way the "wealthy, landed 18th century white men" wrote it and interpreted it, e.g. as not incompatible with no-universal vote, few women rights, slavery and seggregation, and no free-speed by the way, would you be disenfrancized or not?

It's not the "Fathers" that de-disenfranchized the modern masses. It's people (including blacks) fighting, establishing newer protections, ammendments, and laxer interpretations, contrary to what the "wealthy, landed 18th century white men" constitutional practice was.

> You can’t even articulate the complaints you’re making using concepts indigenous to Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.

Ah, moving the goalposts again, from just the Constitution to also including Europe (which hopefully I established did many of these things first, and some better, and some much much earlier), the new ask being to find similar things "indigenous to Asia, Africa, or the Middle East".

Which exist. Even in ancient practices. And not just Greeks and Romans. Public deliberation, assemblies, and criticism of those in power have been found as practices all around the world, from egalitarian indigenous societies, even when not having a shorthand rallying cry like "free speech".

>You talk about slavery. But the countries those slaves were from enslaved their own people and sold them to America. Those cultures didn’t think slavery was wrong.

That's not an argument about how those "wealthy, landed 18th century white men" didn't still disenfrachize slaves. It's an excuse about how some other groups did it too. It might have been relevant response, had I claimed those other groups didn't disenfrachize slaves. But I didn't.

>It was the “0 to 1” step that was the hard one from which everything else followed.

Finally, that's an actual argument to the issue under discussion.

May I paraphrase it as "Sure, the founding fathers e.g. disenfrachized blacks etc, but their principles created the foundations for e.g. eventually abolishing slavery (that's an important 0 to 1 step)"?

And yet, tons of other places have either abolished, or practically zeroed, slavery, long before the Constitution was created. Didn't take a whole bloody war to achieve that either.

And we have no reason to believe the same modern changes wouldn't have happened without the Constitution, since parallel developments happened anyway, from Swiss cantons to the British Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, and the rest.

If anything the US in 1787 weren't ahead of the global curve. They were behind the other emerging constitutional states in accepting and even actively establishing constitutional support for slavery (like with the Three-fifths compromise and the Fugitive Slave clause). Even Japan had abolished slavery earlier!

> it's not their influence on modern principles and their related concepts that's in question

No, that’s exactly the question. You’re saying that the constitution protects non-white people less because it was written by white people. The logical follow-up is to ask what the constitution would look like if it had been written by non-white people. That would solve the problem, right? In that scenario, people would share more “in common” with the hypothetical non-white framers, right? That would mean they would be more enfranchised, right?

For example, what if the framers had been Bangladeshis like me? Under your logic, I’d be more enfranchised by such a constitution, because I share more “in common” with those hypothetical Bangladeshi framers. But in reality, I’d be less franchised! Because we had no indigenous notions of democracy, civil rights, due process, free speech, etc. I’m actually better off that the framers were white British people than I would have been if the framers had been my own ancestors! Similarly, what if the constitution had been written by people from west africa? The people enslaved during the founding would have been enslaved under that constitution as well!

So the original premise is false. If you’re Asian, or African, or Middle Eastern, you wouldn’t be more franchised in a counterfactual scenario where your ancestors wrote the constitution according to the precepts that prevailed in your own ancestral lands.