Are the Founders still relevant?

Caught a segment of Hoover’s “Uncommon Knowledge”, featuring Condoleezza Rice, on the topic of America’s founding. Host Peter Robinson (one suspects acting as an agent provocateur) asks how the framers of our Constitution could possibly be relevant in today’s diverse society.  They were, after all, white males.

Condi replies, with remarkable eloquence, “So?”

After a moment for that to sink in, she follows up with “And your point?”

They also grew up in the mid-eighteenth century, a very long time ago, and were products of the Enlightenment, the frontier, and the Great Awakening; of a society in which religion was a touchstone and belief in God unquestioned; of intense loyalty to one’s local community (Jefferson, and R. E. Lee as late as the Civil War, referred to Virginia, not America, as “My country”), and to the land. Surely all more significant formers of one’s intellectual foundation than mere gender or skin color.  And yet they displayed a deep understanding of human nature, as opposed to society, itself very slow to change.