It is, of course, deeply ahistorical and borderline offensive to call the founding fathers of the American republic a bunch of "woke" liberals. Yes, I can hear the objections coming in from all directions, and we'll get to those — but let me explain.
It's all relative, and if the relative standard is the troglodyte ideology of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and their various followers, hearkening back variously (and incoherently) to the Jim Crow era, the Confederacy and even medieval Europe, then the comparison is easy. With ideas gleaned from reading Greek and Roman philosophers and from the Enlightenment that surrounded them, the men who founded the United States were, given their era and their backgrounds, as "woke" to the themes of justice and equality and universal human rights as could possibly have been expected of anyone.
