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When Americans think about their country's Founding Fathers, they tend to think of them as cool and competent\xa0figures, who were supremely confident in the superiority and longevity of the republican\xa0government\xa0they had created.\n\nBut my guest says that nearly all the founders experienced great internal and external conflict in\xa0conjunction with the new government, and came to be greatly pessimistic\xa0about the future of the democratic experiment they had helped\xa0birth. His name is Dennis C. Rasmussen and he's a professor of political theory\xa0and the author of\xa0Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders. Today on the\xa0show, Dennis unpacks how four of the founders \u2014 George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson \u2014 ultimately\xa0came to worry that the American republic wouldn't last past their own generation, based on concerns that ranged from the rise of partisanship to a lack of virtue amongst the American citizenry. Dennis also discusses why it was that one founder, James Madison, remained optimistic\xa0about the future of the country. We end our conversation with why the disillusionment of the founders actually carries a message of hope for us.\n\nGet the show notes at aom.is/settingsun.